“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But I’ve bought a big bat.
I’m all ready you see.
Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
- Dr. Seuss, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew
Imagine canoeing upstream with a broken paddle. That’s effectively what today’s
project managers and IT directors, like you, are doing. Whether you’re managing the
corporate IT application development group—tasked with delivering the systems
that keep the business running—or some other enterprise team, manual processes,
disconnected tools, numerous methodologies, and scattered stakeholders have most
likely left you scrambling to control projects and deliver successful business solutions.
In the United States, more than $250 billion each year is spent on IT projects.
Project managers are key to ensuring these projects deliver a return on that
investment. But, 62% of projects are delivered late, and 49% of projects are
over budget. Project management is clearly broken.
It’s not that project managers lack the skills to manage projects. Actually, most
are very good at it. Finding resources, coordinating task deliverable dates, and
tracking budgets—the skills are there. What’s different is the speed and sheer
complexity of business. Heightened competition, rapid advances in technology,
and a global economy have organizations operating at a dizzying pace.
These changes have impacted the environment that project managers and IT
directors have to work in. In response, companies have invested in a variety
of project management tools. But these tools are restrictive, take time to learn,
are rarely adopted, and don’t solve the bigger issues. So, team members and
stakeholders resort to familiar habits of phone calls, email threads, and hallway
conversations that inhibit productivity and imperil project timelines and budgets.
Yet without a solution, enterprise teams face countless obstacles: redundant work,
hours of unnecessary meetings, manual reporting that eats into actual work time,
and a continuous cycle of hurry-up-and-finish-this-today projects that lack scope,
direction, and quality checkpoints.
Fortunately, there are some things you can do to successfully manage projects
in this rapidly changing environment. It starts with understanding the underlying
issues and then working to improve your processes.
Here are the three leading reasons why project management is broken and ways
to fix the problems.
Problem #1:
Herding the cats.
“Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?”
- Dr. Seuss, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
You know how to manage projects. Schedules, budgets, tasks, dependencies—you’ve
got it. But, you still have to manage all of the other daily work, and it comes at you
from every angle. No doubt, you’ve seen changes in project scope buried in email
threads, executives making special requests in hallway conversations, and status
updates left on sticky notes. Getting a handle on all of these activities is like herding
cats. Add the time wasted on manually updating status reports and time spent in
status meetings, and projects can fall dangerously behind before you even realize it.
The average IT organization spends 45% to 55% of its time on unplanned (and urgent)
activities. Non-project work like ad hoc requests, maintenance, and fixes can distract
resources and derail project plans in a hurry. Without visibility across the entire lifecycle
of work, it’s nearly impossible to assess the real impact of these requests. Until you
take a broader view of enterprise work, you put every project at risk of failure.
Fortunately, there are steps you can take to more effectively manage all of your
team’s work—not just projects—and get the visibility you need. Begin with a single
place for intake of new requests and changes, whether that is a specific email
address or point person. No back doors, no end-arounds. Period. Now, with all
of your team’s work requests in one place, you can compare them, and prioritize
them strategically so you can always make sure your team is doing the right work
at the right time.
Build trust by providing visibility into the process. By creating access to project and
activity information in one place, your customers can see for themselves the status
of their requests without having to bombard you with emails and phone calls. And,
you’ll have an easy way to demonstrate your value and results to your executive team.
When the time is right, invest in technology that can manage the entire lifecycle
of work from end to end in real time. The solution you choose should be easy to
use and provide additional features that make your team more productive, such as
social collaboration and mobile access.
Problem #2:
Managing the mix of methodologies.
“When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their
paddles and the bottle’s
on a poodle and the poodle’s
eating noodles...”
- Dr. Seuss, Fox in Socks: Green Back Book
Lately, Agile is all the rage. Its more responsive approach can bring better, faster
results to certain types of projects. But Agile can disrupt the traditional processes
of budget forecasting, performance benchmarking, and accountability. For project
managers, it means rethinking how these types of projects are managed.
Project management methodologies and frameworks come in all flavors, from vanilla
to spumoni. Each of your project teams has its favorites, and you are left trying
to manage them all. Whether it’s storyboards in Agile or critical dependencies in
Waterfall, it can be difficult to track the various stages, let alone manage them all.
You can end up with several different tools to manage each kind or, even worse,
limit your team to the methodology you can support.
Even then, you still have to figure out how to manage the one-off, ad hoc requests
that always make their way to you.
Don’t let the tool choose or limit your work methodology. For your project teams to
be as effective as possible, they need to use the best methodology for the job. It’s
up to you to figure out a way to support them and help them be successful.
Often, the choice of methodology is pinned on company culture. However, culture
can easily be confused with capabilities. Improving the ability to support various
methodologies, like Agile, will often ease cultural acceptance. Building this mixedmethodology
support requires the following capabilities:
Like learning a foreign language—once you can understand and speak it, you expand your world. Break down the language barriers and watch your project and development teams excel.
Problem #3:
Enforcing the tools.
“Your Majesty. Please…
I don’t like to complain.
But down here below,
we are feeling great pain.”
- Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle
You rely on your team members to update you on the status of their deliverables.
You thought a bright, shiny, new project management tool would do the trick.
But, you still get hallway updates, voicemails, and drive-bys. That’s if you’re lucky.
Usually, it’s you spending the time tracking down team members for updates.
Getting your users to embrace your project management tools can be very difficult.
It doesn’t help that the average person uses 13 different methods to control and
manage their time. To make things worse, a recent survey by PMP Research shows
that very few companies think their project management tools are very effective.
Nearly half (49%) view them as only moderately effective, and 26% saw them as
not very effective.
When any of those tools are not easy to use and not seen as effective, people
simply don’t use them. And, that doesn’t leave you with a whole lot of options.
In order to get your users back on board, managing their own updates and project
communication, you need to meet them where they are. That will require a change
in mindset. It may sound crazy, but a spreadsheet is far better than a multi-million
dollar solution if that’s what your team members and stakeholders want to use.
Sometimes, simple is better.
When project management solutions are easy, you’ll find your team members
become active participants. And, when solutions are as intuitive and interactive as
social media or mobile apps, your team members will happily engage—ensuring
quality conversations and updates happen automatically.
Going Beyond Fixed:
Getting to fabulous.
“You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”
- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
When it all comes together—a broader view of work, an intuitive experience, and
support for mixed methodologies—organizations like yours can begin to transcend
traditional project management in favor of true, comprehensive Enterprise Work
Management. That’s what happened with Peregrine.
Peregrine Semiconductor moved away from a patchwork of project management
tools and selected an Enterprise Work Management solution to provide greater
visibility across all types of work. This solution has become the single point to
intake new requests, schedule and manage projects, provide collaboration on
tasks, and produce accurate and detailed reports. Peregrine was able to shift
its model from one where project managers manually updated the timeline and
completion status to one in which this data flowed up from the team automatically.
This shift saved enough time to increase their project capacity by 200% .
AtTask is a cloud-based Enterprise Work Management solution that helps IT application
development groups and other enterprise teams conquer the problems associated
with traditional project management. Using a combination of technology and expertise
acquired from observing the customers we’ve served, AtTask provides a single
system of truth that eliminates work chaos, provides global visibility, and increases
productivity. It offers a complete, adoptable solution—powerful enough for technical
users, intuitive enough for business stakeholders, and flexible enough to utilize
Agile, Waterfall, or a mix of the two.
To learn more about AtTask Enterprise Work Management and how it increases
enterprise visibility, please contact us at the following:
“You’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So…get on your way!”
-DR. SEUSS
OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!
(+48) 22 295 08 89
office@combeenut.com