"Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided." Charles Curtis

The use of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) is commonplace throughout the lifecycle of a project. The "experts", as we generally refer to them, are typically functional experts in their respective roles that the project manager relies on for making delivery estimations and identifying potential risks to a project. Depending on the dynamics of your particular organization, such experts may come from the same functional team that will be responsible for the execution of the tasks for which the experts are providing input. On the other hand, they may be in a specialist division that deals with project set-up. In either case, there are a several risks which the project manager needs to look out for to avoid being given an impossible or very difficult delivery task.

Education, Training: to-may-to, to-mah-to, I run into this frequently. When preparing a training session I first determine whether there is a need for Education alone or Training as well. This raises the question, what is the difference? And more importantly which is the best choice for the need at hand? With ever increasing constraints on training budgets, it is critical that we get the most for the dollars we spend. Often stopping short will incur a loss instead of a return on our investment; less is not always more. A prudent choice will not only maximize return on investment but increase the chance of the overall project’s success.

A number of years ago I was privileged enough to listen to Ken Mattingly give a keynote address to a room full of project managers.  If his name doesn’t ring a bell, think of the movie Apollo 13.  Ken Mattingly was the astronaut played by Gary Sinise who had to stay behind because they were sure he would get the measles while enroute to the moon.  Mattingly is now Rear Admiral Mattingly and I was eager to hear what he had to say about project management.  When he opened the floor for questions, someone asked him if he could give his definition of project management.

In this third of four articles, Yogi Schulz describes 12 signs of impending IT project doom that are visible months before catastrophe strikes.

Project Organization

Good - I've created a reasonably clear organization chart.  Names and titles are shown.  The chart shows few empty boxes.  For example, I recognize many of the names on the org chart.

Additional Items and Next Steps

This is a continuation of Implementing Project Management at a Functional Organization. At the conclusion of the first phase of our work, a list of action items was given to the company based on the issues identified in the first stage.  If you wish to reference the first part of this article, which appeared on May 5, 2010, please click here.

We also strongly recommended to the company's management that they try to capture the "before" organizational project performance metrics with respect to time, budget, scope and stakeholder satisfaction. This data will be required in order to compare the results of the pilot project and decide whether it is beneficial for the company to move ahead to the next step in the project management framework initiative.