IT Project Success

Top 10 Best Practices for Making an IT Project Successful

The purpose of a project is to build compatibility in IT, in order to meet your business goals. According to Ross, from MIT, only 11% of companies worldwide are currently building IT capabilities that are successfully using a mature architecture framework.

A mature architecture road map is necessary for the success of any IT project.

Enterprise Architect plays a key role because they service the entire business, including strategy and execution well beyond IT and IT solutions delivery. 

Role of Enterprise Architect in Project Management

1. Focus on business intents and convert them in a storyboard. Allow Enterprise Architect to focus on business & System architecture to cover business needs at least for next 2 years.

Project Evaluation Matrix

This is the job of EA to analyze the success factor of a project along with business team, project manager , subject matter expert & organization culture. Organization should focus on strategic projects.

2. EA & IT teams should focus on COTS product deployment instead of a general requirement based on custom development. Subject matter experts, integration & functional architects should work on finding out how quickly the storyboards could be configured in the COTS product directly.

EA needs to play a crucial role in aligning IT with business.

Process Chain & Framework to be followed for successful
completion of large IT transformation projects.

COBIT : Business & IT alignment. Mainly for Governance i.e. direct

Next Architecture blueprint & service strategy finalization. This is most critical. TOGAF & ITIL framework both are applicable here. PRINCE2 or PMI methodology for managing the change.

 Service Transition & continuous  will be applicable during operation.


  Key focuses should be quick deployments of the available functionality quickly. EA teams should work with senior users and members of supplier teams, in order to include non-available requirements/intents in product road maps. This approach will give the required agility when addressing business needs by the IT team.

3. EA teams should prepare business cases along with estimated efforts (pessimistic, optimistic and most likely) for critical deliverable to project bards for approval of the initiation of projects. This is important because a good architecture means reusability of components and architect teams should justify the range of the estimated effort.

Role of Project Board & Project Managers/Team Managers

4. Project boards should appoint a project team and a project manager. The project manager will work with multiple teams in order to build a complete business case. The project manager should also prepare details for various stages of the project, how each stage of the project will be executed and allow tolerances for each stages boundaries and include an exception management plan for each stage. Project managers should now submit the entire business case to project boards for approval for the formal initiation of projects.

5. Next, project managers need to prepare a detailed project plan using Microsoft Project. Project managers should follow PERT CPM methods to build the schedule & to optimize the projects plans and identify at least two critical paths, major constraints, or dependencies.

6. Project boards should agree and approve of the project plan, stage boundaries and exception plans for each stage: Risk, Issues and Quality Management & Reports Dashboard, along with reporting frequency. Project boards should be direct on following certain methodologies and frameworks and need to periodically check the process adherence and revalidation of business care. Project managers need to create a project team and assign them a work package.

7. Project boards should agree on project governance & management report.

(a) Governance reports should include Z score, CPI & SPI along with trends in an agreed frequency. The purpose of this step is to improve the probability of completing the project on schedule and within cost. 

Z score helps predict any delay based on the estimate of remaining work, whereas EVM method forecasts
based on actual work completed.

(b) Weekly project report dashboards should present risk statistics. There need to be clear risk mitigation & contingency plans for risks above the agree tolerance. A root cause analysis should be available for any violations of any SLA/OLA. This helps with the early arrest of any potential issues.

(c) Project boards should know key decisions taken when, why and by whom.

(d) EA & SME should ascertain the quality for products, any deviations from previously agreed product descriptions and product acceptance criteria.

8. Increase the communications within team members because this will create an engaged workforce. This will also help to create a more cohesive and motivated team.

9. Find the influencers and the connections within the organization who may be able to help you move the project along. The more people talk who talk about the program will encourage others to participate in the program voluntarily, increasing the acceptability of the project. Project managers should learn to avoid/neglect few people, mainly because they are destructive critics.

10. Always, think about what could go wrong and how you could act quickly to mitigate the problem.

Related Article: Microsoft Project Tutorial

About the author : Arindam has spent 23 years of his career managing large and complex IT transformation projects. He is a telecommunications engineer & PRINCE2 practitioner. Arindam has hands on working experience with ITIL, COBIT & TOGAF. He has completed more than 50 projects total, worth more than $150M USD around the globe.
 

IT Project Failure

Last week we had a discussion at our local PMI chapter on key reasons why large IT projects fails, especially projects that require 12 months to complete or more, and cost in excess of $5M. We invited CIO’s from a few Telecom and Retail Companies for this particular discussion.

Here are some interesting statistics on IT project failure

• Only 40% of projects are completed on schedule, budget and meet quality goals.
• Between 65 and 80% of IT projects fail to meet their objectives, also running significantly late and/or cost far more than initially planned.

