Wish You Happy New Year !!!

New goals to achieve our vision .....
New strategies, to achieve our goals...
New methods to thrive new projects....
New models to build up effective teams ....
New ways to use resources effectively.....

New Year will give new start to all these things....

But not only limited to plans, but also to achieve measurable results

SCRUM and Implementation Issues by it's founder Mr. Ken Schwaber

Project Management in Consultancy Projects

Deliverables of a consultancy projects are different to deliverable of a Development projects, due to the fact that the key deliverables of consultancy projects deliver documentation including recommendation, best practices, assessment reports & findings. Unlike in development projects, most consultancy projects dos not deliver any workable product. Due to this reasons, some of the steps such as complex software coding tasks, Software Quality Assurance (SQA), debugging, implementation & user training are not relevant for consultancy projects. But when doing an IT strategy design, requirement gathering and analysis, high level architecture design, documentation and quality assurance will play a key role in this context.

The challenges we face in managing consultancy projects are very much varied than the other projects due to some of the inherited features of IT consultancy projects.

Following are some of the typical challenges face in managing consultancy projects
• Scope management
• Expectation management
• Stakeholder management
• Cost Management

Below is a brief discussion about Scope Management in the context of consultancy projects.

For any kind of a project, scope management is and important aspect and in cases where there is poor management of scope will most likely to pave way for budget & time overrun. Satisfying different rationalities and expectation of the stakeholders can be difficult. And in most instances the expectation of different stakeholders can be contradictive and sometimes may not be align with project objectives or organizational objectives. Specifically in consultancy projects, it is vital to analyze more than one industry verticals or several business entities together and due to the fact it’s more difficulty to demarcation of the boundary line for the project. When it comes to the BPR (Business Process Re-Engineering) or GPR (Government Process Re-Engineering) related projects, the existing processes and systems can be very vague or sometimes tightly coupled. In such situation, it is important to separate tightly coupled processes to several processes and recognize processes which is relevant to the project scope. But, what will it do for the processes which are beyond our boundary line?. Can we ignore those?. Ignoring is not the best practice to go ahead , what we can do is, provide specification for these processes and emphasizes relationship with processes which are in the project scope. This will help to maximize the efficiency of our project outcome and help in the improvement of future projects.



What will be the situation if we totally ignore such processes from our project scope?. This is one of the reasons for most of the project failures in the implementation stage or after. If we consider a consultancy for ERP implementation project ( e.g. Supply chain management system), what will be the impact of above ignorance. For example, in the supplier management, we don’t take into consideration the impact it can bring to Accounts Receivable system (AR) when a particular supplier becomes customer of the same business. The reason is, usually supply chain management system directly associate with Accounts Payable system (AP), and it will lead not to realize the above special scenario.

By looking at this simple example, we are able to understand the importance of thorough analyzing of project scope, with respect to every process. Even though if it is more likely to be outside of the intended project scope.

Why this factor is much more important in a consultancy project. The reason is, software development & implementation task is wholly depend on the outcome/recommendation of the consultancy project (BPR, GPR or Requirement Analysis)

Enterprise Architecture & Modelling

When you read magazines, books or any other articles on the web, you may have come across these buzzwords numerous times. Enterprise, Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Architect, Business Modelling, Enterprise Resource Planning and more or less similar words.

What exactly is this enterprise architecture and enterprise modelling? Why modern businesses are keen on these emerging topics?. Were these hot topics discovered recently? What are the popular enterprise architecture frameworks?

With this article, I’m hoping to briefly discuss some of these hot topics.

Enterprise architecture is simply about how the modern business is made up with several technical and business components, how these components interact with each other to accomplish a common goal. (Enterprise vision).
In more formal definition Wikipedia states “Enterprise Architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model” (Wikipedia, May 2009).

Considerable amount of business organizations are fed up with procuring legacy IT systems, and custom offshore development and in-house development projects, since these projects are unable to deliver expected results at the end of the project. If you analyse the success rate of IT project implementation or custom development projects, considerable amount of projects failed due to various reasons including poor analysing of business requirements and unstructured business processes. In addition, today’s business owners are demanding high ROI and other rewards through IT enabled business model. Hence, business researchers are working towards finding an IT enabled solution(s) to increase productivity and performance of the business. Because of this, various researches have come up with several models and frameworks to create a more solid IT enabled business model to having better adoptability to agile world.

Due to the recent economic downturn, the necessity towards high performance business models, methodologies and frameworks, which can re-engineer under performing businesses, were increased. Priorities for such improvement initiatives are becoming top of the agenda of today’s CEO’s and CIO’s.

