Digitization in project management.

In one of my earlier posts this month, I talked of Project management in digitization and the benefits that may arise out of these two. We saw how digitzing service/products can lead to better effeciency in managing projects. Today I will go back to that post and review it from another perspective; how digitization is transforming project management and how these two disciplines are being used to achieve planned benefits in an organization.

There is an increased impact of digitization on project management, project managers and organisations. There are unlimited number of project management tools in the market today, both free and commercial. Digitization of what used to take ages, has made it convinient for project managers to move from the laborious task of documentation and collaboration to concetrate more on management. Gone are the days when projects were managed without any technology. Digitization has brought about new culture trends in organizations making great leaps of transformation success. It has become possible today to initiate projects where the benefit owners/sponsors could be sitting on the other end of the globe, without any problems. In 2018, FIFA managed to introduce the concept of VAR (Video Assisted Referee) in World Cup competition, where matches could be analyzed on real time. This is a concept that started in Netherlands in early 2010 and took time before it’s first implementation. The idea which was initially a dream, took lots of project managers in different parts of the world to get it executed properly. Since it’s inception, there have been improved efficiency in officiating matched. The point is, partial digitization of matches has succedded in bringing benefits to both players, sponsors, officials and other stakeholders involved. There are fewer incidences of incorrect judgement by football officials. The project took cross disciplined teams that were well stacked against solving the recurrent problem of incorrect officiating and the end results was to partially digitize the service.

Digitization is changing project management rapidly and massively than anyone would have thought. This can be attributed to the large number of additional internal digitization of projects that continously get initiated but also because customers have become more tech-savvy today and companies have no choice but orient themselves along he market expectations. This has led to advancement in products digitization in favour of customer-specific procedures. Since a “digitized” administration is generally considered to be more efficient, this is not a problem, at least it is often claimed. The speed is infact so fast that project managers are gasping, trying to catch up with the pace at which things are changing. This puts more projects into risk of not realizing the intended benefits as we will see shortly.

Digitization in project management may lead to disoriented stakeholders especially in large teams. Most projects are often interrelated with other projects within a program initiative. If a project is highly digitized and the

interrelated projects are not, this may lead to inappropriate flow of information which may result in costly adjustments. For instance, an ERP system in a company which makes it possible for the finance, sales and warehouse dept. to discharge their duties may be a good idea. now, let’s suppose that a cargo delivery company offers an interface program for the clients to track their orders and a new project is born. The project manager is bound to cordinate with other project managers in the other departments to ensure a seamless integration with the ERP. Digitizing of such a service may be costly if the end product will be a lousy solution bogging the network down. Rescue measures for the misaligned project will often affect other projects.

This is not to say that digitization is bad. Not at all. It all depends on the project manager’s competence and ability to streamline the process. It is important that I should point out that holistic project and portfolio management with central resource planning is able to maintain an overview, set priorities and enforce them as well as to realize controlled client projects and digitization projects. Such a project and portfolio management with upstream demand management will form the backbone of digitization in project management.

Communication as a tool for effecting deliverables

The power of communication is often understated in a team, yet the results are always crystal clear to the management, stakeholders and beneficiary owners. Today, I will narrate an example of how poor communication led to undesirable results in a project I was once involved in.

Back in the days, I was involved in a software development project, in which I was one of the senior developers aided by external consultants. The software was quite big and was critical for the operations of the company I worked in. In the intiation stages of the project, it was budgeted that the software would take a time frame of 6-8 months and the benefit was identified as customer satisfaction and optimized operations. Truly, the project scope should have been at least one year, but was incorrectly forecasted to take a shorter period. Right from the beginning, things did not go as planned. At this point, I already voiced my concern to the project manager, that developing the software goes beyond coding. This however fell on deaf ears. The days leading to recruitment of the external consultants was done in exclusion, with no formal and concrete knowledge, on which competencies would be required for the project. The project manager would mostly make unilateral decisions and believed that they were in the best interest of the team.

After the consultants were hired, communication went south. The introductory phase of the project to the team was confined to the technical part at a very high level. This not only left the whole team with lots of questions but they also did not know how the technical part was to be integrated with the business part of the solution. The benefits to be realized were not communicated either and there was no communication on how the project was to be managed. The introduction was informally done, as though the whole team belonged to the company and knew the different components that were to be involved in the project. The team members spent more than a month, trying to understand the nature of the project. What made it worse is that the project manager doubled also as the program manager. While he could not formulate the project’s purpose in an articulate way that connects it to the business part, he also consistently gave brief responses when prodded for further information. Matters were even worse because the project manager solely wanted to ensure that no other suggested alternatives saw the light of the day.

In the days that followed, the project team conducted their own ‘start-ups’ to co-ordinate their own progress. The project manager had a micromanagement tendency and would only show up to ask for progress on individual team members, multiple times a day. This increasingly became annoying and team members were losing their patience. The tones became hard and harsh, there were fewer ‘start-ups’ and the cordination came to a halt. No TEAM WORK. Period. This went on for the next 6 months before it was suddenly announced that the projects had to be finalized in 2 weeks time. The consultants’ patience had already run out and they were glad that the contract was coming to an end. At the end of their stay, they left a half baked solution that was not documented and not merged in the repository. And who gets to clean up? Yes, I had to. Of course the project was procastinated to take another 6 months, where I worked alone to breath life to it.

