Project Management Agenda

Why is Project Management Agenda so important? According to data from Steve McConnell, an IT guru, 72 percent of all IT projects fail. The success rate of even baseball players is better than that and hit balls a little bit better. They are not failing 72 percent of the time when they go up to bat. Failure, in this case, doesn't necessarily mean that you don't launch the system. Maybe you are two years past your scheduled installation date and you are 500 percent over budget. So, Project Management Agenda is necessary for the proper allocation of resources and to meet the desired objective.

So, rather than failure, the word I have chosen is complicated. Once you make your way through the nightmare and the red tape to finally get your projects in place and get them launched, you want someone to manage it, to make sure that you don't have to go through that process again, that this time you can take the resources and the budget you have been allocated and be successful.

What you’re really being asked to do is do more with fewer resources. You don't want to squander the resources you have. The success of medical projects is critical and time sensitive. When your projects are late, they can have some profound implications. So let’s talk about Project Management Agenda. First is control the scope. You will never hit a project where you don't end up wrangling over scope. It is part of the process.

The Project Management Agenda’s basics:

• Control of Scope

– Signoff on requirements & design critical

– Important to agree to what will NOT be in the system

• Control of Product Quality

– Build QA steps into the plan

– Foster ownership among team members

– Involve the customer

• Control of Budget
• Control of Schedule

– Detailed Project Plan required

– Constant monitoring of plan

While making Project Management Agenda there are few things which we have to taken care of. The way you get control of a delivery system is by ensuring that you have a really good set of requirements and a detailed design. You should be heavily involved in the requirements gathering process. It shouldn't be a matter of looking at a document that is produced at the end of the requirement session and signing off on it.

Get intimately involved in sessions where you are culling out the requirements, working heavily with the vendor or the development team that is providing this for you during Project Management Agenda. By the time they produce that requirements document, you are intimately familiar with every piece of it, and you have a lot of confidence that all of your requirements have been captured.

Sign off on the requirements documents is really an important step for your vendor because they are saying, “here is what I am promising you I am going to deliver.” It is an important step for you as well, because you have the comfort of knowing they have captured my requirements. We can hold them to delivering on these requirements. Once you have a good set of requirements, you will move into the design stage and be actively involved here as well.

You will be designing the screens and the interfaces for your system. This is what it comes down to. How will your users interact with the system? You want to have a lot of say about what goes on in the design, because your users will be living with the system potentially for many years afterwards.

Equally important in Project Management Agenda is to agree on what won't be included in the system. What can be left for a later phase or what is something that you simply won't be addressing.