Everyone on our panel has agreed these are the top 7 reasons why large IT projects fail

 1. During project initiation, the program’s management office or corporate office, signed an agreement with the suppliers without detailed technical scope.  Neither end users, nor the subject matter experts were consulted, or there was inadequate attention paid to their recommendations.

Dilbert on why IT projects fail




2. Projects often start in good faith and quickly progress until a major disconnect occurs. The major disconnect might be a change in business priorities, inability to show incremental progress, few changes in executive sponsorship or immature organizational capabilities.

3. In some cases, project boards and executives failed to resolve conflicts. Most of the time, executives approach the conflict in a highhanded manner without having to address the root of the cause. People agree to align, yet do so without ever actually aligning. One Canadian study has actually stated, “Bad communications between parties are the cause of IT project failures in 57% of the cases we have studied.”

4. Management does not want to make decisions on a large project. Rather than accept authority and responsibility, they would rather get consensus and agreement.  This can reduce the impact of failure to any specific manager. Nobody is fired for screwing up; however, this kind of consensus will always produce a sub-standard design. Having shared authority for large decisions is bad. You end up with results that are not designed, but voted upon.

5. Large projects have a massive scope, partly because of integrating several systems. Here, project managers do not deliver on just one product, but deliver the entire system that talks to this new product(s). Any change in suit to BAU can cause scope creep in the main product. This triggers cost overrun and can influence quality.

6. Most of the time there was no designated Enterprise Architect or they are part of the IT team managed by the CIO, leading to improper planning, inadequate budgeting for performance, security testing & end user training.

7. Frequent status review by senior executives often takes too much time, including the preparation of status reports and presentations, rather than actual work. Remember a project might be technically successful but that does not mean it meets stakeholders need.

Everyone in the enterprise is responsible for a large part, not just IT. The failure of larger IT projects is a business failure that is the shared responsibility of the entire senior leadership team. Seldom do projects fail due to technical challenges, but mainly due to personnel issues.

Here is a great video on top 10 reason why project fails

Now that’s enough discussion on IT Project Management Failure, so here is a list of the Top 10 Best Practices or Making A Successful IT project.

Reference on IT project management failure:

• Why Project Fails?

• What makes "big" projects fail?

About the Author: Arindam has spent 23 years of his career managing large and complex IT transformation projects. He is a telecommunications engineer & PRINCE2 practitioner. Arindam has hands on working experience with ITIL, COBIT & TOGAF. He has completed more than 50 projects total, worth more than $150M USD around the globe.

MS Project Tutorial -2

 Best Practices For Building & Tracking MS Project Plan

 Have you read  "Top 10 tips to new MS Project users” ? If not, click here to read it.

Now, you will learn top 16 best practices to make an effective project plan using MS Project 13. You can use them during preparing the plan or for tracking the plan.

1. Always track actual start and finish date. Actual dates must reflect when a task started and or completed. They should not be auto-generated and should not exist in the future. An actual finish date cannot be earlier than the actual start date for a task.

2. Ensure that all next level tasks all roll up to summary tasks. The calculation compares the baseline start and finish dates of the summary tasks to those of the lower level details tasks.

3. Always set a status date to get Cost Performance & Schedule performance Index against a chosen baseline.

4. The Critical Path is one of the most important areas of the program schedule. It is usually the most difficult, time-consuming, and technically challenging portion of the schedule. It should represent a small portion of the overall program schedule.

5.The schedule should be primarily made up of discrete tasks that have work associated with them. Summaries and Milestones are needed for reporting and program tracking but should not be the majority of the line items.

6. There should not be any missing predecessors and missing successors.

7. Please always careful during update of tasks that have begun when their predecessors or successors are not 100% complete

8. Schedule progress should drive the end dates of the program. Not scheduling forward or leaving incomplete work in the past does not allow for a correct picture of the project status and projected end date.

9. There should not be any summary tasks with resources because they are strictly an outlining or rolling up feature and should not drive schedule dates or resource loading. There shouldn’t be any summary tasks with predecessors or successors

10. Task duration should be within 5 to 20 working days

11. All schedules should have a reasonably small amount of slack or float. Large positive or negative slack values may indicate a poorly constructed schedule.

• Large negative slack indicates a logic error or a program that is no longer on track to meet its commitment dates.
• Large positive slack may indicate poor or missing logic.

12. Resource planning requires that all discrete tasks be resource loaded in order to analyze and identify resource constraints or overloaded resources.

13.  Baseline dates for tasks and milestones should be established in the project schedule early in the program. For large projects involving a customer, the contract may require this to be done in 60 to 90 days after the start date and prior to a formal review.

14. The majority of the task dependencies should be Finish-to-Start. Since most of the tasks represent work that will have a start and an end date resulting in some product or document that is needed by someone else, the work is performed in some sequence most of the time. 

15. Remove tasks that are missing links to its start or finish points.  These tasks can change duration without a detectable impact to the schedule.

