By way of background, I work for a large financial services company within the IT division that has about 400 people.
The company has a reasonable method of prioritising the major projects but we have grave difficulty when the business change those priorities. Aaaagghh! The IT group has many different divisions and when the project priorities change the impact can be very big. Project plans are already done, communication plans are already in place, stakeholders identified, resources assigned, etc.
Is there a decent project priority change process out there that will faciliate the IT group when they decide that they want Red instead of Green ?
Thanks,
Shane M Saving Changes...
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Michael WoodProject Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent ContractorGig Harbor, Wa, United States
Shane I feel your pain. Having been the CIO of a lager multi-property casino / hotel company we were constantly juggling priorities. At some times the rate of priority change exceeded the rate of progress. Worse was the IT staff's lack of closure on projects as they were started and stopped far to often.
Here is what we did to solve the problem. First we created two types of teams. The first did SWAT team work (short throw / high urgency projects). The second did major projects (over 300 hours). Major projects were resourced and only reviewed quarterly in terms of relative priority. Organizationally we created User Groups by line of business or application. These groups were headed by the users and each assigned an account/application manager from IT. They set their own priorities for their area. The chairs from each of these groups comprised the IT Steering committee which was chaired by me. This group was charged with balancing priorities and I along with the CEO had last say on changes that created more chaos than progress.
This did the trick and IT's star rose as projects were finally aligned to business needs and key growth strategies.
No doubt AMP also follows the line of segregating projects into categories: jobs, significant minors, and major projects. This provides the basis for specific and appropriate methodologies and governance rules for each type.
We have an Australian client base with very similar profiles to your company and would be happy to discuss the issue in more detail if you had the time.
But changing priorities are the project managers nightmare (and program/portfolio manager). I recently saw the sacking of a project manager who could not come to terms with the whole concept of change management - he treated changing management requirements as outside the project scope. As you would no doubt agree, change management is not just a PM tool, it is actually one of the strongest suits in a good project/portfolio governance hand. Good change management in my experience separates the chaff from the wheat in project management professionalism.
I assume that you have a senior project management board that comprises both business and project delivery representatives. This is typically managed through the PMO, with the PMO potentially acting as secretariat.
There are a number of good case studies in my experience including large banking and finance entities in Australia - all of whom are tackling similar challenges to yourself.
In my experience, some PM's make the mistake of 'carrying a cross' for their project or portfolio. Often they (and others) feel that it is the PM who is accountable for issues arising from rescoping or reprioritising of projects, when clearly this is not the case. If change management and issue management is effectively integrated into project and portfolio governance, then the buck stops where it should - with the business planners.
