5 Tips to Project Management Success

What does it take to make your project successful? Ensure success of your latest Lean Six Sigma or BPM project with some simple steps. Avoiding the common pitfalls of project management is not rocket science, it is simply a case of taking some sensible measures. Here are five tips to success.

#1 Ownership

Make sure you have the top down backing from senior management. There must be direct communication from the sponsor to the stakeholders. The message must be, "we are serious, this thing is going to happen so you are either with us or you are not" and beware those that are not.

Be careful as project manager to make sure the sponsor does not take the project over and become the de-facto project manager.

#2 Interaction

Interact with your team, not only for updates on the project, but to brainstorm ideas in progressing or improving projects. Set up working groups if you need to be more specific on certain issues or if it’s more technical and then provide reports on the outcomes of these meetings in future meetings or briefs.

If it’s an IT project, the IT department must take time to understand the customer's requirements before proposing any technical solution. Often IT is blinded by the latest, newest thing available and try to shoehorn the requirements into it. On the other hand, customers must devote the time and effort necessary to ensure a successful project by interacting with the IT department and making sure all requirements have been fully defined. Ensure you have spoken to all stakeholders to gathered their requirements and that they continue to work with you for the duration of the project.

#3 Project Management

Ensure that the business case, requirements and scope are clearly defined and documented. Make sure the stakeholders understand them and sign them off. Stick rigidly to the scope and if changes are required then put them through a change management process where they are documented, justified and then agreed.

By creating a solid plan and strategy for the outset, everyone knows what they are doing and what milestones they have in their sites to focus on. By doing this, time management is optimized, and it also means that as a project manager you will spend a lot less time micro managing or indeed dealing with issues brought about through a lack of clarity. Leading on holistically, time management is a basic skill for project managers. If you can't manage your own time, how can you expect to manage your teams? Ask each day what you did to move the project forward. Plan your next day, what will you do to ensure your project continues along the straight and narrow. Plan your time, manage your resources with a light touch and communicate effectively. With a little time management, project success should come easier.

#4 Manage Expectations

One way to avoid this is to break a project into smaller pieces or phases. Equate this to a sausage machine, where you feed in the raw material at one end and out it comes as small, perfectly formed, packages or sausages at the other end. The same can happen with IT projects where you take small packages of requirements and push them through the machine, producing several deliverables over the life of a project. This way you manage expectations by making frequent deliveries to demonstrate what the technology can really deliver. This approach ensures the project delivers to the customers’ expectations by giving them early visibility of what you are building.

#5 Communication

Any project is doomed to fail if it lacks a good communications plan. You need to figure out the best way to work with your team or partners. Interaction and collaboration is vital. Create a good flow of reporting, calls and meetings. This not only ensures that you keep track of your project’s next steps, action points and risks, but also it keeps the project deliverables transparent for all involved… including finance! Keeping an audit trail of the progress not only means that you can map out if you’re on track, but also potential risks to your project.

Communication problems are the hardest to resolve as often it is only looking back that the problem is identified. Regular communication and a close working relationship with the customer will help.

 What you really need is a person with a foot in both camps, someone who understands the business and the IT equally well. If you can identify this person make sure you keep hold of them, they are hugely valuable. If you are unable to find this person, the next best option is to have two people, one from the business and one from IT. By working closely together and sharing information they can minimize any communication problems.

Stay in touch with all stakeholders throughout the project. Make sure everyone knows what they need to know to make decisions and get work done. Analyze status information to create status reports. Be prompt and decisive.

SOURCE: processexcellencenetwork

Process Improvement - Setting up for success

Ensure Brand Longevity With A Sustainable (Technology) Strategy

While green and sustainable initiatives haven’t traditionally been a high priority for business technology decision makers, the growing urgency of climate change continues to place scrutiny on large resource users. In today’s hyper competitive marketplace, your customers, employees, partners, and possibly regulators are demanding more transparency in company operations and products.

