Tag: Strategic & Business Management

Know Your Project’s Setting for Realistic Planning

Written by George Pitagorsky on November 1, 2022. Posted in Articles.

In any project, your mindset and setting influence your experience. To plan realistically you must know the mindset of the players and the setting, the project’s environment. This article focuses on the setting, and what you can do you identify and consider environmental factors in planning.

Previous articles have addressed environmental factors from different perspectives[1]. Here we use PESTLE Analysis to identify environmental factors to better enable risk management and performance.

Identify the Factors

To be realistic, a plan must consider the project’s environment. For example without knowing the technology to be used and the nature of the relationships among major stakeholders, planners may be overly optimistic or pessimistic because they make unfounded assumptions; overlooking a legal requirement can have far reaching effects.

Performance can be improved in two ways, 1) by changing environmental conditions (if possible and practical) and 2) by accepting what cannot be changed and baking the impact into the plan. Both ways require that the conditions are identified. That is where environmental analysis comes in.

PESTLE Analysis is one of many models that help you to understand your project environment. Other models, for example SWOT Analysis, can be used instead of or with PESTLE analysis.

PESTLE Analysis assesses the Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors that affect project performance. The model is usually applied on the organizational level for strategic planning. Here the focus is closer to the project itself.

Tacit vs. Explicit

Often, there is a tacit understanding about environmental factors. With tacit understanding, there is the risk that stakeholders do not share a common perspective of the situation. Some may be unaware of some factors; others may have different views and values. Changes may have been made or are planned that make experience less useful as an anchor for predicting the future.

Explicitly identifying and analyzing the factors helps to make sure they are meaningfully addressed. This means spending time and effort on the analysis, deciding which factors are actionable, and planning accordingly.

Resistance

As sensible as explicitly assessing environmental factors seems, there is resistance to it. Possible causes are, the team and its leadership may not recognize the benefits, they may believe that everyone knows how things are, and they may take the attitude that “we can’t do anything about the environment, so why bother talking about it.” Leadership must be willing to confront the realities of their environment, including its flaws.

If powerful stakeholders are eager to have realistic plans, then resistance is overcome by recognizing that one of the primary reasons for chronic late and over budget projects is not taking the project environment into account. For example, a plan will be unrealistic if it is based on the assumption that a decision will be made in a month when it always takes three because there are multiple levels of decision makers, many of whom are very busy with other priorities.

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The Factors

The environmental factors in a PASTLE analysis are described below. The purpose of the model is to raise questions that enable project managers, and planners to identify any hidden obstacles and to consider as many factors as possible. How will these issues effect the project? Do they effect multiple projects? What can be done about them to make plans more realistic and to streamline the process?

P – Political:

Politics is the process of making group decisions. On a macro level, there are governmental influences in the form of regulations, taxation, international and other issues. Internal politics also have an impact on the project. Is project governance effective? Is there a political issue about the way the PMO, project managers, and functional managers perceive roles and authority? Do differences in political beliefs and allegiances cause conflict among stakeholders? Is the project goal a political issue among organizational leadership? What “old grudges” and beliefs get in the way of effective collaboration?

Political issues along with the social factors are among the most difficult to address. There is a tendency to make believe they don’t exist. There may be “hot” buttons and fear of poking a hornet’s nest.

E – Economic

Economic factors are both internal and external. The internal ones include the perceived cost and value of the project outcome, volatility in resource costs, budget adequacy, the project budget as a proportion of the organization’s budget. How flexible is the budget? Is there a clear expectation of financial gain? External economic factors include interest rates, volatility in the cost of resources. credit availability, and market behavior.

S – Social

Social factors relate to stakeholder cultural norms, values, and demographics. For example, if the team includes members from different generations or cultural groups, is there potential conflict? What is the expectation and tolerance for the “Storming” stage of team development? What is the organization’s culture? Are there multiple organizations involved? Are their cultures compatible? Explicitly the way to facilitate communication, manage conflict, and make decisions can avoid unnecessary stress and conflict.

Technology

On the project level technology has two dimensions: the technology used to manage the project and the technology that is part of the project deliverable. Is the technology stable? Is the technology new to users and providers? What learning curves are involved? Is there adequate support? For project management is there a platform of PM software and related productivity tools? Is the platform adding value, is it well managed and supported? How is the data managed and used? What options do you have and how will each impact performance, cost, and risk? How aligned with other projects is the technology?

