There are many books on Project Management and many theories what works and what doesn't work. But all this information does not guarantee you a successful project. When you consider the high project failure rates you can question how many projects are run with the necessary Project knowledge today. Here is an interesting article from Harvard Business Publishing concerning Project Management experience
In general it is a question of whom you or your management trusts to get the job done. If you're in a big company you might have to choose the consulting company that is on the approved vendor list of your organization. In many cases these will be big consulting firms that offer higher manpower and safety and also charge higher rates.
For a medium or small size company you might want to find the local consulting company that best suit your needs. These consulting companies won't offer the breadth of the big consulting companies but they are most likely niche specialists that might offer lower rates.
Whatever the answer is some key questions need to be answered before any IT related project can be successful
Some example questions:
- Do you have resources with sufficient Project Management knowledge that can lead your project?
- Do you have in-house IT resources that conduct the project or will you have to use external IT
resources?
- Did you specify and document your business requirements clearly?
- Did you identify all the stakeholders of this project?
- Do you have a clear picture of the Cost, Scope and Time priorities for this project?
- Does your budget cover the necessary effort?
- Are your business processes stable enough to justify the deployment or development of this project?
- Do you have an idea about the expected Return on Investment (ROI)?
- Do you need external resources on an ongoing basis to maintain the outcome of this project?
- Do your users support the development of an IT solution?
- Did you specifiy exactly what constitutes success for the Project?
- Do you need deep industry knowledge to come up with the best solution or is it an added value to
engage someone outside your industry to get new ideas?
- Do you want to engage resources that are onsite or can you use remote resources?
- What are your quality expectations for the Software deployment? (e.g. 99% availability etc.)
A Project should generally start with a project charter that clearly states the purpose, objective and scope of a project. (see also this PMI link).
Once you know what you want to achieve (via the Project Charter) you will need to determine how you can get there. So the next step is to assemble the team that will execute the project. Depending on the size of your organization you might be able to pick your team members or you have to take the organizations that are on your approved vendor list.
You will have to gather requirements and document them unambiguously. This sounds simpler than it is. To get unambiguous requirements is a real challenge for any organization. You need to spend considerable time here with qualified resources that can question the purpose/benefit of your requirements. One key question to keep in mind is the Return on Investment. WHY do you do this? What do you expect to get out of this project? In one of the next posts we'll dive deeper into this section.
Once you have the unambiguous requirements you need to estimate how much effort it will take to implement them. This means you have to come up with a time and cost estimate. There are several methods on how to provide cost and effort estimates. You will also have risks related to the cost and effort estimates and you have to think about how you want to keep track of them.
One of the KEY TASKS during any project is how you plan to communicate to all your stakeholders.
This can make or break a project! All your stakeholders need to know what is going on. How do you plan to do that? What communication methods do your stakeholders prefer? email, phone, video conference, face-to-face? At that point you should think about a communication plan. The bigger the project the more important this becomes.
At this point you have a scope plan (what do you want to do), a schedule (effort estimate), a cost estimate (how expensive are the resources that you need, what non-labor resources do you need), a quality plan (what constitutes a successful project), a staffing plan (which resources and how many do you need to achieve what you want to do) and a communication plan (how do you plan to communicate with all stakeholders of your project)
In the next posts we go into the different project knowledge areas (Integration Management, Scope Management, Time Management, Cost Management, Quality Management, Human Resource Management,
Communications Management, Risk Management, Procurement Management) in more details and will provide some, hopefully useful, tips on how to master Business Management + IT projects for different organizations (Small, Medium, Large)
