Information Technology Aligned» Productivity

Project Mission Statements – Justifiable, Objective Focus

John Brunswick — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:01:17 +0000

It is not uncommon for project mission statements and organizational mission statements contain lofty, heartfelt missions that sound terrific – but fail to translate into meaningful guidance for a project or company. If you ever had a chance to use the Dilbert mission statement generator before it was decommissioned, you may have created mission statements like the following, which highlight how NOT to create a mission statement -

“We have committed to synergistically fashion high-quality products so that we may collaboratively provide access to inexpensive leadership skills in order to solve business problems”
“Our challenge is to assertively administrate timely resources and authoritatively integrate enterprise-wide products while promoting personal employee growth.”
“It is our job to continually foster world-class infrastructures as well as to quickly create principle-centered sources to meet our customer’s needs”

The above mission statements are ultimately empty and provide no guidance or control over the execution of tasks that will take place to fulfil them.

In his book Winning, Jack Welch emphasizes the need to take a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to mission statement development if any real value is to be gained by it. Mr Welch states that “Too often, these exercises end with a set of generic platitudes that do nothing but leave employees directionless or cynical. Who doesn’t know of a mission statement that reads something like, “XYZ Company values quality and service,” or, “Such-and-Such Company is customer-driven.” … Give me a break—every decent company espouses these things!”

To make the most out of a project charter’s mission statement it must be meaningful enough to provide business justification, focus the project execution and provide a high level metric to objectify project results. If developed correctly, a mission statement will act as an excellent compass by which to deliver a successful project. This is done by clearly defining

WHAT the project is about – focus execution via this statement
WHY it is being undertaken – business justification
HOW it will be achieved – objective metrics for success

This might sound trivial, but it is amazing how often this fundamental criteria is not met. If this criteria cannot be clearly articulated by a project team, the project should not be undertaken.

Although the Project Management Institutes’s (PMI) Body of Knowledge can be idealistic, it does a good job of making sure that a project mission statement is clear in these respects and define it as follows – “Brief summary, approximately one or two sentences, that sums up the background, purposes and benefits of the project.” (from http://www.pmi.org/PDF/pp_besnerhobbs.pdf). In my abbreviated approach above, addressing the WHAT (goal), WHY (business justification) and HOW (metrics for success) will ensure that a foundation for project success is created based on a strong vision.

Business Value – Minimal Investment, Maximum Impact

John Brunswick — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:24:25 +0000

Looking at web technology it is easy to feel that great business value and user productivity can be gained from creating deep, complex integrations presented through elegant user interfaces. This could be the truth, but it is often far from it.

As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is the ultimate business value that an application is delivering. The most value can be gained from even the most mundane technical solution.

How does one define a great technical solution? The best technical solutions solve a business problem with the least amount of technical effort. This includes effort from a full lifecycle standpoint – design, development, implementation, education, operation, maintenance and decommissioning of the solution. A few years ago I worked with a company that demonstrated this point so clearly that I had to highlight it in this post.

This particular organization lends money to low income families at below market rates to aid them in home purchases. For a few years they had been using portal technology that from a development standpoint was focused on business users. This technology required little programming to allow them to further develop their extranet and intranet environments that connected their customers on the lending and purchasing sides of their business.

A need arose within the organization to provide executives with a summary of call activity from their sales team to judge the effectiveness of various calling campaigns.

The IT team spent time deliberating over what course of action to take to solve the business problem. It was decided that the executives could be best served via a dashboard that would roll up various pieces of performance data around these calls made by the sales team and surface the information via their existing intranet.

The following two options were arrived at assuming that the requirements gathering for the solution was already complete, irrespective of the technical solution

Solution 1

Extend their base CRM system to support tracking this data and develop an integration to aggregate and present the data. This solution would require the following development efforts

Extend the data model of the base system to account for the new reporting needs
Develop a presentation layer to gather the relevant information for the business users based on this data model
Create a presentation layer to allow executives to view and sort the information
Integrate the presentation layer into their intranet
Complete a quality assurance cycle on the solution and resolve any issues found with the technological implementation

Solution 2

Use an out of the box – MS Access like – portal component that is already available to capture and present the information. This solution would require the following development effort

Configure the data model and forms relevant for the data collection around the business needs
Configure the presentation layer for the end users to expose the required reports

The above comparison might be deemed biased, but it is important to note that in the 2nd solution data would now be entered into two distinct systems by the sales team and the organization will not have complete control over the presentation format beyond a series of basic, caned reports.

After lengthy deliberation the IT team was strongly in favor of using the first solution due to it giving them full control and confining all sales team activity to the CRM system, but estimated the time to completion at around four months of effort. This effort would detract from having their developers work on core offerings within their extranet to drive business leads to the sales team. The development and QA time, not to mention possible adjustments that may be needed after an upgrade of the underlying system also added to the overall “cost” of the integration.

The first solution would require around 8 hours of effort to configure and 10 minutes from the sales team each week to summarize their call activity, which would be required regardless of the technical solution selected. It would be created on top of an out-of-the-box technology and require almost no quality assurance testing, but require the sales team to end their day outside of their CRM system and leverage the intranet for summation of their calls.

In a perfect world we would have the deep integration of the first solution, married with the ease of development within the second solution. Unfortunately that was not feasible and the business team was requesting a solution as soon as possible from IT.

Ultimately the IT team went with the second option. If more complex needs arose that the configuration based solution could not meet they would have to revisit the solution, but for now they were able to meet 100% of the business needs with this stop-gap effort in a very short time span. Given the limited effort and accuracy in addressing the problem, this had tremendous positive impact with the business.

