Large Project Management

Whether you are using Agile, PMBOK, or other methodologies, the challenges facing project managers and teams on a large or highly complex project are enormous. While some challenges can be overcome with experience and skills, others require more focused specialized solutions and tools. The following are the most common challenges encountered in managing large projects:

1. Monitoring

Challenge:

Larger IT projects are often more complex, riskier, and can be derailed by the slightest inadvertence. The reasons behind this could be many complex technologies, resources from multiple regions, mixed stakeholders, higher project impact, etc.

Whatever the reason, such projects require a higher degree of visibility and control to identify problems before they become too large to handle or cause irreparable damage.

Complex projects mean that detailed reports cannot be easily generated due to technical complexity (reporting tools, systems used by the team, capabilities of the tools) and scale (team size, scope, number of requirements).

Solution:

With  PPM, job completion data is produced and verified by the four-eye principle, and all stakeholders can see the same version of data (referred to as real-time business-based data or real-time transaction-based data) in real time according to role permissions.

PPM also supports a high degree of visualization. It provides a bird’s-eye view of the project progress chart and allows clicking on the content of the chart to display its composition. Through layer-by-level query, stakeholders who continue to participate can trust project data, which is different from the data of “The Myth of 90% Complete” in data accuracy and reliability.

2. Collaboration in Workflow

Challenge:

Project work is a collaborative process and if one resource in the activity has a problem or does not clearly understand the activity, he/she will not be able to contribute as much as possible. In small or medium-sized projects, collaboration problems can be solved by relying on regular or ad hoc meetings. However, large projects cannot rely entirely on meetings because doing so is too expensive and too slow.

A 10-person project is easier to schedule regular meetings, but a 500-person project must be scheduled on demand (eg, by iteration or workflow). Another problem is that the larger the project and the more people involved, the greater the chance that meeting members will not be in the same time zone (or even in opposite day and night time zones).

Solution:

PPM has built-in collaboration in the workflow, which not only promotes collaboration, but also has a differentiated effect on work efficiency. There are many project management tools on the market that rely on manual integration of project activity forms to generate project status data, but this approach results in untimely and inaccurate data, and even evolves into different versions of the truth. When different members see inaccurate and inconsistent project data, certainly there are more questions, but these questions are often resolved at higher costs and in a slower way, such as through regular meetings. Project management tools that manually integrate project activity forms are generally not workflow-driven. When new project members are unfamiliar with these workflows, they must ask other members or wait to ask questions during regular meetings.

PPM promotes the accuracy, timeliness and transparency of project status information or workflow information. It makes it clear to each team member what needs to be done as a team, thereby promoting accountability.

3. Unable to access the organization/business unit resource pool

Challenge:

Projects and organizations rely on geographically dispersed people with diverse skills. Each location has multiple human resources/resource managers responsible for resource management. Most of these HR/resource managers rely on stand-alone spreadsheets or emails when managing resources. The results were exactly as expected - latency, inefficiencies, inaccuracies, a mismatch between resource requests and allocations, under/overutilization of resources, etc. Impact - increased project duration, reduced delivery quality, unhappy customers, loss of recurring business, etc.

Solution:

PPM’s function used to create and manage centralized resource pools offers project managers and resource managers full visibility into available resources. With appropriate access rights, project managers and resource managers can match their project requirements with the resources in the resource pool. The necessary triggers for hiring or scaling down resources enable senior management to optimize resource management costs.

4. Lack of understanding of resource skills and capabilities

Challenge:

Project success requires unique skills, abilities and experience. For medium-sized (500 to 5000 employees) to large organizations (over 5000 employees), getting this level of detail is a daunting task. Please do not forget the time it takes to get the "right resources" for the project.

Solution:

PPM is equipped to capture resource skills, certifications, experience, location, cost profiles and other parameters to make resource management easy! Remember that your project costs are closely related to your resource profile.

5. Temporary and Manual Resource Requests and Allocations

Challenge:

The allocation of resources is based on multiple levels of review and approval, according to the size of the organization and the importance of the projects undertaken. Unfortunately, most organizations struggle with ad-hoc and largely manual/email-based approaches to resource requests and approvals. The situation gets worse when resources are shared across multiple projects - the time it takes to allocate resources can become prohibitively long and unpredictable.

Solution:

PPM provides resource request, review, approval and resource allocation, and policy-based notifications can be defined according to various stages of the resource request and allocation process.

6. Ineffective resource utilization assessments

Challenge:

Senior business executives want to ensure the most efficient use of resources - close to 100% is ideal! A common challenge is that one set of resources is staying up late while another set is idle - indicating skewed resource utilization. If your total resource cost is $1 million and your resource utilization is 70%, you are facing a $300,000 wasted cost - imagine the impact on your bottom line!

Solution:

PPM dynamically captures resource utilization levels by resource allocation in projects/portfolios/organizations in real-time in an automatic summary manner, so that project managers and resource managers can achieve perfect visibility and make informed decisions about resources.

7. Governance structure

Challenge:

A large-scale project will encounter many problems. In order to solve them faster, it is necessary to establish a formal governance structure and problem escalation path.

Solution:

PPM users can escalate issues based on the role of the activity responsible person, the reporting structures of the project structure and the organizational chart, and the pre-set escalation rules until they are resolved. The escalation rules can be set to escalate once or more or go through one or more procedures according to different problem types or risk levels. A governance model helps set responsibilities, clear roles, responsibilities, effective issue management and communication for all team members.