Project management good practices
Project management good practices that facilitate successful service life cycle management and produce the desired project results include the following:
- A well established governance combined with effective, preferably automated, tools to record, track, monitor and ensure accountabilities and responsibilities across the value chain are critical to the success of the service life cycle management, which include project management and product delivery management. The governance should not be based on endless committees, but rather on teams and individuals with well defined roles and responsibilities limited to corporate, strategic business units, project portfolio and project management levels.
- Having signed contracts among the key players within the organization or project team is a key success factor. Contract in this context refers to a simple description or short agreement of what are required, when, dependencies and at what quality and cost. Having an established contract is not because of mistrust, it is about ensuring discipline to get work done. Some stakeholders may not want to have any signed commitment or agreement in order to avoid being regularly monitored and held accountable or responsible for specific deliverables.
- Good attitudes, friendly and service oriented organization are vital to the successful management of service life cycle. A service oriented organization organizes people and teams around services. That is, it makes service outcome the driver for the organization structure. In a service oriented organization every resource recognizes that he/she is playing a role, regardless of the job title; job specification should be generic to some extent in order to provide latitude.
- To manage project successfully, focus on the deliverables and outcome; rely on the combination of your knowledge, experience and capable others to get the work planned and executed. From the onset, promote team maturity through the project team values which should guide the conduct of the project team activities.
- Always have the end in mind and do the first thing first. This will prevent forth and back movements, and it enables you to save valuable time and money.
Complementary Practices
Complementary practices are practices that complement each other or make other practices effective. Good project management practices require supporting practices like effective governance, leadership commitment and discipline. An organization with effective governance, leadership discipline and passion for service excellence facilitates and promotes effective service life cycle management.
Effective project management and product delivery management practices yield high benefits to the organization, leading to maturity and provides the necessary feedback to the organization strategy development. A good practice does not work or become effective in isolation. Understanding the effect of complementary practices will enable organizations to detect point of failure of practices and ensure that complementary practices are established to ensure project delivery success.
For example, if project charter is a mandatory project management artifact, to ensure its credibility and sustenance, the responsible stakeholders must have the discipline to spend quality time to review and approve it, and commit to implementing the charter content. Also, if an organization requires realistic progress tracking and status reporting, it must commit itself to realistic planning and schedule, which are base-lined on realistic expectations and commensurate resource capacity.
Complementart practices complement project management good practices.
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Project and Product Delivery Management
The emphasis on project and product delivery management is to show the importance of the subject matter expertise required in each discipline and their overlapping relationships that are required to deliver the desired project outcome.
Project management is the discipline of planning, controlling, monitoring, executing and closing a project. It provides management oversight for product delivery. A project manager does not have to be, and not usually, the subject matter expert of the product the project has been mandated to develop and deliver.
Product delivery management is the application of specific industry processes or frameworks to obtain and analyze product requirements, design, develop and deliver a product into a production or commercialization state. The product delivery management processes are layered with the project management processes, and together they provide a unified delivery methodology.
Product delivery management delivers the outcome of the project through effective project management. A product delivery manager, responsible for the product delivery, is usually a lead subject matter expert or a product development lead who has solid end-to-end understanding of the product design and development processes. He/she coordinates the design and development resource efforts to accomplish project delivery goals. For projects with simplified requirements and lower risks, the same person may play both the role of the project manager and the product delivery manager.
Figure 11 shows the relationship between project and product delivery management. The goal of project management is to ensure timely and cost effective delivery of a product or set of products. The goal of product delivery management is to deliver the right product in order to fulfill the overall goal of the project. Project management is industry independent; product delivery management is industry specific. Examples of industries include information technology, sales, service, construction, manufacturing – chemicals, pharmaceutical etc.
Figure 11 – Project & Product Delivery Management Relationship
Service Life Cycle
Service life cycle is crucial to understand the delivery of any service from end to end. Most organizations have established processes for project management, product delivery management and service management. However, a complete and harmonized framework that combines these processes rarely exists. A key challenge is taking ownership of the combined processes, due to the frictions that exist at the interfaces between them. Service life cycle helps to resolve this challenge by establishing a harmonized framework, including the supporting governance, to ensure the consistent end-to-end delivery and sustenance of products or services.
Understanding and embracing service life cycle facilitates effective product or service design, development, delivery, support, and retirement. Service life cycle provides a preferred way to measure and understand total cost of ownership of delivering a product or service. Figure 10 shows a service life cycle framework, which can be customized or used as a reference to develop an organization service life cycle framework.
The service life cycle framework in Figure 10 includes the supporting governance, stages and performance assessment steps to achieve service excellence. An organization service life cycle framework, with the supporting governance, provides clarity on teams interactions, roles and responsibility. A practical service life cycle framework facilitates stakeholders’ collaboration to produce superior results.
Supporting governance includes corporate/service strategy, service portfolio management, service delivery management and service operations management. Service strategy defines the organization’s service delivery vision, goals and strategic choices. Service portfolio management includes project and product portfolios management. Service delivery management includes product/service design, development and delivery. Service operations management includes product/service operations, post-delivery support and retirement. Product/service renewal requires the collaboration of service portfolio management, service delivery management and service operations management.
In a service oriented organization, a practical service life cycle framework facilitates single point of accountability and/or responsibility. Team performance reward is paramount, without diminishing or eliminating individual performance reward. When deliverables are assigned, the assignee is responsible for completing it as agreed and gets support from others as needed. This diminishes the emphasis on job description and enables team members to focus their efforts on delivering results. Team members are willing to make things work. A service oriented approach has proven to deliver greater successes than other alternatives.
Figure 10 – Service Life Cycle
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Why Service Oriented Approach?
“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.” Winston Churchill
A service oriented approach is about the delivery of a piece of work, product or service, through the collaborative effort of the organization’s teams, whose performances and rewards are tied to the outcomes of the project. In situations where the team effort is more rewarded than personal effort, team members support and challenge each other. This leads to healthy competition, promotes creativity, prevents groupthink (that is, complacency and conformity among the team members). A service oriented team resolves issues faster and is a catalyst for service excellence.
Having a service oriented mind set enables the organization and the project team to understand the strategic importance of an undertaking and focus on delivering an outcome that relies on the collaborative effort, not heroic or individual effort.
A service oriented approach can also be described in terms of the concept of boundary-less information flow. Boundary-less information flow enables independent systems, teams and organizations to work together seamlessly, with clear exchange or free flow of information in every direction.
Service oriented organizations organize their resources around the product or service they produce, sell and support. These organizations make conscious effort to establish objective measures that are used to measure the success of the desired outcome throughout the value chain – that is, every point where contributions are made to deliver the end product. A service oriented approach ensures the establishment of a clear pathway from conception to realization, sustenance and retirement. Service oriented organizations have gained distinctive capabilities and competitive advantages in their industries and in the marketplace.
Service oriented organizations base rewards on results and in proportion to the contributions of the teams, without ignoring the individual contribution. Rewards solely based on individual performance could cause unhealthy competition, promotes empire building, protectionism or self preservation and conflicting performance measures.
A traditional or non-service oriented organization is a highly stressed environment and less innovative. It is characterized by blame culture, high conflicts, groupthink, unhealthy competition, uncontrolled escalations, low productivity, complacency and mediocrity. In a traditional organization, getting things done depends heavily on who knows who.
Service oriented organizations are usually the best performing organizations. They focus on developing people and teams that create superior solutions and services, and build wealth. Their workforces are happier, more productive and less stressed; they know and recognize their value to the organization and count on each other to deliver results.
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Categories: Approach Tags: service oriented approach approach to project management
