Reflecting on learnings

Oftentimes I pick a weekend to think about the events that have dominated my professional life and try to determine what I have learned from these experiences that I can then rely on for my ongoing challenges.

Reflecting on my last 25 years of Tech consulting and project experience, I reflected on some of the major projects I either sold, delivered, or managed and decided to share my thinking with my colleagues and followers for a wider discussion.

Some of these consulting engagements and projects failed, but many were very successful. Some of the findings on the failed engagement helped me tremendously in planning for the successful ones which I am very proud of today. A failed project is always an opportunity to ensure the success of the next one. A successful strategy would be to run a post deployment review with both the sales and technical teams to extract the learnings for your next project.

Some of the findings below are open for debate in terms of their order of importance but nevertheless, they are all critical. What are some of the important drivers for success?

• Executive sponsorship and carefully planned communication strategy

This is arguably the most important element of success in any project. You can have the budgets, the team, and a perfect solution architecture, but without the right sponsor in the executive team onboard your project may be doomed to fail. This process should be a pre-contract signature activity for the team. You should try to identify this person very early on even before the contract is signed, as they will help you steer the ship during a storm and guide you to safety. The sponsor will further drive your relationship with the rest of the C-suite and bring more business to you in the future.

I remember on one of my very critical ERP projects we had several obstacles to clear with the staff along with 3rd parties’ vendors who were supporting the client with many services. We needed to be able to work with their teams to scope the impacts of all the changes we were introducing in the account to be able to gauge the impacts and plan for them properly.

Without the involvement of the executive sponsor in the account whom I had a very strong relationship with, the project would have been dead on arrival. He quickly engaged all vendors and cleared the way for a discussion under his umbrella that allowed us to complete the task successfully. ?

The second element of this pillar is having the right communication strategy. You should define it early on, even before the project kicks off. A sound strategy and communication mechanisms will allow you to keep a tight control on the project, which is important because if control is lost, success can be jeopardized. Some important items to consider for this are:

Who to include/exclude?

Identifying this group should be an exercise conducted with the executive sponsor. Your job should be to highlight the importance of the members of each group and how they can help you steer the project in the right direction when obstacles arise - and they most definitely will for any project. Sometimes you will need a success catalyst in one of the teams to be able to neutralize negativity or keep a check on perceptions.

o??You should have a good argument prepared for exclusions. Your customer may doubt your intentions for this based on your argument supporting the exclusion. Be prepared for objections and prepare for them ahead of time. There should be careful considerations taken in support of your argument(s).

o??What are you communicating and to whom?

It is wise to build a communication list for what needs to be communicated and what should be excluded. A successful strategy would be to create 2 or 3 communication groups for the project. One group representing the executive team and stakeholders; this crowd will receive a summary on a bi-weekly or monthly basis with obstacles and success drivers during the project’s lifespan. Another group would be the project team and 3rd party vendors to keep everyone informed on progress and obstacles and what needs to happen to clear them. A 3rd group would be the users and company staff. Content will vary for each group, but the ultimate objective is to use these instruments to drive the project to the finish line.

• Do you understand your customer’s budgets/financials?

Understanding your customer’s budget is critical to building the right solution and statement of work. Over or underestimating a project’s budget(s) can be a negative contributor to your relationship with your customer. Furthermore, analyzing the budget status is also important. You should always try to find out if the project is a confirmed line item or if it was added in the middle of the fiscal year in response to a competitive or market change situation.

The process of understanding the budget should start at the 40% stage of your opportunity, and it is critical to maintain it as an open discussion throughout the various opportunity management stages. Some sales professionals may find this an uneasy discussion, but a successful methodology for this process is to work early on with your customer to establish a Trusted Advisor (TA) status before the financial discussion is initiated. Your customer will be more open to sharing valuable details on their budgets if that status is achieved early on.

Another tactic to consider is working with influencers in the account with whom you have already established a TA relationship, as this can be your relationship entry point for a TA status with the project’s executive stakeholders. Influencers are key players in any account in terms of intelligence and understanding the customer’s landscape.

