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I am a project manager working on a major update of our CRM
database, but the sales team keep changing their requirements. We
are three months behind schedule. All the shots are called by the
head of IT, sales director and managing director. How do I gain an
effective voice in the matter?
Find a mentor to develop your influencing
skills
Scope creep is one of the major reasons for project delays and
failure. As project managers are measured on scope, time, and cost
(with resulting quality) you are right to be concerned both at a
business and a personal level.
Take the business issues first. Putting in a product that does not
meet requirements is a lot more expensive than continuing to talk
about it. That is providing there is not an expensive team who are
programming all the changes at the same time as the analysis is
going on. What are you doing to help clarify the requirements? Do
you have a strong business analyst? Have you built a prototype to
help define the needs?
At a personal level, I assume you are recording the changes the
steering group is making and that the reason for the delay is
accepted. If not, you may find you are held responsible even if you
believe you do not have accountability. A strong project manager
needs hard and soft skills. You should seek a mentor who can help
you perform a stakeholder analysis and advise you on how to develop
your influencing skills.
Sharm Manwani, Henley Management College
Hold workshops with the project's key
stakeholders
The situation you describe is typical of one where the objectives
of the application are either unclear or the stakeholders have
different goals.
Hold one or two short workshops with the key stakeholders to focus
on the business outcomes and improvements in performance the
customer database is intended to enable. Once you have agreement
here, you can determine which business activities the improved
information and analysis available from the customer relationship
management database will support and how the information should be
held and presented to gain the required outcomes.
Your role here is to help maintain focus on clarifying and
identifying only the critical information needed to deliver the
business benefits. This should help you challenge unnecessary scope
creep and changes in requirements.
This approach should also enable you to relate the cost of
developing and maintaining aspects of the database to the benefits
enabled, hence killing ill-conceived requirements.
Unless you act to resolve the situation it will continue as people
add ideas without necessarily understanding the overall goal or
realising the cost implications.
Rob Lambert, Senior lecturer in IS, Cranfield School of
Management
Consider risk, reward, effort and need
relationships
I hate to be the doom and gloom merchant, but the scenario you
describe has disaster written all over it. If you change your
requirements in the nature you describe, you are increasing the
risk of failure. There are numerous high-profile examples of this
in the public and private sectors.
I suspect that the process of change request does not consider the
relationship between risk, reward, effort and need. It also appears
the specification has not been thoroughly thought through at the
requirements phase.
The position you are in is that you are running behind schedule,
your requirements are changing, you are no doubt over budget, and
the project is unlikely to deliver benefits. You need to bring
these facts to the attention of the managing director and suggest
you put a stake in the ground and put together a rescue plan.
You need to stop developments, clarify the requirements, draw up a
revised implementation plan and introduce strict change
control.
Roger Rawlinson, NCC Group
Properly define the role of the steering
committee
When you refer to the head of IT, the sales director and the
managing director "calling the shots", I suspect they form the CRM
project steering committee. Good practice requires clearly defined
roles and responsibilities on all relevant projects.
The role of the steering committee includes monitoring progress,
helping to resolve issues and sanctioning major changes to the
project. The role of the project manager includes providing
information to the steering committee on the implications of
changes, with recommendations, if appropriate, on how to resolve
issues.
If these roles and have not been formally defined and agreed, it
could lead to misunderstandings about where responsibilities lie
and the influence of the project manager.
Changes to business requirements are quite common in projects. They
usually have an adverse impact on budgets and timescales and
therefore are brought to the steering committee for sanction. The
steering committee should require the project manager to classify
the change requests as "necessary" or "nice to have" and to
estimate their cost and time.
The project manager can also provide options, whereby a "line in
the sand" is drawn under functionality for the initial release of
the upgrade, and where subsequent changes are scheduled for later
releases.
My second recommendation is to get formalised, consistent and
visible reporting and a robust change management process. The
visibility and clear implications of an ever-increasing project
budget and timescale should do the trick.
Paul Durkin, Partner, Ernst & Young
Get the head of IT to sign off the system
changes
This concern is as old as IT. It is strange that users who need to
stick to strict design specifications and timescales appear to
believe they can keep on changing those for IT.
Bridge builders do not change their design weeks or months after it
has been approved and prices are being sought. A bridge does not
start with a cantilever design and change into a suspension half
way through. Why then do users believe they can change IT
requirements and not pay a price and time penalty - which may wipe
out the return on investment which justified the work in the first
place?
It is scary you say the head of IT is involved in calling the
shots. Did they sign the original specification, cost and
timetable? If so, how can they imagine that changes will not affect
the outcome?
You have a formidable list of opponents, with the head of IT, the
sales director and the managing director all apparently happy with
the inexorable slide of this project brought about by their
changes. Either they are not aware of the consequences of their
decisions - presumably you have a project reporting system, or they
are aware and this has not been passed on to you.
Either way, you have to clarify things with your head of IT. They
must sign off these changes, otherwise you are in a vulnerable
position. You have a problem if you do not get this from the head
of IT, because it is dangerous to go behind your boss's back.
If you have a peer-level user member on the project team, ask what
they think about the situation. Have they talked to their line
manager? What has been the reaction and why has this not been fed
back into the project team?
A worrying scenario is that your head of IT is unwilling to draw to
people's attention the consequences of these changes. If this is
the case, and they go down, you need to have your side very well
documented or you may go down as well.
Robin Laidlaw, President, CW 500 Club
Clarify who your sponsor is and communicate with
them
Your role is to manage the project on behalf of your sponsor.
Provided that the sponsor knows that the project is three months
behind schedule, and is happy to live with this to accommodate the
changing requirements, you are accountable to them for delivering
the project to the new timescale, not the old one. It sounds like
the three key players are acting as a steering group, so presumably
they are all aware of the situation.
You have a problem if you:
- Do not have a clear sponsor
- The sponsor is not fully in tune with the impact of the
changing requirements on the timescale
- You have not agreed the new timescale with the sponsor
- You or the sponsor have not formally notified the wider
steering group of the change in timescale and why
- You have not "bolted down" the new timescale and made any
further changes subject to formal steering group
agreement.
If any of these are true, act to rectify the situation. Provided
you do it well, you will gain a more effective voice.
Chris Potts, director, Dominic Barrow
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The experts
Computer Weekly has put together a panel of experts. You can
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questions (or your own solution to this question) to
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk
NCC Group
www.nccglobal.com
Ernst & Young
www.ey.com
Cranfield School of Management
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
Computer Weekly CW500 Club
www.computerweekly.com/CW500club
Henley Management College
www.henleymc.ac.uk
Dominic Barrow
www.dominicbarrow.com