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Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Project/Program Management Extra Steps series, Part 2

Due to many festivals , I couldn't take out time to write further. Anyways ..Wishing you all Happy Diwali, Happy Halloween ..

Continuing further on the Extra Steps series, lets talk again on communication management. Again to say , this is one of the most important plan for any project. And most important aspect of any communication management is to know about stakeholders. Please remember the Golden rule : For any project successful, it is implicit to have the right information flowing to right stakeholders at right time.

As we know  IT projects has variety of stakeholders, ranging from Business department( key driver and system users), IT department and Vendor( for build ) and Operation dept( for application maintenance and post go live operations). This itself is complex and if we add some other aspects like multiple vendors ,different locations/timezones, different culture and languages, this become super complex . One can image how important is communication management in above scenarios as there would be many many communication channels. The simple formula to find out number of communication channel is as follows

Number of Communication Channel = N (N - 1) / 2

Usually we create wonderful plans which looks great on papers however falls flat when it comes to actual implementations. There are various reasons , I am just quoting few of those as follows which I feel most important .

  1. Identification of all the stakeholders who has direct and indirect influence. Usually our plans are around the stakeholder who have direct involvement in project and we miss out on those who needs to be just informed.
  2. For the identified stakeholders , the practice is not to capture the required satisfaction level for separating important stakeholders from regular ones. This alone can make or break the project.
  3. There is no dedicated stakeholder delight measurement practice. we just measure it with project deliverables . However this may or may not work.
  4. Other points are governance flaws which I am not intending to discuss. 

Now lets see what Extraa steps can make the project more successful

Togaf ( The open group architecture framework ) provides a beautiful way of capturing stakeholders interest, involvements , power. This surely can help project team to have focused  and effective communication. Just have a look on following sample( this surely can be tailored based on project needs, the views and view points are more in relation to Enterprise architecture ): I believe having a good stakeholder map takes care of 2nd point.


















For the first point , the Project manager and team needs to keep ear and eye open during all offline discussions with non project members( usually from client Business , IT and Operation departments). PM needs to decide based on discussion with core team members to include their name in Stakeholder map or not. It can also happen that project team maintains internal version for maintaining the additional stakeholders for not to missing out expectations. Ideally we should have only one version( to avoid any version mismatch and other issues) , however it depends on political situation of project.

For third point , the communication plan should have provision and bandwidth for stakeholders survey. Ideally this can be done by team other than project team or by Senior Project members. Project manager should sell this to stakeholders during approval of communication plan. This practice usually gives different forum for stakeholders to raise their concerns and most of the times intent is for project success.

I sincerely hope that implementing these small extra steps would bring success to your projects.


regards 

Ajay

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