Project process is for wimps

I currently work in a small team that prepares reports for senior Technology managers on the health (or lack thereof) of major tech projects. With a project portfolio of over $100 million, it's worth paying attention to what's going on.

These projects follow a very standardized process, overseen by project managers responsible for making sure everything gets done according to plan on time, and on budget. Projects move through well-defined phases from initial definition, through design, development and implementation. We report on "adherence": a measure of the percentage of "misses" or deviations from the expected results. Forgetting to make certain inputs in the project tracking system can put the poor project manager suddenly into yellow, or worse, red status on their projects: not a desirable state of affairs.

Yet our organization, the project management police, ironically have no such structure on our internal projects. Our reporting team never sees well thought out business specifications for what's to be done. We get passing conversations, e-mail asides and the like that pass for our "specs". There is no standard process; in fact, there is no process all! And whoever made up "change is a constant" certainly had our group in mind.

This week we were doing some upgrades to our early-project process as the 2007 budget cycle begins to gear up. I needed to do some pie charts to better visualize the data, completed this Monday, and thought I was done. But Tuesday morning, in a dreaded feedback e-mail, the manager had a new idea: let's add two charts to the original four charts, and do them all for each department. Since there are six departments, the simple upgrade had gone from four charts to over 30!

Still, these changes keep us busy, and my kids in school, so I can't complain. As my teammate likes to say: I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.

As I say: it sure beats the alternative.

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