Tailor IT Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects

Right-size PMBOK for all of your IT projects.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

If the process doesn’t fit your projects, change the process.

"Over the past two decades, the project management industry has become increasingly rife with best practices and formal frameworks for achieving project success. However, this proliferation hasn’t changed the fact that most organizations continue to struggle at projects. Indeed, statistics around project failure—especially IT projects—have remained consistently high since at least the mid-1990s, a time that coincides with the rise of the ‘best practices’ industry itself. While it’s important that best practices be understood, it’s equally true that best practices aren’t always the best fit. These frameworks commonly set unrealistic expectations for resource-constrained IT departments, and in their clinical approach, fail to address the day-to-day challenges that project managers face on the front lines. In my experience, I’ve found that a right-sized approach to your project management processes works best. Take what you need from those formal frameworks, and then tailor a process that’s going to work for your organization and for the variety of projects that come your way."

Matt Burton,

Research Director, Project Portfolio Management

Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• PMO directors looking to standardize project management processes and get more consistent and reliable data from project teams to help increase visibility.
• IT managers who need to encourage skills development in their project managers and team leads.

This Research Will Help You:

• Develop a standardized project management process to help ensure that all project managers are feeding the portfolio with the appropriate KPIs and status updates.
• Develop an ongoing project management training curriculum to help experienced project managers keep their skills fresh and new project leads build up their capabilities.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• New or experienced project managers looking to follow industry best practices and who require a comprehensive set of project management tools and templates.
• CIOs or other C-suite executives who need to improve the throughput and value of the organization’s project work.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Follow COBIT and PMBOK informed project management processes—and pull from a project management toolkit—that can scale to projects of all sizes.
• Provide organizationally appropriate project management standards to help minimize waste and improve project outcomes.

Executive summary

Situation

• As an organization, you need to improve project success. Your current project management processes are poorly defined, and projects are commonly plagued by cost and scheduling overruns.
• This lack of project management discipline contributes to stakeholder dissatisfaction and fuels the perception that IT does not deliver value.

Complication

• You have access to formal project management frameworks and advice, but you’re not sure what to do with them all. Their advice isn’t immediately tactical, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to implement everything they suggest.
• Your team is resource constrained, and for the most part, members lack any formal project management certification or experience.

Resolution

• When it’s right, keep it light. A lightweight approach to project management process suffices for the vast majority of IT initiatives. Establish different tiers of PM rigor to ensure that you’re not weighing down potential quick wins in too much process, and to ensure that you’re applying the right amount of rigor to more complex, high-risk initiatives.
• Apply the right tools to the job. Your project management processes will succeed or fail depending on the quality of your artifacts and how they are applied. Build an actionable project management toolkit that can accommodate projects of all sizes and that will help facilitate optimized communications with project stakeholders.
• Put your processes in context. Project management doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If your project management practices don’t inform effective decision making, then your investments in process discipline will be all for nothing. Develop processes that provide a gateway to the “big picture” and help facilitate effective portfolio management practices.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Tailor a project management framework to fit your organization. Best practices aren’t always the best fit. Take what you can use from formal frameworks and define a right-sized approach to your project management processes.
2. Make it about project outcomes, not processes. Project management success doesn’t equal project success. Project management processes should be a means to an end (i.e. successful project outcomes), and not an end in themselves.

Successful projects are the #1 driver of satisfaction with IT

Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision Survey (N=21,367) has identified a direct correlation between IT project success and overall business satisfaction with IT.

Reported Importance: Initially, when asked to rank the importance of IT services, respondents ranked “projects” low on the list—10 out of a possible 12.

Actual Importance: Despite this low “reported importance,” of those organizations that were “satisfied” to “fully satisfied” with IT, the service that had the strongest correlation to this high satisfaction was “projects,” i.e. IT’s ability to help plan, support, and execute initiatives that help the business achieve its strategic goals.

Successful project outcomes depend on effective project management

There’s no getting around it: if you want consistently successful project results, then you need to invest in project management discipline.

Project management (PM) is a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes from start to finish. Implementing PM processes helps establish repeatable steps and controls that enable project success. Documentation of PM processes leads to consistent results and dependable delivery on expectations. While an investment in PM discipline isn’t free, the time and money spent in developing repeatable processes will pay off in terms of improved project success rates and greater stakeholder satisfaction.

Data from the Project Management Institute (PMI) shows that organizations that have developed cultures around project management discipline are significantly better situated to succeed at projects.

