ENHANCE PROJECT AND CORPORATE OVERSIGHT

Challenge: How do you know when you have all the business requirements?

If your organization does not have an answer for this question, internal projects could have excessive risk that will significantly overrun time and budget.  External projects will run the risk of ending in failure. Of course you can manage this risk by sheer force of will and the skill of a key person but eventually playing the odds by not addressing the process will lead to an expensive failure

The most common reason for a catastrophic failure ending in litigation is a failure to adequately define requirements and use this definition as an integrated part of project delivery management.

In today’s world of increased financial scrutiny of institutions, can audit committees reasonably approve the spending on a $10 million initiative without first conducting its own tests to determine if corporate risks have been adequately managed? Can you think of at least 3 times when a project seemed to be in a ‘continuous discovery’ of requirements mode or were forced through to result in the delivery of a largely dysfunctional system?

The management of project and corporate risk must start with how your organization:

• Initiates a project in a way that scope, roles in requirements participation and the overwhelming layers of information which must be developed can be streamlined and systematically managed.
• Ensures appropriate and sufficient participation from subject experts.
• Ultimately tests if scope has been properly assessed before releasing funds if spending is significant.

Ask yourself:

Before approving spending on a enterprise IT project, would corporate risk be better managed if the board was able to assess the probability of a large project overrun based on the project documentation provided by management?

Before initiating a project, would it be useful for the SVP of a Line of Business to know precisely how much time will be needed from each member of their team to properly develop business requirements?

At the early stage of defining a project, do your project managers have a role that links your project management process to your process for building business requirements?