Going Beyond the Waterfall: Managing Scope Effectively Across the Project Life Cycle
280
Going Beyond the Waterfall: Managing Scope Effectively Across the Project Life Cycle
280eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781604277517 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Ross, J. Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
IDENTIFYING SCOPE AND SOLUTIONS: ARE WE DOING THE RIGHT THINGS?
In an information age, an on-demand era associated with a "have it now" culture, the natural, human condition is to gravitate toward consumption and use of a product or service (the "what"), typically with little concern for the complicated world of how those products or services came to be, or why. In the business world, when it comes to change, the last forty years have seen a heavy focus on "doing things right," with a view to satisfying ever demanding user expectations. From process improvement and reengineering to change management, product and project management, a focus on methodology, process compliance, a series of linear, almost mathematical "painting-by-numbers" steps is observed in identifying scope and solutions.
While doing things right is vital, it is not immediately clear in many organizations that the list and mix of the things they are doing and have planned to do over a given timeline are the "right" things: balancing the needs of the environment, capabilities, and assets of the organization with constraining factors such as risk, costs, dependencies, and resources to produce the optimal portfolio of investments (change initiatives), as aligned to the companies' missions, strategies, and objectives. It is suggested that doing the wrong things really well is not a good measure of success. Organizations need to demonstrate execution competence of the right things at the right time to maximize their chances of remaining relevant.
CHANGE: PORTFOLIO, PROGRAM, AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT
While the terms "portfolio, program, and project management" are commonplace in today's business vernacular, a clear, concise, and commonly accepted understanding of these concepts does not exist. Further, in the broader context, the distinctions between portfolio, program, and project management are blurred, at best. A major part of the difficulty in this respect is that these concepts are: a) broad, and b) complex. In a time where solutions are desired quickly and simply, selling complex disciplines that can enable the journey to this utopia presents challenges in terms of adopting a program management capability. For example, the "What's in it for me" factor is difficult to articulate in a 15-second elevator pitch.
A Focus on Program Management
Strictly speaking, portfolio management is about ensuring that enterprises are "doing the right things." This concept will be clarified and demonstrated in this chapter. Focus is given to the domain of program management; however, this is a critical enabler of the concepts of portfolio management and project delivery. It is also a key component of an enterprise-level change capability.
It is not easy to find a shared understanding of "what" program management is and of critical importance, "how" to do it. There are a number of (commonly accepted) interpretations as to what a "program" is. The three main definitions of a program are:
1. simply, a large project,
2. a group of interrelated projects, or
3. a composite of identifying and selecting major change initiatives, and seeing them manifest.
One thing is clear: the domain of program management is multifaceted and relatively complex. As such, it is difficult, and perhaps futile, to provide an isolated, meaningful definition of a clear, coherent understanding and definition of the differences between portfolio, program, and project management.
The Project Context: Doing Things Right
Projects exhibit a short-term focus, a "product-centric" perspective, and are tactical in nature. They have well-defined objectives and deliverables, and therefore, possess a certain degree of predictability. There may be high uncertainty at the beginning (high assumptions/facts ratio), such that the focus is to reduce uncertainty via work breakdown, planning, and risk analysis, followed by quality, time, and cost control. Projects focus on achieving "operational improvement," and the paradigm for projects is about "performance." Project management is a decision implementation process that seeks to keep change to a minimum. The measure of success is typically delivering the right output (scope), at the right time, within the right cost.
The Program Context: Bridging Strategy and Execution
As shown in Table 1.1, there are key differences between project, program, and portfolio management. Programs exhibit a medium-to-long term focus and a "benefit-centric" perspective. The organizational situation is complex, and there are multiple stakeholders. There is uncertainty (degree as to known, knowable, and unknown solutions) and ambiguity (expectations vs. defined requirements; conflicting aims; continuous readjustments). Programs reduce uncertainty and ambiguity through the elaboration of needs and expectations, as aligned to the strategic objectives being pursued (concept of "value management"), negotiation, and decision making. Programs focus on achieving "business change" and the paradigm is a "learning and performance" cycle. Program management is both a decision-making and decision-implementation process.
Programs comprise projects in addition to other key management capabilities of governance and decision management, benefits realization, stakeholder engagement, and dependency management. All of these enable the program to effectively deal with expected change, while bridging the domains of strategy and execution.
Portfolio Management: Doing the Right Things
As illustrated in Figure 1.1, there is a clear relationship between executive, portfolio, program, and project management. While the initiatives that comprise projects and programs are largely concerned with "doing things right," portfolio management focuses on ensuring that there is an appropriate, feasible, and desirable return on investment — that the organization is "doing the right things." To achieve this, portfolio management is concerned with ensuring that change initiatives contribute to the organization's strategic objectives, and the outcome represents value for money.
