Just an Upgrade? Every Project Has a Benefit

Heidi is a PMO Team Lead/Senior Project Manager in Summerville, Georgia.

  Benefits Realization   Lessons Learned  

I was meeting with a project manager and we started talking about her project status. This particular project is scheduled to finally go live in just a few days, despite having had its fair share of hiccups along the way. What prompted me to sit down and write this article was the laugh that the project manager and I shared about a statement that was made by a member of the project team that I imagine many of you have heard before: “But it’s just an upgrade!”

Our organization’s project management office got its humble start as a part of the information services and technology department, so we’ve done plenty of system upgrade projects. Usually considered to be small efforts and assigned to the more junior project managers, they are most often very repeatable in that the timelines are similar, the project teams are familiar with the work efforts and the project manager usually has their choice of a plethora of past project documentation at their disposal.

Sounds great, right? The downside of all of this is that these projects are often seen as boring, that documentation is pointless since it’s already been done before and that risk management is an absolute waste of time because the team already knows how the upgrade is going to go before it even attends the first project meeting.

In addition, when asked about why we are upgrading the…

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