The concept of Enterprise architecture and modelling has being in the industry for last decades but has become more popular due to the fact that ore and more business leaders are becoming IT savvy. Due to the high demand of IT oriented business leaders, and the new routes opened up for young technical professionals to become entrepreneurs during the last two decades were the thinking pillars who opened up eyes of researches to find out innovative models to incept the 21st century business enterprises.

There are various Enterprise architecture frameworks and other related tools widely used in enterprise modelling are being evolved throughout the last decade. Out of these Enterprise modelling frameworks “The Zachman Framework™” (http://zachmaninternational.com) , The TOGAF(http://www.opengroup.org), IDEF5 (Integrated DEFinition Methods - http://www.idef.com ) are widely used in the industry.


I would like to talk about more of this TOGAF™ & The Zachman Framework™ in more detail through my future blog posts.

How to realign organizational strategies to survive in economic turbulence time?

The present economic turbulence situation has created various challenges as well as opportunities for business organizations. As a result of this crisis situation in the business environment, many organizations are taking preventive measures to cut down their costs by downsizing operations which results in retrenching staff, cutting down on additional facilities, reducing work time, cut off employee benefits such as allowances & increments and many other strategies to survive in this economic downturn .

Can only cost reduction and other shrinking approaches help organizations to survive and rescue from this situation? It’s a wise idea to think about it and seek alternative approaches to bring an organization out from the crisis situation. How about re-align the organizational business strategies to drive the organization in to new direction. Will it be help to convert an organization to a healthy state?. Someone can argue that it is a high risk approach in period of recession. But, economic crisis is also a cyclic incident can happen over a period of time & then back to usual progressive state. Most of the business/or products also following the similar cycle by having a continuous/alternative growth from it’s startup stage to maturity stage and then go in a gradual declining stage.





How can a business overcome above situation? What strategies can be implemented to avoid the declining stage? What will happen if introduce an alternative/enhanced product or change the business direction of the organization? Mostly it will change the life cycle into similarly as follows, if the management takes the right decision at the right time.





Why can’t an organization have this re-alignment/reengineering approach to make a turbulent business environment to more stable one?

Let’s think about new business opportunities which can generate over the crisis situation. For example, what are the possible opportunities available for a project based IT organization?

Instead of looking for new IT projects using the traditional way, organization can introduce options for client to have a Re-engineering project (BPR) to the client organization after detailed business analysis to eliminate wastage & improve productivity. After this analysis project, the analysis report can contain various recommendation & improved procedures including IT Solutions. This will ultimately create a new business opportunity to the service providing organization.

Why organization cannot change the organizational product strategy to develop an innovative system to measure & monitor power consumption of office equipments, rather than propose to replace the existing asset management system?

What will be the impact, if propose a new marketing survey solution to the client instead of proposing a traditional advertising web site?

If an organization really uses their “Think Tank” and the creativity of the staff, it may explore lucrative new business opportunities in the similar way.

Only difference is the way we look at the problem, the way we understand it & the reality, if we are capable enough to tackle it properly, it may ended up with making this economic turbulence time into a business paradise.

Meritocracy Over Tenurocracy Through Agile Approach

Some decades ago most of the public sector organizations used a very bureaucratic approach to reward their employees based on the seniority (tenurocracy), based on the wealth (plutocracy), based on family connections (nepotism) or based on the class (oligarchy). Due to the rapid expansion of the private sector organizations & concept of MBO (Management by Objective) most of the senior managers tends to follow a very result oriented approach named Meritocracy to reward their employees. This became very highly prominent in the modern business society to gain competitive advantages in the agile market. As a result of this, organizations are demanding highly dynamic, flexible, creative & talented professionals who posses quick learning skills with adaptability to fast pacing environment. Specially, agile management approach provides more democracy to the team members to utilize their creative talents to achieve the project objectives. Among the team members, there can be certain people who show leadership and imitativeness. Agile methodology like SCRUM will provide unique provision to these types of professionals to become scrum leaders in the future projects.

Due to the lack of hierarchy among the agile team, every team member will have an equal opportunity to express his or her ideas & implement the most feasible ones. Such opportunities will definitely help to encourage the team members and create good role model through scrum leaders & lead to build the trust that any team member can become a leader if they developed their skills & commitments.

The fact that we can realize is that the tenurocracy will have little room in the modern business society but creative talents & result oriented approach will always be rewarding & recognized by the senior management.