Chapter 10: The Operational Project Management Infrastructure

This chapter touches on the unglamorous parts of successful project management. It provides some practical organization to topics that you are largely familiar with, but perhaps never thought were important enough to develop further or standardize in your company. Hopefully, you will see that there is some low-hanging fruit and that picking it is not only easy, but will have a dramatic affect on your project management agility.

Developing a project management infrastructure is one of those important but not necessarily urgent internal activities that organizations must undertake to support their project managers. It is important because with a well-honed and integrated set of tools and processes at his disposal, the project manager is freed up from administrative PM duties and can focus on some of the more critical duties discussed in Chapter 5. Unfortunately, for many organizations, PM infrastructure development is just not urgent enough to make it to the top of their list. Ironically, this is because most project managers are able to "get by" using their own homemade systems, which are usually based on multiple different general-purpose software programs. So, while the inherent organizational capabilities of project managers enable them to move forward despite a lack of specialized PM tools, they are forced to work on lower-value administrative areas of PM. Consequently, the organization itself never reaps the full return from its investment in project management.

What Exactly Is an Operational Project Management Infrastructure, and Why Do I Need One?

A project management infrastructure is an organized set of tools and processes that can facilitate the project management process from start to finish. While these tools and processes are usually clumped together, I find that it makes more sense to categorize them into two broad groups (see Figure 10-1). The first grouping applies to the "initiation and planning" processes. The second is those tools and processes that apply to "execution and control". This chapter is primarily focused on the second group, which is where agile projects can gain the most benefits; however, as you will see, there is some overlap.

Figure 10-1: Project management infrastructures are focused in two broad areas, planning and execution.

I use the term operational because we are dealing with those tools, processes, and systems that facilitate day-to-day project management activities rather than those tasks that generally take place on a more periodic basis, such as planning. I use the term infrastructure to mean that the tools and processes in question are organized and integrated in a logical manner, as opposed to merely being a collection of things with no cohesive thread holding them together. The relationship between these elements and project management is shown in Figure 10-2.

Figure 10-2: The operational project management infrastructure.

Agile Strategy

Create an operational project management infrastructure to help your project managers efficiently manage day-to-day PM activities such as task, action item, issue, and communications management.

All projects require some type of operational infrastructure to operate efficiently. The team needs to know how progress will be tracked and reported, how communications will be managed, how information will be shared, and how changes will be handled. These tools and processes collectively support the project manager in managing the project. An example of an operational project management infrastructure is given at the end of this chapter.

To further illustrate this point, here's another example. Let's say a new project manager is hired from the outside or internally transfers from another type of job. One of the first questions she will probably ask is: "How do you guys manage projects?" It's not that she doesn't know how to do the job; rather, she wants to know if there are methods and tools in place that have been used effectively in the past. After all, why should she reinvent the wheel if she doesn't have to? Additionally, she will want to use tools that are consistent with what other project managers use, so team members who contribute to multiple teams won't be confused.

You may be surprised, but in all but the most mature project management organizations (or those that have purchased a sophisticated enterprise software solution), there is generally no consistent operational infrastructure that is driven by the company. And, as you may suspect, most mature project management organizations tend to be in large conventional companies. The sheer volume and complexity of projects that large organizations undertake usually justifies the investment of time and resources necessary to develop both a planning and operational infrastructure for managing projects. On the other hand, there is a perception that smaller, faster-moving companies do not really need formal project management at all, let alone an operational infrastructure, because their projects aren't as large or complex.

This line of thinking is fundamentally flawed because it only looks at project size or volume of projects as the justifications to develop a consistent infrastructure and does not consider the effects of uncertainty on project execution. The uncertainty of the agile environment creates frequent changes and therefore generates many action items, issues, and risks that don't appear on the initial project plan. Managing these additional elements, as well as the increased communications, is as critical to project success as managing those identified in the original plan. Without an organized process for keeping these elements tied to the primary plan, your project can quickly go off-course.

Agile Strategy

Ensure that your operational infrastructure integrates the status of unplanned action items and issues with those of the original project plan, to deftly manage the frequent and rapid changes to that plan.