What are the critical actions regardless of methodology?

There are critical actions that can make the difference between success and failure.

The following activities are proven to reduce risk, but some of them are not a prominent feature of Agile or Waterfall methodology.

Dress rehearsals

Along with professional project initiation, dress rehearsals are the most important activity to ensure a successful project. Dress rehearsals will draw attention to problems not encountered during any test phase. The users will approach go-live with a high level of confidence because they have already completed core business scenarios in the dress rehearsals.

It’s important to note that dress rehearsals are not a rerun of UAT. This is a separate activity with different objectives.

Strong project governance

Effective governance is critical. 

• Ensure appropriate project governance is in place and everyone on the team understands it. This includes the ability to escalate issues and resolve them quickly.

Benefits management and critical success factors

Agree on the critical success factors at the beginning of the project. This doesn’t need to be a long list. In fact, having five or ten critical success factors keeps the team and stakeholders focused on delivering the most important elements.

Ensure you can measure critical success factors to confirm they have been delivered. It's rewarding to review these after delivery and have stakeholders agree that all priority items were delivered.

Risk management 

Risk management is critical throughout the project and will come under sharp focus as cutover approaches.

Risk management should be based on objective criteria. Without this, opinions of the level of risk will vary widely. Pathway has developed a risk management spreadsheet with typical criteria. The yes or no answers only take a few minutes to complete, and this provides a low, medium or high risk score.

Deliverables

Regardless of methodology, agreeing on and tracking deliverables is key to managing a successful project. Whether it is the deliverable from a sprint in Agile or a milestone in a Waterfall project plan, stakeholders will require updates on progress. Understanding, tracking and managing dependencies between deliverables is essential.

Project initiation

This is a critical activity. Issues with project initiation are a major factor in eighty per cent of failed projects.

The level of documentation depends on the size and complexity of the project. The following items need to be considered:

• The project’s size. Do you have a development team of five and one stakeholder, or ten project teams, 200 IT staff, 50 business people and 20 key stakeholders?
• Does the project have a hard deadline that is not negotiable? For example, is there a critical business requirement that includes supporting a product launch or delivery of a statutory or regulatory project?
• Is additional infrastructure required?
• Are new non-functional requirements included in the project scope? 

Please include all relevant sections in the project initiation phase, regardless of the methodology used.

Project budget

Please consider the following: 

• It’s always beneficial to include contingency in the project budget. 
• Increase the contingency if you have several unknowns.
• Please consider that securing additional budget may not be guaranteed. Many projects have been cancelled due to budget issues.
• Realistic estimates are critical on all projects, but on complex projects it’s worth taking time during initiation to ensure your estimates are as accurate as possible. 
• Some projects include costs for company employees who are seconded to the project, while others do not; please confirm this at the start of the project.
• When preparing budgets, remember that most tasks take twice as long to complete compared to their estimates. 
• Consider the complexity of the critical path of the project.
• How likely are you to have delays where planned work can’t proceed but costs for project staff will be incurred? Also, third-party staff may be impacted by delays, and this could result in extra costs.

Communication plan

On some projects, the activities in the communication plan commence close to going live. The plan should be prepared during the early phases of the project, and communication should be an integral part of the complete project. 

Quality plan and quality assurance 

Quality assurance is a separate activity, and it is essential for successful project delivery.

Be wary if anyone says, ‘Quality assurance is just part of everyone’s activities.’ This statement isn’t correct, but it is heard on many projects. The quality plan should specify the person responsible for quality assurance and measurement criteria.

Quality assurance is required for all activities, but data quality assurance is an area that requires additional diligence. 

Project board

The project board exists to support the project and guarantee proper governance. If the project team is unable to resolve a problem, they should escalate it to the project board.

When attending the project board meetings, you should be very clear about the issues, the impact they have on the project, and the action you are asking the board to take. Please prepare clear and concise reports for the project board according to the agreed schedule.

Estimating

Universities have conducted studies to determine the accuracy of estimates versus actual time taken to complete tasks. They concluded that tasks take, on average, over twice as long to complete compared to the estimates. Optimism and not considering potential issues and blockers contribute to the problems with underestimating.

The studies found that people are able to estimate other people’s tasks more accurately than their own. Not using historic data to assist with estimating is another cause of poor estimating.

Resource planning

It is good practice to assume that full-time project resource will not be available for more than 80 per cent of the time. This is to account for holidays and illness.

If people are working on the project in addition to their day jobs, make sure there is a contingency plan in case they are needed to resolve urgent BAU issues. These people may be Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and it may not be easy to find a replacement for them. 

Work packages

Work packages are a valuable tool to control time and cost. They distil work into an easy-to-understand one-page document that includes resource, cost, date and deliverable information.

Project delivery

Please always remember the famous saying, ‘There are no IT projects, only business projects supported by IT.’ 

Various people have been credited with this statement. The meaning is that there must be a business benefit to any project, or there is no point in the activity. With this in mind, it is important to have a way to show the benefit realisation of the project.

Testing

If the users haven’t worked on an Agile project before, explain the iterative process before testing starts.

Document the testing tools the project will use and the training needed to use them. Identify any scenarios that require live data to ensure that the tests are valid.

Many companies will have a policy that prohibits the use of live data in any testing. If this is the case, you will have to prepare test data that replicates production data. Don’t underestimate the amount of work required for this.

If the use of live data is allowed, ensure that the environment is completely locked down. Production-level security must be in place.

• The only people who will see the data during testing will have access to it in their BAU roles.
• Remember to turn off any processes or procedures that will trigger an email or send data outside of the test environment. Check this every day before the start of testing to ensure no changes have been made.
• Monitor changes to the applications that may have an impact on production data and update the test scenarios as required.

Cutover 

Include cutover planning from the start of the project. (Strategy, approach, target dates, etc.)

Develop a detailed cutover plan that includes dependencies, activities, resources, communication, checkpoints and post-go-live project support. Complete a cutover dress rehearsal to ensure that all timings are correct.

Handover to support

Handover to the support team is critical for a smooth cutover. Please include handover activities in all plans. Ensure the handover documentation is fit for purpose.

Review the documentation at regular intervals starting early in the project. Don’t leave the task until the last minute and rush the preparation of this.

Include the support teams in the dress rehearsals. Add a failure scenario to ensure that everyone from the end user to third-level support understands the process. Also, involve the support team in the preparation of the support Service Level Agreement. (SLA)

Post go-live project support 

Please consider the following in the planning process:

• The timeline that the project team will provide post-go-live support should be agreed upon early.
• From day one go-live, the support team should take the lead, with the project team assisting them.
• If everything is going very smoothly, the project team may work on other activities, but the go-live support must be their priority.
• Superusers are an integral part of the post-go-live support team. Ensure everyone knows who they are. Having the superusers walk around the departments immediately after cutover works very well. 

Summary

These activities will make a difference to your projects. For example, dress rehearsals have been key to the successful cutover on many projects, and work packages were used on a multi-million-pound programme that was delivered £10K under budget.

For more information on these activities, please request a free copy of the Pathway Project Management Toolkit ebook.