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Two Common Trouble Spots
March 15, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Project Scope Management, Scope Management
Two Common Trouble Spots
By Barry Otterholt
Conversions and Interfaces
If you want to quickly establish your project management prowess within a project, ask about conversions or interfaces. They are two areas that are thematically trouble-prone. And you can find some form of these tasks in nearly any type of project.
- Conversions
In systems projects, it can mean conversion from one system to another. Or from one data format to another. Or of hardcopy files to a digital form.
In business projects, it can mean conversion from one set of procedures to another. Or from one organization to another. Or from one location to another.
A useful way to think about conversions: Anything in a project that needs to be one way one day and another way the next.
-
Interfaces
In systems projects, it can relate to information required by government agencies. Or exchanged between systems within your organization. Or involving manual steps in the middle of automated processes.
In business projects, it can relate to processes that involve governmental agencies. Or with external business partners. Or across lines of business.
A useful way to think about interfaces: Any entity outside of your own, to whom you owe or require information to meet your day to day commitments.
What to do
The best answer is to scope it early. That is to say, understand all things that will need to be converted and compile a complete inventory of what exactly needs to be done for each and by when. Get an estimate of quantity. Similarly with interfaces; compile a complete inventory of interfaces that will be affected - either eliminated, changed, or added - and important dates and dependencies.
Once you understand the size and nature of the challenge, you will be in a much better position to evaluate the skills needed and level of effort required to complete the tasks. From that, you can work back from important completion milestones to ensure work is started early enough and you can monitor progress much more effectively along the way. You will also learn of dependencies in getting the job done. Dependencies are a common trouble spot when you need a response from somebody over whom you have not control, as is characteristic of external entities.
These two areas are so often sources of problems that it’s a good idea to stage this scoping analysis very early in the project and visit it from time to time to ensure it accurately reflects the work to be done, and challenges in getting it done.
Barry Otterholt, CMC, PMP
Barry Otterholt has been a project management specialist and coach for the past 30 years. He is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) and a Project Management Professional (PMP). He works with both public and private sector companies in the USA, Europe and Scandinavia. Mr. Otterholt was a Director with Microsoft, a senior consultant with Deloitte Consulting, and a COO with a nationwide consumer electronics enterprise. In 1988 he founded Public Knowledge, LLC to provide independent management and operational support to the public sector. More recently, he founded Stouffer & Company, LLC to provide as-needed project management services to fill an obvious skills gap in both private and public sectors.
Mr. Otterholt is an adjunct professor teaching project management at Northwest University. His essays on project management have been published in PMI newsletters. His runs a blog, Project Management Essays, where he muses about various project management topics.
Mr. Otterholt is a member of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) and the Project Management Institute (PMI). He has a BA in Accounting and Computer Science and an MBA in Business Administration. He lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
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