Methodologies at your projects: How to?
Methodologies at your projects: How to?
Methodologies at your projects: How to?
Methodology can be defined according to PMBOK 4th edition as a system of practices, techniques rules and procedures for those who work in the discipline. Merriam Webster dictionary defines methodology as a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline:a particular procedure or set of procedures. So let's just agree that it is a set of predefined rules or steps to be followed to achieve or serve a certain goal.
But why do need a methodology in our projects? Statistics shows that more than 85% of projects worldwide fail due to not having a methodology in their projects. Methodologies can be subdivided into Quality methodology, Cost methodology, time methodology etc.
But is there any certain methodology to pick instantly and start deploying it in your organization? Or do you have to establish your own methodology from the scratch? Definitely such questions are not a multiple choice or true / false questions. They usually require a lot of assessment and evaluation. But a certain ground rule that is there is no methodology that fits all, any methodology is to be customized and tailored to your project unique needs.
I like to follow four steps to implement the methodology in the organizations, they are: Assess, Convince, Benchmark and compare and finally deploy. These for steps will be highlighted in the coming paragraphs.
Firstly: Assess. This means to know what are your requirements including the checklist, templates, forms and standard procedures. The next thing to assess is what is the size and priority of the project? Is the senior management interested in that project or not? You may try to consider affiliating your project to a global or local standard. Finally never ever forget to make easy to use, because if you introduce your preliminary idea and you fail to show that it is easy to its end users then you will get in trouble in your next step.
Secondly: Convince. Whom do you have to convince? You have to get buy-in from those people who will be using and interacting with the new methodology on daily basis. This includes senior management who will read status, progress or trend reports, if your methodology will make the senior management less involved and informed then expect a hard time. Also if the clerks, line workers will do extra steps with no added value to the output, then you have to expect a hard time. People by nature resist the change, so what to talk about a change that will degrade performance or add difficulties.
Thirdly: Benchmark and compare. If you feel that developing and establishing a new methodology from scratch is time consuming, then you may consider seeing which methodologies similar to your discipline and duplicate it. But this will not be an easy job as there are no two identical projects. But it will relief you from a lot uncertainty about its success, all you have to do is to customize it to your needs. After reaching a consensus on that benchmarked methodology you may consider comparing it to your already deployed methodology and come out with the best of the two.
Finally: deploy. Before deploying your new methodology make sure that all three steps are up to your satisfaction, because the cost of failure as move ahead will be higher. In fact finding a methodology itself is a project that has to go through the following steps:
Get buy-in from all those involved.
Create a deployment plan that controls and directs the steps necessary to reach your objectives.
Train people for the new methodology.
Start developing forms, procedures, checklists etc.
If there are already projects running try implementing the new methodology on these projects to increase their efficiencies.
After successful deployment do not stop there, always improve the processes and procedures within your methodology.
Finally few reasons that if exist will fail your methodologies:
Not getting buy-in for your projects.
Not customizing the benchmarked methodologies to your needs.
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