What's the recipe for project management success? Many IT
professionals agree that buy-in and support from top management, clearly defined
scope and requirements, good communication, and the right project
resources top the list of key ingredients.
Some of the top
success factors mentioned were obvious—others, less so. Here, CIO.com shares
some of the less obvious, but no less important, factors influencing project
success. (And by less obvious, we mean factors that don't immediately come to
mind, get easily overlooked or that get short shrift when the going gets tough
on a project.) We compiled this list, which is by no means exhaustive, based on
comments raised in the CIO Forum discussion and during phone interviews with
project management experts. Feel free to leave your two cents in the comments
section below.
1. A Clear
Definition of Success
You can't achieve success if you don't know what it looks like, maintain
several members of the CIO Forum. Steve Hawthorne, global project manager at
Integra LifeSciences, saysproject success must be defined in terms
that are meaningful to the business.
"Too often as IT professionals, we assume that success is defined
as on time, on budget, and meeting the defined requirements," wrote
Hawthorne in the CIO Forum. "While these are important, it is [equally]
important to understand the expected value proposition of the project and to
drive project efforts to ensure that it is achieved."
In other words, even if the project is completed on time, on budget, and
meets all requirements, it may still be considered a failure if it doesn't
deliver the expected business value.
2. A Willingness to
Make Unpopular Decisions
Bronnie Brooks, an IT consultant and project manager who participated in
the CIO Forum discussion, told CIO.com that she's had to make tough decisions
over the years that were unpopular with either her client, her manager or her
team in order to keep projects on time, within budget and with the right
resources intact. For example, she says she once had to tell a client that a
feature they were expecting in an upcoming software release wouldn't make it
and that they would have to wait for the following release, a year later.
Another time, she had to move a team member a client liked onto another project
on which that team member's skills were needed.
Making tough decisions about project resources and priorities can be
difficult for some IT project managers who want to please everyone and who want
to believe, like everyone else, that the project will work out, Brooks says.
But making tough calls is crucial, she adds.
"Sometimes the best decision will not be the most popular
one," Brooks says, "but it will get you further down the road."
3. End-User
Training and Hand-Holding After Go-Live
You'd think training end-users on whatever new system
is being deployed would qualify as an obvious success factor, and to many IT
professionals, it probably is. But too often, systems implementations fail—not
because they're delivered late or because they're over-budget—but because
end-users haven't been adequately trained. Consequently, they don't adopt the
new system.
"You can never put enough emphasis on training or pay sufficient
attention to hand-holding post go-live," wrote Carlos Garriga, CIO of
Spain's Grupo Unipapel, a distributor of print consumables and office products,
in the CIO Forum. "I would say that most IT project failures come out of
inadequate user-side training and poor management of the most critical phase:
post go-live."
4. Clearly Defined
Roles and Responsibilities
Sometimes, the people involved in a project—the project manager, team
members, steering committee members and sponsor(s)—don't understand their roles
and responsibilities because no one defines them, says Chet Ung, an IT auditor
with The Wood Group who participated in the CIO Forum discussion and spoke with
CIO.com over the phone.
If, for example, project steering committee members don't understand
their role, they don't know what they're supposed to contribute, says Ung. They
don't realize they have the ability to change the course of a project.
Consequently, they don't contribute anything in meetings because they don't
know what questions to ask—let alone that they can ask questions. Projects can
fail when the steering committee doesn't play the oversight role it's supposed
to, he says.
"Roles and responsibilities need to be outlined and documented to
set expectations and avoid confusion on what level of contribution each project
member makes," Ung wrote in the CIO Forum.
5. Transparent
Workflows
When project workflows are transparent, every person
involved in a project knows exactly what his or her role is as well as what's
"upstream and downstream" of that work, says Stacy Goff, president of
the Colorado Springs-based project management consulting and training firm
ProjectExperts. In other words, they know what work has been done on the
project before them and by whom, as well as what work will be done after them.
Transparent workflows can save time and improve project quality, adds
Goff. "If you know you have something from someone who does excellent
work, you won't have to fill in any blanks. You're comfortable accepting what
you read," he says. Similarly, if the person to whom you'll be sending
your work is very diligent and detail-oriented, you may spend more time
perfecting your product so that it meets the next person's high expectations.
