Your Project: Welcome To It!

Heaven, Earth and the Devil are in the Details

You are the project sponsor. However,  having the title does not necessarily mean you are the most informed member of the team. In fact your role may distance you from the details. If this is the case you may find yourself going “high level” when pressed to discuss project status with your stakeholders. Now what??

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.

Barriers to IT Strategic Relevance

Henry Peyret, in his 2007 Forrester article, Assess Your Enterprise Agility well describes the CIO dilemma:

• 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?

Herding the Executive Cats

How do you solve a problem called Executive Alignment?
They said they were on board. So why don’t they show up? And most importantly, why are their direct reports fighting you on the assignment of needed resources ? You’ve written a clear project strategy with clear objectives and a business case that demonstrates your project’s value proposition. So, why does everyone still seem so confused?

What’s Going On?

Imagine that each of your stakeholders is a magnet capable of uniting or splintering their extended network for or against your project’s objectives. The power of the magnets may differ, some are positively charged and some are negative but the ability to control their combined effect on your project is the single greatest lever in your change management toolkit. Are your stakeholders pulling towards a common objective or is your company’s management team its own worst enemy? Once the negative energy starts it will spread invisibly and swiftly and it will create havoc in the white spaces of your project.

Are your stakeholders impotent or worse?

• The VP who practices public support but behind the scenes bets against your success
• The Director who believes in the project but can’t commit any of her people to its implementation
• Your peer in a lateral department who led a similar project last year, knows you are underfunded but hasn’t told you he can help you find more money because he doesn’t want to insult your intelligence.

With these kinds of friends, who needs enemies?

What’s a Project Leader to do?

Executive Alignment uses project management, soft skills, hard data, simple logic, coaching and business acumen to help you get the support you need to succeed.

Sound easy? You’re right. It’s not. It’s really hard. That’s why most projects come in late and over budget, with all kinds of bugs and failures.

The Good News is if you take it step by step, it may not be easy but it is doable.