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IT Metrics - Project and Risk Management


Project Management is undoubtedly one of the key IT activities any CIO has to properly address if he wants to appropriately run the overall IT agenda.

During my professional career many people has approached me asking which are in my opinion the more important aspects of running a successful project, and why? I always come back to them with two main building block recommendations; the first one is to focus on project communication during the entire project time frame. This is a essential element of a well manage project because doing a proper job on communicating progress, risks, mitigation activities, achievements, etc. we will increase the level of people engagement, both internally within our teams and externally through the entire business organisation.



Some times under the pressure to deliver critical operational milestones we tend to focus on project operations and IT deliverables without having in place a proper communication agenda. This is a clear mistake that could jeopardize other project deliverables on the long run. I used to manage Project communication as an intimate part of the Change Management activities, this due to the fact that doing this way it naturally allow us to raise up the importance of the already defined communication tasks. Whether we take a decision to go for a more tactical-level communication, such traffic-light indicators, whether we implement a detail operational project scorecard, combining project KPIs and management summaries, the point here is to design this communication tools in line with the different business stakeholder expectations. This means that before we close the definition of the project information elements we have to take into account what information needs are required by the different business areas. This to say that we cannot do this activity just as an internal IT project exercise, which used to be one of the more common project mistakes. I recommend a formal 360-consultation process followed by an smart selection of the outcome exercise, and this before we deliver the final set of a well-balanced project information components.

The second building block I always recommend is about the Project readiness, say to invest all the time you believe can be needed to make a thorough analysis, this in order to understand how much and how well prepared are the different project components (Information architecture, Technology architecture, IT people, user community, vendors plus related project contracts and finally the change management activities). I used to do this by running a pre-risk analysis exercise using a risk reference table that I have been building during all these years. This gives me the opportunity and the Project Managers to anticipate any lack of readiness regarding the above mentioned project components, and even more important, by quickly and timely react to any potential project risk resulting from this exercise. The outcome of this due diligence process is usually a set of recommendations and contingency activities that have to be implemented and in place before we move to the capability phase of the project.

Those are two of a set of different project control activities that I always recommend when confronted with a medium-large projects. However is important to highlight that some times the project risk is not only directly related to the project length but also to the project complexity that resulted from measuring the different project components, participants, technology, business readiness, business project buy-in, etc. In order to measure project complexity there are other management techniques I will talk in a separate blog spot.           

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