In reaction to this trend, many organizations have already started to embrace sustainable initiatives as an opportunity to showcase creativity, technological achievement, as well as their brand’s commitment to the environment and broader community. In order to investigate this trend, my colleague and principal analyst Jim Nail and I set out to better understand the technology, processes and marketing strategy behind corporate sustainability initiatives.

The resulting report “Bolster Your Brand With A Greener Technology Ecosystem” outlines the buisness case and technology roadmap for sustainable initatives, intended to help your organization achieve and communicate operational excellence, while simultaneously providing further differentiation for your brand and organization.

The unexpected appendix

The original research project was designed to understand the position and influence of the I&O professional as well as the needs of the marketing organization. However, as a consequence of this effort I learned a lot about designing, building and executing a corporate wide sustainability strategy. While the report focuses on I&O and opportunities for collaboration with marketing, I wanted to share a broader overview of these findings.

1. Build the business case

To make the case to invest in sustainable practices, instigators will need to be able to account for and justify the inherent productivity impact fundamental to any operational and procedural change, as well as the capital investment in net new tools. While each organization is its own snowflake, across the board sustainability initiatives can help to:

■  Reduce costs. Savings will come from improved efficiencies in hardware, space, power and cooling usage, while reducing energy bills, prolonging equipment refreshes and additions, and extending the capacity of your facilities.

■  Mitigate risk. This includes preparing for future legislation and regulations around energy usage, diversifying your supply chain and assets, not to mention sustainable initiatives go hand in hand with process optimization, thus reducing the risk of operational failure.

■  Grow revenue. According to the 2013 CDP S&P 500 Climate Change Report, “companies that have made the environment and sustainability central to their businesses strategies are seeing higher profitswhile also better positioning themselves for an uncertain future.” 

■  Create a competitive draw for employees. In addition to choosier customers, employees are also holding their employers to higher standards, choosing to work for organizations in which they can take pride.

■  Increase shareholder value. All of these factors together will impact business and shareholder value – better cost management, proactive risk mitigation, new revenue opportunities and a happy workforce.

2. Secure budget

Unless your business has embraced sustainability as a core directive within your company and product strategy, many of these projects might be stalled by financial limitations, especially given the difficulty of calculating return on investment.

■  Start with efficiency and optimization projects to free opex. Initiatives like consolidation, virtualization, and automation will increase efficiency in people, processes and technology. Bottom line: increasing efficiency will help your organization do more with less, and free up funds previously dedicated to MOOSE to spend on more innovative projects.

■  Investigate available government credits for energy reduction. For example, tax deductionsare available for commercial buildings that are constructed or refurbished to meet the latest ASHRAE Standards around energy and water efficiency.

■  Some utilities will pay YOU for energy reduction at peak usage. Utilities participating in demand response programs will pay large energy consumers to reduce electricity usage when the grid is stressed or there is a shortage of supply.

■  Apply for green bonds. Depending on the initiative, you may qualify for a green bond. In 2012, $3 billion green bonds were sold, and in the first 6 months of 2014, that number increased to $20 billion.

3. Set goals and strategy

For those who are beginning from scratch, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a great place to start as they have already developed sustainability reporting guidelines that are used today by many organizations globally. Whether your goals are around energy reduction in operations, supply chain, or increasing community engagement and service, it’s important to:

■  Set goals that are achievable. Whether you are setting goals for next year, or the next 10 years, it can be easy to get carried away with the possibilities. While far reaching aspirations are great for inspiration, in practice sustainability leaders need to be able to set goals that are reasonable within the circumstances.

■  Be able to track and measure progress. Now that you’ve sold the value of this initiative to your leaders and investors, you will need to be able provide regular progress reports. The task starts with measuring your baseline – current energy usage, carbon emissions, ewaste, water usage, etc across your people, processes and technology – to compare against available benchmarks like theCommercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS). While this initial task can be daunting on its own, not to mention ongoing measurement, consider investing in tools, like data center infrastructure management (DCIM) or energy management tools that, once implemented, will be able to automate much of this work.