It is of critical importance to understand how the project is being funded.

o??Is it a confirmed budget line item in the fiscal year’s commitment? A confirmed budget line item is always considered safe.

o??Is the project funded as a market response to a competitor or a change situation? This can be tricky as one of the important things to keep an eye on is how the budget was built for the project. Changes driven by CXOs in response to a market driver or competitor can be done very quickly and thus resulting in hasty decisions on cost structures. Reviewing it carefully in this scenario can be very important before a decision is made to engage in the project. ?

• Did you involve the right stakeholders in your business analysis phase?

Oftentimes the selected stakeholders for the project are not the right personnel. Why is this important, you ask? Well, the stakeholders in any project should be the ones leading business divisions that are directly impacted by the proposed solution. Or, they have vested interests in seeing the project succeed. These can either be your strongest influencers or your toughest objectors.

A stakeholder typically holds valuable line of business intelligence on a project which is crucial to your analysis and your review of proposed or existing business processes. One example that comes to mind here is a project I led at a major hospital in Saudi. The head of the supply chain and logistics division was the project owner, and he was modeling his warehousing and supply chain business processes on one of the largest hospitals in the US. He also reported directly to the chairman, and he was a critical piece of the puzzle for the grander purpose of their hospital modernization endeavors.

His business team was fairly inexperienced when it came to structuring new business processes that were in line with the hospital’s aspirations for their new modernization endeavors. The best way forward here was to follow best practices which were modelled against successful hospitals in the US. We also consulted with several hospitals to compare their existing processes against what we were proposing for their warehousing and supply chain operations. ?

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• Did you add enough solution architecture time into the project’s estimate?

Solution architecture can sometimes be tricky. A solution architect takes many things into consideration. What new technologies are coming out? Is the new proposed solution supportable in the short and long term? Should it be hosted on the cloud or on premise? These are only some of the questions necessary to ask when building a successful solution architecture.

All these considerations can impact the supportability of the product and its lifecycle along with its costs. One of the important aspects of solution architecture is understanding the business’s objectives and its alignment with their enterprise strategy and in many scenarios, it is highly recommended that two sets of eyes are engaged in analyzing and providing feedback.

• How strong in your technical/project leadership?

Technical leadership on any project can be crucial. A technical leader should not only understand his team’s capabilities but also have a strong technological background to be able to address challenges within their team. A technical leader should also be someone with a very close relationship with the project manager to be able to address gaps in the team.

Oftentimes the team working on a solution may have strong capabilities but lack the capability to work as a team using agile development methodologies. The technical leader should be someone who has the capability to wear multiple hats and be able to fill the gap when a situation arises where a team member is not able to deliver. This means they must have a strong understanding of their capabilities and how to address gaps that may arise during development.

I once had a project being delivered to a customer where one of the team members had very little knowledge of one of the technologies that were proposed by the solution architecture and the team lead was skilled enough to be able to make a quick judgement to outsource this team member’s position and augment the team, as the hiring process was going to last longer than the development phase of the solution, and finding that specific talent through head hunting was going to be very challenging.

The solution was to work with a 3rd party vendor to be able to outsource very quickly and keep the project on track, and that’s exactly what we did. Had it not been for the experience of the team lead to spot this, we would have missed 2 milestones and that would have been a detriment to the customer’s delivery date expectations and go-live dates.

• Did you properly plan your UAT?

Last but not least is User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This component is an important aspect of validating with the customer that the solution meets their requirements as defined in the statement of work. Selecting the right team to work on this can be vital to meeting the Go Live date.

Setting the right schedule, how features are being tested, and how bugs are being reported can be crucial to success. Oftentimes agreement between this team and the development team can be difficult and thus the involvement of the project manager in this process is very important to be able to address the testing and development process.

Delivering technology solutions can sometimes be complex but with the right team, SOW, and a good project manager, many of the project challenges can be addressed in a timely manner. As long as the team is working in harmony with their project manager and good risk management procedures are structured in place to address rising challenges, any solution can be delivered with customer satisfaction. And this is a great recipe for repeat business!