jump to navigation

Project Scope Management – Begins With the End in Mind October 22, 2009

Posted by Chris Foley in : Project Governance, Project Management , add a comment

Begin with the end in mind. You’ve heard it so often that it’s become cliche, but the advice is never more true than when chartering a new project.  A charter should not state what you want to do, but rather what you specifically and measurably want to achieve, by when and to what degree. The proposed benefits you define here are critical to the choice, design, and scope of the solution. 

Get Focused and Stay On Track
SMART objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time–bound and timely. SMART objectives are the best way of setting boundaries and managing scope, and they’re essential to ensuring that benefits are realized. Furthermore, SMART objectives are the single most effective way to maintain stakeholder alignment and keep your project focused and on track. If SMART objectives aren’t already defined when I take over a project, identifying them comes before making a single cost, schedule, scope, or quality commitment.

After defining SMART objectives, I refer to them throughout the project in order to control scope. Whenever a new requirement or change request arises, I ask, “How does this change support our project objectives?” When the change clearly aligns with project objectives, I assess and negotiate the appropriate budget or schedule modifications. Changes are consciously made and are approved by the sponsor and stakeholders. Changes don’t slip in unnoticed; there is an audit trail. Surprises are avoided, and there is no cost or schedule variance to explain or defend later. If a proposed change doesn’t align with predefined SMART objectives, which is often the case, I have a solid basis to disallow it. Resources aren’t diverted, and the team stays focused on its original scope and schedule commitments.

It’s tempting to run with a good idea proposed during the course of a project, but that’s how projects get derailed, drag on, and fail to meet expectations. SMART objectives keep projects on track.

Start smart, Finish smarter
Although it is not the role of IT to set and define corporate strategy, business goals, or objectives for project investments, IT is still frequently expected to start and deliver projects before a business has defined what it wants to achieve. As a result, IT resources are far less likely to design and accurately estimate appropriate solutions. 

Faced with poorly defined objectives, well-intentioned and business-knowledgeable IT staff will often guess what stakeholders need or expect, leading to unnecessary functionality, complexity, and rework. To cover – or even to amuse – themselves, IT employees may choose an inappropriate technology solution or indulge in overkill.

Without SMART objectives to guide project decision making, it is difficult for the project manager to get agreement on initial scope. With no filtering criteria, opportunistic requests bloat the original project scope. In addition, when objectives aren’t clarified and prioritized up front, key business requirements can be overlooked completely or surface as late as user acceptance testing. Finally, despite adding a contingency to pad to their estimates, IT will still often overrun its budget and schedule.  

When so many projects begin without concrete, measurable ends in mind, it’s inevitable that so few ever complete on time, on budget or deliver real bottom line results. But if you start SMART, you’ll look smart, and your IT projects will look even smarter.

Project Management – IT Project Success Begins With SMART Goals October 22, 2009

Posted by Magic of Metrics in : Project Governance, SMART Goals , add a comment

When IT projects consistently go over budget, past due and lack in quality, it may be natural to assume the Project Manager is to blame. When return on investment and performance improvements from IT projects don’t live up to expectations, most managers assume it’s the IT department’s fault. Both assumptions, however, are wrong. 

Uncertainty Breeds Certain Failure
There’s a saying that goes, “We don’t plan to fail; we fail to plan.” Yet even before the planning stage, most organizations fail. They fail to define desired outcomes and project intent. They fail to identify the improvements that a correctly implemented project would bring about. In particular, they fail to describe how success itself will be evaluated and measured. And that spells almost certain failure for the entire project.

As a Six Sigma Black Belt, I’m obsessed with finding the root causes of problems and poor results. After many years of managing projects and advising others, I’ve concluded that the single most common cause of poor project delivery happens not during a project but before a project manager or resource is ever assigned. 

Too often, a company buys into a solution before it has identified the problem it hopes to solve or has defined, in measurable terms, what it aims to achieve. Managers approve budgets, set schedules, and assign resources before settling on objectives, success measures, and goals. On occasion, an ingenious project manager can help a sponsor “back into” a set of objectives for the solution already chosen – a case of shooting first and calling whatever you hit the target. Sadly – and all too often – a project is reduced to merely installing a system or set of features rather than delivering quantifiable improvements or a return on investment.  

