Organizations spend quite a fortune on processes and technology to improve project success rates. However it’s been observed that most projects fail at their launch, because the original requirement criteria were not met. Some project failures lead to delays in product launches. There are some aspects that need to be considered for products and services to get consistently delivered on time, on budget and with the highest quality
Roles and Responsibilities/Processes-
Roles and Responsibilities: There should always be a delivery responsibility role assigned in an organization to deliver products in a smoother way. This needs to cover new organizational structure for better communication within the delivery teams.
Process: The creation of a project management methodology will allow for consistency in delivery. There is an added benefit that the new employees on board who rapidly move up the learning curve thereby provide immediate value.
Having a set of standards and a consistent project management methodology provides the platform to document and follow processes. It's difficult to document when things are moving quickly and always changing, but taking the time to do so will provide benefits such as improved control, identification of risks and an ability to mitigate risk before it turns into a true problem.
Evaluation of new project-
Organizations need to formalize a process for evaluating which new projects should be approved. The process must define the decision-making criteria that will be used during the evaluation, and also take into consideration the organization capacity and capabilities to successfully deliver the projects.
Resources allocation-
Without resources—or more importantly, without the right resources—project success is impossible. Resources need to be identified or hired on the basis of unique skill sets or their industry experience. So right resources should be hired and right people should be allocated as per the project requirement.
Goals and Objectives-
It is very important that all the goals and objectives are clearly defined for every project. It is also quite important that all the listed goals tie together well. First goal of the individual should be success of the organization, and organization success depends on project success and further ahead, project success is always dependent on individuals. All of these factors are interrelated. So individuals should understand the scope of the project to make organization successful.
Project Control-
One of the true single points of failure to the success of any project is the lack of project control, specifically around scope and budget. Many times in a project, we often hear things such as “My request is easy" or "This is just a small change." These things are brought up without considering both, the scope and the budget. To make a project successful, we should understand that any change in the scope, timeline or budget assigned for a project will only produce failure, especially so, if these variables aren't subsequently adjusted to accommodate the change. In addition, project managers need to define a strong change control process. This will allow you to deliver your product and services on time and on budget.
Monitoring-
There needs to be transparency and accountability of the plan, goals, budget and scope, in order to achieve confidence that the information is accurate and actionable.
Past experience as reference-
Even in the most successful projects there is always something that could have been done better. Being able to capture those lessons will enable an organization improve its project delivery capability and deliver more complex and challenging projects in less time and in lesser cost.
Any learning from the past experiences, need to be documented properly. This documentation is vital as this is the only way one can learn from the past as these records can be of great reference and the chances of repeating mistakes would subsequently be very low.
Improvement-
There is always a chance of improvement if we firstly:
Invest in people: Improve the skill sets of your people with training and giving them challenging project assignments.
Make continuous improvement: Formalizing a process to capture the lessons learnt for each project proves to be a successful method. That process should also essentially outline how recommendations for change are prioritized, approved and implemented. As with other items, one can measure the progress at each step and each approved recommendation to determine if its goals were met. Think on project technology, as to how technology can help increase the efficiency and quality of your project delivery.
If we follow the above processes, it will improve your ability to get your products and services in market on time and on budget. But if we implement this, our organization will gain a greater competitive edge, increase quality, capability, and most importantly, improve client satisfaction. And for organization the most important factor would always be to improve grow client satisfaction.