■  Demonstrate success in accessible metrics. Think about your audience – executive team, employees, partners, or consumers? Your average consumer might not be able to contextualize an energy usage reduction of 100 kW per year, but saying that you reduced your CO₂ emissions from 7.8 gallons of gasoline might make more sense.

4. Engage and encourage stakeholder participation

In order to successfully implement sustainable practices throughout your organization, you need to establish an effective umbrella project team, governance model and engagement strategy for leaders, employees, and partners. And at the end of the day, the success of this will not only depend on the enthusiasm of your stakeholders, but also active participation across the organization.

■  Define roles and responsibilities. To lead sustainability initiatives, many organizations have appointed a chief sustainability officer (CSO), and/or have created ad-hoc teams from many departments to plan and orchestrate these projects.

■  Involve your stakeholder community. While inspiration and guidance can come from the examples of peers and organizations like The Green Grid and GreenTouch, achieving a consensus for prioritization can be difficult. To help guide this exercise, investigate the priorities and expectation of your stakeholder community – employees, investors, shareholders, partners, and customers. 

■  Create incentives for participation. Many of these initiatives will require significant changes to employee behavior, from commuting habits, paper usage to composting food waste. Without defined goals and incentives, employee participation will be difficult to instigate and sustain.

■  Leverage engagement tools and platforms. While incentives will help to encourage participation, the end goal should be to drive fundamental changes throughout individual behavior and not just in the work place. To facilitate this transition, some organizations have leveraged social platforms to create communities where individuals can share their achievements and get inspired from their peers. And it never hurts to add an level of competition from interdepartmental challenges to gamification. 

SOURCE: Forrester

BPM governance: The foundation for true business transformation

In some ways, business process governance gets no respect. Governance isn't the high-concept, "sexy" part of BPM at promises to radically improve the way business is conducted—it's the necessary practical counterpart of BPM that focuses on obtaining and documenting results. In this article, we'll look at best practices for BPM specialists who are looking to do that important job effectively.

UNDERSTANDING GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

According to analysts and consultants, the problems with BPM governance exist both at the conceptual level, where those envisioning BPM projects need to provide governance plans that can support implementation, and at the granular level during and after implementation, where it's vital to ensure that what's proposed or planned actually works—and that it actually gets implemented.

Among the biggest challenges of this subject is that there's no universally accepted definition for what constitutes BPM governance, says Clay Richardson, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. In Forrester parlance, process governance, or BPM governance, involves establishing methodologies, skills, and best practices for consistent delivery of process-improvement projects and programs.

In recently surveying some 45 companies about their BPM practices, Forrester researchers found that companies reported having many new project opportunities, but no method for weighing which projects would reap the best results. "A big part of governance is to come up with that methodology and what the key metrics are to select BPM projects," Richardson says. Similarly, Forrester found that many companies had portfolios of completed projects, but hadn't defined metrics for evaluating the benefitsgained.

GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES

"Part of governance is to build a best-practices guide," Richardson says. A guide might include selected best practices such as setting standards for new BPM projects and for prioritizing among projects. Its recommendations must both reflect leadership support and address business and IT concerns. Says Richardson: "That's a critical piece that is also missing in a lot of cases."

Setting up and exercising governance properly involves more than simply jotting down modeling frameworks and general advice. It's also a demanding organizational task that requires not only people who have clear responsibility for specific deliverables but who are also empowered to act and enforce, warns Thomas J. Olbrich, co-founder of theTaraneon Consulting Group.

Many companies want to be seen as having process governance, but in too many cases, they don't actually undertake any governance activities, Olbrich says. He cites numerous reasons for that imbalance.

For one thing, starting a BPM initiative completely from scratch is rare. "In most cases, you will already have your processes in place and afterwards you put your governance on top," Olbrich says. "This will either be a lame compromise, so as not to be disruptive, or it will be so abstract that it doesn't serve any real purpose."

Another issue involves determining which processes will be subject to governance. "What we tend to see is that where governance is established, it mostly concerns process operations and does not extend to the early lifecycle phases of design and implementation," Olbrich says.