Lacking clearly defined outcomes and measurable objectives, a project team can’t design the best solution and implementation. Consider the case of Henry Ford; who wanted to build an affordable car for every American household. He wanted to build hundreds more cars instead of only a dozen more. It meant he needed to reduce the time to build a car by 90%. Without this key information, it’s not at all obvious that the solution design had to be innovative or that it required Ford to initially offer fewer options and only one paint color. But because Henry Ford clearly defined the desired outcome and measurable objectives before he began, he created the Model T and revolutionized auto making.

Revolutionize Your Results
Setting objectives establishes criteria for effective decision making. It clarifies what is essential versus nice-to-have or simply out of scope. When project objectives are vague, stakeholders with problems of their own will choose different interpretations and form conflicting opinions about what should be in scope. Inevitably, stakeholders, technical architects, and systems engineers introduce new requirements and changes to existing requirements. In an attempt to appease them, the project manager will accommodate most of these additional requests, thereby expanding the work, distracting focus, diluting resources, and ultimately diminishing project benefits. The gradual accumulation of unforeseen and/or unintended requirements progressively adds to project scope, complexity, costs, and delays. Don’t risk the success of your projects: always begin with a clearly defined outcomes and SMART goals

The Power of Strategic Focus March 9, 2009

Posted by Magic of Metrics in : Project Governance, SMART Goals , add a comment

Have you ever thought much about freeway metering lights or the role of air traffic controllers? They both sprang out of a similar need; the need to make efficient and effective use of limited resources. They have the same simple but very important strategic goals: to reduce accidents and fatalities and to improve the predictability and duration of travel.

Take the case of metering lights. We all know the effects of too many cars trying to jam onto a congested freeway. Left on their own drivers behave quite differently; some aggressively plow ahead while others passively sit back. Merging does not go smoothly, freeway flow is interrupted or moves slower than necessary, and there are more accidents and incidents of road rage. Now let’s consider air traffic and airport gate controllers. They work in cooperation to ensure airport safety and on-time departures and arrivals. Like erratic drivers, air travelers are motivated by their own needs. Given the option they would each choose to depart and arrive at a date and time to suit their own convenience. Yet we can all agree it’s both impossible and unsafe for too many planes to take off at one time or to accommodate the whims of each passenger.

There are obvious constraints with air travel such as the number of runways, limited gate capacity and a finite number of planes. We understand that leaving our gate early or as soon as the door closes doesn’t get us to our destination any sooner if we can’t land or disembark at a gate once we get there. Spending time taxiing on runways wastes gas and can cause a delays to refuel. Likewise spending too much time in the air wastes gas, leads to over-crowded air space and risks passenger safety when circling an airport to land. When life or death is at stake we accept and even value planning and schedules.

Managing Resource Constraints
Portfolio Management without strategic goals, governance and an understanding of resource capacity, is like modern air travel without air traffic controllers. It fosters a first to the trough mentality. Every sponsor rushes to be first and too many projects take off at once. Resources become distracted and overloaded, their effectiveness is diluted; consequently progress moves much slower, budget run rates increase, windows of opportunity close, scopes creep or are drastically cut, many projects eventually crash and burn. Significant business benefits are delayed and diminished; others are never realized while non-strategic low value projects waste fuel.

Working Harder Isn’t The Answer
Working harder, starting too many concurrent projects and reacting to operational problems with point solutions won’t help you improve performance or stay competitive. The power of strategic focus is that it provides criteria for decision making and creates a sense of urgency about what is most important. Successful companies know when strategic goals exist and priorities are clear it becomes extremely easy to select, sequence and keep resources focused on projects that will most directly and significantly impact achieving company goals.

If your company is struggling to get focused, consider the following steps:

  • Review your company’s values and vision and update your mission statement
  • Do a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) to identify core areas to improve or exploit
  • Create a strategy map to clarify and broadly communicate the key initiatives and/or projects you’ve chosen to achieve the company’s mission goals
  • Identify a balanced set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics to track your progress and provide actionable information to adapt your tactics

    • When you focus on what matters, such as customer requirements and solving high impact root cause problems, rather than attacking symptoms, you can dramatically improve your results. 

