Project Management 101

The keys to a successful, on-time project are not only defining its scope, but measuring and mitigating risk and developing a policy for "scope creep."

By Carolyn Heinze

Even in the best of times, an IT firm that completes its projects late and over budget will eventually witness the ramifications: unsatisfied clients and a reduced chance of gaining repeat business. These days, however, companies are under pressure to spend less and accomplish more. So IT providers that can deliver on time and within the financial parameters that were specified at the outset--using as few resources as possible--are extremely valuable indeed.

The key to a successful, on-time project is defining its scope, says Erick Simpson, vice president and CIO of Garden Grove, Calif.-based Intelligent Enterprise and founder of MSP University. "Once you've developed that scope and get the client to agree to [it] so that you have a finite box of what the project entails," he explains, "then you can develop a project plan from that scope."

To do so, channel partners have to be very savvy about how they analyze their customers' immediate needs, as well as their overreaching goals for the organization.

"Business analysis goes after not just what they say they want, but what they think they want and are not telling you because they don't know how to express it," says Linda H. Schumacher, a certified project management professional at Pittsburgh-based Schumacher Consulting Inc., and author of Ready, Set, Succeed! How Successful Projects Triumph Over Business as Usual. "You have to make sure you establish your identified requirements as well as the implied requirements."

CONTROLLING SCOPE CREEP
Rudolf Melik, co-founder and CEO of Tenrox, an international project management software and workforce management solutions company headquartered in Glendale, Calif., describes the two approaches that his firm applies in a preemptive effort to control scope creep: the waterfall method, in which requirements are defined at the outset with the understanding that if a change is requested, there is a chance that the schedule and budget will be modified; and the agile method, in which a set number of days are allocated to the project, along with a list of prioritized goals.

If, for example, only 16 of 20 tasks were completed within the deadline, there is an understanding that this still constitutes a successful project. "The unfortunate part is that a lot of people who do these projects try to mix the methodologies, and that's where projects fail," Melik says. "They go in with hard requirements, but the customer is not ready to commit to them."

Every project should be broken down into specific phases, and channel partners need to develop guidelines to measure the risk and success of each phase. "There has to be a point at which you either go forward and implement the phase, or you roll back because you encounter a situation or a problem," Simpson explains, adding that each phase should have a point of no return.

The risks associated with each portion of a project should be discussed ahead of time so that both the solution provider and the client can take the proper precautions. "There is risk in a project because you are doing something that probably hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done quite this way before," says Schumacher. When evaluating the risk of a project, channel partners and their clients should implement elements to mitigate it.

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