Campus Financial Systems for the Future

III: Structuring and Managing the Project

Employing Good Management Strategies

Whatever approach is taken in identifying requirements and establishing business needs, there are a number of good project management strategies that are especially critical in a campus financial systems project and that need to be employed throughout the life of the project.

Teamwork/team-building strategies

As pointed out in earlier chapters, creating and using teams of people to accomplish the institution's goals is a critical success factor for any systems project. The effective use of teams requires a set of skills on the part of the project manager/team leader, as well as each member of the team. The project manager, or leader of any of the individual additional teams, will be called upon to facilitate discussions and help the group move toward consensus; to establish clear goals for the group, and provide a role for each member that takes maximum advantage of his or her skills in the team's area of responsibility; to provide structure for team meetings, including an agenda for the meeting and clear starting and ending times; to set a tone for the discussion that allows participation from all members of the group; and to summarize the work of the group in order to provide information to other teams as well as to the larger campus community.

Each individual team member must bring a willingness to participate in a group setting, and to respect and participate with the other members of the group; an ability to represent his or her particular area of expertise, while also keeping the steering committee's larger institutional vision in mind; an endorsement from his or her supervisor of the importance of the team's work, so that appropriate amounts of time and energy can be devoted to the group by all team members; and a level of knowledge and expertise about the project at hand, or the willingness to become better informed by pursuing additional information as necessary.

Understanding how to work on a team is of such importance that it is worth considering providing the opportunity for team members to do formal team training. At the University of Idaho, for example, information systems staff learned team skills by completing two twelve-week team-training courses through distance education from the National Technological University. The skills they developed helped them when they later used teams to implement several modules of an integrated information systems package. At the University of Michigan, the information technology organization has identified a staff function called Professional Development Managers; these individuals work with technology staff on an ongoing basis to help them develop teamwork and communication skills.

Communication strategies

Involving institutional players in the teamwork effort means being sure that good information, and complete information, is being shared often and well with all interested parties at the institution. Ensuring that all constituencies hear about the project, in ways that are tailored to their involvement with the outcome, is a critical success factor. The project team must understand the difference between information sharing with all parts of the institution and project management reporting for those who have a direct investment in the outcome and/or are involved in moving the project forward toward its goals. In particular, the project management team (or a subset of the team focused on communications) is responsible for ensuring appropriate levels of communication among the various teams who are involved in the project, so that business process teams, the technology evaluation team, and the steering committee are all connected to and informed about each other's work.

Unfortunately, part of any communication strategy must include dealing with complaints. They will happen, so having a thoughtful approach in place will solve problems more quickly when they arise. At Wayne County Community College, a financial systems implementation employed a "committee on gripes" to provide a special mechanism for complaints to keep these kinds of issues from taking up valuable project team meeting time. Many complaints can simply be forestalled by clear communication about the goals and timetable of the project from the start, so that at least confusion or lack of understanding are not significant factors. However, there will be some areas, offices, and individuals for whom the project does not have material advantages, and who will have criticisms of the methodology of management, the approaches, and so forth. It is important to take these risks into account at the start, and anticipate complaints so that reasonable responses can be made, especially as the stress of implementation approaches.

Strategies for resolving differences

As business processes and the underlying technology tools that support them become more decentralized, just as the "owners" and stakeholders of a financial system are spread throughout the institution, so too are the players who can effectively derail an implementation project.

Obstacles to the success of the project can arise both from the personal perspectives of the individuals involved and from their institutional responsibilities. For example, differences of perspective over security of data versus easy access to information, or decentralized processing of data versus centralized responsibility for the quality of that data, are perfectly reasonable given the variety of perspectives from which team members will be drawn.

Such fundamental differences can constitute a project land mine if the project team fails to ensure, first, that such differences are seen as differences only, not judgments of right and wrong, and, second, that there is a project framework in place that includes a mechanism for the resolution of such differences. This can be handled by the project management team itself, or referred to the steering committee or some other authorized body, but the mechanism must be easily accessible so that the resolution of these issues does not slow down the overall progress of the project.