So what went wrong?

Communication went wrong. It was buried long before the project kicked off. This was the golden rule that was forgotten. There was no communication from the portfolio, program and project managers that streamlined the planned benefits with the organizations strategy. The planned benefits were not clearly communicated to the team. Eveyone had a zeal to see the outputs but didn’t realize the building blocks necessary to deliver the outputs.

Secondly the team was not fully and correctly engaged in the execution phase of the project. There was inconsistency and abstraction in the introduction phase of the project. The team was left begging for further explanation but there was unfortunately no forthcoming answers. To spend a whole month trying to understand the project, was a poor sign of bad leadership and lack of communication thereof. This not only strains the budget but it also clearly spells the lack of KPIs in monitoring, measuring, evaluating and reporting on the achieved progress. This should have been an eye opener that something had to be done.

Thirdly, the team was left to conduct their own ‘start-ups’. It is not a bad idea if it is a poor developer’s meeting to discuss the finesse of the adopted architecture and code. However, when the startups are spent on understanding the project, then it is a capital NO. That already is a red flag. Having the project manager doubling as a program manager is also a sign of poor governance structure in the company as the roles overlap each other. It makes it difficult to make transitions and ensure that the planned benefits continously remain a center of focus.

Fourthly, micromanaging the team, makes the team members lose pace on their work. As a project manager it is better to participate in punctual progress reviews and guide the team towards their success. The team members need to understand how their output contributes to the planned benefits so that they know how they impact the success. Had this been possible, it would even have been possible for the emergent benefits to be discovered as well as the threat of disbenefits.

Finally, the project ceased to be relevant, the moment the team was left in a pilot mode with no clear agenda on what they are to develop and relying on shallow information. This was detriemental in keeping the project relevant and aligned to the planned benefit within the provided budget.

In the days that followed, I spend a considerable amount of time, understanding the code from the rest of the team, merging it, testing it and handing the output. Of course this was long after the projected due date and impatient stakeholders being calmed down. Of course there were many factors that could have been made better including but not limited to the project management skills, but communication was the key to resolving the impasse and improving effeciency to deliver the output within the stipulated period.

Hurdles on the backdrop of Ethics and codes in the digital world

It has been quite the norm these days in the businees world, to want to stay ahead of the market population by digitizing services and products. For instance, most companies have launched apps to make it convenient for their customers to access their services. But what does this mean in the legal world? Who is responsible for ensuring that stakeholders are well-informed of the pending changes to be made long before they are implemented? What happens when digitization goes wrong? Who should be held accountable for misused data? It is not always a guarantee that digitization of services and products leads to success contrary to what is wildly believed by the leadership of most companies. Infact, it is reported that most digitization projects end up being discarded in their initial phases due to poor feasibility studies, change in market trends or moral and ethical issues. More often than anticipated, it leads to wasted time, resources and unmet expectations, unless the project was intended for research purposes.

This failure is not entirely to be blamed on the management of an organization but can sometimes be attributed to unobserved morals and poor ethical culture in a company or during the development and management cycle of the product. Market insecurity and failure to follow project management ethical guidelines are some of the reasons why businesses end up costing millions of dollars in lawsuits. It is quite normal that companies spend a fortune to implement a technology and learn how to use it, but later learn that it needs adjustments and even more supporting technology. The end users may not as well have been informed what the collected data is used for, which in some cases may be sold to third party companies without the clients’ consent. This causes mistrust in the public domain and the company looses integrity. This has been witnessed in many occassions, when opinion poll companies give misleading information to influence public opinion.

When there is no transparency and good communication between the team, then the project manager takes a fair share of the blame of their incapacity to instill confidence in the profession. The project management community advocates for responsibility, respect, fairness and honesty as the cores of the foundation. By willingly not informing the program and portfolio managers or the whole team of the actual hurdles that the project may face, then the ethics are compromised. This leads to products that are do not really meet the companys’ strategic goals and objectives and ends up being a costly affair, when later sued by customers or withdrawal of sponsorship.

A recent case study has been the sanction of facebook by US parliament after it was exposed that users’ data were compromised and shared with third party companies. Definitely, this could not have gone undetected for a company of Facebook statue unless there was compromise on the security and integrity of the users’ data. What followed was a massive panic in the market, which led to drop in their shares at NYSE. It led to legal suits which forced them to adjust the company’s approach to data collection, storage, management and usage. Such blunders may be fatal especially for startups which may not have the financial muscle to sustain legal battles and recover their reputation. It is therefore extremely important that PMs observe the code of ethics at any level of product development cycle as it not only safe guards the company but also help them have untainted reputation with a solid integrity.

