| This article is transferred fromProject Manager Alliance (PMU) Author: Xu shenxu Xiaoqiu Case
Company A is a medium-sized IT system integration company in China with many years of industry system integration experience. Through years of experience and management exploration, we have established some project management processes and project management information systems.
In a bidding project for a large project, the company's vice president appointed James as the owner of the bidding project to organize and manage the entire bidding process.
After receiving the project task, James learned that the task must be completed within 15 days. Then, he immediately convened the Ministry of Commerce, pre-sales technology, sales department, customer service department, quality department and other relevant departments to hold a project launch briefing, and deploy their respective division of labor and schedule.
However, during the review of the bidding documents three days before the bidding, it is found that the equipment configured in the technical scheme is faulty in the use of the previous project and must be replaced. James and the programme team worked overtime and completed the modification. At the formal bid evaluation meeting, James encountered another problem. The original authorization representative statement was inconsistent with the one written in the bidding scheme, which affected the bid evaluation score. But fortunately, the project was finally obtained and the contract was confirmed with the user. According to the company's procedures, James handed over the project to the after-sales Implementation Department, responsible for project implementation and acceptance.
After the Implementation Department takes over the project, Bob is appointed as the Implementation Project Manager, responsible for project implementation and acceptance. Bob found that because he did not intervene in the project as early as possible, many items in the early stage of the project were unclear, resulting in slow follow-up and affecting the project progress. At the same time, Bob also found that the presales engineers did not have a good understanding of the user's needs, nor did they have a written requirement analysis survey report. After taking over the project, you must re-understand the user's requirements and prepare the implementation scheme, which increases the implementation difficulty and cost.
After all this was taken into consideration, during the business order process, we found that due to business personnel's work mistakes, we had to purchase fewer equipment, in addition, the device module configuration function is incorrect and cannot meet the requirements.
In company A, after-sales and pre-sales are two independent departments. During project execution, especially after project execution, there is no clear and complete project summary and closed-loop problem analysis and closure process, leading to repeated errors or errors of the same or similar in many projects (including technical and commercial aspects ), as a result, the bidding fails, the project cost is high, the project is difficult to implement, and the user satisfaction is low.
For the above reasons, Company A's management leadership requires Paul, the system integration department leader, to propose reasonable improvement measures for this issue, and prepare a summary template for each project. It is hoped that the summary of various departments at different stages of the project will be reported to relevant departments and personnel to form a closed-loop process, so as to avoid and reduce the recurrence of similar problems. So how does Paul solve these problems through effective project summary and procedures?
When talking about the project summary, everyone thinks it is very important. However, in actual work, people seldom treat it as progress, cost, and so on. They always think it is a dispensable job. Therefore, in the project implementation process, project stakeholders seldom pay attention to the accumulation of experience and lessons, even if the project operation is broken, it is just complaining about luck, environment, or poor team cooperation, and seldom systematically analyzes and summarizes, or does not know how to summarize, so that the same problem keeps appearing.
In the above case, Company A repeatedly encountered the same errors or errors in the project, leading to project delays, high project execution costs, and even a decline in customer satisfaction. This is also a problem that system integration companies or software companies often encounter in their projects.
After a problem occurs in the project, we do not know how to prevent it from being too slow, and how to reinforce it through effective project summary to avoid similar problems in the next project. This is actually a closed-loop feedback mechanism formed in the project process through effective summarization to avoid and reduce problems.
After investigating and analyzing multiple projects of the company, Company A's department director Paul realized that doing a good job in project summary is the key. In addition, after communicating with the project manager and project members, Paul found that to do a good job of project summarization, he should first specify it when the project is started, for example, project evaluation standards, summary methods, and participants (such as the Project Office, the Ministry of Commerce, the pre-sales department, the marketing department, and the storage and transportation department.
Of course, if possible, users and other stakeholders should be involved at the project summary meeting to ensure the comprehensiveness and adequacy of the project summary.
In fact, the project summary should be an important part of the existing project or future continuous improvement of the project, and can also be used as a confirmation and verification of the project contract, design solution content and objectives. As mentioned above, the purpose and significance of the project summary is to sum up experience and lessons, prevent the same mistakes, evaluate the project team, accumulate data for performance appraisal, and check whether the project meets the stage objectives. Summing up the project experience and lessons will also play an indispensable role in the construction of the Project Management System and project culture of other projects and companies. A complete project report and summary system is important to the continuity of the project, such as after-sales maintenance and equipment warranty After the completion of the project. In particular, in the project summary at the end of the project, the project management organization should formally review the project before the end of the project, focusing on ensuring that usable experience can be provided for other projects, in addition, new user needs can be extended to further expand the market.
Source of Project Summary
In this case, what information is required to summarize the project experience? During project implementation, the project manager sometimes finds that the summary information in the previous project is scattered. Each department only starts from the Department and summarizes its own problems without the participation of other departments or personnel. In fact, it should come from all aspects of the project, including feedback from the project team, customers and other stakeholders and the Project Management Information System (PMIS ). At the same time, prior to the use of such information, systems, organizations and processes for collecting such information should be ensured to run properly, and a collection, release, storage, update and Retrieval System for project information should be established, ensure effective use of various information resources in the project.
From the management point of view, every stage or milestone of the project's life cycle should be evaluated and summarized to determine whether the goal of this stage has been achieved, whether the project can officially carry out the next phase of work. In short, there should be a complete project summary at different stages of the project, but the summary form, content, writers and readers have different focuses.
