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The Key to Successful IT Project Management
Continued from page: 1
Adeesh Sharma, Jasmine Desai and Vishnu Anand
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Dealing with attrition
When we look at the human aspect of implementations, an alarmingly high rate
of attrition seems to be the biggest concern. Not that companies have not worked
a way around this issue. We see a slew of innovative solutions being tried. Some
companies consider knowledge sharing amongst peers a must-have weekend activity.
Such an initiative, they feel, ensures that employees at different levels of the
hierarchy trickle down information to their immediate subordinates. This also
enhances the motivation to learn new technologies and get updated on the latest
trends. Similar discussions are undertaken with other partners and service
providers to ensure homogenous mapping of information. There are companies that
initiate similar projects at different locations, just to have a failsafe option
ready in case a team at a particular location quits. It also helps to share your
business growth plans with your team members and associates to keep them
motivated and pitch in with additional resources as and when the need arises.
Another idea is to rotate employees across challenging assignments to improve
skills and keep them excited. However, keep your second string of leaders ready
just in case your team quits en masse!
What has changed in the IT
landscape in recent months in terms of IT deployments?
We find consensus amongst clients on the fact that IT can no longer be
considered a support function. Instead, it must contribute directly to
business value by driving innovation, growth and revenue. Clients are
increasingly building necessary IT processes and skills required to
implement and manage an IT environment capable of satisfying their
organization's business goals. From an IT infrastructure standpoint we see a
growing demand for server consolidation, energy-efficient data centers,
unified communications solutions, managed services, business continuity and
security across all industries.
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Bhaskar S
Anand
Country Executive, Integrated Technology Service, IBM India/South Asia |
Where are CIOs of new-age industries such
as retail, real estate and healthchare most likely to go wrong? Any thumb
rules they can follow?
The CIOs should ensure that their infrastructure is scalable, they
should provide a solution-oriented, where they get one vendor to provide an
end-to-end solution, instead of chasing different vendor for different
components,
We find clients increasingly channelizing
their investments towards broader business challenges like growth, expansion
and profitability. Non-traditional competition coupled with global market
forces require companies to find new streams of revenue, centralize their
services and build strategic partnerships. At IBM, we enable clients to
effectively succeed in this landscape.
One of the biggest challenges that CIOs
face with their IT implementation partners is ensuring timely delivery of
products or solutions required by an IT project. How do you combat this?
Strong project management, project governance, and adherence to
processes are some of the key areas that CIOs need to relentlessly focus on.
This is where we see some doing better than the others. A well-defined SOW
can help address this to a great extent. It is a very important document and
a lot of attention needs to be paid on it to ensure that a CIO's
expectations throughout the lifecycle of the implementation are well-met by
the IT partner.
Is there any message you'd like to give to
the CIOs and IT project heads of enterprises?
CIOs should make their management view clear to all that IT as a
business-enabler would ultimately help the organization grow its business.
They should also ensure that they have the right IT solutions in place that
would help mitigate all kinds of risks likely to arise in the business.
Plus, they should provide efficient and optimized IT solutions to end-users
in the organization, that run smoothly on an everyday basis. |
A sore point echoed by almost all companies, and one that showcased an
increased reliance on people rather than processes, was the lack of proper
documentation of processes. And even in companies where it was duly maintained,
regular updates was an area of grave concern. This means if the main people
involved in a large and complex implementation leave, the viability of the
entire project could be under threat. Therefore, it makes sense to follow
processes that are people independent and where you can easily slot-in new
employees in case the need arises. It also helps to keep documents in places
where they are easily accessible to all and keep proper security checks to
ensure that there is no scope for redundancy or confusion.
Yet another set of respondents believe in keeping track of each and every stage
of a project and maintaining regular lists of the positives and negatives, so
that they can nip the evil bud before it could blossom into a crisis. This also
helps in keeping a regular check on the assignments being done by different sets
of people and take proactive measures wherever required. Also, the top
management could take time off to sensitize the team on the impact of their
actions on a client's business.
What's happening on the IT
implementation front across different types of industries? What kinds of IT
implementations are hot or in demand these days?
There is lot of focus on enterprise-wide digitization. Traditionally
people would have implemented IT for doing their accounting, balance-sheet,
payroll etc. There is also a broad implementation of enterprise-wide
connectivity technology.The next step
of concern once you start connecting different parts of your organization is
the security and authenticity of data transfer. Associated with that, there
is also a growing emphasis on Business Continuity Process and Disaster
Recovery.
What are the sunrise industries, like
Retail, Healthcare, Real-Estate, etc doing in IT?
In the process of managing retail chains, focus is extremely high on
logistics operation. In healthcare industry, there are two kinds of players.
First are the providers who actually administer healthcare (doctors,
hospitals, pharmacy), secondly there are healthcare players and insurers.
However, this industry has not really progressed compared to outside. There
is no automation here when it comes to transaction between these two
sectors. These sectors need to pay a lot of attention to automation.
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Satish Joshi
Executive Vice President
and CTO, Patni |
What advice would you like to give to CIOs
of these sunrise industries for their IT implementations?
For retail industry, a greater emphasis needs to be on logistics
automation, automation of the operation of the retail outlet, the supply
point etc. What they have'nt done yet and should be doing at the earliest is
investing in CRM. Retail outlets in India still do not use IT to understand
their customers well. CRM is equally important in healthcare industry. In
technology jargon it is called 'unified customer view,' which is knowing
each and every customer and his buying preferences.
Change management is the biggest worry for
any CIO. What advice would you have for ensuring a smooth transition to a
new technology?
Change management becomes an unsolvable problem in couple of situations.
When a business process is badly designed no amount of automation or
technology can help. So, even if the business process architecture has been
correctly designed, but one does not get the people who are supposed to
execute it efficiently, then change management would become a big problem.
Another critical thing is to bring about the change is a very
non-threatening manner. The end users have to be educated about individual
benefits and to the enterprise after the deployment. |
Needless to add, retaining the right manpower is always the best option for
an organization. It serves well to always keep all channels of communication
open and maintain an atmosphere of healthy camaraderie amongst colleagues. Apart
from proper motivation, it's very important to dole out salaries and perks that
are in tune with the current market trends.
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