Step one in Project Management is to define the desired outcome … defined in detail. Only then consider
- What is the overall strategy?
- How can any antagonism from The Awkward Squad be overcome?
- What resources are needed in terms of personnel and equipment?
- What are the time-scales?
- What is the total cost of the project, and the cost of doing nothing?
To quote
Patty Azzarello: "I see leaders setting themselves up for failure and credibility loss when they don't differentiate the cost of doing a
GREAT job from the cost of doing an
OK job."
Is the project intended to deliver a bicycle or an F1 racing car? Which is the budget for?
One source of failure is not treating a project as "chartered": as something that
must happen.
An example of success:
A software company had many manual steps in deploying code from their development servers to the customer deployments. At the start of the project:
- No process documentation: "We don't need that; we'll never need that"
- Process training was by word of mouth
- All release and deployment stages were being performed manually, which was prone to human error
- Quality control was a cursory visual inspection
At the end of a multi-year project:
- A library of over two hundred process documents
- Process training using the documentation
- Four utilities automated the release and deployment processes
- Two automated quality control utilities in place
- A suite of Quality Management procedures in place for routine process reviews
When one of these new auto-QC tools was initially used on older deployments, thousands of defects were identified. The team then worked on rectifying the errors as a priority task.
Project Benefits:
- Reduced operations staff time spent on release and deployment
- Deskilling allowed for the delegation of standardised, regular tasks
- Greatly reduced lapsed time processes
- Dramatic quality improvement
- Periodic process reviews
Upgrades had been taking two days, with the deployment offline. With the implementaion of automation, the process had been reduced to a maximum of half a day, with no disruption to customer service. As a result, operations staff had been able to take on the role of process minders, freeing them to carry out other tasks.
