The secret, not really unknown, of the success of a project is a good planning. But often you realize that there is an enormous difficulty in getting a plan sustainable, manageable and consistent with the vision of the project.

But what are the causes of this serious lack? Again, often who has to manage the project has a good operational experience but a big lack of project management skills; to manage a project in an excellent way what is needed is a deep knowledge of the project scope and the management tools.

It is not uncommon to find project plans managed on PowerPoint. This software is used to make presentations and so it is not the best tool to support the governance of a project. The plan is shown on a slide, the delays are added again and again and there is no comparison with the baseline, in essence there is no prediction, no real operational planning but only reactions to any critical issue noted. Delays hang over and threaten the success of the project.

Some more advanced project managers use a spreadsheet; Spreadsheets are well equipped with various macros that simulate a project plan. In these cases, the project plan is more under control but again we cannot speak of Project Management. The scenarios “if then” are not manageable, neither the resource planning and their commitments.

Finally we come to the most common solution: the use of a project management tool such as Project (Microsoft versions or freeware). The role of the project manager is a craft and complex job, though often the management of important projects in terms of effort and budget, it is left to improvisation, and to good luck.

The use of a proper tool becomes dangerous, or even harmful, if not based on solid conceptual basis and knowledge. The planning fails and with it, with great probability, also the project. So to use a tool of this kind one must have a thorough knowledge of the techniques and methods of planning. MS project, while having separate licenses, belongs to the Office suite.

The problem is that using a word processing program or a spreadsheet is often the source of many problems. If the software is used in a wrong way the plan becomes dangerously unreliable or even misleading.

The training path for a project manager should then be directed to the best practices of project management compliant with recognized standards (PMI, Prince2 etc.) And it must foresee a practical implementation of these concepts with the use of proper project management software. With this basic training the project manager will be better able to actually predict the future of our project, although our Gantt will not be the infallible crystal ball of a powerful magician, it will allow us to better manage our projects.

Andrea Gribaudo

We are at the end of an ERP system implementation project, a month until we go live, our system integrator is taking the final steps to fine-tuning the new system, tests are coming to the end, the migration of historical data is ready to be performed, the interfaces with legacy systems have been tested and they work as expected. However two important activities still remain to realize, they seem to have nothing in common apparently be but indeed they are deeply linked, we are speaking about training and user profiling.

One of the most common mistakes is to consider user profiling a merely technical activity and, in fact, when it is considered in this way, it just becomes a necessity to perform just to go live.

In these circumstances, the profiles are made with wide access to the system features to minimize the risk of continuous help desk calls caused by access problems; the constraints regarding to the segregation of duties, and even the needs to limit the data access are not considered at all.

So the engineering of the roles in the system has not be done, but this course of action is just a delay of this kind of activity as once the new system has gone live, soon we will achieve that the re-engineering of roles must be done quickly, (once again!!) and maybe upon recommendation of the internal audit with all the related pressures.

I spoke about the relationship between training and user profiling, as also the identification of training needs answers to the same basic simple question that is the basis of preparation of the authorization roles: Who does what?

The starting point is once again organizational and is not an IT concern. Realizing roles without proper process mapping is like trying to start from the roof in the construction of an house. The solid foundation is the identification, within defined processes, of the activities to be carried out into the system by an “operational job”. The operational job is just an authorization tool to define the proper access to the proper people.

The formalization in RACI, or RAPID, matrices allow a faster verification of the authorizations by the process owner. The use of authorization objects (as organizational units, type of material, cost centers ect.), enables the implementation of the organization to work in the different functions and/or the ability to govern access privileges to data considered “sensitive” by the company.

The next step, that seems apparently easy and immediate, is to associate these privileges with the names and surnames of people. The list of users accessing the system will have to be associated with the different “operational jobs”. The authorization specialist will create general roles to minimize redundancies and duplication of operations; the declination for authorization objects will be done through a derivation of roles from the general ones. In this way any subsequent changes will be applied to the general roles and the derived ones will “inherit” these changes.

Once the names have been associated with different operational jobs we could immediately understand that to design training courses targeted for users that will operate the new system will be a very easy task.

The last step that should not to be overlooked is testing these roles. In some situations, the training will be used also to perform these tests, this approach is highly discouraged for several reasons, the first is that it could cause considerable drawbacks in the training delivery in case of any malfunctions and the second is that we can give the perception to the users that nothing is working properly with the risk of spreading rumors about inefficiency of the new system.

The project manager should always take into account this two responsibilities: to ensure the correct access to users and to guarantee the proper segregation of duties to the organization.

Andrea Gribaudo