The latest Gartner research has shown that the top three challenges faced by CIOs related to business expectations today are improving business processes, reducing enterprise costs and enhancing enterprise workforce effectiveness.
Peter Green, programme and project management executive at Intuate, believes successful management of these challenges will, to a large extent, be driven by and depend on the implementation of IT-related projects. “The successful delivery of such projects is similarly dependent on adherence to (governance) processes, including risk management and effective financial and resource management supported by accurate and complete documentation and reporting,” he says.
“The challenge, however, is finding the right IT programme or project managers who have the appropriate experience and skills to successfully deliver increasingly complex projects.”
Historically, IT programme or project managers were required to be competent in programme or project management as well as possess the appropriate industry, business and IT knowledge and experience. Today's IT programme and project managers need a considerably broader range of skills, including excellent relationship and communication management abilities, strong negotiation skills and most importantly, they need to be proficient in change management, particularly when managing stakeholders involved in complex programmes and projects with varied and often diverse expectations.
They also need appropriate behavioural traits to gain the respect, trust and confidence of the sponsors, executives, business owners, other stakeholders and team members in both their programme or project management ability and technical knowledge and understanding of the programme or project. “This calibre of person is not easily found and seldom readily available,” states Green.
“For that reason, Intuate Group has developed an IT Project Management Services Model to provide a comprehensive IT programme and project management and project administration capability, delivered by a team of professionals to successfully deliver IT programmes and projects.
“All project management team members are employed by the company and undergo rigorous recruitment and induction processes together with ongoing training and development. We have established a broad performance management framework, which details the required experience, qualifications, project management skills, industry, client and technical knowledge, organisational skills and behavioural traits required for junior project administrators through to programme managers. This is used for initial recruitment, career planning and development, training, performance assessment and key performance indicators,” he explains.
Team members are placed on-site at clients after the levels of accountability and responsibility for the delivery of programmes and projects have been agreed upon, with engagements ranging from risk-based to monthly fixed rate contracts.
Intuate Group provides programme and project management and administration services for any IT related initiative. The company however specialises in managing data centre relocations, IT and network infrastructure implementations, contact centre implementations, application development, desktop deployments and storage migrations.
“For each project, a suitably experienced and knowledgeable senior project manager, 'The Guardian', mentors on-site teams and performs regular project reviews and/or audits to ensure qualitative management, governance, documentation and reporting on the programmes and projects in accordance with the methodology and lifecycles,” continues Green. “Furthermore, supplementary programme and project managers and administrators are assigned to assist and support when required, for example with the facilitation and documentation of workshops. When a team member is on leave or resigns, stand-in support or a replacement is provided.
“To ensure successful delivery, it is imperative to follow a structured approach and we therefore use a global best practice project management methodology based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which is fully integrated with application development, infrastructure and data centre relocation life cycles, including processes, guidelines and deliverable document templates. This is packaged as an Intuate Group product called VersiPlan and regularly improved through the increased know-how of the Intuate team together with PMBOK upgrades. The experience and growing knowledge of decentralised team members working in different environments are proving extremely valuable in this regard.
“In the end, businesses are looking for quick return on investment and for any IT project to be deemed successful, it needs to be completed within budget and set timeline and ultimately contribute to effectively run an organisation,” Green concludes.
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