Strategic Project Management

Completing projects on time and on budget has proven to be a pretty valid measure of IT project success—but should it be the primary measure?  I believe that pushing a project to completion on time is not the only objective—ultimately the project also needs to deliver business value.  Along with the worthy objectives of finishing projects on time and within budget constraints, here are some other objectives that should be considered:

1. It should be about doing the right projects, not just doing them right.  Delivering business value and satisfying customers is becoming more important than ever—and it starts with the evaluation of which potential projects will meet those needs and provide that value in the first place.  Hopefully this has always been important, but organizations are realizing that they have to do more than give lip service to meeting customer expectations while meeting organizational goals.  It must become a primary measurement of how we determine the success or failure of any IT project.
2. Project teams need to completely understand and address the business needs of every project.  Although everyone would agree that "quality" is very subjective, if everyone on the team doesn't have a thorough understanding of the cost of defects and rework, it doesn't matter what work management tool you use, it won't help.  Edward Deming used to talk about how organizations must build quality into the product, it can't be inspected in.  Quality assurance needs to be a part of every process from start to finish.  Smart organizations are looking at defects and their root causes through the project life-cycle to develop methodologies that improve the quality of their final deliverables.
3. The final product needs to be stable, compatible, and easily maintainable.  It's just too expensive for organizations to maintain software that's incompatible with current systems or unreliable.  Because staff and maintenance budgets are at a premium, software that isn't will be abandoned for something that is.

The way organizations measure the success of project based work is changing.  Managers who leverage project management tools to meet these new objectives are able to better address business needs and ultimately increase their value within their organizations.

What a great weekend. Four days in the high Uinta mountains of Utah fly-fishing with my family, enjoying the 20+ degree drop in temperature, and falling asleep to the sound of distant mountain thunderstorms. It just doesn't get any better than that.

The original plan included relaxing for a few days on the shore of a mountain lake, napping in the afternoon, roasting marshmallows as the sun went down, and otherwise just taking it easy. I took my fly-rod in case I got the urge to catch a fish or two, but when my adult children started to arrive, they and those they brought with them, all wanted to learn how to fish with a fly rod—so I introduced three willing learners (my boys had been introduced years ago) to the art of fly-fishing.

From morning until the sun went down in the evening, we fished from the shore, in the canoe, or along the river. I think everyone had a great time, I know that I did. I also re-learned something I haven't thought of in a while.

If you've ever seen Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, watching Brad Pitt's character, Paul Maclean, "shadowcast" is a thing of beauty. Fishing with fly and fly-rod is an elegant and sometimes challenging way to catch a fish. As the narrator, Norman Maclean says, "My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy."

The basic technique of fly-fishing isn't really that challenging, but as I found myself correcting form, presentation, and otherwise tweaking little things here and there, I realized that there are many things we tend to take for granted if we have experience doing something for any length of time. Basic skills I've acquired over the years, things that are just automatic to me, I found weren't automatic to my neophyte fly-fishers. However, with a little instruction, they picked it up quickly and were catching fish.

I think the same can be said for project teams. I don't think it really matters what project management tools your organization employs or your particular work management methodology, there will likely be things that have become automatic to you that the rest of your team doesn't know. Leading the team sometimes requires a manager to be a teacher, which I think makes a big difference as to whether or not you are a real leader.

So take inventory of some of the skills that you take for granted as a project management professional and see if there are skills you can share with the rest of the team to help them grow. You might be surprised how effective a little instruction can be.

What do you do to share your experience and knowledge with the team?