Legal

What are the contracts, rules and regulations that effect the project? How are contracts managed? Are project staff and management subject to legal liabilities? Are there audit requirements? Are there ethical issues? Common legal issues are, copyright, patents, and intellectual property, fraud, non-disclosure, consumer protection, environmental protection, data security, health and safety, discrimination and abuse.

Environmental

From a project manager’s perspective project performance is effected by the project environment, the environment into which the product will go, and the broader environment with its weather, climate, geographical, factors. Project and product environmental factors overlap with the other PESTLE categories.

Moving Forward

Using an analytical model to assess environmental factors enhances risk management and leads to better plans and improved performance. Is your approach to identifying the factors that influence your project as good as it could be? How can it be even better?

[1] Consider the Project Environment, https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/consider-the-project-environment/ by George Pitagorsky and Understanding Enterprise Environmental Factors, https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/understanding-enterprise-environmental-factors/ by Mark Romanelli

Software Tools or not Software Tools? That is the question. The way to achieve Enterprise Agility

Written by Giovanny Guillen on October 25, 2022. Posted in Articles.

The way to achieve Enterprise Agility

How many times we have heard about agile, Jira, Kanban, etc., and everything related to agile philosophy? Today we can find a lot of software tools to manage projects or processes using agile methods. However, can enterprises implement agile through implementing a software tool?

What is Agile?

Agile is a philosophy, a way to act, to collaborate in an organization to achieve a goal, to complete activities and tasks, in a process to ensure and encourage participation, leadership, and collaboration among every team.

Enterprise Agile Transformation

Business Agility is an ability for enterprises to react to changes using an evolved system in the way they work. From this system, we can extract its essence and adapt it to any professional field.

The Process

Figure 1. Enterprise Agile Transformation Framework

Before implementing software to manage agile projects or processes, we need to make a change in our processes, our organizational and leadership and people mindset, and our belief, to create an agile environment in processes and people. We must begin to change our minds and our organization. This is the way to implement agile in any organization. How?

Change the mindset. Today, project team members, and employees, are one of the main parts of the business. Without them, an enterprise can’t work and achieve strategic goals. As leaders, we should recognize their value and encourage their collaboration and participation in every process. In this context, leaders, from executives to supervision levels, should impulse a leadership model based on:
1. Motivation
2. Empowerment
3. Share responsibilities with the team

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Focus attention on the main wealth generators of your organization. It is important to transform their mindset and their way of facing changes with agility. If moving the boat (an entire company) is complex, then in parallel a BOAT is built that moves faster. A flexible and small structure. A self-sufficient team, empowered and specialized in facing market changes.

Change your processes. It is important to review your processes to create lean ones that include support to manage changes. Reduce bureaucracy through employee empowerment, giving them enough authority to make decisions and eliminating unnecessary steps.
Change your organization. We must break with the idea of working by departments – by silos. Unite the diversity of professionals in an area, a flatter structure, or a HUB. Common mental, digital, and physical spaces favor agility.
Customer Centric and focused on clients’ needs. Nowadays, clients change their needs and preferences. It is imperative to know their expectations, and how you can address those to manage their preferences and make changes. Listen to customer needs. Orient the attention of your entire crew towards a customer-centric objective. The goal of agile teams is to meet customer demands. And to hear it, it is important to focus attention on a 360º view: sales data, navigation data, and direct customer data.
Frameworks. To face changing environments, it is important to organize teams with new ways of working. For this, Agile business methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Design Thinking, OKRs, and Management 3.0 can be implemented. For example, you can work with SCRUM frameworks used within teams that handle high-uncertainty and complex projects. This will allow you to set new work rules, such as working in short periods called sprints, carrying out daily follow-up or daily meetings, working with the initial features that offer value to customers and the organization such as MPVs; and organizing teams in another way: product owner, scrum master and development teams.
MVP Culture. The minimum viable product must be above complete products. An MVP culture should be established to deliver constant value to the customer. Instead of developing an entire product for years and waiting until it is complete, the MVP allows us to launch the minimum value of this product to the market, check how it is received by the customer, and continue to evolve with new developments in the right direction.

Software tools

After you have begun changes in your mindset leadership and employees, your organization, and your processes, you can implement software tools that can help you to measure and improve your processes, fix issues, and achieve Enterprise Agility. By means of software tools, your enterprise can start a transformational agile way, face changes, adapt processes through automation, and respond fast and efficiently to customer changes by analyzing their behavior.

