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Project Management and Development of Standards

July 31, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Miscellaneous, Project Management Best Practices

Project Management and Development of Standards
By Sam Zaydel

I am sure most will agree that projects are unique in nature and if a repeating process is being treated as a project every time, there is a problem, whether or not the organization realizes it. One of the most important by-products of every project is development of processes and standards to treat similar efforts in the future as operational activities instead of projects. Often, companies mistakenly belief that they run a lot of projects, and their project budgets cannot seem to bear the amount of projected project work. The trouble is that many of the supposed projects really should have been classified as operational tasks, because they already occurred as a project in the past, and likely did not lead to development of repeatable and sustainable processes. I think we have all seen an example or two where a wheel is re-invented every now and again. The difficult thing about projects and resulting processes is that far too often people on the project mistakingly believe that what they are doing is truly a one-off, and will not likely be repeated. Unfortunately, this is myopic thinking and leads to processes that cannot be easily reproduced, nor are they published and established enough to be easily reproduced.

Development of good processes and standards should be considered on of the essential elements of a project, before it is considered to be successful. There are many, many details that should be captured during the course of the project, and with help from groups who are actively involved in the project, and who will eventually inherit the ongoing support of whatever the project is meant to produce, all operational details should be translated into clear processes. Most organizations will develop process flows various input/output diagrams, and other visual representations. Developing these processes and thoroughly documenting them during the course of the project is extremely important, because the
more time passes from the point of the project being turned over to operational support the lower the likelihood will be that accurate and detailed-enough documentation will be produced. One of the reasons for this is lack of priority. To most people, when things already work, and the process is generally understood, developing in-depth documentation is not critical. Even more of a challenge is to develop processes that are reproducible. During the course of a project, the Project Manager has a luxury of having all the necessary resources to evaluate various proposed methods of implementing the project. Whether the outcome is a product or a service, there are always multiple ways of implementing it, and often methods are chosen based on implementation speed and ease. Less often, methods are evaluated against sustainability and repeatability. How often does the project team think about the fact that they might need to do something very similar in the future and base their implementation and ongoing support on the expectation that they will need to do the same thing again in the future.

Running projects with a mindset for repeatability will definitely help organizations develop processes and standards which may take longer the first time to implement, but in the future will preclude new projects from being initiated. Projects are always more expansive than operational activities, so the goal of every organization should be to only initiate projects for truly unique new products or services, and to have a robust-enough project management approach to anticipate the future and be able to roll-out products or services that are similar to past projects as operational activities, instead of new projects. Essentially, your goal should always be to invent the wheel only once!

Sam Zaydel is a Technical Project Manager and a consultant to organizations with expertise to streamline and create more service driven and productive IT operations, more in tune with the objectives and operations of the core business. You can learn more about Sam by visiting his LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/samzaydel.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 and is filed under Miscellaneous, Project Management Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

Sam,

The PMO function in most organisations is charged with creating and improving project management processes. Having a handful of repeatable processes for various types of projects creates the foundation for making project management leaner.

Pradeep Bhanot wrote on August 4, 2009 - 8:34 am | Visit Link

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