16. Avoid inactive tasks and manual tasks to the extent possible. You should select auto schedule as default option.

In summary, You need to follow current, actual & baseline start, finish & duration. Always prepare based on initial effort and update the remaining work and reestimated duration based on remaining work. Never allow very short or vary long duration for tasks. Put resources and maintain resource calendar. Get the CPI & SPI ( will discuss them soon) based on baseline & status date.



Till now, you learn top tips on how to make a plan and best practices to build and track the plan. Next we’ll discuss & demonstrate how to make a plan in MS project for simple SDLC.

Next Article :  MS Project tutorial 3 on Microsoft Project schedule

Related Articles in our Project Tutorial :

1. Top 10 Best Practices for Making an IT Project Successful

2. Top 7 reasons why large IT projects Fail

 

Share your comments  on best practices for building & tracking MS Project Plan

MS Project Tutorial -1

Are you frustrated with MS Projects because it's not behaving like EXCEL?

Are you sick and tired of watching video after video in Youtube but not getting the EXACT answer?

So, I decided to share these lessons for you based on my personal experience on large IT transformation program in last 20 odd years in IT & telecom industry across all continents.

Lesson 1:  Top 10 tips to new MS Project users 

1.    MS project is not Excel. If you think Excel is right tool ask yourself why Microsoft and IBM first created complex tool like Ms Project 13 or Rational tool concert (IBM) and create an update every year. So, by NOT using project tool is not an option.

2.    Work with subject matter expert to create a detailed activity list. You can create the list in Excel or Word.

• Identify which are fixed duration work and which are effort driven work (i.e. addition of resources might expedite delivery because it will shorten the duration). 

3.    Get the resource list ( i.e. people going to work)along with their availability ( calendar along with % of availability ) from each team.

• You need to add this resource information in the resource sheet.
• Never assign resource 100%.
• Always manage the schedule of experts in each group as they are the real accelerator of the program.

4.    Avoid using constraints (like Must Start On or Start No Earlier Than) to the extent possible it creates challenge during optimizing of the plan. It is important to identify the sequence of work before you the plan.

5.    Agree on a review schedule say weekly or fortnightly. Make sure to break all activity in smaller activity so that activity should complete between two reviews. Will discuss in detail during tracking of activity in future lessons.

6.    Familiar yourself with type of work like fixed duration, fixed work & fixed unit in the tool.

7.    Basic scheduling formula is duration = Work/Units. So, never adjust duration.

8.    Identify major milestones about which you need to communicate executive steering committee.

•        Get agreement on those milestones from all performing teams.
•        Avoid using milestones within summary tasks. 

9.    Identify all critical external dependencies like commercial, procurement in your program, deliverable from team whom your company outsource the work. Ensure a regular risk & issue management  because  these are major culprits for violation of project triangles  scope, time & budget

10.    Reduce the amount of slack (but never get rid of it all!) on individual tasks.

You  MUST  understand these 10  tips before you start making any plan with MS Project 13 or Rational Tool concert or anyother open source tool or online tool.

Initially, I will speak about system development life cycle. In future lessons I will explain how you can  customize Microsoft Projectc13 to support  Zachman enterprise architecture , methodologies of service CMMI, service transition, capacity planning.

I, personally follow critical chain for the overall program and extreme programming for team level service delivery. Will share with you how  you can write plug-ins in MS project to support theory of constraints and agile methodology.

Please note that  you can use "tutorial de project" is generic and you can even consider it for tutorial project 2007 or 2010.

Next article:  MS Project Tutorial  on best practices for building & tracking MS Project Plan.

Related Articles in our Project Tutorial :

1. Top 10 Best Practices for Making an IT Project Successful

2. Top 7 reasons why large IT projects Fail

Share your  tips om MS Project tutorial  below as comments or share the article in Facebook , LinkedIn or Myspace.

Vinita - The Warrior of life

Oh! God…!

“How do I pay for my mortgage?” Vinita cried out. She had just heard about the possible hike in interest rates on mortgages on her FM radio station, while she was driving towards home after another long and tiring day.

“God! Why don’t I get an increment, a promotion or another high paying job?” Vinita sobbed, feeling hopeless.

She became upset with herself and felt a choking feeling in her throat.

Parking her car, she walked towards the elevator slowly with her head down and her hands clasped tightly at her back, biting her lower lip.
Entering the elevator, she went up to her apartment and put the key into the key hole.

The door creaked loudly and Vinita entered her studio apartment quietly.

She went to the refrigerator and began to drink some of the chilled water she had left in there earlier, staring towards the floor and tracing circles in the carpet with her right big toe.

“Mama! What happened? You didn’t call me!” Vinita’s young daughter came running out to her and hugged her tightly.

“Mama! I already finished my homework today! Am I behaving like a good girl today?”