That fact may reflect the perception that governance generally viewed as a stable, or even rigid, instrument that's difficult to apply to the more volatile and dynamic development phase. In fact, the pre-implementation process that Taraneon does in its Process TestLab is an effort to exercise governance over design, Olbrich says: "It seems to be what a growing number of companies feel is missing."

DIFFERENT PROCESSES, DIFFERENT GOVERNANCE

However, simply having governance without being able to apply it—and, when necessary, enforce it—will ultimately prove futile. "The way to exercise governance is tied to the demands and requirements of the processes," Olbrich says.

For example, if you have high-volume, highly distributed processes, you need a different type of governance than required for a one-step, locally run process. In addition, many companies define governance only for their core processes, expecting to extend the effort to other processes eventually. "But, of course, they never do," Olbrich says. "The challenge lies in the fact that governance itself is a process, which, because of its objectives, makes even higher demands on process management than other processes do."

Simply getting started with governance can be challenging as well. For instance, "we know that the average process-reengineering project will require about 40% of project time on [process] discovery, finding out what the current processes are and how they work," Olbrich notes. When you're investing that much effort on documenting where things stand, it can be tough to justify spending even more on governance.

GOVERNANCE SHOW-STOPPERS

Another common disconnect in BPM governance, in Olbrich's view: the question of authoritative documentation. For example, the documentation for each phase of a process lifecycle frequently involves different content. Design documentation will vary from operations documentation—if the latter even exists, as employees often choose to modify or ignore the methods prescribed in the design phase."We had a case some years ago at a financial institution where we found out during a process audit that 90% of [actual] working practices did not conform to the documented processes," Olbrich says.

Furthermore, audits performed in the Process TestLab indicate that about 92% of tested processes contain logical errors, with an actual average rate of around 120 errors per process, Olbrich says: "That's 120 reasons why a process would not work or cannot be implemented."

Even after those errors have been corrected, when future process-users are allowed to try the process, "this usually leads to the discovery of any number of misunderstandings in the process design," he says.

Unfortunately, in the absence of such rigorous testing, what usually happens is that "these things only come up either during or after implementation, which makes correcting these errors extremely expensive and time consuming," Olbrich says. That can create disillusionment among executives who are unwilling to trust process methods or to invest in topics such as process governance. Likewise, he says, employees may instinctively mistrust any projects involving major change, because they believe, based on past experience, that such efforts don't really provide improvement.

SOURCE www.Ebizq.net

Reviewing the Business Case for Lean Six Sigma

SigmaPro uses a five phase approach to developing a sustainable approach to performance improvement.

1. Review – the Organisation to determine strengths, weakness and opportunities for improvement and establish the business case
2. Align – thinking at senior level to ensure that there is support to take action
3. Launch – the initiative by tackling some problems or improvement opportunities using the lean six sigma methods, either in a pilot area or across the organisation
4. Progress – to build on initial success and start putting in place the components required for ensuring a sustainable approach
5. Sustain – the initiative by making it part of everyday life

Phases 2-5 are described in more detail in other articles, but the first phase, that of reviewing the organisation to determine strengths, weakness and opportunities for improvement and establish the business case is covered here.

The first stage is to assess the organisation to determine current status and identify opportunities for improvement. A tool such as value stream mapping is useful to do this, and SigmaPro’s maturity assessment tool can also be used. Cultural mapping can also be carried out so that the culture can be compared with those of more mature organisations. As recommended in previous articles, it is best to do this by involving people rather than alone.

Suppliers, Customers and others in the organisations industry may be good sources of information to provide insights into how they improve their own performance, and their experience with using lean six sigma methods and tools.

If the people carrying out the business review are not familiar with lean and six sigma approaches then the organisation may wish to consider involving a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) consultancy or attending training to find out more about the approach.

Once the organisation review has been carried out, the business case can be properly assessed by evaluating short to medium term opportunities with the costs involved in training people and running projects.

