Infrastructure As a Facilitator of Communications

An additional, significant value-add of an operational infrastructure is that problems, miscommunications, and other conflicts can be avoided during the project. The infrastructure lays out the details of how the project will be managed, thus leaving little to guesswork. Without an established operational infrastructure, team members who are not familiar with each other may be timid to ask basic questions such as "How will the project be managed?" because they think that everyone already knows. That's a recipe for confusion and inefficiency. Much of the infrastructure should be referenced in the project communications plan (see Chapter 4). Any disagreement can then be discussed and resolved directly rather than indirectly, which will help to head off many team dynamics issues.

An integrated operational infrastructure is also a very efficient way to capture and distribute critical project information to the various stakeholders (e.g., management, project managers/leaders, contributors) through various reporting mechanisms. This is especially true for a program or portfolio that is composed of many individual but linked projects. A change in one project or environmental variable may have a ripple effect on several other projects. Likewise, a shift in high-level strategy or functional direction could have a similar ripple effect through various projects. A good operational infrastructure helps to efficiently propagate all relevant information and changes to the appropriate parties.

Teams are usually aligned with major projects; however, in an agile environment, a working team can also be a small group that is quickly brought together to solve a particular issue and later disbanded, a functional group working on process improvement activities within that function, or a management team dealing with a competitive threat. The efforts of these teams, while not formally defined as a "project", can be captured and analyzed along with other PM efforts as part of the infrastructure.

The operational PM infrastructure is like a machine that takes in real-time project data from many sources, analyzes it, and then creates valuable information for the project teams to use in making decisions and running the projects. The inputs to this machine may be documents, online tools, e-mails, or voice mails and may include meeting minutes, decisions, issues, action items, risks, status reports, and anything else related to the project. While this will definitely take some effort on the part of the team members, the system should be designed to make input of the data as painless as possible. The basic value proposition of the PM infrastructure should be that the effort required to provide input to the machine (i.e., the infrastructure) will pay off many times in the form of robust information on which project and business decisions can be based.