Extraordinary challenges exist in facing a more mature worldwide competitive environment with significant resource pressures and constraints, rapid changes in business alignments and philosophies, customer and consumer segmentation and ever developing new technologies.
Company leaders have begun to focus on the importance of project management skills within their organization, in order to improve productivity, provide the most cost effective solutions, mitigate risk, and shorten the time to market of new business concepts.
Project management has been identified as a key to any major corporation's ability to reliably deliver its commitments to ultimately increase shareholder value.
At Mieloo & Alexander we define Project- and Program Management as a:
Project management and Program management is clearly carried out within an environment of set constraints, either from a program or as a stand-alone project with a defined scope. Mieloo & Alexander specializes in managing complicated technology driven change projects. All of our projects are carried out according to the following phasing structure:
At the end of every phase a predefined set of detailed deliverables is produced. Budget control and delivery monitoring is performed with the help of a master plan in which all deliverables of all sub-projects are described, scheduled and resources allocated.
All deliverables are produced with the use of our predefined templates. Examples of such templates are: conversion layouts, fit/gap analyses reports, and training material.
Projects and programs are always conducted following a clearly defined and well communicated organisation structure (see example below). In our projects we always pay special attention to communication: internal - within the project team (functional teams, test teams, etc.) - as well as external - outside of the project team (customers, third parties, organisation as a whole). We have found that proper communication is an essential element in making a project a success.
2. IT Project Success Factors
We have defined a set of project factors, which in our opinion determine the difference between success and failure. These factors are described below.
2.1 Project managerial
- Sponsorship by executive management
- Alignment of project with company strategic direction
- Definition of objectives, scope (business processes organisation, and systems) and conditions for success
- Adoption of an integrated project methodology covering design, development, test, conversion, change management and infrastructure realization
- Definition of a clear project organization, project communication structures and procedures, and a project progress control framework
- Assembly of a project team to staff the project organization consisting of the 'best and brightest'/available/knowledgeable/empowered staff
- Creation and execution of a validated work/resource plan including deliverables, activities, responsible people, realistic deadlines and man-day estimates covering the total scope of the project
- Definition of a well defined and validated acceptance/sign-off procedure for the acceptance of the main deliverables and conclusion of project phases
- Adoption of a communication and change management approach to motivate the project team, and to prepare, train and motivate the user community
- Establishment of a go-live support organisation and control procedures
2.2 Functional and technical design
- Definition of an integrated conceptual design that captures the future state of (physical and administrative) business processes, systems and organization, to direct the project and organization
- Adoption of an unambiguous documentation concept covering process, system and organization detailed design documentation to support the (future) project(s)
- Definition of a 'minimum requirements' technical infrastructure design to validate performance and availability requirements and resulting cost/investment implications
2.3 Support Center Processes
- Adoption of a structured, tool supported development method for reference and documentation
- Implementation of a clearly defined application environment landscape
- Adoption of application release schedules, technical change management procedures and outages schedules (including stakeholder communication)
- Adoption of (tool supported) application support procedures, organization and communication structures (including escalation)
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