Four Critical Areas for EPM Implementation Success

We've been asked many times to evaluate implementations that are in progress or that have been recently completed. We see 4 typical and costly things that are forgotten, not considered or undervalued (by the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) software vendors) during an implementation.  

• Assessment and building an EPM Roadmap
• Executive support for EPM
• Designing a measurable EPM plan
• Choosing and implementing the right EPM tools

The first two areas (Assess and Roadmap along with Executive Support) should be run in parallel. Executive support is imperative as an ongoing part of your Enterprise Project Management execution. 

The third area (Design a Measurable Plan) should be built into the Roadmap and then monitored throughout the implementation, and finally into production. This will ensure continuous improvement of your Enterprise Project Management environment.

Choosing a product set for Enterprise Project Management, Project Portfolio Management and Earned Value Management should occur after the Assessment is complete, and User Scenarios are in place.

EPM Assessment and Roadmap

Understanding where you are now requires an assessment of your organization’s capabilities, challenges and goals with regards to Project Management, Portfolio Management or Earned Value Management. Read more about EVMS Assessments and Scorecards.

These assessments should be done by role, deliverable (or work product), and process.

Roles

Many organizations miss some of the critical Project Management roles.  Consider these when laying out your plan:

• Project Managers (project leads, technical leads given project responsibility) 
• Resources Managers (functional managers, resource coordinators, team leads)
• Project Management Office team members (if a PMO exists)
• Project Portfolio Managers (formal or informal, this may belong to the GM or Execs.)
• Departmental Managers or General Managers (P&L owners)
• Executives users of EPM, PPM and EVM information (CEO, CTO, COO, CFO)
• Customers (internal and external)

Work Products

Think of these as EPM reports or capabilities needed by the organization. This tends to be an area where many companies struggle. 

If your customers can nail down the Project Management, Earned Value Management reports they want, then your job just got a lot easier.  You have the answers!  Now you just need to understand how to produce the information in a sustainable and affordable manner.

Ask yourself what you need to produce by each role or for each role; make sure you ask people who work in those roles. The easy ones are contractual work products required by customers. The more difficult ones are the internal work products / reports required by senior executives who often don’t know or can’t agree on what they want.  

To get Execs to agree you need strong facilitation skills, diplomacy, and preferably, an outside voice who can handle the political fallout.  The right consultant will bring experience in implementing EPM tools and processes, Enterprise PMOs, facilitation skills, and a track record of successes.  They are able to express things that employees may not feel comfortable with and are conveniently expendable.  Pinnacle has worked extensively in complex environments and knows how to build support and consensus.

There is also a tendency to think that a software system (EPM, PPM, EVM) is going to produce everything you need or that you need everything it produces.  Unless you clearly define your mandatory deliverables / information before you begin your implementation and select your EPM product, you run the risk of missing significant capabilities required by your organization and your customers.

Getting these work products defined is critical to determining how you need to implement them and where you want to be at the end of your Enterprise Project Management implementation.

Processes 

After you have your Project Management roles and PM, PPM, or EVM work products defined then you can determine which processes you need and where you have to fill the gaps. Often the teams assembled to implement EPM systems just don’t have the experience required. They don’t have someone who has done this before and, therefore; don’t have the background to avoid common pitfalls and mistakes.

First timers often miss other processes from across the Enterprise that affect Project Management.  A clear example is in Finance and Accounting.  The PM community will often not engage them, but at the same time assume that they can see financial information when and how they want it. 

Executive Support for EPM

No surprise here.  Many people are aware that you need Executive support for a cultural change / adoption effort like Enterprise Project Management.  It’s a well known fact that major change efforts fail because Senior Management believes that their commitment is done when they approve the budget, they are not sure of their key roles or simply lose interest.  To avoid these and other issues set clear expectations upfront that they will need to be involved for the duration in:

• Kick-offs
• Funding 
• Strategy
• Escalations
• Cheerleading and / or mandating
• Major announcements as part of a communication plan

We have some good presentation material here about EPM adoption.

Engage a mid-level management team to keep up to date with status reports and to turn to for staffing and day to day escalations.

Have working team(s) that are cross functional.  Make sure that team members understand they are evangelists and that they will regularly report back to their functional groups with progress and successes.

Design A Measurable EPM Plan

When you understand your Project Management capabilities and challenges as described above you can begin to design your implementation Roadmap.  There are several things that you should include in this Roadmap.  There are 3 things that we commonly see missing from most EPM implementation plans.  They are:

• Measuring adoption
• Iterative deployment
• Training coupled with coaching

Measuring Adoption

 Inspect your EPM, PPM and EVM data. Looking at the number of projects that have been planned and statused using the new processes is a good measurement. Understanding that Management is using and acting on the new Project Management data is critical as well.  

Iterative Deployment 

There are several aspects to consider here. The Rule of 3: Prototyping, End to End Testing, Cut Over to Production is one great technique. Consider rolling this out to one functional group first (early adopters).  After they are successful and you’ve broadcasted this success, then on-board other groups as your deployment team can handle them.

Another type of Implementation to consider is Evolutionary Deployment of EPM.  Once you have a feel for how mature your organization is and how much change they can handle, develop a plan for how you can layer in more robust capabilities.  Many large organizations can take 3-5 years to do this, smaller ones can move much faster.

Training and Coaching 

Training should always be delivered as Project Management Contextual training combining tool and process.  This should always be followed up with coaching. A simple example is to train a PM on your planning and scheduling processes and tools and then follow up by coaching them as they enter and status projects.  This combination takes training from about 15% retention to about 80%.

Selecting EPM, PPM, PM Tools

There is one mistake we see time and time again.  The first thing a company does when they decide to implement an Enterprise Project Management solution is to call the software vendor.  

Until you have determined your own unique needs and what your users will adopt and how fast, how can you tell which product is a fit?

When you have defined your organizational needs and end users’ needs, then you can select a product.  The best way to do this is to define a set of simple User Scenarios for each of the roles and put them to the test across all of those roles.  Make sure and get as much buy in from key stakeholders, to ensure their support when you deploy.

Now you are ready to evaluate one of the hundreds of PPM, EPM, EVM, PM software tools.  Read more about EPM tool evaluation.

If this article has raised some issues for you - or you would just like to discuss your Enterprise Project Management situation contact us.

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