When preparing the project summary report, we should first clarify the purpose of writing the report, and briefly describe the project overview, project background, and project progress. Since it is called a project, it has its uniqueness and timeliness, so that the project summary content can be more targeted, timely and continuously improved.
Finally, Paul divided the project summary framework outline into the following aspects based on the project management framework of the American Project Management Association (PMI.
Project Summary framework
1. Project Progress
Analyzes the gaps and causes between the planned duration and the actual duration according to the overall project plan or project rolling plan. What are the changes in the process? How is the workload estimated? In order to provide corresponding data for the project experience library and improve the accuracy of the next plan.
2. Project Quality
The final deliverables of the project are in line with the customer's actual needs. It should be noted that the customer can be an external customer in the general sense or an internal customer. Project Quality Management includes not only quality management of the project, but also quality management of the products produced by the project. Specifically, we can start with quality planning, quality control, and quality assurance to ensure continuous improvement of the project quality. The ISO9000 Quality Assurance System can be used, and comprehensive quality management tools, charts, and other auxiliary tools can be used for statistical analysis to provide suggestions for improvement.
3. Project Cost
Analyzes the gaps, causes, and suggestions of the planned cost and the actual cost, and summarizes the implementation of the project contract. Generally, IT project managers can control labor costs. For organizations that do not have a project-level accounting, they can use weighted person-days, assign different weights to different levels of personnel (project managers, senior engineers, and General Engineers.
4. Project Risks
Summarize the experiences and lessons learned in risk identification, risk analysis and risk response, this includes the analysis and summary of the risk measures identified in advance in the project and the unexpected risks. It can also include the changes in the project and the summary of the analysis statistics of problems in the project.
5. project resources
Project resources include not only human resources, but also the rational use and development of equipment, materials, and other resources. In particular, the performance statistical analysis and evaluation of project members can be used to develop and use human resources more effectively. Generally, you can use an intuitive chart to reflect the project resources.
6. Scope of the project
Project scope includes product scope and project scope. The product scope defines the features and functions of products or services, and the project scope defines the work that must be done to deliver products or services with defined features and functions. The product scope, project scope, and user-confirmed plan set forth in the contract are all under the control of the project. In addition, the gaps in actual implementation and cause analysis are also included.
7. Project Communication
Communication is a key link between people, technology, and information, and is necessary for project success. In China, many project managers do not pay enough attention to communication or do not know how to do a good job of communication in the project. In the project summary, You can summarize the internal and external communication in the project process, and the impact on the project caused by communication.
8. Project Procurement
Project managers of domestic IT projects generally have little or no access to project procurement, and are mostly responsible for business and finance departments. For project-level accounting, procurement management is an important component. Otherwise, many problems may occur due to the costs, risks, progress, technology, and resources in the procurement process.
9. Project documents
Project documents, including hard copy documents and electronic documents, should be collected, organized, compiled, controlled, and handed over for unified archiving, storage, and further development and utilization. A document is a trace of the process. It provides objective evidence of the project execution process and a real record of the effective implementation of the project. The project documentation records the project implementation track, carries the project implementation and change processes, and facilitates project handover and maintenance. In addition, the project documentation is also a tool for project implementation and management. It is used to sort out the work order, check the work completion, and improve the project work efficiency. Therefore, a document management system should be established for each project, and documents should be prepared in a timely manner and archived in a timely manner. At the same time, document information must be authentic and valid, and the document format and information must be standardized and comply with standards.
10. Project Evaluation
Project evaluation is a summary of the productivity, product quality, new technologies, new methods, and project features of the project deliverables. In addition, project Customer Satisfaction statistics and analysis should be included. The customer satisfaction survey should not only cover the project management or process level, but also the technical level. At the same time, it is necessary to describe the special features of this project compared with previous projects. For example, special requirements, special environments, resource supply, new technologies and new processes are all challenging and unique events, as well as key solutions and implementation processes.
11. Issues to be resolved
Indicates whether the project has any issues that need to be resolved. If any, you must conduct in-depth analysis on these issues, clarify responsibilities, and propose solutions.
12. Lessons learned and Suggestions
By constantly summarizing the technical experience, management experience, and lessons of the implemented projects, the accumulated experience can become the fortune of the company.
In the above case, Paul summarized the project summary template and project summary process in the promotion and use of Company A, coupled with the attention of the company's leadership, previously, the repeated problems in Company A projects were effectively controlled.
The above are several aspects that should be included or paid attention to in the project summary. In short, the project summary should provide targeted content based on different reporting objects. Different Report readers have different requirements. For example, a company-level project leader may only focus on the reasons for project collection and the impact on collection Progress, the project acceptance plan, and major accidents or problems in the project. The technical manager may be more concerned with the adoption and effect of new technologies, processes, and processes in the project. The quality manager may pay more attention to project quality control, changes, risks, and issue reports. The project manager should try to ask all Members of the project team to submit the project summary report, because each person will be responsible for different jobs and different project stages based on their own knowledge, experience and capabilities, different questions and suggestions are put forward, so that the project can be summarized from different aspects to provide meaningful reference for the next stage or subsequent projects.
Finally, it should be emphasized that the project summary should not be good news or not, especially for failed projects, the summary should not be a review meeting, but should adhere to the principle of being wrong to people. In this way, the project summary can be carried out smoothly and will be of guiding significance for future work. |
