Page 335 - Global Project Management Handbook

16-22 MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS

Project life cycle is viewed as a collection of project phases determined by the control
needs of the organizations involved in the project. Consequently, a variety of project life-
cycle models are in use in corporations today, from traditional models such as the waterfall
model to the spiral model to agile models. Project life-cycle phases are composed of logi-
cally related project activities that can be divided into two groups: managerial and techni-
cal activities. The former are activities by which we manage a project; developing the
project scope and constructing the project schedule are typical examples. Technical
activities (often referred to as product management activities) include beta testing, for
example. They are project type–specific and reflect the nature of the project product.
Both managerial and technical activities usually culminate in completion of
deliverables—in the tangible product. Managerial activities produce managerial deliverables
(also called project management deliverables) such as project schedule (often referred to as
the product management process). Technical activities lead to technical deliverables, for
example, a requirements document.
The project management process in successful VGS projects tends to be relatively
standard, with built-in flexibility, and often customized. Relatively standard means that
some structured process is in place to provide a certain level of predictability, to make the
project process to some extent repeatable, and to prevent project management activities
from differing completely from project to project and from project manager to project
manager. Said a VGS project manager, “. . . we had a reasonably mature implementation
of the PLC process. So . . . depending on the size of the team, you can apply [this
process] to a 500-person project; you can apply to a 5-person project. But you have to
scale.” If so, the parts of the project management process that are not standard should be
made flexible to account for the project specifics. Also, often the process is customized
to solve a specific problem, as in the following case. A project lead mentioned:

There is so much involved with getting the development started and working efficiently.
. . . So I’d say [communication] is most important . . . during low level design and develop-
ment kick-off. We had releases where we [had] someone there to coordinate that initial kick-
off of the development cycle. It really saves time, and it gets them productive much quicker.
After that, [we] come back to the United States and work with them [remotely]. But that
face-to-face time at the beginning of the development cycle is critical.

CSF18: Plan for and Control Project and Its Product. In successful VGS projects,

the project management process is used to do the planning and control of the projects, as
well as product management. In particular, such planning and control mostly focus on
project scope, quality, schedule, and risk. Simply put, when the project scope (i.e., deliv-
erables) is planned and defined in detail, its quality is possible to determine, becoming
the foundation for developing the schedule and planning for risk reduction. This becomes
the baseline project plan. Against it is compared the actual status of the project, establish-
ing the difference or variation, finding why it occurs, devising corrective actions to bring
the project back to the baseline plan, and reporting project progress. An example of the
widely popular type of project progress report called the dashboard is shown in Fig. 16.5.
Over all, this is the classic process that all good VGS projects follow. While there is not
much new about it, some of its details deserve attention.
Many successful VGS projects tend to minimize the interdependency of the tasks
assigned to different sites to enable the sites to work as independently as possible.
However, this is often hard to accomplish. One way to reach this task independence is to
use work sites with module-based or phase-based development responsibility and to com-
mit upfront to defining interfaces between the different modules. Prototype development
is a valuable tool that can be used for this purpose.
Successful VGS project organizations often insist on knowing the skill sets of
resources upfront before allocating tasks to the resources. Says an executive who was