By Michael Dempsey
Keeping imaginative and fallible human beings moving in the required direction is never going to be easy. Inject the potential complexity of technology into the mix and things are bound to get a little bumpy. Managing IT projects seems to require a peculiar mix of skills and disciplines. And there has never been a shortage of new ideas about how to go about making broken deadlines and cost overruns a thing of the past.
Professionals who have dedicated their careers to devising solid project management principles agree on one thing: there is no such thing as a typical project. But Mark Taylor, who has spent the last decade managing projects for Siemens, says that this is no excuse for not getting it right. “Any project can be broken down into bite-sized chunks and these create distinct steps that allow you to check that you are still on budget and on time at each phase.
Mr. Taylor has recently implemented a complex telephony project across several European nations for a major oil company. The aim was to create a managed service offering a single point of contact across regional units while making budget and headcount reductions possible. “The customer wanted it on time” says Mr. Taylor, “and Siemens wanted to give the customer real value.” These were the key deliverables that kept Mr. Taylor and his colleagues focused.
Siemens has adopted a project management framework, project in a controlled environment, known as PRINCE. This lays out the elements of any project, consisting of a series of stages:
- Scoping
- Definition
- Design
- Implementation
- Quality testing
While PRINCE helps Siemens to tame the project management challenge, it is not a cure-all, Mr. Taylor warns. “PRINCE gives us a framework, but it is not a bible”
Knowing the needs of separate national or regional elements within a large project is vital, says Mr. Taylor. “When an operation is spread across several countries you have to be able to get local resources and deliver what is needed on a local level even if the overall control is centralized.” In the case of the oil industry client he took the decision to roll the managed service out one region at a time.
Simon Alderman, a Siemens Programme Manager, describes how monitoring projects for financial and contractual performance is a key aspect of IT governance. “You have to measure your progress against a plan. So we use the idea of Earned Value.” This means tracking the project’s progress against the budgeted costs. So if a project is 25% complete but 35% of the budget has been spent it is easy to see that things are beginning to go astray.
Mr. Alderman stresses that the Earned Value approach has to allow for the real world. “We are working in the real world, where nothing ever goes completely to plan. So at the start of the project you have to agree tolerance, a percentage that is the discrepancy between progress and actual spend.” This variant is a small percentage that is agreed during initial planning. But the continuous review, of which Earned Value is a part, means that small problems can be ironed out well before they grow to threaten the project delivery.
Siemens’ experience reflects a new era of sober assessment in IT project management. Nick Kalisperas is Delivery Director at the UK government-backed IT forum Intellect. He believes that a watershed had been reached in customer understanding of what it takes to make IT work. “I think there is a more intelligent approach from the customer side now, they can see what they want IT to do for them. And that means they don’t go chasing the pack and all signing up for one big idea, such as outsourcing.”
Customers have enough experience of IT trends failing to work out as planned. The outsourcing boom saw countless projects shifted from expensive European sites to far-flung locations where programming personnel cost a fraction of their Western counterparts. But recent years have seen a growing reverse migration as project managers discovered that distance can create its own problems.
This about turn is evident in Malta, where the IT sector grew out of call centre activity prompted by local English language skills. Now a cluster of Maltese software houses are being signed up for development work by companies retreating from the long-range outsourcing model. Work that was originally farmed out to developers employing cohorts of programmers in India or the Philippines is finding its way back to the edge of the European Union. Operating a project remotely is not easy. No amount of internet activity can conceal the simple truth that the coders and their manager are nine or more hours apart by air.
This lack of human interaction led to a loss of control. Hence these projects found their way to Malta, a destination that is just three hours flying time from most Northern European capitals. A Maltese software house can find itself employed as a front-end for large-scale programming that takes place in India. It acts as a project manager, keeping the detail in check. For the customer the result is all that matters. And with its European project team close at hand there is no danger of misunderstandings creeping in.
Communication is evidently the key here. Chris Redsull has spent 25 years running telecoms projects at Siemens and advocates workshops designed to engage the customer’s staff at all appropriate levels. “It is all about getting people to take ownership of their level of the project while making sure that they can see the involvement and intentions of their own senior management.” As technology has become commoditised good IT governance has changed into a secure process for managing everyones’ liabilities.
At Intellect Mr. Kalisperas has recognised that close communication makes for happy outcomes. Intellect encourages customers to attend a workshop with a number of potential suppliers. They explain the project and the issues surrounding it and leave the suppliers with a list of questions. The answers are collated by Intellect, which issues the customer with an anonymous version of the suppliers’ views. It is what Mr. Kalisperas calls a concept viability dialogue and serves two distinct purposes. By expanding on the proposed work to third parties the customer is forced to meditate on what is really required. And the set of anonymous answers gives that customer an accurate reflection of the market’s capacity to meet those needs.
The users that Intellect cultivates are almost all from within the large UK government sector. But its approach has been designed to fit any large project. It advocates appointing two ambassadors, one from the customer, and one from the supplier, to take the helm and keep the project on course. Termed a Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) this is the person who spots when development is beginning to slip away from its original purpose.
Mr. Kalisperas reckons that analysis of failed projects always reveals a juncture where early intervention by an SRO would have prevented work going off the rails. “These are lessons that can be applied internationally” he says, “we have spoken to our French, Dutch and Australian equivalents and around the world there is a recognition that both customers and suppliers have a responsibility for putting in place measures to ensure a successful implementation.”
Around 35 major projects have undergone the Intellect concept viability process during the last three years. But Intellect points to a further set of projects that were not pursued as a result of the customer realizing that their ideas were not practical. “They learned that their vision of an IT solution was not as strong as they thought” Mr. Kalisperas says. Occasionally, it makes sense to abandon a project before it gets the chance to run out of control.
Tags: BBC News, communications, governance, IT projects, IT trends, large projects, siemens, technology