    Learn more about Key Performance Indicators by browsing the Enterprise Performance Management Review KPI Library http://www.epmreview.com/KPI-Library.html

    SMART Choices – Are You Doing The Right Projects? March 6, 2009

    Posted by Magic of Metrics in : Metrics, Project Governance , add a comment

    Do you know if your company is doing the right projects; projects that will improve performance, generate value and help achieve company goals? How can you be sure that you pick the right projects? You start by leveraging output from your company’s strategic planning process to align projects with the company’s mission goals. But to consistently make SMART Choices you need to add a robust governance process, including review gates and active decision making based on objective success criteria. This means project charters need to focus on outcomes rather than solutions; they need to clearly answer the question, “Why are we doing this project?” More importantly, projects must be approved based on the strength not the length or weight of their business case. Let’s consider how companies often determine which projects they will do.

    When to Pull the Plug

    During their annual budgeting process companies establish a budget and earmark dollars for a portfolio of projects. In the absence of a corporate strategy and a robust governance process many companies resort to compiling a bottoms-up list of their in-flight carryover projects, last year’s unfunded wish list and this year’s new list of requests from across the company. Rationalizing the list of projects is a time consuming and ineffective process that fails to screen out projects with ambiguous, differing or competing objectives that are unlikely to realize value-added benefits.

    When a cap is eventually put on spending, it becomes obvious that demand far exceeds the available resources or capacity. Stakeholders begin the game of exaggerating potential benefits and understating costs in order to get their projects into the budget. Many of these projects “make the cut” and seldom does anyone take a second look at their fuzzy business case or hold them accountable for tracking the promised benefits.

    When these projects are allowed to proceed despite the lack of SMART success metrics they rarely meet expectations. They typically struggle to stay focused; they experience scope creep, delays and over spending. These are all leading indicators that you may need to pull the plug. Resist the temptation to salvage a sunken investment. Before you commit additional time or money, do an objective reassessment of the project’s value to the company.

    When to just say “No”

    A strong business case contains compelling SMART success metrics, in other words it describes what specific measurable improvements will be realized, by when and how they will be tracked and proven. Project ROI (Return on Investment) is a CFO’s favorite type of SMART metric, but it isn’t the only valid metric nor should it be the sole focus. Productivity and quality improvements, for instance, are easily measured and equally important because they impact company performance and indirectly affect the bottom line.

    The ability to develop SMART Metrics is a skill and isn’t always easy. Done correctly the process uncovers buried expectations, challenges assumptions and clarifies scope. SMART Metrics essentially help you determine the realistic value of a proposed investment and reduces the risk of project failure. In the end, SMART Metrics are really about knowing when to say “yes” and ensuring that each project you undertake clearly aligns with your company priorities and demonstrates how it will measurably create value.

    SMART Goals – How to Guarantee Project Benefits February 26, 2009

    Posted by Magic of Metrics in : SMART Goals , add a comment

    No longer is it enough just to complete projects on time and on budget.  Companies can’t afford to waste time and money on projects that fail to deliver measurable benefits. In these difficult economic times it’s more important than ever to deliver expected benefits, ensure organizational readiness, stakeholder engagement and solution adoption. Easily said, of course, but hard to do in practice because there is often no process or expertise in place to make it happen.

    The key to consistently delivering benefits lies, upstream of project execution, in the strategic planning process, when senior management define their business objectives and SMART Goals. SMART Goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. They play a crucial role in communicating company priorities, reducing ambiguity and focusing all levels of an organization on what really matters.

    SMART Goals focus on a company’s mission and desired outcomes. They provide the basis for developing strategies, the rationale for tactical planning and the criteria for making objective decisions or SMART choices among diverse projects. SMART Goals coupled with a robust governance process will ensure every project’s business case includes success metrics to demonstrate how it will measurably impact and contribute to achieving one or more of the company’s SMART Goals. Projects that fail to clearly link to a strategic goal or show how they can advance the aims of the company can be easily weeded out before they further distract or consume resources. While projects that do link to company goals can get the resources they need based on their overall impact and return.

    SMART Goals are critical to clearly communicate expectations, plan strategies, measure performance and achieve desired results.

    SMART Goal Definition: