Executive's Guide to Project Management: Organizational Processes and Practices for Supporting Complex Projects

How Will You Make It Happen?

For the three examples given in the following sections I want you to follow the same robust implementation process that I used in Chapter 5, A Professional Development Model. I've adapted it to this discussion. Recall that my model simply asks you to answer five questions:

• Where are you? For the purposes of this discussion you need to assess what you now have in place in the organization. That assessment should be a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis. The deliverable will be a detailed description of the current state of a business process.
• Where do you want to go? Describe the ideal or end state of the process. If there were no constraints on the process, what would it look like? Include in this description a few performance metrics and your expectations for the performance levels of the end state as compared to the current state. In other words, what is the expected incremental business value of the end state as compared to the current state?
• How will you get there? This is your plan to move from the current state to the end state. I prefer to see a phased plan. Prioritize the end state requirements and, within the limitations of dependencies, implement them in priority order.
• How will you know you got there? There needs to be performance metrics that track how well you are doing with respect to the evolution from current state to end state. Allow the possibility that learning will take place and may result in changes ...