Getting Predictable Assessment

Overview

We often hear that during the last two weeks of a project things suddenly become unpredictable and chaotic. Understandably, teams want to know why their projects are consistently late and unpredictable.

For the most part, the areas that wield the most power when it comes to influencing team performance are Process, Roles & Responsibilities and Metrics.

Getting Predictable Assessment is a week (or two) long workshop designed to evaluate your organization around these all-important areas. Our goal is to help you safely improve your defined Process, Roles & Responsibilities and Metrics in order to reduce rework, delays, incorrect estimates, unclear status and unpredictable performance.

How it Works

Based on your performance improvement goals, we make recommendations on how to close the gap between where you are now and where you’d like to be.

Our first step is to explore your end-to-end methodology from the discovery phase through deployment. Do you have a consistent approach to your methodology? If not, where are the inconsistencies? Does the methodology create obstacles or does it efficiently solve business needs?

Next, we examine how the organization defines and executes roles and responsibilities. Are all the key roles accounted for? Does everyone approach these roles consistently? If your organization has four different project managers, are there extreme differences in how they go about their jobs? Do they yield similar results? The third area we look at is metrics. How does your organization measure success? Are there metrics that define progress and realized value in terms that make sense to all project stakeholders? Is it based on business milestones and objectives?

Once these three steps are complete, we can begin to identify the specific areas of your organization in need of a tune up. Often these areas are interdependent. For example, if you tweak your processes, you may also need to review your roles and responsibilities to make sure the right heads are still in the right hats.

The Client Experience

Sometimes the improvement areas we uncover may surprise the team. However, once opportunities for improvement are identified, the entire team usually rallies to remove the barriers that prevent them from performing at their very best.

During an assessment, some team members become nervous about what the assessment may say about them. Our process is not about determining what is right or wrong. Our focus is on what is effective and what is getting in the way. Or, in other words, we assess specific organizational processes, roles, and metrics — not individual team members.

Once an assessment is complete, teams always feel they’ve participated in a safe and fair process to discuss what works and what doesn’t. From the executive point of view, obstacles and inconsistencies at both the line and organizational levels are finally identified.

A maturing organization has many opportunities to improve the efficiency of its teams. The changes we recommend do not have to be intrusive and, more often than not, both IT and business stakeholders are relieved to address these thorny areas.