The generic case for six sigma is well established. Research from Mikel Harry in the year 2000 found that Six Sigma projects created on average around £100,000 savings for the organisation. This was across 3,000 projects. SigmaPro research more recently has found similar results with an average project value in Europe of £121,000 per project.

Each Black Belt is expected to run around 4 projects per year if operating full time, and typically 1% of employees will be full time Black Belts. Therefore the total savings can be worked out as somewhere around £400,000. If belts are to operate part time then this number of projects can be reduced pro-rata. Green Belt projects should be expected to contribute far less than this, and there is less data around to quantify these, but in our experience a Green belt project delivers around £25,000, and GB’s will run on average 1 project per year as it takes longer to carry out due to part time working.

A rule of thumb is that around 1% of employees become Black Belts, and 5% become Green Belts.

It costs around £7,000 to fully train a Black Belt to a recognised level of competence, and a Black Belt salary is somewhere around £45,000 per annum. Green Belt training is around £4,000, but because Green Belts carry on in their existing roles and work part time on improvement their salaries are not included in business case calculations.

For a 100 employee organisation, there would typically be 1 Black Belt and 5 Green Belts. The salary costs and employee costs would be £72,000 for the first year. Benefits would be £262,000 in the first year (assuming that it takes six months before the first projects are completed). So there would be a clear business case at a generic level for a payback within the first year.

But of course many organisations are reluctant to accept such broad generic business case figures, on the basis that their own situation may well be different, for example more or less opportunities for improvement, different level of maturity and so on.  A further indication of the potential financial benefits can come from the level of maturity. SigmaPro research has confirmed that as maturity increases the Cost of Quality (COS) reduces as a percentage of Cost of Sales (COS). For low level maturity organisations (level 1) COQ is typically around 25% of COS, so for an organisation with a £10M COS COQ will be £2.5M. For a more mature organisation, COQ will reduce to around half of this or £1,25M. That is a £1.25M improvement, so the opportunity will be there to achieve financial savings

The full answer of course is to carry out a comprehensive business review on the organisation and determine the specific opportunities that exist and estimate the financial savings that can be made.

One other factor that needs to be remembered is that research has shown that there is a clear correlation between success and how well goals are deployed throughout the organisation.

 

Effective programmes are most often seen in organisations with effective goal deployment strategies. So, effective goal deployment needs to be a clear part of any overall programme plan.

The next decision that needs to be made is where to start in the organisation. Most organisations will find it easiest to start in manufacturing or operations, as this is where there is most financial opportunity short term, and most performance measurement. Over time the improvement approach can progress through administrative areas and ultimately into all areas. Most difficult is in Research and Marketing areas as these areas tend to resist being structured.

 

The steps involved in carrying out a business review are as follows:

1. Assess the Organisation to identify opportunities for improvement - use VSM or similar approach
2. Estimate financial values for the opportunities
3. Determine what would be required to realise the improvements
4. Assess the Infrastructure that already exists for improvement
5. Estimate the costs associated with making the changes
6. Make the Business Case!
   

Once the business case has been established, and assuming that it makes financial sense to progress it, then support for the changes required needs to be built. Getting support within the business requires concentration on the people side of things. It should be remembered that in almost every organisations the financials are important, even non-profit making organisations need to demonstrate best value and balance the financial books. The language of organisations is therefore money, and the business case needs to be expressed in monetary terms. Having said this, it is important that the vision for the future means something for the people as well, and paints a picture of a better working environment for example, or better customer satisfaction.

Thinking further about how to implement, sometimes people are reluctant to accept ideas from others, but most people will think about what any change in the business means to them as well as what it means for the organisation as a whole. It is a good idea to work out in advance what benefits there will be for different groups of people within the organisation, for example if customer service is better it will make it easier for sales to generate repeat business. If this benefit is communicated to sales management they will want to support it.

In summary, building the business case can be done at a generic level first and if this makes sense, a more detailed study can be done. Once this shows a good indication of the benefits support can be sought to start the process of implementation. 

SOURCE