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Three Tips for Delivering Short Cycle Projects

The fundamental laws of projects.

By Susan Cramm

August 01, 2002 — CIO — A few big, expensive projects have given your IS organization a bad name and overshadowed all the other wonderful work that is going on. In the middle of the night, you have an epiphany: Big projects violate organizational physics. Consider that:

• Competitive industry conditions and basic human nature limit organizational attention spans to about six to 12 months—far less than the duration of big projects.
• Most massive initiatives are an educated guess about what will move the business, with only a foggy clue about "requirements."
• Mere mortal project managers (the kind who work for you) cannot bring projects involving more than 50 people over the finish line without significant problems with time, scope or budget.

Once you are committed to this cause, you will have to spend some late nights figuring out how to get your organization to deliver value within this time frame. Successful short-cycle delivery means that you have to address three key challenges: maintaining an unwavering focus on value, leveraging infrastructure that is already in place and getting a few senior people to tout the idea as their own.

Value focus. You will gain a huge amount of leverage by keeping the initial project stages focused on delivering value?any way you can. That means getting the business sponsor to articulate the value proposition (using financial and operational measurements), analyzing the value drivers, taking baseline measurements and conducting tests. You will need to cobble together some targeted solutions, using existing technology, so that you can find out what factors move the numbers and thereby "discover" the project requirements.

Back when I had a real job, as CIO of Taco Bell, my team simulated a field reporting system by crunching the numbers manually and delivering information in an online format to a few selected markets. We learned what the issues were with the existing data, what decisions could be made with correctly formatted and timed data, and what oversight was necessary to reinforce the desired new behaviors. By the end of this initial period, we had compiled value-focused requirements and a clear understanding of the risks involved. Our next project stage involved developing an enterprisewide solution in three months. Although it wasn’t pretty, it supported the company for a few years while the necessary business process, management and skill changes were seeded in.

 

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