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.
Comments