6. A Process for
Managing Scope Changes
End-users of a system being developed or a new process being implemented
often want to make changes to the system or process as they see it unfolding.
Little do they realize that even minor changes can dramatically affect the
project's cost and timeline.
Sometimes the project manager or implementation team being asked to
accommodate these additional scope changes doesn't realize how, say,
the addition of three buttons on a user interface, can impact the project's
budget and schedule, especially in the case of external consultants, says Chris
Spivey, founder of project management and rescue consultancy Spivey & Co.
Wanting to please end-users, adds Spivey, the consultant or project manager
agrees to add the three buttons, saying it should be an easy change, only to
find out from the technical design teams that adding those buttons pushes the
project by three months because of the additional work it creates.
"Someone has to go back to the users and say, 'We really didn't
know what we were talking about. We thought this was a simple change, but it's
going to add three months to the project,'" says Spivey.
Having a change control process sets everyone's expectations that
requests for new features or functions need to be formally requested and will
go through a formal vetting process to determine how much work they will
require and how they'll affect the project's cost and timeline. With a formal
change control process, a project manager can more definitively say whether or
not a particular change truly is minor, says Spivey. Moreover, the project
sponsor can make a more informed decision about the additional features and
functions that are truly worth extending the cost and schedule of the project.
With a formal change control process, there are fewer surprises, which
makes everyone happy.
7. Risk Management
"Risk management is a key part of project management for any size
project," says ProjectExperts' Goff. "It should be part of any level
of planning, whether initial project planning or phase- or stage planning for
each new portion of a project. All too often I see it done upfront and then not
revisited."
Risk management is so critical, adds Goff, because it provides project
managers with a forward-looking view of both the threats that could throw the
project off track and the opportunities to improve it. Risk management
practices also provide project teams with an opportunity to engage the people,
such as project sponsors and end users, who could control the risks that might
threaten a project, he says.
8. Adequate
Documentation
Without proper documentation, project teams may not capture the right
functional and technical requirements for a project, says IT Auditor Ung. And
without proper documentation of various requirements, the project team could
spend a lot of time, effort and money on a project that doesn't meet the
sponsor's or end-users' expectations.
Project teams also risk moving forward with a project that lacks an
execution plan or a project charter, both of which are documentation critical
to the success of projects.
Lack of documentation, says Ung, "creates a lot of confusion and
uncertainty about the direction the project should be going in."
Confusion, in turn, creates conflict, delays and cost overruns.
9. A Good QA
Process
Quality assurance efforts such as integration testing, black box
testing, functional testing and stress testing often get short shrift on
projects, says Ung. Sometimes it's because the project manager isn't familiar
with the different types of QA testing, he says. Other times, the project
manager has to cut corners to meet a looming project deadline. Because QA often
gets left to the end of a project, it's a frequent victim of cost-cutting.
Regardless of the cause, the result is software, a system or a new process that
doesn't work properly.
"A good QA process is very important," Ung wrote in the CIO
Forum. "A QA team would ensure that requirements and functionality are
intact before end users get a hold of the product. It only takes one negative
view to domino the perception that the project is a failure."
Peter Scheyen, CTO at the Richard Ivey School of Business in London,
Ontario, Canada, recommends doing early demos to solicit feedback from users.
Getting early feedback is one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk
that a project doesn't meet end-users' needs (and thus becomes considered a
failure), he wrote in the CIO Forum.
10. Project
Governance
Governance sets the framework for how a project or program will be
managed, according to Ung. "It also establishes a common understanding or
language for the project team to follow," he adds. "When you have
good project governance, the people who are involved with the project
understand what they need to do."
When project governance is lacking, staffers may
execute a project inconsistently. For example, the development team might use
one project management framework, while business analysts might use a different
process. Inconsistent project execution raises the risk of failure.
CIO | Jun
23, 2010 8:00 AM PT
Tomado de: http://www.cio.com/article/2417296/project-management/it-project-management--10-less-considered-keys-to-success.html
