Thursday, March 13, 2014
The Project is Dead! Long Live the Project!
We recently completed a project of redesigning a feature of our software. The software keeps track of life-cycle and supply-chain data for military programs. One of the features is a configuration management feature that we recently redesigned and released the new design and process to our customers & users.
The most influential aspect of the project was the limited time available for those of us involved to devote to this project. As Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer (2008) tell us, groups in an organization “are often competing against each other for services of a specialty area …” (p.62). In this case, there were several projects competing for my time. I had to make a decision on which project, this one or another one, needed our attention the most.
I chose the other project because the potential for problems was higher in the other project. It was not a redesign of a feature but was a brand-new feature that needed testing and documentation. Managing risk is an important part of project management (Allen & Hardin 2008). But I have to admit, that the success of this project, the redesign of the configuration management tools suffered because of this decision.
We could have scheduled the project with the other projects in mind. If in the beginning we had identified that the other project was a higher priority, we would have been prepared to delay the release of the configuration management redesign. As it was, the redesign was released without complete testing and documentation. The other project, a brand-new feature. Has not yet been released, but it is now more ready for that than the configuration management piece was.
I think we made the right decision, but we can learn from this project nonetheless.
References
Allen, S., & Hardin, P. C. (2008). Developing instructional technology products using effective project management practices. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 19(2), 72–97.
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Hi Gary,
ReplyDeleteIt seems as though more stakeholders should have been identified and included. When there are competing projects, there also needs to be a process by which the projects are measured for return on investment or impact on something, such as customer service. What other project management steps or processes could have been used, in hindsight, to improve the situation?
Laurene
Hey Gary,
ReplyDeleteI thought your post was interesting. We all have moments in our lives where we have to decide on one thing or the next. As a school teacher who also is also taking Masters Level classes at Walden, I have to make the important decision of what do I do with my time. I can choose to work on my Walden homework, which will of course be graded and in turn affect my grade, or I can grade my students papers where I give students quality feedback and they learn from their mistakes. The problem here is deciding which is more important to you, and as you can tell by some of my late assignments, Im sure you know what is more important to me.
Adam
Hi Gary,
ReplyDeleteThis scenario is very familiar to me. I typically have senior management assigning me projects with competing urgency and time requirements, in addition to my regular work (like teaching the new employee classes.) A lot of times, too, these types of assignments come from the client with an unrealistic requested deadline, or very close to the actual deadline. Since the configuration management feature was in support of a military product, was this a result of a client request? Also, did you (or the team) use any sort of tool to determine which project would be better to assign a high priority? We have to use a decision matrix to visually reflect how we came to certain decisions. As time-consuming and outwardly unnecessary it might sound, using a tool like this actually does help to determine which project or task should take the priority.
Jenna Holtz