It's 9:00 am. Do you know where your team members are?
This might have been a silly question years ago, but times are changing -- and project management with them. Employees with software development, helpdesk support, and project management teams are all crucial to the successful rollout of information systems, but a historical lack of interconnectedness has made it difficult for executives to know what individual employees are actually up to at any given time.
This is because team members may be in their offices or kilometres away at customer or partner sites. And this, in turn, can make the ongoing management of information projects extremely difficult: like any project, successfully turning an IT-driven business initiative into reality requires the involvement of a broad range of skilled people at different times. Without a clear view of skilled workers and updated information as to when and for how long they're going to be available, it can be difficult for high-level executives to plan overall corporate strategies.
Such issues come to the fore in larger organisations, where many projects may be running simultaneously. They're also common after mergers, acquisitions, and strategic restructuring such as that that recently happened at Woodside Energy. There, an expansion in corporate direction saw the company's IT services arm separated from the core business into a new company called Adesi Solutions, which maintained its role as a provider of IT services (largely around SAP R/3) to Woodside but also generating new business by servicing external customers.
With four other major customers apart from Woodside, managers at the new company were finding it difficult to know which staff were committed to which projects, at which time. With up to 80 different processes running at once and employees forced to use different systems for change requests, billing, time recording, and other functions, co-ordinating between them became nigh unto impossible. Adesi eventually resolved this problem by implementing Mercury IT Governance Suite, providing those functions and more in a multi-project environment that has improved project visibility and helped managers regain control over their runaway business.
"We have a lot of resource sharing between projects and one person could be working on five projects at once," says Adesi consultant Wesley Franke. "We've created different business rules for all our clients, and can drive service requests through any defined processes we want to create. Because everything is in the one system and we have a single source of information, we've been able to standardise all of our processes across the different teams."
Backing the service guarantee
Major changes in organisational structure force managers to reconsider how things are done, but effective human resource management can fall through the cracks as management focus sticks on more conventional bottom-line financial performance and efficiency strategy.
This presents a major problem for companies eager to improve service, in an age where agreements between business units are increasingly governed by formal or informal service-level expectations. If a framework for better people management isn't put in place from the get-go, it can be difficult to engineer into the business later on.
The implications of such a shortcoming are significant: there's little margin for error when people are expected to be jumping from one project to another with alarming regularity. Miss a step, and the whole project can be delayed or thrown off altogether -- and this can have knock-on effects that damage other efforts. Commit to a project whose execution requires a particular staff member to be in two places at once, and someone is going to end up disappointed. Worse, it could put you into defensive mode and threaten your reputation.
Clearly, the solution to this problem requires the ability to forecast project requirements well into the future -- but most companies lack this kind of long-term visibility. Managers looking to bring consistency to their resource management systems need perspective on the change they're introducing -- something that's often possible by wrapping program management into overarching service frameworks such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) or its derivatives, such as the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).
"Our industry is very dynamic, and you know you're going to learn technology today that is not going to be relevant in three to four years' time," says Microsoft Solutions consultant Gary Roos. "You need to keep people motivated, educated, and relevant, which is why workforce management is one of the key areas addressed in MOF."
The need to smoothly handle multi-project co-ordination was a core precept in the work of the UK-based Program Management Group (PMG), whose downloadable Program Management Maturity Model (PMMM) questionnaire guides companies through the process of improving their overall resource management.
PMG breaks the process into seven key stages: planning each project; transmitting project plans to a central point; consolidating many project plans into a single program plan; evaluating inter-project conflicts and identifying over-demands; experimenting with alternative strategies to optimise the workload schedule; disseminating strategic decisions back to individual project teams; and evaluating performance through a feedback measuring system.
