01.12.10
Are We There Yet?
[Cartoon]
Running an IT project is a little like being a distance swimmer. You start with a bang, pace yourself, and end with a sprint to the finish. You also cannot stop or you will go under and may never recover.
We have all heard the story of the swimmer crossing the English Channel. After getting half way across, the swimmer was too tired to finish. So, the swimmer turned and swam back. This makes the swimmer look pretty stupid since half is half. Why not just finish?
The big question is how did the swimmer know that the halfway mark had been reached? Was there a buoy? Did the swimmer carry a GPS device? There could not have been a boat nearby tracking the swimmer’s progress. If there had been a boat, the swimmer would have probably just gone aboard.
The swimmer must have just done some dead reckoning. The distance in both directions must have looked about the same. Possibly there were structures on land that could be easily lined up to determine the mid location.
So what can a Project Manager do? How can they tell where they are in a project? How do they know when they are halfway? Are there GPS devices, buoys, visual alignment, or just plain dead reckoning?
Although many would disagree, it is very difficult for a Project Manager to know where they stand on a project. No good Project Manager would ever suggest they were not sure of their status. Yet, the Project Manager has limited history on which to base estimates and determine the project’s status.
There has been an enormous amount of intelligent effort to define approaches to help in making project estimates. Since the best estimates are made when there are fewer unknowns, the approaches attempt to manage the unknowns.
Projects can be broken down into smaller more understandable activities. The dependencies of the activities can be determined and schedules developed. The estimates for each activity can be made by weighting multiple estimates as in PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) or historical data can be used based on quantitative approaches like Function Point analysis.
The challenge is to understand what the components are and to collect the history of effort on past changes. Here is where an Enterprise Architecture pays off. The architecture provides standardization for categorizing all components. Having these categories defined then offers the tags for storing historical information.
The consistency that an Enterprise Architect can bring by helping an organization define its Enterprise Architecture will help Project Managers with their project estimates. This help comes when the project is first estimated. This help also comes when there are proposed scope changes that must be evaluated.
The Project Manager will know when their project is halfway. The Project Manager will be able to answer the question, “Are we there yet?” and give a GPS type of ETA.
Closing the Business / IT gap
