Measuring actual project benefits - How to maintain your project profile and funding
Dean Zastava
Convergent Group
6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle, Suite 600
Englewood, CO 80111
Your project is approved, don't relax - initiate a plan to maintain your project profile
Congratulations, you've fought the big budget battle and have won. Your project is approved!
Now you should be able to put away your sales persona, close the door to your office, and focus
solely on project implementation, right? Wrong! You did win the budget battles against the new
Customer Information System (CIS), the new Call/Customer Care Center, the Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) system, the Y2K PCs, the new fleet vehicles, etc. But new initiatives
are already winning your executives' mindshare. Of course, the Internet, and e-business are on
the playing field, but so are other emerging initiatives such as Customer Relationship
Management (CRM). The longer the elapsed time until your next executive discussion or
presentation, the smaller the size of the executive mindshare your project will command. A
project with small executive mindshare translates directly into lack of understanding (read
support) and requests to reduce the project budget.
To keep your GIS project on the playing field, you must keep selling, selling, and selling.
Selling refers to educating and communicating. GIS project implementation time frames have
been dramatically reduced to half or less than half of the time required just two or three years
ago. The good news is that this fact helped you to sell your project in the first place. The bad
news is that competition continues to demand ever-decreasing implementation time frames and
ever increasing benefits. In addition, new initiatives being considered in your company's
executive suite are taking aim at some of the benefits that you claimed in your project's
business case. If you do not continually defend (sell) your project, you risk being perceived as
not meeting your stated objectives - a potentially career-limiting situation.
To prevent any perception that you have not met your objectives, take the following steps:
- Communicate your project charter and project status.
- Confirm that GIS benefits are being attained and look for new benefits.
- Develop new corporate initiatives and explain how your GIS project can benefit from
these initiatives.
Think of the above steps as opportunities to continue to sell your project. As used in this paper,
the term "sell" means educate and communicate. You need to take every opportunity to sell
your project, even at the risk of repeating yourself on a regular basis. You know and understand
the importance and the promise of GIS to your company because you are immersed in it every
day. Outside of your project team, other people in the organization only know about GIS from
what they hear from you and your team. They do not have the emotional or career investment to
want to chase you for information. Therefore, you must be unrelenting in selling your project.
Your plan to maintain the profile of your project must include all levels of the organization.
Communicate Project Charter and Project Status
From the lessons-learned archives of GITA, the key ingredient of project communications is an
active executive sponsor. If you don't have one, get one, and the higher up your sponsor is on
the organization chart the better. If the one you have is not actively bearing the GIS project
torch, you need to schedule an appointment to discuss your concerns and ask for assistance. A
project like GIS that can positively impact areas across the entire organization is a once-in-acareer
opportunity, but it requires taking care of the project implementation and a continuous
selling effort.
Executives are gauged (paid) by their ability to lead organizations to perform more effectively,
and thus lower the cost of doing business, as well as for their ability to increase revenues (grow
the business through new revenue producing services or mergers and acquisitions). The result of
lower costs and increased revenues is higher shareholder return for corporations, and increased
services without increased taxes for governments. GIS can help achieve both of these, but the
executives need to be educated as to how and when. And they need to be updated on a regular
basis.