Vinita kissed her forehead and told her brightly, “Yes, of course Darling!”

Pinky began clapping with joy and jumping with the praise from mother. She began running around the room laughing and giggling.

“Mama, I told my friends that next month I’m going to go to Disneyland. Right, Mama?” she asked while Vinita hugged her tight.

A deep cry started choking Vinita’s through again; about to burst into tears, she felt a burning sensation in her eyes. Looking at her six-year-old daughter with teary eyes, she cleared her throat and managed to utter the words as she looked up at the ceiling in the room, “No, Pinky, we can’t go this time.”
Vinita started to feel her world crumbling like a house of cards. She felt so hopeless in the situation.

It all began a month ago when her boss Mr. Paxton had called her into his office telling her, “Vinita, it appears that your position at the company is no longer...” and that is all he had to give her. After sixteen long years – sick days, days Pinky was sick, days when she didn’t know how she was holding it together- making the long trips back and forth across town, especially through the traffic on Mumbai Street. She though process broke with her daughters wailing.

“Why! Mummy! Why? Why? You... promised me we would go! I wanted to go! I don’t know why....” she sobbed, “You have to take me to Disneyland!”
Vinita’s insides twisted and she began quivering at her knees. She slowly collapsed into a chair while staring blankly at Pinky. Emotionally drained she murmured, “Pinky, dear, forgive me.”

“Why? Why Mummy? What is the problem now?”

“Pinky, I promised that we would go because I was told that I would be getting a bonus this month, but I didn’t get one. “
“Mama that’s simple, just ask Socrates! Today our teacher told us how wise he was! I’m sure that if you tell him; ask him what you do, then we should can find a way to get to Disneyland!”

Vinita signed. She was upset and helpless in front of her own small daughter, who had just lost her father before being born. The poor child had no idea that Socrates was already dead.

Vinita NEEDED money, NOW. Right NOW, but how?

Her soliloquy, “Oh! GOD teaches me the MAGIC of making money...”

Dropping herself on the sofa tired and weeping, she prayed to God for help.

Click here the revelation  which helped Vinita to turn around in her life.

The Revelation

“Child! Why are you weeping?” Vinita heard the low silvery voice say.

She woke. There was no one. Pinky was sleeping on her bed. It was cold outside so she but an extra blanket on Pinky and took another one out for herself.
Switching off the lights she tried to go back to sleep.

Again, she heard the majestic voice, “Child, don’t look outside, look within yourself. I am here with you. Why are you calling me?”

Vinita was awake, but still asleep as many thoughts began jostling in her head. In her half-awake state, she managed to speak out, “I am tired and exhausted. Tell me how I can earn a million, how I can get a promotion and how I can begin living happily.”

Again, the voice reverberated, right at her ear, “Ask me only one question, and tell me what your greatest worry is.”

Vinita responded in her hypnagogic state, “Why, I haven’t had one promotion in the last sixteen years and now I’m losing my job. Why?”

“Again, you asked too many questions. Let me ask you, why do you think you never received a promotion?”

Vinita was awestruck. She had no clue why and if she had known at all, she clearly would have taken some action by now. She cried out, “You told me that you came here to help, so tell me exactly what I should do, I’m tired, and I’m clueless.”

This time, Vinita heard a very feeble voice, “Child, solutions to all these problems are already within you.”

There was a long pause and a deep silence. Then it was over.

Vinita became very disturbed. She drank a large glass of water and walked through the apartment for some time before feeling comfortable enough to try sleeping again.

As soon as she laid down in her bed again, Vinita heard the whispering, as if several people were talking at once. Feeling a lightness within her, feeling good, she drifted off to sleep. With all her muscles losing their strength, she finally fell asleep.


Suddenly she felt a transmission towards the center of her heart, as if thousands of white light bubbles were showering her.
“CHILD, everyone wants me to help them but I give my everything to you all. I live within each and every one of you. You have my intellect and my wisdom. I can help you search within yourself. Everyone wants treasure, islands and more, but these things must be earned Therefore, whomever you think gets the promotion in your office, may have been less deserving than you were. Instead, stop being jealous and think of a positive way that you can find a single point, giving yourself courage and a competitive advantage over the rest. Always remember that life sets up up with nothing but challenges to overcome, and that we must find the willingness to change it. You need to introspect and improve yourself, think and take actions! I am always here with you.”

Vinita managed to ask softly, “I will, but, when will you come again?”

There was no answer. The sound of a pin drop prevailed in the empty room.

Sitting up she found herself covered in a cold sweat. Staring at her body she slowly felt the strength returning to her limbs.
“Divine revelation?” Vinita asked herself.

Now, she has many mixed feelings. Motived and feeling good, her tiredness has gone. She walked into her study, turned on her computer, and began looking for more answers.