Here’s the scenario: You have an ongoing technology project to implement changes that will enhance the capability of your organization, but you’re not sure how to keep tabs on how things are going and whether the project is on track to be successful.
If you feel you don’t know if your technical project team (whether staff members or outsourced vendor) is working effectively, if your project will deliver desired results, and complete on time and on budget, there are some things you can do. This post and successive posts will outline good practices for effective running of a project.
The starting point is defining the intentions of a project – goals and expected business outcomes. The goal of an IT project is not to deliver a system change. It is to create a situation where certain things can be accomplished in the business. If you are trying to drive up revenue or open up new markets, the project goal might be to support sales staff with better data. If it’s the need to improve production processes, the project might be related to measuring quality or automating routine tasks. A project that improves staff access to computer tools might be in support of general productivity improvements.
Normally the way to get at project intent is to ask the question, “What does the work environment or the processes look like when the project is complete?” The ideal answer to this is descriptive and detailed. It could include information about how long a task takes to complete, or how a client interaction works, or what a staff member’s workload looks like.
After the business outcomes and project intent have been defined, the project itself needs to have measurable success criteria. This is often harder than identifying the project intent. Production quality measures might be relatively easy to define, but if your goal is to provide better data to sales staff, how do you measure that?
You can set some benchmarks such as number of transactions completed, or how long activities take within the current environment. Then set a goal for specific improvement – speed things up by 25%, or reduce time required by 10 minutes per transaction. One project I ran had a goal that a simple query (which we had to define) had to be completed in the time the client services staff took to set up an order – about 2 minutes – so they could seamlessly serve the customer with no wasted time. Client satisfaction surveys can be useful, or running a specific technology test to see improved results. Sometimes you just have to use a proxy measure if nothing better is available. For example, if your goal is to improve the health of clients by providing better food options, measuring how often they go to the doctor or hospital might be a proxy to see if things are improving.
Whatever your goals and success criteria, it is important during this process for the project team and the operational stakeholders for the project to work together to reach a common understanding of “what done looks like”.
