The UPS & Downs of an enterprise-wide project management team
David W. Dennis
P. E. City of Cleveland, Division of Water
1201 Lakeside Ave. Cleveland, Ohio 44113
E-Mail: dave_dennis@clevelandwater.com
Abstract
The City of Cleveland is developing an Enterprise Wide Geographic Information System across
all 14 City Departments. The project is managed out of the Division of Water, with a Project
Management Team composed of representatives from each City Department. This presentation
will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of utilizing a project management team, composed of
department representatives, for an enterprise wide integration of GIS. The experiences gained
from the City of Cleveland Enterprise Wide GIS Program will layout
- The Organization structure of the team and how this provides value to the project.
- Assigning Roles and Responsibilities within the team and what to do if those
responsibilities aren’t fulfilled
- Methods for team building and education, and creating consensus across departments with
radically different missions, and
- Achieving user buy-in down all levels of the organization.
An explanation of how this process aids in assuring executive level support while providing
department administration a high level of confidence in their control of the process will also be
provided.
Effective Organizational Structure
At the City of Cleveland, Departments are unaccustomed to working together. In general, the
Directors make decisions for their departments, independent of what other departments are
doing. The lack of significant GIS Systems in the majority of the City Departments prompted
the development of the Citywide GIS Project. Very few departments had done anything with
GIS, and the only systems being used were uncoordinated and out of date. It was believed that
by developing an Enterprise Wide implementation of GIS, we can achieve significant economies
of scale, and we can achieve a leading-edge level of GIS technology.
In order to achieve enterprise wide implementation, conventional Project Management
Techniques were used and a Project Management Team (PMT) has been established.
Department representatives to the Project Team are assigned by the Director of each department
to be the department interface to the project. They are the primary point of contact for the Project
Manager and the Consultant to the Project. In this way, each Director has high degree of
confidence that there is only one information stream in and out of their department and they can
better control how the project is developed. The value of this method was graphically
demonstrated during the formative stages of the project. At an Executive Level meeting that I
regularly attended, one of the directors became quite upset upon finding out that the Project
Manager of another citywide initiative had been working with people within his department
without clearing it first with him or his appointed representative. The Project Manager was
severely reprimanded, and no one in the room objected. Afterwards, the effectiveness of this
Project Manager was severely diminished and she was eventually removed from the project,
because she had lost the confidence of the executive management. Department Directors are very
particular about protocol and can lose confidence when employees outside of their department
don’t follow the designated contacts into their department.
Authority of the PMT
One important aspect of this structure is the authority vested in each Department’s PMT. Even
though the City does not yet have a comprehensive GIS, this does not mean we have not been
working towards a GIS. Efforts to automate our Water Maps go back to the early 80’s. We have
made various attempts to automate, all with a certain level of success, but none of them totally
successful (is any project really “totally successful”?). One of the major lessons we have learned
in all of this is the importance of having buy-in at the very top, and communicating that buy-in
throughout the organization. One of the fundamental responsibilities of each department’s PMT
representative is that they need to operate throughout their respective departments with the
authority of their director. When they tell someone to provide information or to attend a
workshop, that “request” needs to have the authority of the Director, not be construed as a
request from another sections project. Enterprise wide implementation will only work when all
staff view it as enterprise wide and support it as “theirs”, not as a favor they are doing for another
section. We are currently finishing up the pilot phase of the implementation. The PMT
representative from one department, stationed in the Engineering section of that dept., was
attempting to achieve buy-in from the Operations section, but was doing it by bypassing the
internal chain of command. He was reprimanded and denied direct access to anyone but his
Supervisor and people in his own section. This resulted in an inability to provide the necessary
staff for QA/QC of the pilot. The situation has been resolved and a PMT representative with
appropriate authority has been appointed for that Department, but we experienced significant
turmoil within the team before the true situation became clear. The point is, the authority of the
PMT representatives must be clearly defined and maintained to insure their effectiveness and
that they can bring about a successful project across the enterprise. “The vertical flow of work is
still the responsibility of the line managers. The horizontal flow of work is the responsibility of
the project managers, and their primary effort is to communicate and coordinate activities
horizontally between the line organization.” (Kerzner 2001)
The impotance of consistency and flexibility of PMT Appointments
The PMT representative is the essential, key point of contact for a department. This creates a
multi-faceted situation, and not all or those facets are positive. As evidenced by the example
above, if problems develop, the PMT representative is the one person responsible. There is no
passing the buck, and if that point of contact is the problem, that point person can be replaced.
It
is not something you do lightly, but you do it when it is necessary to insure the success of the
project. Replacing of PMT members can have numerous downsides. You do lose project
institutional memory if this person has to be replaced. This will, of course, also happen if a
person is reassigned or quits. We have had some departments in which appointment of new
PMT representatives became a regular event; each representative only lasted about three to six
months. This made it very difficult to continually bring the new representative up to speed and it
created a reluctance to assign significant tasks to the representative of that dept. because of the
uncertainty of their durability. Some departments have attempted to mitigate this danger by
naming two representatives, but, invariably, only one of them is able to fully participate. This
revolving door has seemed to stabilize during implementation but we have to constantly be
aware of the potential to lose members.
