Project Management Success Driven by Infrastructure
How to Manage Infrastructure and People Side of Projects
Project Management Success Driven by Infrastructure - Computer projects are viewed as success when they meet these key metrics:
- Delivered on time
- On or under budget
- System works as required
Only a few projects achieve all three. Many more are delivered which fail on one or more of these criteria, and a substantial number are cancelled having failed badly.
Major projects fail more than half the time, according to industry research, and too often it's easy to blame the tech stuff instead of the people who really screwed up. Technology does not have feelings or a family to feed. But IT project managers and team members have figured out that human behavior is often the root cause of these failures.
The classic project pitfalls stem from shortcomings such as bad planning, a lack of focus or a dysfunctional work culture. The most frequent causes of failure are:
- Lack of user involvement and no strong user champion of the project
- Implementation time-table longer than the normal enterprise operating cycle
- Poor or lacking requirement definitions
- Expanding or creeping project objectives scope
- Lack of project life cycle methodology - no change or version control processes
- Poor or inadequate testing
- Poor user training and documentation
- In sufficient implementation and conversion resources
To succeed project managers must manage their most important resources -- infrastructure and staffing. It's a jungle out there and project managers are fighting to survive. With countless man-hours clocked and billions of dollars spent every year on project tools, the success rate for projects remains astonishingly low. So what's the solution?
An infrastructure and people-centric process that works in conjunction with an organization's existing culture. Success is based on the seven characteristics of high-performance project teams -- transparency, accountability, communication, trust, integrity, leadership, and execution.
- Take project teams out of their functional silos and transform them into a powerful, integrated force
- Balance the expectations of customers, management, and project teams with the technical requirements of cost, schedule, and performance
- Apply practical phase-by-phase project guidance to real-life situations
- Avoid or minimize possible pitfalls
Every successful project involves someone in the trenches who has the infrastructure and people skills to match process with the capability of his team and organization.
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