Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

An Even Newer Idea to Consider

The Standish Group has been tracking the reason for project failures for several years now. Its 2010 report listed the top ten reasons projects become challenged (shown in Table 18-1). Based on my research into effective complex project management I have defined the disciplines needed by a complex project manager to be:

• Project Management (PM)
• Business Analysis (BA)
• Business Process Management (BPM)
• Information Technology (IT)

Table 18-1 maps these disciplines to the ten causes of project failure. Notice how important the roles of the BA and BPM are in mitigating so many of these reasons. For the first time meaningful client involvement (expressed as user input) was at the top of the list. We've always had client involvement but until quite recently it amounted to little more than signing an arcane functional specification document under threat of project delay if the document was not promptly signed. That characterized the relationship between the techie and the client in the 1950s and even into the 1960s. The techie's toolkit has evolved and now includes Joint Applications Design (JAD), Rapid Applications Development (RAD), prototyping, requirements gathering, use case scenarios, business process diagramming, and a host of other processes that bring the client into active involvement beginning with the scoping phase of the project and continuing through to completion and implementation. The BA has been instrumental in facilitating the meaningful ...