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IT departments frequently find themselves leading a single major initiative upon which their success as an organization is pinned. These are the initiatives that cut across organizations and that are anticipated to have a transforming effect on how the business as a whole is run. Recent examples include internal software development projects, ERP and CRM implementations, major security upgrades, wide scale integration initiatives, internal and external portals, desktop OS upgrades and the modernization of critical business systems such as e-mail.
While these initiatives typically have the potential to deliver tremendous value, they can represent up to a third or more of the organization's technology investment portfolio in terms of dollars and time spent and they are always fraught with risk. For example, in 2004 the Standish Group found that only 29% of major application projects were completed on time, on budget and with all specified functionality with fully 18% failing altogether. Business as usual has not been consistent with success.
In response to these discouraging figures, critical success factors have been discussed and identified for technology projects by a diverse array of experts. A review of a wide range of findings shows a consensus forming that the following things have the greatest impact on project success:
- Executive sponsorship
- Short time to initial return
- Minimized scope creep
- Effective communication of benefits and expectations
- User involvement
These success factors mandate a new way of looking at major initiatives. Rather than approaching a major initiative as a single very large and complex project, major initiatives should be viewed as a portfolio of micro-projects around a common theme. Micro-projects are defined as self-justifying investments that require no more than six people to execute over a period of no more than six months. The micro-project approach is the best approach for aligning with the success criteria listed above.
This paper discusses the factors most closely associated with technology project success, the specific ways that micro-projects make it easy to align with these success factors and the reasons why a complete Project and Portfolio Management solution is essential to success in applying the micro-project approach and therefore to the success of any major initiative.
While this approach is essential to reducing the risk of major initiatives to acceptable levels, it does present some unique challenges, including:
- Prioritization
- Project management overhead
- Management of inter-project dependencies
- Resource capacity management
Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions can address these challenges. This makes PPM Software a crucial component of any major initiative that cannot be overlooked. Borland? Tempo? PPM streamlines and improves:
- Project prioritization
- Efficient project planning and execution
- Management of diverse inter-project dependencies
- Integrated resource management
Critical Success Factors and Micro-Projects
Project success as defined by traditional metrics such as "on-budget," "on schedule" and "complete functionality" can only be reliably achieved when projects are kept small and approached in an agile manner. This is not the same as having frequent milestones because "project" in this context is defined as the completion of an undertaking that delivers stand-alone benefits for a specified cost.
What this means is that successful major initiatives are not major projects that take years to execute and then deliver benefit all at once. Rather they are a collection of carefully coordinated, frequently interdependent micro-projects that deliver incremental value over time as they are executed.
This approach delivers an array of benefits, including the following:
Executive Sponsorship
Visible and active executive sponsorship at the outset, and also throughout the lifecycle of a major initiative is one of the most critical success factors. Most broad-scale initiatives require changes in organizational behavior, business processes and technology to deliver desired results. Project Managers can only accomplish these in the context of steadfast executive sponsorship. Executives are busy, tasked with a specific set of corporate goals and have more latitude than most to set their own priorities. Gaining and sustaining executive sponsorship is therefore a continual process.
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