Enterprise Project

Archive for the ‘Articles’ category

Being a Project Sponsor Means Championing a Cause

January 27th, 2011

When talking about the positions on a project team, the ones that come to mind first are project leader, project manager and team members. Time is spent designing the project, selecting the right members, establishing the critical path leading to end goals, and establishing a reporting and measurement system. Unfortunately, what many firms discover is that the project still seems to get off course even with all the elements so carefully aligned.

A project team, in the final analysis, needs what every team requires and that is a champion, or someone who keeps the team spirit alive while steering the project to ultimate success. A team also needs someone who serves as a negotiator who interfaces between the team and the rest of the organisation. The project managers and project leader are busy focusing solely on the project, but this can actually serve to isolate the team from the rest of the organisation unless there is a project sponsor governing the project as a component of a larger enterprise.

That is where a project sponsor is invaluable. The sponsor is a key position which assumes several roles as project champion, project reviewer, project communicator and project diplomat.

Project Champion

As a team champion, the project sponsor plays a critical role in keeping the endurance, interest and viability of the team alive and well. A project usually takes weeks, months, and sometimes even years, to complete. A team is made up of people, and anything which relies on human resources is never going to be static.

Building a team requires a number of people and departments working well together on an ongoing basis. But just about the time the team is functioning like a well-oiled machine, a key player will quit or personalities will clash. Maintaining a team cooperative spirit to keep the project moving forward requires a project sponsor to serve as the champion of the team by helping it reform itself as necessary to stay effective.

In other words, the project sponsor is the unifying force that keeps the team on track for the duration of the project.

Project Reviewer

The project sponsor has the responsibility for reviewing the project status from an executive viewpoint. Though the project managers and leaders are performing review functions, the project sponsor has a more organisationally broad review responsibility.

In other words, the project sponsor reviews the status of the project in relation to the organisation as a whole. The sponsor review tracks the project in terms of timelines, budget tolerances, and resource availability. This position serves as an interface between the organisation and the project itself. When a review indicates the need for more support, resources, a redirection, or any other issue which impacts the ability of the project to proceed as planned, the sponsor is responsible for taking appropriate action.

Project Communicator

The project sponsor has key communication responsibilities. The sponsor is the person who communicates project needs to the project steering committee or executive staff. The sponsor has the critical duty of insuring the organisation as a whole understands the goals of the project and provides the ongoing support the project needs for success.

Project Diplomat

It is seldom a project reaches its goals without experiencing problems along the way. The possible problems are varied, but it is the ones which require diplomacy skills for resolution that can be the most difficult. For example, interdepartmental conflict requires sensitive diplomacy which balances the need to get the project back on track with the need to force adherence to organisational policies and procedures.

The project sponsor plays the role of diplomat in a number of ways.

* Conveying project status to the ultimate organisational authority

* Resolving external issues impacting project success

* Negotiating project goal or objective changes

* Establishes team and organisation-wide communication program

The project sponsor is the person who is responsible for controlling the project in a way that benefits and outcomes are achieved. This requires the ability to manage, coordinate, and most importantly, communicate.

By: Tim Millett

About the Author:

Timothy Millett, head trainer at i perform, has extensive expertise in performance training, sales training and customer service training. Tim has helped participants from organisations such as SWIFT and UBS achieve peak levels of personal performance. For more information please visit Management Training.

Comments Off »

Posted in Articles

Tags: diplomat project

The Role of the Records Manager in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems

January 26th, 2011

ECM, or Enterprise Content Management, has traditionally been a project led by the Information Technology (IT) department. ECM refers to the technologies and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver structured and unstructured content. ECM focuses on ways to improve operational efficiencies, improve workflows, enable electronic searching, and significantly reduce the amount of paper used. Sounds like IT buzzwords to me.

ECM focuses on three challenges:

Enhance workforce effectiveness through collaboration, communication, and information sharing. Transform business process through the integration of content and the automation of related processes Optimize the infrastructure for content and compliance through the capture, the archiving, the retention, the discovery, and the retrieval processes.

IT loves ECM as it speaks to technologies, storage, archiving, organizational processes, and unstructured information. To IT, ECM represents the state-of-the-art technology for managing data in a highly efficient manner. So it would seem that it’s a no-brainer that IT should be leading ECM projects, or is it? And it would also seem that IT has a wonderful justification for ECM systems, right? Actually, the answer is “No.” IT generally cannot justify ECM programs on their own. And this is where the records manager can save the day by becoming the business sponsor of the ECM project. Just two cases prove this point. In recent litigation, two large companies suffered losses of $29 million and $600+ million due to inadequate email management systems; put more bluntly, they didn’t have a records management sponsored ECM program in place.

IT Missed the Point

ECM is more than achieving hardware and software efficiencies. The underlying focus of ECM is not on IT efficiencies but on compliance, risk, and ediscovery challenges. Now here’s the rub: While IT may have achieved some data reduction efficiencies with email and document management redundancies, they haven’t touched the critical component of compliance, risk, and ediscovery challenges.

Enter the Amended Federal Rule of Civil Procedure (FRCP).

On December 1, 2006, the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure was amended to include ESI, or electronically stored information. The new rules address the extraordinary increase in information conveyed and stored in electronic format. These amendments related to “electronically stored information” (i.e., information stored on computers or other electronic media) during the discovery phase of litigation. Prior to these amendments, whether electronically stored information should be searched or produced during discovery was a point of confusion and disagreement. The amended rules have resolved this issue.