Project management is the primary discipline separating top IT performers from the rest of the pack

Info-Tech’s research shows that the ability to effectively plan and execute projects is among the top activities that correlate with high IT performance.

Our data shows that the ability to right-size project initiation and governance based on capacity forecasts, as well as the ability to drive throughput through project execution, are two of the top three activities that separate top IT performers from average performers.

Despite its importance, project management remains an Achilles’ heel for the vast majority of organizations

The statistics around project failure – especially IT projects – have remained consistently high for the last two decades, despite a proliferation of project management best practices.

29%: Only 29% of projects were delivered on time, on budget, and with a satisfactory results in 2015.

—Hass and Fulmer

60%: On average, 2015 statistics show that 60% of projects are not aligned with organizational strategy.

—Wrike

75%: 75% of IT executive stakeholders and business leaders believe their projects are “doomed from the start.”

—Geneca

17%: 17% of large IT projects fail so badly they threaten the organization’s survival.

—McKinsey & Co.

56%: Only 56% of strategic projects meet their original business goals.

— PMI

$50-$150 billion: The US economy loses $50-$150 billion per year due to failed IT projects.

—Gallup

While it’s true that project management failures are common and well reported year-after-year, Info-Tech finds that the barriers to project management success are relatively straightforward to diagnose and – with the right measures – surmountable with just a few tweaks to processes.

The biggest barrier to project success is often project management itself

Best practices aren’t always the best fit.

Formal project management frameworks like PMBOK and COBIT provide comprehensive approaches to planning, executing, and monitoring projects. While these frameworks can provide the right amount of rigor and controls for large, complex projects in environments that are optimally funded and resourced, they can prove to be less actionable when applied to medium-to-small initiatives—especially in resource-constrained project environments, like small enterprises or IT departments. When these formal methodologies are applied without specific tactics, they can lead to quick wins being weighed down by too much process or to project ROI being depleted by excessive PM administrative burdens.

"[PMBOK] offers a vast body of knowledge to Project Managers, but without the specific guidance to distil the knowledge into practical and actionable methods tailored to different situations. This has resulted in failures and practitioners spending too much time translating the knowledge and not enough time executing and delivering it."

—Lisa Hodges

When applied as a universal standard, PM best practices can stand in the way of the effective standardization of process

"PM started as a planning and scheduling tool and PM standards were limited to those areas. Planning and scheduling has since been built into step-wise models, providing an apparently perfect path to follow. That may be troublesome enough but the problem escalated further when new areas, such as people skills, human resources, and ways of dealing with complexity were added to the standards. When the developers of standards were directed to become more comprehensive and more up to date in terms of their practices, they added issues that were less easy to standardise. This trend was exacerbated when the application of the standard was expanded from covering a few industries in a few countries to all industries in all countries, and from large and complex systems development projects to all types of projects."

—Hällgren et al. “Relevance Lost! A critical review of project management standardisation”

With this history in mind, IT project managers should approach formal frameworks asking, “what can I take from these that will benefit my projects and my team?” rather than attempting to apply them verbatim, at all costs, when and where they might not be applicable.

The ability to right-size project planning and controls contributes significantly to IT project throughput

Find project management success by walking a middle path between too little and too much PM formality.

Project management planning and controls are necessary for all projects—they just shouldn’t look the same for all types of projects. Right-sized project management discipline will help you straddle the divide between two equally destructive poles of project chaos:

"The trick to implementing sustainable project management is to tune process to the needs of the organization (right fit – which depends on culture and maturity) and to the needs of all projects (right scalability – which depends on differences in project scale and complexity)."

—Howard Vaughn

Use Info-Tech’s project management framework to tailor processes to fit your projects

This blueprint will help you build right-sized PM processes by defining different levels of projects and determining the right amount of rigor to apply at each level.

Our approach to right-sizing project management centers on five distinct phases:

1. Lay the groundwork for PM success
2. Build a lightweight PM process for small initiatives
3. Establish a standard process for initiating and planning medium-to-large projects
4. Establish a standard process for executing and closing medium-to-large projects
5. Implement your project management SOP

Info-Tech’s five-phase framework is geared toward applying the right amount of rigor, as project risk and complexity dictate. Project throughput benefits from letting quick wins be quick wins and getting ROI out of planning activities by applying rigor only where it’s needed.

Our approach provides project managers with tailor-to-fit solutions to help them drive quality project results

Project management success doesn’t equal project success.

