Less Wishing, More Assurance

  Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Your project indicators must go beyond past phases and address readiness for upcoming tasks and activities. This is one of six principles for implementing a project assurance methodology that can help minimize surprises, provide objective analysis, and build trust among team members and stakeholders.

If you work in the business world, you have likely heard of or experienced horror stories with complex software implementations that range from daily headaches to loss of business. But the fact is that most organizations do not anticipate project failure. Instead, they plan for success, governed by budget, next step deliverables, executive expectations, and go-live deadlines. Heads-down to the task at hand, the project manager and team have little visibility and less control over potential risks within the project — until it’s too late.

Not unlike the evolution of business process reengineering, we are discovering that there is a better way to plan for and prevent failure. It begins with a blueprint of strategic project assurance at critical points in the implementation project’s evolution. It establishes clear understanding of expectations among all people involved — from the executives, to the business and IT management, to vendor partners and end users.

Over the years, countless papers and articles have been written on software implementation …

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