Change management strategies

The project management team, and the project manager individually, will both be called upon by the force and scope of this project to represent and articulate the need for profound changes for the institution, by the very nature of replacing financial systems. Leading this effort will require a level of institutional credibility and respect for the individuals involved, constant communication with the stakeholders throughout the institution, and willingness to explore a variety of solutions in order to be able to clearly articulate the appropriateness of the final recommended solution.

In addition, all members of the project teams will need to be able to withstand pressures to slow down or derail the change process, as well as deal with attempts to change the project scope for political reasons or in reaction to a perceived crisis. Clearly the project manager and team members will need the support of the steering committee as they continue to pursue this high institutional priority.

Progress management strategies

To ensure that the project moves toward successful completion, the project manager will need to employ a variety of progress measures. These will include setting key milestones for the project (such as completion of the business process reviews or drafting of the request for information document), and then working with the specific teams to set more detailed task lists and deadlines for each area (for example, each business process review will have a set of tasks that must be completed to prepare the needs recommendations).

As outlined in the project plan, these milestones should be tied, whenever possible, to necessary resources, so that the project management can measure whether the resources devoted are producing the products required. The more such milestones with affiliated resources can be established at the outset, the easier it will be to diagnose if the project is not going to be able to meet its larger end goals, and to take corrective action well in advance of reaching such a crisis.

In addition, the project manager should be responsible for managing the project resources themselves, administering the staff and equipment budget, monitoring the expenditures of outside consultants, and working with the individual teams to ensure that their activities are funded and managed appropriately.

Finally, the project manager may wish to use outside parties to review the project's progress. In this case, the outside group or groups involved -- probably from the institution's outside audit firm or technology consulting firm -- should review the initial project plan to identify any problems as quickly as possible, as well as to help prepare interim reviews as the project moves forward. Such reviews may be formal visits to campus to meet with project teams, or may be done on a more informal basis by reviewing project notes and reports and talking to individual team members as necessary.

Strategies for managing expectations

A major critical success factor in managing the project is the effective management of expectations. This includes not only setting the expectations of those involved in the project to keep the project planning realistic and within achievable scope, but also setting the expectations of the broader campus community about the scope of the project and its resulting impact on the way the institution does business.

In defining the project scope at realistic levels, there will be constant pressures to expand the boundaries of the project, as each of the institutional areas with which the financial systems interact is analyzed and considered. While each of these expansion decisions will be perfectly defensible in its own right, the breadth of the project cannot be allowed to exceed a realistic scope for an institution that has many other competing claims on its energies. It will fall to the project manager to constantly exercise restraint in refining the project goals to keep them both complete and realistic.

In setting expectations, the whole institution will be affected to some extent; all of the members of the teams defined above will have at least some portion of their time consumed by this new endeavor, so some component of their existing work will either fall to other individuals, or not be performed as the institution has been expecting in the past. Ensuring that the campus community understands the longer-term advantages of the project and therefore can revise its near-term expectations will avoid burnout on the part of the team members, as well as disappointment on the part of the campus community about the inconveniences presented to their lives and work.

By raising the consciousness of players as to what is possible and desirable, and clarifying the difference between a wish list for "what technology could do" and a needs assessment for "what we are looking for in this implementation," the project management team can ensure that the particular project outcomes will be understood to match institutional requirements.

When all functionality cannot be met by the initial system implementation, expanding expectations or needs can be noted for possible attention in a subsequent, post-implementation phase. At some point, it may be possible to "grow" the new system to provide additional functionality; if so, keeping a record of needs that could not be met in the initial implementation will provide a foundation upon which to build later. A note of caution: This should not be confused with an invitation to freely add new functionality to the selected system as it is implemented, but to note the potential for improvement when the opportunities arise at a later date.

One potential land mine for a project that has heavily engaged users of business processes to reevaluate those processes -- and define their needs based on making major changes to those processes -- is the potential that a product cannot be found in the marketplace that will provide the required functionality, yet the institution may not have the resources to develop the systems in-house. The project management team must take extra care in clearly communicating this possibility to business process teams, and emphasize the importance of their role in identifying "must have" functionality and prioritizing requirements so that the most critical functionality can be met with the initial implementation.

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