Project management is so 20^th century!  At least that’s the impression I get, listening to some people.  Here are a few attitudes about project management I’ve encountered recently:

“With the Agile method, we don’t have to take so much time at the beginning to understand requirements”

“The Cloud and SaaS solutions make deployment so easy these days, project management would mostly just be in the way”

“Things change too fast, we’re not available for meetings and we don’t have a big budget, so can we just go light on the PM stuff?”

Project management isn’t near the top of my list of interesting topics to write about.  And when it comes to solution development, I’d rather just go for it and see results quickly.  But after many years of implementing EPM and BI solutions, I have come to respect effective project and engagement management.  To get the full benefits that modern analytic, reporting and planning technologies can deliver, I’ve learned it’s important to first build a critical (if less exciting) foundation for project success, before any fingers hit the keyboards.

It’s not always the case that projects fail outright and then have nothing to show for the effort. Usually, the project concludes and something is deployed at the end of the day.  The question is, could the deployed solution have achieved a higher level of benefits – not just immediately after completion but also over the long term?

Think about this: The success of a solution implementation isn’t calculated just when the development work is done and the solution goes live.  The value, whether measured as payback or ROI (or whatever metric you apply), continues to accrue during the solution’s entire useful life.  In fact, the return on project investment occurs mostly after solution deployment.

Giving attention to key Project Success Factors, from the very outset, will not only streamline the implementation process but it will also result in a more useful solution and set up the users and their organization for a higher level of success.  What I’m really talking about isn’t just project management in the traditional sense, it’s more solution lifecycle management, with long-term business value as a main focus.

Here at Analysis Team we’ve identified a set of Project Success Factors that encompass key areas of project execution, and impact solution management long after project end.  These areas include:

Whether you employ Agile or Waterfall (or a hybrid), all of these areas are relevant for you to consider and manage.  Over the next few months, I will write a series of posts related to our Project Success Factors, and tell some success stories and cautionary tales along the way. I hope you’ll benefit from the lessons I and my colleagues have learned (and very often the “hard way”).