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III: Structuring and Managing the Project

Establishing a Project Plan

Before proceeding with the actual formation of additional teams, the project management team will need to establish an initial project plan, made up of a preliminary timeline and an initial estimate of resources needed for the project. Creating such a plan will provide a sense of the resource commitment that will be necessary to accomplish the steering committee's goals in a reasonable time. The initial project plan will then need to be presented to the steering committee for its approval.

In pulling together this project plan, the team will have an opportunity to further define the project. Important questions to answer will include who really "owns" the project, and who really "funds" the project. If the functional office (through the CFO and/or CBO) assumes primary ownership, the value of technical expertise may be underestimated, but the enhanced buy-in from end users will be valuable in achieving success; if the technology office takes primary ownership, project management skills may be stronger and the technical issues will be well addressed, but there can be a cost in achieving an appropriate functional focus. In designing the funding strategies, user-funded projects can produce high acceptance of the importance of the project, joint funding can produce some conflict over priorities, and core funding can produce concerns for control of costs. All of the funding and ownership models can be successes or failures, depending on how they are articulated and managed, and how they conform to the institutional culture.

The preliminary project timeline should reflect the major phases of the project (conducting business process and technology reviews, generating a requirements document, issuing a request for information/request for proposals, selecting a solution, and implementing the system), and indicate which phases can run in concert and which are "gating" items for future steps, with rough estimates of the amount of time necessary for each. These time estimates should incorporate the assumptions about available resources included in that part of the plan.

The resources plan, which will of necessity be a rough approximation of anticipated needs, should reflect both one-time expenses (such as initial hardware and software purchases) and the ongoing costs (such as maintenance, training, and eventual equipment replacement). As mentioned earlier, training, in particular, is an area too often overlooked in the cost analysis. The plan needs to address how it will be funded initially, how long it will be necessary to offer training, and what kind of resources will be needed to support maintenance of the training function.

The costs of the project need to be broadly articulated for the entire institution, so that personnel impacts from across the institution are included, as well as other resource allocation choices such as assignment of space. If systems will be running in parallel for some period of time, the cost of supporting both systems will need to be reflected. Likewise, if part of the project strategy is to distribute work flows in a more decentralized way, any burden of that "incremental" work on the decentralized units needs to be reflected in the project's resource plan.

The resource planning should also reflect realistic assessments of the project benefits, to manage the full impact of the project. There may be benefits from the project that are seen as key but that are without direct budgetary impact (for example, increased quality of service to customers); for these benefits, appropriate indicators of success (customer survey responses, reduced number of complaints, decreased cycle times) should be established at the outset, to provide a matrix within which the team can report on progress toward goals.

The resource allocation choices in support of the project need to be made and managed within the context of a set of outcomes and an assumption about timing of milestones. If changing institutional priorities require that the resources available be reduced, the project team must define a reduced set of goals, or set a longer time frame for the achievement of the goals, or perhaps a little of each. These revisions to the context of the project must be seen as part of a cohesive whole, so that those who are relying on the outcome of the project have a continuing, realistic understanding of what will happen and when and with what degree of support.

Clearly stating this set of assumptions at the outset will help to avoid a significant project land mine, that of embarking on the project with an unrealistic assessment of the formula, "resources plus time equals outcomes." Underestimating (or not fully reflecting) the resources or the time necessary to achieve the agreed-upon outcomes will, without exception, produce a project that is unrealistic to complete, and will at best put the project owners in the position of constantly managing immense frustration and unplanned resource reallocation in order to achieve a reasonable outcome. At worst, the project will be brought to a halt over the inability of project management to meet the agreed-upon goals with the agreed-upon resources.

This risk must be managed through a variety of strategies:

In planning funding for the project, it is important to include the impact of any financing strategy on the project outcome -- if funding sources are going to be available over time, the major expense components of the project must parallel these funding streams, or temporary funding sources must be identified at the outset. Establishing the major milestones of the project, both with absolute dates and as they are tied to other earlier deadlines, will allow the community to incorporate the project work into other institutional priorities.

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