While a project may deliver all the required features to the specified quality, deadline, and budget (therefore, traditionally declared "successful"), it would be difficult not to accept a reduced measure of success where, in the fullness of time, the project turned out to be the wrong initiative to commit time, money, and resources to in the first place. The outputs of the project perhaps were never being consumed and used by the business, and therefore, the targeted benefits were never realized.
Portfolio management addresses these issues by providing the mechanisms for translating strategic objectives into an appropriate, feasible, and desirable mix of change initiatives focused on optimizing the realization of targeted benefits and effectively balancing cost, resources (available capacity), risk (achievability), and dependencies at the enterprise level.
Program Management as a Key Capability
The ability to adapt and change at the organizational level is a key driver to maturing business capability and growing sustainable value. In addition to the classic business capabilities defined in the value chain (sales, operations, etc.), a modern, dynamic, and fast-paced environment requires that a core competence of any organization going forward must be the ability to identify, react, and adapt to change (in technology, attitudes, trends, and so on) to ensure continued relevancy and competitive viability. Program management provides a consistent approach to effect larger-scale organizational change in this environmental context.
As an integral part of a corporate change capability, programs provide the bridge between business strategy (manifested in portfolios) and tactical change initiatives (projects) to deliver results. As a structured approach to enterprise driven management of change, programs exist to make sense of complex, often ambiguous environments enabling a robust, business-led evaluation of options.
Management of programs is a distinctive business service of a change capability. As a service, it works within the construct of an enterprise architecture that incorporates organizational and systems design through a coordinated set of capability based planning services. Collectively, these services prepare business users in readiness for end-to-end change. Program management provides the vehicle to address pressures on, and the needs of business, as expressed through its environmental factors, business strategies, and strategic working assumptions.
Key change behaviors support a consistent approach to business governance. The goal in utilizing program management practices, shown in Table 1.2, is to drive business thinking toward achieving the right coordinated outcomes within each business unit. Providing clarity on change value propositions enables effective governance and investment (portfolio) alignment, and empowers decision making at all levels of leadership in a timely manner.
Once expected outcomes are clearly defined, program management becomes a performance management practice that is intended to deliver outcomes with the highest possible efficiency (best scope/quality vs. lowest cost/time).
Another key benefit of managing programs versus projects is that the management of change occurs at the enterprise level. Instead of simply managing change, you have a broader concept, and thus, a broader reach. Finally, developing program management skills and practices offers a number of organizational benefits to effect sustainable change, i.e., the transformation as shown inTable 1.3.
With the above context in mind, a simple, pragmatic definition of a program is offered:
A program is a group of related change actions (projects and operational activities), managed in a coordinated way, to obtain benefits and control not available from managing the actions independently.
Adopting Program Management
Program management is a complicated discipline. Therein lies a number of challenges to its adoption and successful application. Program management calls for a certain level of application to appropriately understand it. It involves many moving parts, and many management and leadership concepts, and needs to marry other professional disciplines and associated practices, such as change management, vendor management, and procurement practice. It requires intelligent knowledge of organizational operating models (ways of working) and experience at effecting enterprise-level change. It requires an understanding of how to assemble and calibrate the correct features and functions, in the appropriate sequence and pace, which is only possible by having experienced the journey previously — ideally, experienced several times. In the words of Lao Tzu, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," and the first step is often the hardest.
To undertake programs, organizations need to be comfortable with a number of conditions that traditional leadership approaches strived to reduce or stamp out, such as:
• Knowing what you want to achieve, but being comfortable with the fact that you do not yet have the answer as to how you're going to achieve the goal;
• Uncertainty, a turbulent, often volatile environment;
• Risk, and increased understanding and appetite for it; and
• Failure, and acceptance that some failure (albeit, not catastrophic) is part of the journey and should be embraced.
There are numerous indirect benefits of such a "learning experience," the ability (and willingness) to make decisions where the desired facts, information, and time to implement simply do not reside.
Organizations that are willing to at least consider that the classical management model practiced since the Industrial Revolution is perhaps an anachronism. Understand that embracing a new delivery paradigm will involve a certain amount of missteps, when it truly wants to (or must) implement larger-scale, more transformational change, and recognize that as part of the journey, more than 30% of the individuals that commence the journey will not finish it. Those organizations also understand that this is normal, and that the way we define success and reward/recognize it needs to change. Finally, those organizations understand that the concept of "ready, fire, aim" is more conducive to many modern day situations, and that overanalysis and decision procrastination kills creativity, innovation, growth, and the very essence of the human spirit. Only then are the conditions ripe to take on the challenge associated with leveraging the profound benefits a well-executed program framework can enable.