Enterprise Agile Transformation Benefits

Focus on people. Collaborative and multidisciplinary work makes talent prevail over processes and organizational charts.
Empowerment and motivation. Collaborative work, fluid communication, and the equal participation of all team members generate autonomy, transparency, and accountability in all its members, which empowers and motivates employees
Risk Minimization. The continuous review model allows adaptation to change in a faster and more efficient way, finding solutions during the process that minimize the risks of failure
Response Speed. Agile transformation provides a flexible structure that allows the delivery of projects/services versions within short deadlines.
Improved results. The closeness with the client allows having a more excellent knowledge of it providing a differential added value and generating savings in costs.

Best of PMTimes: 5 Tactics To Successfully Handle Multiple Projects Simultaneously

Written by Jimmy Rodela on September 21, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Managing multiple projects at the same time can be an absolute n-i-g-h-t-m-a-r-e.

You need to keep track of your projects’ moving parts, ensure you’re using the right processes and strategies, stay within deadline, keep your employees motivated, and be mindful of your expenses.
Data even shows that on average, 88% of remote workers experience miscommunications and inconsistent leadership with team members, highlighting the importance of proper program and project management.

Sadly, we just scratched the surface. So much more goes into project management than the things we pointed out.

The good news is, there are tips and tricks to help you manage multiple projects simultaneously.

Continue reading to learn five proven tactics that will help you run your projects efficiently.

1. Stay On Top Of Your Work Schedules

Regardless of how carefully you planned your projects, everything can easily go off track if you don’t establish a schedule that includes your team’s work for the month, quarter, or year.

For instance, without a clear schedule, team members might fail to prioritize tasks, overlook critical jobs, and miss deadlines, which can seriously hinder your project’s completion and even impact the result’s quality.

Use reliable work scheduling software to ensure every project team member is on the same page, keep your workflows moving seamlessly, and keep everything on track.

For instance, Deputy lets you build work schedules in minutes by using its easy-to-use interface to schedule the right team members at the right time across various locations and roles.

You can easily create shifts, assign them to staff members, drag and drop to change them, copy schedules, modify them accordingly, and export them to a CSV file, spreadsheet, or print them.

You can also send the schedule directly to your team through mobile or desktop. If you change the schedule, the assigned person gets a notification, and they can accept the confirmation request.

A robust scheduling tool helps ensure your lines don’t get crossed, work gets done, and your project deadlines are met.

This helps keep your multiple projects on track and your team members more productive. Your project schedules will also be maximized for optimum efficiency, avoiding potential delays.

2. Prioritize Tasks

With so much on your plate, it can be tempting to tackle the easiest projects first, but you must resist, or you could kill your team’s productivity and efficiency.

Prioritize based on tasks that will have the most significant impact on your project and program goals. This helps you manage several priorities while working on multiple projects effectively.

Doing so allows your team to work strategically on both micro (i.e., organizing daily to-dos based on importance) and macro (i.e., moving low-impact projects to the following quarter) levels.

Let’s say your team is working on four product launches simultaneously with the overarching goal of increasing customer revenue.

While the four projects require about the same amount of time, effort, and resources to complete and roll out, assess which one has the potential to generate a bigger impact on your new customer revenue than the other three.

Prioritize the project (or projects) that have the most significant contribution to achieving your goals.

This helps you manage your resources and allocate your time better while ensuring your efforts align with your project goals and deliver your desired results.

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3. Establish Goals And Plans

Without establishing a standard project planning process or workflow, you’ll likely manage each of your projects differently.

This can lead to issues down the line, such as inconsistencies in your deliverables and precious time wasted on setting up new processes for each project.

That is why you need to have a solid plan, establish standard processes, and identify responsibilities from the get-go.

Outline everything from your goals, each step, and task necessary for project completion, schedules and deadlines, and the persons and teams responsible for specific jobs at the project level.

At the program level, develop plans, processes, and clarify responsibilities. Establish team-level goals and communicate the projects crucial to achieving those objectives.

You can start outlining your goals using a Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, and Timely (SMART) approach and this sample goal-setting template.

You can use other templates as references and build on those to develop your project and program objectives.

Optimize your project management processes by setting team-wide standards. For instance, you can require project team leads to submit a brief before outlining a project plan for big projects.

You can also create templates for projects your team often handles to ensure consistency across projects and save time and effort.

