Well begun is half done. With SAP Project Launch services from Great Landings Consulting, you are off to great start. We will help you launch your project or program with all the right plans and procedures in place. Doing so will energize the team, build confidence with your stakeholders and keep the project(s) in control form day one.
A Good Master Plan – Timeline and Estimates
Are you confident your timeline and budget are sufficient to deliver the promised scope? If so, you probably have a robust document defining a baseline scope in more than one dimension (business process, application function, customizations, organization, geography, etc.). You likely used a combination of art and science to create an estimation model to support the staffing plan. Responsibilities between major project participants (company, systems integrator, software vendor, etc.) have been discussed and agreed. You have acknowledged and documented risks and uncertainties about things that cannot yet be known.
An Accelerated Workshop Schedule
Design workshops are key to getting to a working design with business involvement quickly. This is also a time for the team to start bonding and trusting each other. Workshops typically require lots of orchestration and logistics management. Expenditures are large. An integrated workshop schedule helps set expectations on who needs to be where when to get the most out of the work sessions. It enables conference rooms to be booked, flights to be scheduled in advance, and participants to block their time.
A Prescriptive Work Plan
A master plan will give confidence, but it doesn’t tell team leads and team members what to go and do. For that, you need a work plan. The best work plans are created as a team collaboration with very strong direction from the project manager. The goal is to get to alignment on how the work will be done. Lack of collaboration will lead to lots of excuses why the plan can’t work. Lack of project manager leadership will lead to a mess.
A work plan should at least span the current project phase or the next sprint. As it defines the scope of work, it should be under change control. And, last but not least, there must be a simple way to collect, update and report status from the work plan.
PMO Procedures and Cadence
Plan and status management is just one of the many key PMO procedures that must be in place to get a project in control. The Project Launch is the right time to kick off these procedures, so they must be defined and ready to communicate at a project launch event. The project meeting cadence for team, status and leadership meetings should also be ready to go at Project Launch time.
Project Governance
SAP and other ERP projects and programs have unique decision making structures. Governance models can range from simple, standard-looking (Project Leader – reporting to steering committee) to complex but elegant (separation of business/solution decisions from project management decisions). What model fits your organization and project scale?
Need help?
If you want to increase your confidence of a good launch of a great project and would like some help, make an appointment for a free, no-obligation consultation or drop us a line. Great Landings Consulting has the experience to help you get off to a great start.