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Projects, Programs, Requirements and Customers |
| John Ruff | 08.31.2006 | Any/All Industries | Project Management |
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 In order for a program to be successful, the projects in the program must be successful. In order for the projects to be successful, the requirements must be delivered on time and within budget. In order for that to happen, there must be a clear understanding of the requirements to be delivered.
No surprise there but getting clear, understandable requirements seems to still be one of the most difficult and largest problems facing IT project teams today. Even after all the years of experience, after all the books, papers and classes on the subject, it continues to be a problem. The industry even created roles such as Business Analyst to directly address this problem. What this article will do is look at approaches to correcting the problem and ways to achieve happier project teams and happier customers. After all, project teams really want to deliver what the customer wants and the customer wants to receive what they need.
In order to have the project team and the customer on the same page, the customer must be part of the process. Let‘s look at a few ways that have been used successfully to make this happen.
1. Provide project training for the team and the customer. This approach was used on a program I took over after it had been up and running for over a year. At the time, it was in a great deal of trouble and had a history of non-delivery from various groups. The project teams were getting change requests from a number of customers daily but they were not being coordinated in any way. After talking with the business manager, it became evident that there was not a very good understanding of what it took to make a project successful. The mentality was “Just throw stuff over the wall and hope.” This, of course, was a prescription for failure and miscommunication and would result in the two phrases at the end of the project being – “I thought you wanted this” and “No this is what I said I wanted.” In this case, a training class (three days) was put together and given to selected members of the project and customer teams. In the class, there were a number of role-playing exercises and the instructor put customers in project roles and project team members in customer roles. This was simply an introductory type course but in the end, the customer stated, “Now I know why and what you mean by needing requirements.” While this did not eliminate all the problems on this program, it did build an understanding of what was needed in order for the project teams to deliver solutions and it put a collaborative relationship in place for the project and customer teams.
2. Use prototyping, screen shots and use cases to develop a good understanding of what the customer is asking. Working with the customer, facilitate discussions of how the business actually works and what the project teams will deliver. During a customer engagement, a vendor package was evaluated and selected to support a number of business needs across an organization. After purchasing, the project team had to understand how to tailor the product to fit the needs of the business and the business had to understand the product so that some business processes could be modified if needed. By putting actual screens up for the customer to review and making modifications right there with the customer, it became much easier to determine the actual needs. The customer began thinking about how each screen would be used and what information would be needed. This process greatly reduced the time needed to gather requirements and allowed requirements documentation to be done in such a way as to be extremely understandable by everyone involved in the process.
3. Have the customer paint the big picture and then present it to the team. When projects and programs involve multiple customers it is important to get the customers on the same team and not competing with one another to get what they want for their area without regard to the other business areas. One way to do this is to facilitate a series of workshops with the individual customer areas to outline the vision for each area. Next, have the customer areas come together and present their visions to each other and allow them to discuss those visions looking for enhancements, economies through collaboration and combining requirements, etc. Next, facilitate a subset of this group to combine visions if needed and work out a release plan for all the customer areas involved. The goal in this exercise is to get everyone thinking globally (what is best for the company) and not personally (what I want for my department). It is okay to have some project team members in the room but they should probably be limited to observation during the initial sessions.
These are only a few suggestions and you can come up with others, however, making the customer part of the team will make the team a winner and that is what every team wants. |
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