Clear goals, plans, and responsibilities help your teams avoid inconsistencies in processes and deliverables.

4. Conduct Systematic Progress Updates

Tracking status and progress updates in a multi-project environment are critical to keeping stakeholders and key project players in the loop.

After all, you wouldn’t want your clients, for instance, to be breathing down your neck because you didn’t give them any status reports, making it crucial to establish a systematic updating process.

Establish smart, systematic status updates so that you can manage stakeholder expectations efficiently.

Below are a few tips for doing strategic and systematic project status updates.

Define expectations. Layout the specific steps task owners or the team members in-charge of particular tasks are expected to follow. Identify a time frame for updating relevant stakeholders, whether every three days, weekly, monthly, etc.

Include a high-level overview of key areas in the project. Add several bullet points that provide an update on the accomplishments, progress, and upcoming work for each key area of your project’s status. This ensures essential points are covered, and stakeholders get all the necessary updates they need.

Schedule accountability. Have third-parties, such as staff in another department, the project sponsor, or other stakeholders, conduct reviews to ensure the resource person or task owner follows protocol and the specified updating time frame to a tee.

Implement a systematic status updating process to keep your project team motivated, ensure they understand the project plan, why it’s crucial to stay up to date, and clearly see the multiple demands your team must meet.

5. Delegate And Empower Team Members

Exercise effective delegation in your resource management by adopting clarity, authority, and accountability.

For instance, empowering your graphic designer to create a landing page for a new project means making sure he/she is absolutely clear about the task by providing a work breakdown structure.

This work breakdown structure of building a landing page campaign for a new product from Kanbanize is a good example.

A work breakdown structure outlines the phases of the project process clearly.

Additionally, to ensure the project process and phases are when delegating, be sure to:

Clearly communicate the work breakdown structure
Set a project deadline
Relay specific client expectations
List down the available resources the task owner has
Describe the workload
Provide him/her the authority to make and carry out decisions

Clarity ensures your team is clear on the direction. Team members avoid any guesswork and prioritize critical tasks and projects.

A clear work breakdown structure and project scope will also empower teamwork that boosts productivity while giving members a sense of fulfillment for meeting multiple demands.
Leverage a reliable project management tool that can streamline your work breakdown structure’s workflows and processes.

Data can back up the effectiveness of using the right project management tool with 77% of high-performing projects using project management software.

What’s Next?

Handling multiple projects at the same time is inevitable in project management and any efforts you take on.

While the tips in this guide are in no way guaranteed formulas for success, these are good building blocks to help develop your strategies for effective and strategic multiple project management.

Leverage the tactics we shared to stay on top of your projects’ moving pieces, meet your deadlines, and achieve your goals.

Best of PMTimes: Managing Fear and Anger in Projects

Written by George Pitagorsky on August 31, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Published on: Mar 19, 2020

Fear, including anxiety, and anger are realities. They are normal. They appear in all situations, including projects.

There is a challenge – to not suppress or ignore these emotions AND to not to act out in emotionally driven behavior. Finding the place between suppression and acting out takes wisdom and skillful effort.

What are the causes of fear and anger? How can we minimize the causes? What are the side effects of being driven by them? How can the power of these emotions be channeled for productive use?

The answers to those questions require mindful introspection. It requires a process among the people involved to explore and resolve, or at least understand, the dynamics of people working together. Emotional and social intelligences along the willingness to forgive and work on oneself are used to avoid the lashing out, withdrawal, blaming, irrational expectations and the other side effects of reacting to emotions.

Causes: Uncertainty and Lack of Control

A predominant cause of fear in projects is lack of control. Uncertainty makes people feel that because they cannot predict the future they are at risk. For example, not knowing if one is safe blossoms into worry about negative outcomes. Thinking that one might not get one’s way creates anxiety that can transform itself into overly aggressive behavior.

Uncertainty and the lack of control it elicits leave many people feeling uneasy and helpless. Uneasiness and helplessness are experienced physically as unpleasant sensations in the belly, chest or throat. Thoughts and worries run rampant. We label the sensations and thoughts as the emotion fear. Similarly, we label the burning in our chest or gut and accompanying thoughts as anger.

Relationship Between Fear and Anger

Fear and anger are closely related to one another. They are both unpleasant and, may range from subtle anxiety and annoyance to terror and rage. Fear and anger occur during stressful or otherwise challenging events. People who evoke fear or anger are seen as hostile. Hostility elicits anger and conflict.

