As a Project Sponsor you have a critical role in driving business objectives. This is your forum for best practices for faster time to market, corporate agility and growth, improved customer experience and increased margins through business process improvement.

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Project Management is a hot topic. Businesses often suffer from a dearth of Project Managers in-house. But when you say you need PM skills, you need to be specific about what kind of project you are talking about. R&D Projects are very different from software system implementation projects which are very different from post merger integration, product launches or customer focused initiatives. It is important to fit your Project Management approach, methods and tools to your kind of project. So…

What Kind of Projects Are We Talking About Here?

This site is focused primarily on:

- Enterprise Technology Implementations

- Projects that Span Multiple Functions and Geographies

- Projects that Change Your Business Processes

- Projects that Improve Your Customer’s Experience

Some typical examples include:

• Systems Implementations such as SAP, CRM, PDM
• Business Process Improvement
• Organization Redesign
• Integrated Product Development

If your project is one of these, you will find the tips on this website useful. If your project is not on this list and you are, for example, developing a new product or new technology, or your project affects only one or two areas of your business, you may still find useful information here but be sure to scale and customize it to your needs. A small project needs fewer steps or phases. Less complexity means fewer resources, shorter time frames and usually, simpler approaches…you get the idea. You must be the judge of how to right size for your unique situation.

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Why invest in Change Management?

Use fewer people to produce higher quality results. reduce risks to on-time/on-budget delivery, accelerate project benefits, make better, faster decisions and reduce overall consulting spend by building your internal change management capability. If you are responsible for any of the above, you will find this section useful. If change management is your job, you may find it essential.

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Have you been experiencing any of these symptoms?:

• Feeling uneasy about project progress and don’t know what to do about it
• Don’t fully understand project activities, deliverables and time lines
• Don’t know who is leading what
• Can’t recite the project milestones
• Feel like the Far Side dog when listening to your project leader, “blah, blah, blah, blah…”
• Don’t understand the project acronyms

I’ll stop here….Houston, we have a problem!

The Solution: Do whatever it takes to get smart about your project.

Rule #4: Tell your ego to pipe down, do your homework and Get Smart.

1. Tell your project leader that you would like an in-depth project review led by him/her with each of the functional and content leads presenting status on their area of expertise. Ask them to summarize with good graphics, diagrams and data. Explain that you will be asking a lot of questions so that you, and they, will be able to explain the project to anyone who asks going forward.

2. Have someone assigned to write down your questions and answers and use this to start your FAQs….that would be “Frequently Asked Questions”.

3. In the privacy of your home or office, read the FAQs and remember the answers. Jot down clarifying questions and get them answered within 48 hours.

4. Use your FAQs to drive your next presentation to senior staff or key stakeholders.

If you don’t know what’s going on, you can be sure that no-one else does.

If you do this, your team will see you as involved and committed to understanding the project details. Your executive peers will hear about it and know you are on top of it – because you are.

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• IT objectives still include only cost reduction and quality
• IT objectives rarely reflect enterprise agility objectives
• Many firms still measure IT on its contribution to cost reductions

While there are a number of current IT trends that, in theory, should improve enterprise agility — such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), on-demand services, pervasive technologies, outsourcing, Dynamic Business Applications, agile development, and off-shoring, these technologies require cross-department investment in enterprises where each business unit manages budgets separately.

A reliance on shared services inhibits change flexibility. Typical shared services like IT, HR, and procurement are often seen as inhibitors to change. While their main objective is to decrease global costs, they often do not deliver the right level of adaptability to the different business units that are facing change. These units complain that shared services provide either the same “lowest common denominator” service at the lowest price for every business unit or a higher level of service but at a higher service/price ratio that is too expensive for the “poorest” units.

Think about this as you design and scope your ERP, outsourcing or shared service initiatives.

If IT wants to be strategically relevant, it must provide business value beyond cost reduction. As you plan your initiative, are you including business functionality, process redesign, and change management that will enable strategic business value?

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Barbara’s Rule #5: Change Management is Like Snowflakes

You will use standards and best practice methods and tools of course. However, your approach and the details of what you do and how you do it must be tailored or it won’t work. Your Change Management Approach must be customized to your company culture, to your business calendar, to your project cadence (more on cadence later). It must fit your team’s needs and abilities, your stakeholders’ appetites for information and your leadership style. You manage the project by phases, gates, milestones and metrics. You manage the adoption of new behavior by understanding the best and worst of human nature, paying close attention to nuance and knowing when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when to walk away. Change Management is alchemy: one part science and two parts artistry. Done well, it turns today’s project elements into tomorrow’s business gold.

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