Project Execution Solutions: Technology and Governance
The critical elements of successful project execution are People, Process, Technology, and Governance. Success is consistently delivered when all of these dimensions are well defined, fully implemented, well-managed, and fully adopted. You must both adopt them individually and integrate them together to enable each other for success.
This post will cover half of these, Technology and Governance.
Technology
In our Information Age, we often equate efficiency and efficacy with Technology. It starts with picking the right technology for your organization. Click here to read an entire post on “Which Project Management Software Is Best for Your Organization.”
Once you select the technology, you need to implement it. This is the aspect that every organization knows to place an emphasis on. What many overlook is adopting it within the organization, integrating it with the People and Process.
Your organization needs to synchronize the business and functional requirements for a technology with the time-phased Maturity Model, as seen below:
Governance
Governance has two prongs of attacks:
- Successful execution of the projects themselves, and
- Compliance to the overall process for how projects should be executed and delivered. In other words, this the formal process of Change Management, or as we described in the Strategy section, how you “change the way you change.”
There needs to be a well-defined set of KPIs for ensuring alignment of results of execution against the business cases that were defined at the portfolio level. You might meet the specs, but the results still needs to stand up to the business case—for example, if the market changes. There needs to be a on ongoing execution governance body, such as a steering committee, ensuring that you continually update the project based on the current environment, updating risk assessments, and so forth.
A well-articulated governance process does not automatically do the governing. The process of effectively governing a project during execution is also not a native competency for steering committees. The governance process and the governing body must harmonize for proper governance to take place.
To read our first post on the project execution solutions, click here.
Here is our series on the project execution challenges.
You may also access our comprehensive white paper on addressing the challenges of project and portfolio management with an enterprise Project Management Office here.