In the everyday hustle and bustle of user communications and the desire to serve by managing the low hanging fruits as fast as possible, project management teams are most likely to miss out on a critical aspect of a project - is it really needed by the corporation?
Most of the projects I have seen are more responses to the short term pains of a few groups of people rather than an answer to an over-arching need of the company. Most of these pains are mere symptoms of the root problem rather than the problem itself and thus there are several project teams that deliver what we call "band-aid" solutions rather than long-term pain relief.
There are some questions that help determine where the project request is truly rooted on and what need does it truly answer and some of them appear below. In several cases, just asking the project sponsor a few of these questions can get people collaborating more across peers or having them re-think their original requests.
1. Priority -> How does this project tie-up to the corporate priorities(sometimes call the CEO agenda, the company mission,etc)?
2. Cost/Benefit - > What will the company gain if we do this project? Don't forget to ask as well what will the company lose if we don't do the project? The more specific the answer - the better. It is, for example, better if the sponsor can tie it to profit growth or profit loss or if the user can tie-it to a specific business process problem that the project will address.
3. Project interactions -> Does this project tie-up with any existing or planned projects that the company is already undertaking?
4. Resources -> To what extent will the company support the resource requirements of the project?
It would be an eye-opener if our executives realize how many projects failed (and costed the company money) because the questions above were not asked(or answered) early on.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
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