Anger can be a symptom of fear. Fear is perceived as weakness, anger as strength. When one is feeling fearful and weak, anger comes up to create a sense of strength. It is the fight part of the fight or flight response to threats. Fear is transformed into anger and directed at the someone (including oneself) or something perceived as the cause. Anger becomes a means for regaining control and a mask for the “weakness” of fear. For example, when in conflict, say, over a design alternative or a plan, the other party becomes the target of anger because there is uncertainty and the fear of a negative outcome.

Anger can be directed at an inanimate object, like a computer. This happens because one cannot control the device’s operation. Frustration arises. There is worry about not being able to get required work done on time.

A project manager might become angry at an administrative department or vendor responsible for a delay. The anger arises out of the lack of control over that department’s response or the vendor’s delivery. There is the fear that the delay will result in schedule slippage and the slippage will be blamed on the project manager.

It doesn’t matter that neither the department head nor the vendor has control. It doesn’t matter that they would like to avoid angering their client or that they have no control themselves. Nor does it matter that they are as fearful as the project manager. Fear and anger are emotions and emotions are not rational. When rationality is brought into play, the emotions can be managed effectively, without suppressing them.

What’s Wrong with Fear or Anger?

There is nothing wrong with anger or fear. Fear is a signal that triggers heightened awareness. Anger brings up lots of energy and clears the way for action. However, being driven by either of them is counterproductive.

Freezing in fear or avoiding conflict is unproductive.

In the moment, acting out in anger, might feel better than experiencing fear. However, reactively acting out in anger is unproductive and destructive. It does not lead to a positive outcome. Breaking the computer or yelling at the department head is not likely to put one in control or make things more certain. In fact, it is likely that acting out in anger will make things worse. Uncertainty increases because it is impossible to know how the other party will react to being the target of anger. A punched-out computer screen will not improve productivity. Not only that, it will only feel good for a moment. Then, there will be embarrassment, guilt and remorse followed by an expense to replace the computer.

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Neither Suppression nor Acting Out

Suppressing fear or anger is as unskillful as reactively acting out. The middle ground between acting out and suppression is recognition, acceptance and transformation.

Recognize

First, recognize the “afflictive” emotion (fear or anger afflicts one as unpleasant, painful sensations and often lead to behavior that afflicts others) as soon as possible.

This is an aspect of emotional intelligence – awareness of one’s own emotions early in the emotion’s life. Emotions grab hold in tenths of a second and then increase in intensity, taking over the mind with the need to somehow relieve the pain, or, if the emotion is a pleasant one, to keep it going. The earlier one recognizes the symptoms of an emotion the easier it is to moderate behavior.

Part of the recognition is to be aware that the emotion is not you. Saying “I am angry” or “I am afraid” sends the wrong message. It is more effective to say, “I am feeling anger.” That reinforces the reality that the emotion is a feeling and that, like all feelings, it is a temporary complex of thoughts and physical sensations.

Step back from the feeling, observe it and do not be identified with it.

Acceptance and Transformation

Once the emotion is recognized, it can be accepted. One accepts that there is anger instead of denying or suppressing it. Acceptance enables transformation.

Let’s be clear, acceptance a situation does not mean perpetuating it. No one can change existing conditions. However, one can, to a degree, influence the future. Acceptance creates the solid platform needed for effective behavior. It enables transformation.

Transformation takes the emotion’s energy and uses it to fuel skillful behavior. The emotion represents energy. Energy is neither good nor bad, it is just energy. How it is used is critical.

For example, let’s look at the situation of the vendor that realizes that there will be a delay in its delivery of a necessary product. The delay will have a ripple effect in the project. The vendor rep experiences anxiety. She fears that the project manager, who has a history of volatile behavior, will freak out. She recognizes her anxiety and can let it cause her to hold back on the truth or use it as a signal that she’d better be careful to craft a communication that while it gives the PM the truth earlier rather than later, also helps to avoid an outburst.

As for the project manager. If he recognizes and is motivated, he can catch his anger before he starts yelling at the vendor rep and instead channels his energy into assessing the impact and changing the plan to minimize disruption. He must recognize his anxiety and be candid with his stakeholders. If he is emotionally intelligent and empathetic, he will realize that the vendor rep is anxious.

The bottom line is that it is skillful to manage fear and anger without suppressing them. Doing so requires the cultivation of mindful awareness to enable recognition, acceptance and transformation.

