Keep reading and you will know it why....
In any company, large or small, your reputation is your biggest asset – you want your projects to be in that successful 8% group. If your IT projects are failing, then you are not going to win the market share you need to compete in that $514.5 billion IT market.
The following 5 principals lay out steps to make sure that your projects are completed on time, and on budget, successfully. Read them, learn them, know them, teach them and then make them stick.
1. Communicate: If everyone involved in your IT project doesn’t know what they’re working on, when it’s due, how to get it done and who the audience is, how can you possibly expect your project to succeed? All of the other steps rely on your communication. Expectations, goals, resources, deadlines, priorities, reports and budgets all need to be available to your team so that they can do their jobs properly. Tools like web-conferencing actually make it possible for your developer in Hyderabad to share his screen with you in New York, to demonstrate how exactly to recreate major bug in your application.
2. Consolidate: We’re talking about information and tasks here. Think about your typical day and how often you stop in the middle of one task to do something else; be honest. How much time do you spend looking for one specific email, out of the hundreds in your in-box? Searching for files on your hard drive after forgetting which folder you saved the one you need in? Opening files to find the most recent version or worse yet, working off of an old file version? Asking around for clarification on an issue? Writing reports? Almost every company can improve their process, cut down on tasks and put data within easy reach, but it isn’t easy and will require change.
3. Prioritize: Issues come in, bugs are discovered, and new application features are conceived of every day. Every item won’t be crucial to fulfilling your business goals, but your team has no way of concretely knowing which tasks are most important to the company unless someone in management tells them. Priority tells your team how important it is that they resolve this issue immediately. Assigning priority and enforcing it, whenever any task or issue is assigned, will make your team work more efficiently.
4. Requirements: In ALM and your SDLC, before you can do anything else, you need to identify, prioritize and agree on application (and project) requirements. Your requirements are the items that your application or project needs to include in order to meet your business goals. Once these basic steps are handled, they need to be communicated back to all relevant parties including both development and business management. Requirements management is continuous throughout a project; and poor requirements management can lead to all sorts of delays and added costs.
5. Manage Time: As management, it’s up to you to take the first step in setting reasonable deadlines and milestones for your team throughout the project. The key word here is reasonable. There are many available tools for tracking how long it takes to do certain tasks. If you utilize these tools on every development project that your organization takes on, after a short period of time you’ll have an educated estimate of how long these tasks typically take to complete. Set these estimated milestones into your project timeline and CHECK IN! As each milestone is completed and checked off your master list, you get an emerging picture of your larger project and how it’s meeting business goals.
Following and adhering to these 5 principals will put you in the elite 8%. You can’t fake it though; set the standards, find the tools to make them work and then enforce them throughout your team. Simply giving lip service to these principals won’t put your project in the top group with those rare successful projects. Make them a part of your daily processes, get your team and other managers involved, and watch how well you meet your deadlines.
Source: http://advice.cio.com/elementool/10025/5_principals_for_reducing_it_project_failure?page=0%2C0
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ReplyDeletepersonal exp is it? :)
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