This example of success is perhaps one of the most powerful, pragmatic solutions that I have come across in my enterprise software work. This is an extreme example, but hopefully there might be a space within your organization that allows you to provide this same level of success with minimal effort. Using simple, configuration-based approaches to development whenever possible is an outstanding way to provide value. They may at first seem too lightweight and due to their technical ease may be overlooked at first pass by a development staff, but never count them out for their ability to provide a big win for your business teams.

Personal Operational Portfolio Management

John Brunswick — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:40:03 +0000

The process of task completion can be a complex, confusing art. This article takes a no-nonsense look at how we can maximize our effectiveness at setting and reaching our goals through “Personal Operational Portfolio Management”.

Anyone who regularly visits bookstores knows that there is a massive ocean of material about achievement. Row after row of these books profess the ideal ways to increase performance in our personal lives as well as the workplace. Why is it then, that the ability to execute evades even the most intelligent people? Over the past few years I have inadvertently stumbled upon a basic system that has helped me consistently produce results while maintaining a reasonably normal lifestyle. Let’s not kid ourselves, if we want to drive hard we are going to need to make some concessions. In this brief, no nonsense examination, I would like to share the Personal Operational Portfolio system that I use on a daily basis to tackle various projects and tasks that I have committed myself to completing.

A Personal Operational Portfolio should represent all of the projects that you are currently involved in. This might include planning a wedding, earning a certificate, rolling out a CRM system at work or losing ten pounds. The items placed in your portfolio represent the things that you are looking to complete or achieve. Notice that all of these items have some objective end, and will never run indefinitely. You need to be able to target and eliminate each item by using objective criteria to measure their completion against. Formalizing this series of items is critical in order to guide them to completion, because taking them casually ensures they will never be completed. I would suggest that you have no more than five items in your portfolio at all times, and the lower the number of items, the more effective you can ultimately be, since the most ambitious person can only leverage a finite number of work units in a given time period.

In order to successfully manage your Personal Operational Portfolio you need to critically filter and qualify each portfolio item, shortening the distance to success by objectively defining your goals, honing and adjusting your strategies through introspection, chipping away at each one through sprints, reveling in your achievement and then repeating the process until the project is complete. It is important to remember that an idea is only an idea until you can hold it in your hands.

Qualify

The first and most important element in honing your operational portfolio is to set your own expectations. Ask yourself, are you really going to do it? Seriously, do you really want to do it? If the work, class or other project that you are looking to do is a “nice to have” and not something that you are serious about, do not place it in your portfolio. It will not get done and will distract you from other initiatives or time that could be spent relaxing. Set yourself up for success, as you essentially get to cheat and select what items are included in your portfolio. If possible, try to focus on items that you are passionate about. It goes without saying that the chances of success for a project directly correlates to our intensity of passion or the necessity for completion of that particular project.

Define

The chance for a successful completion of a project increases by shortening the distance between points A and B. Therefore, try to make the distance between the start and completion of your portfolio goals as short as possible. For those who have done any project management at work, you can think of this as your way of combating personal scope creep. Narrowly defining the project helps to set yourself up for success. Once you reach the completion point of an item in your portfolio you can think about the next project and build on top of your prior work.

Introspect

Just as you wake up, work, relax, sleep and repeat the cycle each day, you need to hone your portfolio. This is something that I enjoy doing every evening and find it very cathartic. It allows me to drive one hundred percent during the day without worrying if my efforts are properly directed because I have done my adjustment homework upfront. For each one of the elements in your portfolio you need to ask yourself:

Is this something that will still provide value to my life or work?
Am I happy doing this?
What adjustments do I need to make to ensure that this is successful?

If you answered “no” to the first or second questions, make adjustments to the project so that it changes your answer or drop it from your portfolio. A caveat to a “no” answer for question two might be if the project contributes to a foundation for later projects and happiness. A good example of this might be graduate school or a certification for work. The most beneficial things in life never come easy and generally take a lot of time, energy and sacrifice.

Item three in the list is fairly significant. In order to run the most effective operational portfolio you often need to make minor adjustments to the direction of your efforts. It is important to note that the more minor the adjustments are, the more quickly you will be able to close your projects. Remember, it is crucial to make the journey from point A to point B as short as possible, which is why your thoughts about direction and strategy during the introspection process are critical.

Sprint

The benefit of doing an evening review is that when you are fresh in the morning you can grab hold of a task and sprint. During the sprint you will place effort against tasks for various projects. Due to the shortness of the sprint (a workday or perhaps a portion of a workday), it is okay if your efforts are not fully on target.. Let’s be realistic and acknowledge that some days we have more enthusiasm for particular tasks than others. After all, we are only human. I have found that to maximize my effectiveness it helps to have an inspirational environment; so grab a cup of coffee, throw on some “Eye of the Tiger” and get to work!

Revel

Sprinting can be an exhausting effort. Do not forget to revel in what you have accomplished for the day. You have worked hard and achievement feels good. Chipping away at the tasks to complete your projects is no small feat.

Summary

I have just laid out the basic foundation for running an excellent Personal Operational Portfolio. It is worth noting two major elements that are crucial for long term success while using a strategy like the one outlined above. Sacrifices and sanity are tremendous factors when it comes to working with a stable portfolio. Driving hard feels fantastic, but it is always healthy to ensure that you do not damage or neglect personal relationships with friends and family throughout the process. The other element to note is that addiction to execution is breathtaking. Once you fall into a groove with this system you will find yourself building upon your small successes, tackling and completing projects that you never thought possible. It is pure adrenaline. Best wishes and good luck in your endeavors. I hope that this strategy allows you to be more effective in helping you fulfill your dreams!