The Most Important Thing: Systems Thinking

Written by George Pitagorsky on August 17, 2022. Posted in Articles.

No One Thing

What is the most important thing in project management? You could say that there is no one most important thing. In the context of our bodies, is the brain more important than the heart, or lungs? One without the others is useless. Weakness in one weakens the others as well as the whole.

The same is true in managing projects. There is no single function – creating a plan, controlling the project, communication, team building, stakeholder, and human relations, etc. – that is most important. Creating a hierarchy of importance fails to acknowledge that bringing all those factors together in dynamic balance, influenced by the needs of the project environment, is critical to success.

The PMI Standard for Project Management[1] lists functions and principles. It supports the idea that none of them is any more or less important than the others.

Systems View

The way you view the world influences your behavior, your values, and goals,
and the degree to which you can handle challenges.

But maybe there is a most important thing after all. It is to view the whole, the parts, and the relationships among them in a dynamic ‘dance’ that influences performance. In other words, the most important thing is having a systems perspective with systems thinking.

The PMBOK supports systems thinking. “There are various components, such as portfolios. programs, projects, and operations, which can be used individually and collectively to create value. Working together these components comprise a system for delivering value…”[2] We can take that further to include all the project management functions and principles and the components of the project environment as part of that system.

The systems view recognizes the realities of interdependence, cause and effect, and continuous change. That makes it a practical model for describing the nature of the world of things, relationships, and the processes that dynamically tie them together. It is a model you can use to better understand your world and to be more likely to respond rather than react.

Remembering that any view or model is a concept that can only approximate reality, use the model as a way of simplifying the incredibly complex world we live in and giving guidelines for how best to manage it. The descriptions and boundaries of systems approximate the nature of the environment.

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Intersecting Systems and Processes

The systems view sees our organizations, communities, economies, projects, operations, families, selves, bodies, as intersecting systems within an overriding system of systems. Systems change as they are influenced by changes in conditions and actions anywhere within or around them. Systems are activated and changed by processes – complexes of performers acting to make change. Processes are the way systems and parts of systems interrelate.

Having a sense of the interplay among the systems’ parts (including yourself), you can more effectively influence change and promote effective performance and quality of life. While being part of the system, assessing it analytically and objectively, as if you were outside of it, promotes objectivity and clarity.

Practical Application – Cause and Effect Analysis

Systems thinking and the idea of the interdependence of equally important factors is interesting but how does it help to optimize performance?

Since the view promotes objectivity clarity, it frees project managers from the biases and beliefs that get in the way of optimal performance. The project manager with a systems view knows that everything that happens in the project is caused by something – a condition or action in or around the project.

The systems-oriented project manager uses this concept in managing projects by cultivating two perspectives, 1) the big picture – the look and feel of the entire project within its environment and 2) the detailed view of the individual factors that influence the whole.

For example, project reporting and performance assessment is best structured to assess the project from both perspectives. The big picture view tells us if there is something that needs attention. The detailed analysis of the individual factors diagnoses the cause of the problem and enables solutions.

In one project, a high-level view gave the impression that things were not going well. There were an abnormal number of conflicts, late deliverables, and abundant changes. Assessing the situation to uncover the cause, it was found that client personnel were not dedicating quality time to the project. As a result, they did not pay sufficient attention to the definition of requirements. Knowing that there was a cause behind insufficient client dedication, instead of going into excuses and recriminations, the project manager assessed the situation further. Was it that the clients were too busy doing their operational tasks, a lack of understanding of the importance of the project, or poorly executed requirements definition?

The cause was not one single factor. The system was a complex one in which each of the factors – insufficient time, lack of priority, and requirements definition performance – contributed to the problem.

With an understanding of the “system” and a sense of how best to influence change in it, the project manager initiated a communication process that identified the issues, motivated senior management to communicate the importance of the project and the role of the clients. This enabled client availability. In addition, the requirements definition team was required to change its approach to one that made client engagement easier, less time consuming and more effective.

Stepping Back

Taking a systems view enables the clarity that not only helps in diagnosing and addressing problems. It helps to avoid them by enabling project managers to step back and accurately view their project and its place in its environment. Then they can identify all the factors that are needed to achieve objectives and the ones that are likely to get in the way. With that knowledge, planning is likely to be more effective.

[1] The Standard for Project Management and a Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), Seventh Edition

[2] PMBOK, Seventh Ed, P. 8.