Managing AM/FM/GIS Projects in Environments of Change
One of the best ways to consign a project to almost certain failure is to manage it without regard for the organization’s external environment, including those project stakeholders who can play such an important part in a project’s success or failure. Project “stakeholders” is the term used to refer to any group, internal or external to the company, that has an active stake in the project’s development and implementation. To ignore the potential power of such stakeholder groups is foolhardy and often results from either ignorance or complacency on the part of the project manager.
As more and more companies re-engineer in the age of deregulation, how they handle organizational change management is becoming increasingly paramount. Adopting new technology forces needed changes in business processes. It is important that companies not think in terms of simply automating tasks that people are already performing, but to think in terms of consolidating and replacing unneeded tasks to ensure the process is efficient and effective. A project manager should always be looking for and encouraging the team to look for ways to improve the entire workflow process, even if it means the organizational structure will be impacted. Nonetheless, if an organization is to work effectively, the communication continues to be through the most effective channel regardless of the organization chart or its structure.
Technology Change Management
One of the consistent temptations of any project manager is to upgrade to newer technology in the belief that it will improve the project’s user acceptance or usability. However, it should be stated that new technologies do imply new and unknown risks. Sometimes the allure of being first to market with a new technology causes project managers to cut comers, marginalize safety factors, or make quality trade-offs. In the end, these decisions almost invariably come back to haunt the project manager.
Intel often states that every eighteen months, the chip technology improvements allow processing speed to be doubled and the price of the processors to be one-half. Make no mistake, new technologies are very tempting to exploit for exactly that reason: they are newer, faster, and/or cheaper. They often offer the project manager an opportunity to improve on an previous oversight from the planning stages of the project. Unfortunately, in the rush to push new designs or technical achievements, there is a strong likelihood of inadequate or cursory pretesting that can result in disaster. There must be a proper balance between being the first to implement new technology and ensuring that the new and improved products will perform in positive, expected ways.
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