While formal methodologies can be a key ingredient to success for some projects and for some organizations, the fact is that the vast majority of projects in IT departments do not require such rigid and detailed processes. Our approach gives project managers the option to run with a lightweight method when it’s applicable, freeing them from a considerable administrative burden to focus on getting projects done. Then, as project level dictates, our framework provides options to apply more rigor to help mitigate risk and complexity.

1. Lay the groundwork

Results

• A current state analysis
• Definition of project levels and categories
2. Build a lightweight process

Results

• Info-Tech’s PM approach for small projects
• Lightweight templates
3. Initiate and plan larger projects

Results

• Comprehensive project execution and closing processes
• Fully-featured tools & templates
4. Implement your PM SOP

Results

• A PM training plan to help standardize processes
• Implementation roadmap

"Making the projects simpler is a worthwhile endeavor because complexity causes only confusion and increased cost."

—The Standish Group (quoted in Karch)

Info-Tech’s framework blends leading schools of thought with practical, tactical insider research

Our method allows you to customize an approach, taking as much or as little from PMBOK and COBIT as required to drive successful project throughput.

Our approach is complemented by our diagnostic tools that measure your success in project management

Key performance indicators of project management methodologies
Desired Outcome	Increase success of project outcome	Increase on-time and on-budget project delivery	Improve project managers’ adherence to standard processes	Increase business / project stakeholder satisfaction with IT
Metric	Project resources used for analyzing, fixing & redeploying	Average schedule and cost overruns	Team satisfaction with IT’s ability to manage projects	Customer satisfaction with IT’s ability to execute projects
Method	Current State Scorecard	Project Management Assessment		Customer Satisfaction Report

Start measuring your PM success with Info-Tech’s Project Portfolio Management Diagnostic Program.

Our approach is rounded-out by a comprehensive and easy-to-customize project management toolkit

Success depends on using the right tools for the job.

Your project management processes will succeed or fail depending on the quality of your artifacts and tools and how they are applied. Each phase and project level in this blueprint is accompanied by a best-of-breed toolkit to help support your PM processes and ensure you develop the appropriate protocol for monitoring and controlling your projects.

Sample Toolkit options*:

In the spirit of right-sizing your efforts, the blueprint provides clear criteria for the artifacts that should be employed for different levels of projects, so your team of PMs will be clear at each stage what artifacts are required, what artifacts are strongly recommended, and what artifacts are unnecessary.

*Full toolkit requirements are developed in the standard operating procedure (SOP) template for this blueprint.

Put your project management processes in context

Project management doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Ultimately, the tools and processes you develop need to inform effective decision making at the executive layer.

Info-Tech takes a holistic approach to project management, putting PM processes in the context of strong project governance and effective portfolio management practices. Whether your department reports into a formal portfolio management function (i.e. a PMO or portfolio manager) or there’s simply someone doing ad hoc tracking of a project list, this blueprint will help you capture a more accurate and reliable view of the big picture. This big-picture view will in turn set your project managers up for more consistent project success.

"Project managers… are accountable for executing the processes necessary for successful portfolio management, and for providing accurate and unbiased information. Portfolio management can enable the project manager to reduce project failures, overruns, and redundancies—all of which are fundamental project management goals."

—PMI, 2015

Info-Tech helps a government agency find the right balance of project governance and process efficiency for its IT projects

CASE STUDY

Industry: Government

Source: Info-Tech Client

Situation

An IT department within a state agency was going through a period of rapid transition. While the former administration had required little governance and controls on the state’s projects, a new administration was demanding increased governance into how large IT projects were planned and executed.

Complication

The PMO was having trouble reconciling the old “low governance” culture with the new “heavy governance” one. Project managers were used to wearing multiple hats within the organization, and didn’t necessarily have the time to devote to rigorous processes or to focus on one project at a time. New contracting laws are very stringent, requiring the project manager to be involved at the project’s onset, specifically for statement of work and timeline design.

Resolution

Info-Tech came onsite and helped develop a right-sized governance structure. Analysts helped IT develop appropriate project levels, which helped increase PM consistency while minimizing the overhead of PM effort. An SOP was developed that gave IT best-practice processes and tools to aid in better upfront project planning and execution.

Case Study Highlights

Right-sized: Info-Tech introduced a right-sized PM governance framework based on effective project leveling in order to increase project management consistency while minimizing the overhead of project management effort.

PPM: Info-Tech identified the need for improved project portfolio management practices to assist with project outcomes and create more even project workloads.

$40,000: Info-Tech analysts received more than $40,000 in measured value for their work in developing a project management framework for the agency.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation.”

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Tailor IT Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects (Phases 1 and 2)