KEY Component of the Amended Rules for Records Managers

This Federal Rule of Civil Procedure affects all companies, big, small, public, private, or not-for-profit and more importantly, the amendments essentially require records managers to prove to the courts that they have a records management program (including an up-to-date records retention schedule) that is consistently applied to physical and electronic records. Wow, all of a sudden, there becomes a real need for records managers. The proof of this last statement can be found at job boards like CareerBuilder and Monster that now advertise pages upon pages for records management individuals whereas several years ago, you would be lucky to find one position listed in any month.

The Records Manager can Save the Day

The key component of any ECM implementation is how it relates to compliance, risk, and ediscovery. The fact that IT can reduce data redundancies and streamline document storage and backup is secondary.

The key to the success of any ECM program hinges on the implementation of records retention rules on the content controlled by ECM (e.g., email messages, documents, work flows, web content, instant messaging, databases, or flash drives, to name a few). With ECM implemented, the Records Manager can have the best opportunity possible to prove that they are consistently applying their records retention schedule to electronically stored information.

Records Managers can Assure Success for Electronically Stored Information and Assure Success for current and future Filed and anticipated Litigation

All electronically stored information must be matched against the company’s records retention schedule to determine if the information is a record and for how long the information should be retained. ECM is the perfect solution for accomplishing this records management requirement as large ECM vendors (e.g., IBM, EMC, or Interwoven) can offer solutions that address email messages, document management, business process workflows, and web content to name a few. More importantly, these vendors have ediscovery modules to implement legal holds (mechanism to prevent records from being modified or destroyed) across all electronically stored information and even physical records, at the same time. As to the vendors that offer these solutions, you have to do your homework. but be aware that there are companies out there that only offer pieces of this solution such as for email only or web content only.

Why the Records Managers should lead ECM Efforts

The current trend is for Records Managers to lead ECM efforts with IT being a partner in the effort. The mistake is to think that IT can lead the effort with the Records Managers as the secondary partner. Records Managers must have the final say (even administrative rights to the ECM system) to assure that the records retention rules are properly and accurately applied and to assure that the legal holds system is administered only by Records Managers and Litigation Attorneys. More importantly, the Records Managers can serve as the business sponsor and provide the funding for the project in situations where IT would have difficulty justifying the ECM system without the influence of the Records Management program.

Summary

In summary, the ediscovery rules have made it clear that electronically stored information, the information on your business’s computers, is discoverable. Therefore, it’s time for your business to become tech-savvy and get prepared because unless your business is immune to litigation, the ediscovery rules will impact it. And the consequences are severe when records are destroyed prematurely because the records retention schedule rules were ignored or nonexistent as they apply to electronically stored information.

My advice to Records Managers is to study different ECM offerings from vendors and attend seminars and conferences given by ARMA and by AIIM to understand the importance of ECM and why you should be leading the effort and not IT.

Biography

By: Stephen Page

About the Author:

Stephen B. Page is certified as a records manager since 1989. He is also a certified project manager, certified software quality engineer, and a certified forms consultant. He is currently leading an effort at TransUnion to implement ECM and the components that relate to email messages, document management, records management, and ediscovery. He is an expert in records management and policies and procedures. For more information about Stephen Page, visit his website at: http://www.companymanuals.com

Comments Off »

Posted in Articles

Tags: enterprise content management

The Importance of an Indicator Stop Light

January 25th, 2011

The use of indicator stop light really depends on the purpose of your organization’s management project. By closely illustrating the methodologies, one can already derive the traffic light behavior chart as crucial to the over-all results of the study. This is because the Project Server administrator must create the indicator stop lights of the organization to decide the tolerance of the project and various tasks involved. By describing the levels of the variance, the brake warning light is generated and it is specifically allocated to the graphic indicator of the chart.

Here are the choices involved in the indicator stop light stuffy. You have to indicate the date slippage, work over budget, and the cost over budget. The level of variance that is generated in each can affect the flow of the chart. You can go for the View in Microsoft Project Professional in a Project Center view through Web Access. The results will affect the decision making process of the company and can also guide the corporation in coming up with the indicator stop light that strongly satisfy and accommodate the variants that the need for their reports.

Remember that an organization must use the indicator stop light in order to reflect the variance and severity of the date slippage. The organization should also how the early or late status and reflect the very late if there are variance that show these.

The traffic light behavioral chart can also display the indicator stop light that summarizes the task that you have to do. You can check the Dashboard of Your Microsoft Project Professional software for guidance. With the Project Center view you can also come up with the Project view in Project Web Access. Remember that the organization of the project managers really depend on the Baseline for each of the projects involved. Before updating any of these into the project, management must cover the baseline of their projects there and then. If not, then this might create slippage indicators stop light which will only be deemed useless to the organization.

It is the responsibility of the project managers to save the Baseline for every project that they conduct. In doing so the actual results will save the Baseline and the projects can automatically be updated. If the indicators stop light is not presented in this manner, then it would take the company a harder time to come with a structure that reflects all the information they need with just a single glance. They have to baseline the projects as soon as possible because if they don’t then the slippage indicators will only prove to be irrelevant to the actual study.

You can also create the customized enterprise task and project fields to focus on the indicator stop light better. You can create the Finish Variance indicators that you need as well as the Project Server administrator. You can create the custom enterprise Task Field by just completing the following steps.

By launching the Microsoft Project Professional and logging into the Project Server with administrator, you can create a custom enterprise Task field which will be used to log into the Project Server with the adequate permissions. You can make the most out of the tools and the enterprise options you have access to as well.

By: Sam Miller

About the Author:

If you are interested in indicator stop light, check this web-site to learn more about traffic light behavior chart.