Project Management Success

Project Management is about

ensuring a one-off, multi-stage transition happens,
happens on schedule,
and happens within budget.

Step one in Project Management is to define the desired outcome … defined in detail. Only then consider

• What is the overall strategy?
• How can any antagonism from The Awkward Squad be overcome?
• What resources are needed in terms of personnel and equipment?
• What are the time-scales?
• What is the total cost of the project, and the cost of doing nothing?

 

To quote Patty Azzarello: "I see leaders setting themselves up for failure and credibility loss when they don't differentiate the cost of doing a GREAT job from the cost of doing an OK job."
 
Is the project intended to deliver a bicycle or an F1 racing car? Which is the budget for?
 

One source of failure is not treating a project as "chartered": as something that must happen.
 

An example of success:

A software company had many manual steps between their development servers and customer deployments. At the start of the project:

• No process documentation: "We don't need that; we'll never need that"
• Process training was by word of mouth
• All release and deployment stages were being performed manually, which was prone to human error
• Quality control was a cursory visual inspection

At the end of a multi-year project:

• A library of over two hundred process documents
• Process training using the documentation
• Four utilities automated the release and deployment processes
• Two automated quality control utilities in place
• A suite of Quality Management procedures in place for routine process reviews

When one of these new auto-QC tools was initially used on older deployments, thousands of defects were identified. The team then worked as a priority task on rectifying the errors.
 

Project Benefits:

• Reduced operations staff time spent on release and deployment
• Deskilling allowed for the delegation of standardised, regular tasks
• Greatly reduced lapsed time processes
• Dramatic quality improvement
• Periodic process reviews

Upgrades had been taking two days, with the deployment offline. With the implementaion of automation, the process had been reduced to a maximum of half a day, with no disruption to customer service. As a result, operations staff had been able to take on the role of process minders, freeing them to carry out other tasks.
 

 

For more information on how we can help you with improving process management, including carrying out an ad hoc review, please write to robert@esm.solutions.