“There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all” – Peter Drucker
Over the past few years, there has been a great deal of effort in creating and improving the competencies that should deliver successful projects. What is less focussed on and indeed is the single largest reason behind project over run, over spend and under delivery is a company’s ability to articulate business strategy and how this translates into implementation.
Most companies conduct yearly strategic planning activities, some may conduct this exercise twice a year. It will produce a slide pack with targets, time frames and possibly business units involved. The problem is that whilst there will be an understood level of competency in project delivery activities, four critical disciplines will be overlooked.
- Business Process Mapping – what does your company do? How does it do it? Who does what? And what creates the value for the business and what supports the creation of this value. This is the most important element because this knowledge directly impacts the implementation of the strategy. It assists everyone in the business to make the decisions necessary to maximise the efficient investment of time, energy, resource and budget to protect and improve the value of the business.
- Technology Discovery and Mapping – what are the technical elements that enable both the value creation and supporting activities? Technology is at the heart of every business and it is the single largest contributor to cost and time blow outs to business projects. At some point a project has to go live, it is at this point real cost is incurred by the business, the correct decisions at the very start of a project can cover all the investment requirements covering not only the functional elements but also the non functional that truly support the business.
- Risk Management – a lot of companies play lip service to risk management when it comes to project investment and delivery. What elements will ensure successful projects and where are the areas of flexibility? Change is an inevitable part of every project, stakeholders need to be able to make quick decisions, having comprehensive and open risk processes will make sure short term decisions can support long term goals.
- Traceability – most project will have a requirements traceability matrix, if you don’t at the very least start here. In most cases this is used to show test coverage, how many requirements have been successfully tested (a very late form of risk management). But how many companies trace a requirement back to a strategic decision or to a desired business benefit? If a requirement does not link to a business strategy then is it really a requirement?
A disciplined approach to delivering projects starts even before a project is initiated. The successful implementation of strategy should be no fluke; knowledge of your business, what technology enables value, creating a decision framework based on risk and being able to trace everything too and from the business strategy creates a predictable business – one which works out the right things to do first and then how to do them right.
- By Toby Mills, Practice Principal – Revolution IT
