Within every organization various types of projects are launched by different teams with different objectives. The integration and long term accountability of these projects will improve quality, maintainability and TCO. The different type of business improvement projects are;
1 BMI projects (Business Model Innovation)
BMI projects are run by business development teams and the objectives are to improve the value proposition of their products and services towards their customers and business partners to optimize profitability and identify required E2E processes
2 BPM projects (Business Process Management)
BPM projects are run by BPM teams and the objectives are to improve the E2E operational processes to optimize business results and organizational agility and define the requirements for the ICT applications and E2E business organization
3 ERP projects ( Enterprise Resource Planning)
ERP projects are run by ERP teams and the objectives are to implement the E2E business processes and to improve the logistical or financial concepts by integration of ERP applications (SAP, Oracle or SAAS) on premises or in the cloud
4 ICT projects
ICT projects are run by ICT teams and the objectives are to maintain the ICT infrastructure (including office and internet) and to extend the ICT infrastructure with applications like BPM(S), mobiles devices and (social) cloud integration
These projects are executed in parallel. The focus of the project managers (and PMO office) is to stay within budget and keep the stakeholders happy. At the end of the project the deliverables and documentation are handed over to the maintenance organization which is from then on responsible for the remainder of the application lifecycle. (which is about 85% of the TCO of the application lifecycle)
During the maintenance phase the following main issues can be discovered:
1 The documentation is not according to the standards and cannot be found within the different project directories and therefore issue resolution takes too much time
2 The projects deliverables are incomplete, contaminated with non-standard methods and tools and are neither interchangeable nor reusable in other type of projects
3 The maintenance organization is not ready to support the project deliverables (ITIL) and the deliverables are not integrated in the E2E monitoring tools (ALM)
4 The project deliverables do not achieve the expected business benefits due to incomplete business case and limited integration in the daily E2E processes
To resolve these issues a Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) approach is required which is accepted by the complete organization and managed by the ADM team.
The ADM team is responsible for the quality assurance of all projects deliverables and the check whether these are according to both project and architecture standards as defined within the agreed ADM integration platform (see previous blog).
The Advanced Delivery Management (ADM) team
The ADM team is responsible for all activities which are part of the “all-man / no-man’s land” between the ERP / ICT departments and the business units like the;
- Creation of a complete and comprehensible RFC with deliverables and ROI
- Validation of the user acceptance tests (UAT) or business models acceptance
- Quality assurance of the deliverables during project phases and hand-over to support
- Maintainability of the project deliverables based on QA and E2E Performance KPI’s
Projects are not delivered on the go-live date but when deliverables pass the QA check.
The ADM team is accountable for the long term KPI tracking of the project deliverables and integration between the different projects and therefore will make sure that the;
B usiness models are aligned with the E2E processes and KPI hierarchy
O perational E2E processes are linked to applications and FRIME developments
A pplications and FRIME are integrated within the ADM integration platform
T ools & Methodologies are maintained according to the ALM approach
This BOAT approach will make sure that the re-usability of the project deliverables is improved, maintenance costs are reduced and the organization can operate like a TEAM.
When the ADM team is fully operational, the focus of the project managers and PMO office will move from the go-live date of the projects towards the TCO of the complete application lifecycle. Because the maintainability is optimized, more resourcesare available for business model innovation projects and these projects will also be delivered faster. The PMO office must make sure that these benefits are understood by the business to maintain support and optimize the priorities within the project portfolio.
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