A simple test of readiness to adopt a program management capability is to ask if those accountable for delivering key change initiatives are prepared to stand in front of the senior management team or company board and support decisions, such as in the following scene:
Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, sent a meeting request to an employee who had recently lost over $10 million for his division in under three months. When the employee arrived at the meeting, apologizing and asking if he was going to be fired, Tom responded, "Fire you? Why would I fire you? I've just spent $10 million educating you!"
To further assess the readiness to adopt programs, Table 1.4 shows some of the basic criteria for effective adoption strategies.
THE DECISION CASE
In the same way that projects have stages, programs have phases. As projects have business cases, a program revolves around a decision case. The term decision case is used for a number of reasons:
1. To simply distinguish a program-level process/document/output from a project.
2. Start the idea that the scale of change in scope requires a number of decisions to be made, both up-front and ongoing.
3. To emphasize the personal accountability that is associated with decisions (i.e., people make decisions).
The decision case supports the effective decision-making process by describing the solution and the reasons that it is necessary, as well as how the solution will exist within the environment. That means the decision case is composed of the following elements:
• Program justification/drivers
• Purpose/objectives
• Classification (Typically four categories of justification; classification is an element of prioritization, e.g., a company may rank maintenance programs ahead of transformation initiatives at a given point in time.)
o Compliance: Demonstrate adherence to a standard or regulation
o Maintenance: Maintain our operations condition
o Continuous improvement: Improve performance
o Transformation: Change the way we do business
• Strategic contribution
• Achievability assessment
• Scope
• Assumptions, dependencies, constraints
• Key deliverables and milestones
• Key risks and mitigation strategies
• Resource requirements
• Costs
• Financial benefits realization plan
• Nonfinancial benefits realization plan
• Program and project governance structure
Table 1.4 Criteria for effective strategies and evaluating options A decision case works hand-in-hand with a program management plan — the plan to manage the program — which answers the "how" in terms of managing the processes and leading the people identified as essential to implement the desired solution(s) and realize the targeted benefits.
The program management plan is the culmination of all planning processes related to groups of projects. They are combined into a single plan in order to create a consistent and coherent set of documentation that can be used to direct both program execution and control.
The program management plan tackles the "how" of redeveloping the program governance framework and control mechanism. It determines the organization structure and required facilities, including an approach to identify, engage, and manage stakeholders; to define requirements; and, to manage cost, time, vendors, communication, quality, and risk.
Finally, the program delivery plan, which is spawned from the decision case and the program management plan, defines the explicit activities, products, milestones, and deliverables, and uses all of the governance, delivery, and management tools identified in the program management plan: for example, risk and decision logs, financial tracking tools, vendor scorecards, communication outputs, and meeting management tools.
Environment, Values, and Resources Congruence
One of the primary functions of the decision case model is to analyze the alignment between all parts of the whole business model (or system) in order to understand how the overall decision will impact the business and its environments. This analysis is done by looking for congruence (or alignment) between the environment (as key success factors), values, and resources (core competencies and capabilities).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Going Beyond The Waterfall"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Barbara A. Davis and Darren Radford.
Excerpted by permission of J. Ross Publishing, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Vincent Serpico,
Preface,
About the Authors,
SECTION 1: DISCOVERY, SCOPE AND DEFINING BUSINESS SOLUTIONS,
Chapter 1 Identifying Scope and Solutions: Are We Doing the Right Things?,
Chapter 2 The Evolution of Scope on a Project,
Chapter 3 Stakeholder Engagement and Involvement,
Chapter 4 Implications of Business Architecture,
SECTION 2: MID-FLIGHT CHANGE CONTROL,
Chapter 5 Requirements Development Life Cycle,
Chapter 6 Governance,
SECTION 3: APPLYING PROJECT AND ARCHITECTURE METHODOLOGIES,
Chapter 7 Implications of Agile on Scope,
Chapter 8 Waterfall,
Chapter 9 Enterprise Architecture,
SECTION 4: IMPLEMENTATION AND BEYOND,
Chapter 10 Roll-out: Marketing and Socializing the Solution,
Chapter 11 Handing Over to Operations (BAU),
Chapter 12 Decommissioning and Sun-Setting,
APPENDIX A Sample Document Templates,