Project Management Best Practices and Recognizing Project Migraines Paper

Project Management Best Practices and Recognizing Project Migraines” Please respond to the following:

• As a newly minted CIO, you have been hired to join a company without a history of project best practices. Suggest strategy and process for your Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to develop standards for your organization that is without any such organizational project history. Justify the main reasons why your suggestion would be effective.
• Reflect upon Kerzner’s “Sources of Smaller Migraines” from Chapter 2. Select three (3) issues from the list. Then, specify the reasons why these issues are more critical to control than the others. Justify your response.

10:34
@ N *
4G
LTE.
Aa » A) Q
.
2.14 SOURCES OF SMALLER
MIGRAINES
Not all project management headaches lead
to migraines. The following list identifies
some of the smaller headaches that occurred
in various companies but do not necessarily
lead to major migraines:
Maintaining original constraints: As the
project team began working on the
project, work began to expand. Some
people believed that within every project
there was a larger project just waiting to
be recognized. Having multiple project
sponsors all of whom had their own
agendas for the project created this
problem.
• Revisions to original mission statement: At
the gate review meetings, project
redirection occurred as management
rethought its original mission statement.
While these types of changes were
inevitable, the magnitude of redirections
had a devastating effect on the EPM
system, portfolio management efforts, and
capacity planning.
• Lack of metrics: An IT organization
maintained a staff of over 500 employees.
At any given time, senior management
was unable to establish metrics on
whether or not the IT group was
overstaffed, understaffed, or just right.
Prioritization of resources was being done
94
:
G
ΣΙ
Reader
Contents
Notebook
Bookmarks
More
10:34
Nie
4G
LTE
Aa » Qa
• More metrics: In another example, the IT
management team, to help identify
whether or not projects were being
delivered on schedule, had recently
implemented an IT balanced scorecard for
projects. After the first six months of
metric gathering, the conclusion was that
85 percent of all projects were delivered
on time. From executive management’s
perspective, this appeared to be
misleading, but there was no way to
accurately determine whether or not this
number was accurate. For example, one
executive personally knew that none of his
top five projects and all ten of an IT
manager’s projects were behind schedule.
Executive management believed the true
challenge would be determining
appropriate metrics for measuring a
project’s schedule, quality, and budget
data.
Portfolio management of projects: When
reviewing project portfolios or individual
projects, all of the plans were at different
levels of detail and accuracy. For example,
some plans included only milestones with
key dates, while other plans had too much
detail. The key issue became “what is the
correct balance of information that should
be included in a plan and how can all
plans provide a consistent level of
accuracy across all projects?” Even the
term accuracy was not consistent across
the organization.
.
95
:
G
ΣΙ
Reader
Contents
Notebook
Bookmarks
More
10:34
@NITE
4G
LTE
.
Aa . Q
Prioritization of projects and resources: In
one company, there were no mechanisms
in place to prioritize projects throughout
the organization, and this further
complicated resource assignment issues in
the organization. For example, the CIO had
his top five projects, one executive had his
top ten projects, and an IT manager had
his top ten projects. Besides having to
share project managers and project
resources across all of these projects, there
was no objective way to determine that the
CIO’s #3 project was more/less important
than an executive’s #6 project or an IT
manager’s #1 project. Therefore, when
competing interests developed, subjective
decisions were made, and it was
challenging to determine whether or not
the right decision had been made.
Shared accountability for success and
failure: The organization’s projects
traditionally were characterized as single-
resource, single-process, and single-
platform projects. Now, almost every
project was cross-team, cross-platform,
and cross-process. This new model had not
only increased the complexity and risk for
many projects but also required increased
accountability by the project team for the
success/failure of the project.
Unfortunately, the organization’s culture
and people still embraced the old model.
For example, if one team was successful on
its part of a project and another was not,
.
CCT
95
:
G
ΣΙ
Reader
Contents
Notebook
Bookmarks
More
4G
LTE
.
10:34
@ N %1
Measuring project results: Many of the
projects that were completed were
approved based on process improvements
and enhanced efficiency. However, after a
process improvement project was
completed, there were no programs in
place to determine whether or not the
improvements were achieved. In fact,
because the company was experiencing
double-digit growth annually, the
executive team questioned whether or not
approved process improvements were
truly scalable in the long term.
Integrating multiple methodologies:
Application development teams had
adopted the software development
methodology (SDM) and agile methodology
for software development. Both of these
methodologies had excellent approaches
for delivering software components that
met quality, budget, and schedule
objectives. The challenge the organization
faced was whether or not components
from both of these methodologies could be
adapted to projects that were not software
development related and, if so, how can
this be accomplished? This debate had
elevated to upper management for
resolution and upper management had
been reluctant to make a decision one way
or the other. This difference in views on
how projects should be managed,
regardless of whether or not the project
was software development related or not,
had led to several different groups
lobbying for others to join their efforts to
support SDM and Agile for all projects.
Overall, the lobbying efforts were not
adding value to the organization and were
wasted effort by key resources.
• Organizational communications: Although
there was a lot of communication about
roiecte throughout the orgonization
.
10:34
@ NIE
Organizational communications: Although
there was a lot of communication about
projects throughout the organization,
many shortcomings existed with the
existing process. For example, one
executive stated that when he had his
monthly status meeting with his direct
reports, he was amazed when a manager
was not aware of another manager’s
project, especially if the project was
getting ready to migrate into production.
The existing process led many managers to
react to projects instead of proactively
planning for projects. Additionally, the
existing communication process did not
facilitate knowledge sharing and
coordination across projects or throughout
the organization. Instead, the existing
communication process facilitated
individual silos of communication.
Meaning of words: A project was initiated
from the staff level. The SOW contained
numerous open-ended phrases with vague
language such as “Develop a world-class
control platform with exceptional
ergonomics and visual appeal.” The
project manager and his team interpreted
this SOW using their own creativity. There
were mostly engineers on the team with
no marketing members, and the solution
ended up being technically strong but a
sales/marketing disaster. Months were lost
in time to market.
• Problem with success: A project was
approved with a team charter that loosely
defined the boundaries of the project.
During the course of the project, some
early successes were realized and word
quickly spread throughout the
organization. As the project moved
forward, certain department managers
began “sliding” issues into the project
scope, using their own interpretation of