Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations

Equip your project managers with a purpose-built approach to project management.
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Major Business Pain Points

  • Your team is expected to manage projects off the side of their desks while also balancing heavy operational workloads.
  • The organization’s project management process is rigorous. While it might have its place on high-risk, high-complexity projects where the outcomes are unpredictable, it seems like a lot of documentation for the typical infrastructure project.
  • You still need your team to properly plan and manage their projects, but the rigor prescribed by the project management office (PMO) isn’t working. Your team is frustrated by governance requirements that don’t ultimately help to drive outcomes on their projects.
Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations-Pain Points

Recommendations

Key Points

  • Project management best practices have traditionally neglected the unique planning needs of infrastructure projects, prescribing heavy requirements gathering, scope, and schedule management rigor where increased communication and stakeholder management tactics are in fact what’s needed.
  • With a high expectation of “get-to-action” (both internally, from infrastructure practitioners, and externally, from requestors and executives), infrastructure project leads can often have an allergy to project planning, and have a tendency to just “get to work.” While this might end up saving the individual practitioner some time, it can end up costing the organization at implementation time in the form of resourcing waste and stakeholder confusion.

Approach

Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations-Recommendations
  • Breakdown the divide between stakeholder groups. Use the training and stakeholder alignment tactics and tools in this research to help promote better project management adherence, while improving relations between project and infrastructure leaders.
  • Shift the focus of your project managers and leads away from your processes, towards the fulfillment of the project. Provide project staff with a simplified process that will help to define scope, manage risk, communicate outcomes, and feed the portfolio, without drowning them in unnecessary documentation.
  • Tune your project management tools to fit the task at hand. Configure the Excel-based toolkit at the heart of this research to help anchor and guide your right-sized processes.
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Methodology and Tools

Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should right-size your project management processes for Infrastructure, review the methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

  • Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations – Executive Brief
  • Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations – Storyboard

1. Develop a project management process for Infrastructure

This phase will help you define and configure a purpose-built project management tool and design a process around it.

  • Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations – Phase 1
  • Infrastructure and Operations Project Management Workbook
  • Project Management Workflow Template (Visio)
  • Project Management Workflow Template (PDF)
  • Project Manager Training Template

All resources on this page are provided to Cyber Leadership Hub members under license from third parties including Info-Tech Research Group Inc, a global leader in providing IT research and advice.