Business Needs: Are Projects Aligned?

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Governance   PMO   Requirements Management   Strategy  

The project management landscape is replete with instances of project teams shocked to see their deliverables being labeled as nearly useless. The impact of such an assessment becomes painful when it comes from one of the most important stakeholders of the project--the project sponsor.

This certainly is not a unique situation, as many extensive studies and industry surveys over the last decade have revealed that lack of alignment to business needs as a major factor for project failures. Recent trends have indicated that project teams continue to cut corners during the planning stages of the project even while exploring options to elevate their project success rates.

Going Hybrid
One of the important aspects that the project teams--especially IT groups--should understand is that the success of their projects depends directly on the availability of mature project managers who have the critical business experience to lead their teams. Only these PMs can effectively communicate the technology benefits to the executive leadership and thereby garner their support for the technology decisions a team will have to undertake, whether that means procuring cutting-edge hardware or on boarding industry-specific, custom software suites.

This assumption of a business savvy project manager aiding in the overall quality of a project stems from a mandatory requirement that such …

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