Depending on the business industry, digitization should be viewed as a continous journey that does not end with project completion but rather follows the product cycle. To realize it’s value benefits, it should be understood to be a journey rather than an event. This can be realized if besides proper budgeting, there is ethical management of projects, programs and portfolios within an organization.

Project management in digitization

Project management drives and keeps digitization alive in the society and in organizations. This change is primarily occassioned by the desire to make a transformation from the current state into a future desired state. Thanks to project management, this can be conducted successfully regardless of the size and nature of the project. There has undeniably been an intimately close relationship between the two, otherwise it would not have been possible to experience rapid digitization of products and services that has been witnessed in the recent past. With better and improved planning, usage of advanced input tools and techniques, digitization has curved a niche for itself in project management. Apparently, this has also led to stakeholders demanding an increased involement in decision making and influencing the outcome of projects. Some of the benefits that this approach may lead to are but not limited to:

Observation of code of ethics by the PM (Responsibility, Respect, Fainess and Honesty). This will help bring control over products and services that previously have been exposed to misuse or unauthorized access. A case in point is the digitization of video services which previously was in the hands of video stores. There have been relentless efforts to ensure that copyrighted materials are not unlawfully accessed or downloaded. With digitization of these services, there have been dramatic decrease in the vice as most people find it convenient and hassle-free to buy videos online or rent them for a small fee and be assured of their security.

Improved transparency: Stakeholders are able to collaborate easily with the project managers and have a better understanding of the decisions made and the status of the projects. Digitization of materials and products reduces unforseen risks, miscommunication and misunderstandings that may arise, whilst creating a better environment to enforce agility in the management of projects. This improved transparency leads to innovative results and a satisfied stakeholder base.

Cost reduction: This is a two-faced factor in most organizations, well embraced by other stakeholders but frowned upon by the employees. As stated in my earlier post, it is nonetheless inevitable and the PM’s should ensure that all stakeholders are well informed on why products or services have to be digitized before commencement. A primary benefit is in reduced costs since it is cheaper and effecient to process information in a figitized platform. Moreover, costly errors that may be caused by humans are significantly reduced.

It also means that any changes in a project, whether compliance, legal or regulatory changes, they can easily be communicated by the PM to all the key players efficiently and faster.

Business strategies are no longer too naive to disengage digitization in their plans if the demand on the services of PMs is to be used as a KPI. Successful businesses have realized the need to nurture the relationship between these two, digitization & project management) in uninterruptedly creating business values so that they can run their projects efficiently and effectively. The only true advantage that an organization can have over it’s competitors is to be ahead with digitization.

Digitization it is. 🙂

The more things change, the more they remain the same

The business world is transforming daily, incorporating new demands from stakeholders and becoming increasingly complex. The pace at which this transformation is taking place is faster than ever witnessed before. With increased network infrastructure and speed, anything and everything can actually be digitized. Companies are struggling to meet the ever growing demand of “delivery convenience” to avoid loosing the market share. One constant thing that never changes is CHANGE itself. The foundation of any successful organization has traditionally been to be ahead of change. This is important in a business environment and is not about to shift.

Digitized security at an airport facility

Apparently, we have all witnessed how in the last decade, security has been digitized to a level never seen before. In the wake of increased acts of terrorism, security has scaled to new technology heights. Project managers entrusted with securing buildings, airports, train terminals and so on consistently strive to drive these changes, aiming to yield both tangible and intangible results. Commercial buildings with good reputation and enhanced security levels have higher market price per square meter yet it will almost be impossible to find a space that is not rented out. Shoppers will feel secure parking their cars and walking in to a mall where there is better video surveillance and can easily wade of attacks before they occur. Such stakeholder demands calls for digitization of services to increase business value creation.

The decision to digitize services and products lie solely with the management, born out of a desire to improve effectiveness and effeciency, but one thing is sure; Nothing remains the same except CHANGE. What could be interesting is to know in which context should digitization be embraced and how should it be effected to meet business objectives and satisfy stakeholders’ expectations? Which risks could affect the strategic goals of an organization? As a PM, how do you increase chances of success in a digitization project?

Digitization it is. 🙂

Understanding the need to digitize

Industrial revolution has always been part of change and is not about to stop in this era. Services are being digitized in every sector and the only reasonable thing to do is to embrace change. Project management plays a crucial role in ensuring that this digitization process is seamless and the end results meet the expectations of the stakeholders. Contrary to the old school of thought that have critically baptized digitization as a cost-cutting effort, it is a catalyst of effeciency and an avenue of increasing through-put.

A practicle example in the aviation industry is the digitzation of flight services. The travellers enjoy the convenience of checking in online and avoiding unnecessary long queues at the airport. Ticket purchasing has also been made easier to a point where someone can visualize the flight’s interior and choose a seat number. It may arguably be stated that it has also led to loss of jobs at the airport, but on the other hand there have been less cases of human errors and airports are able to handle increased capacities. Such changes require meticoulous planning and implementation if they are to be successful.

Such processes have been driven by human desire to change the current state to a better state. A unique combination on knowledge of skills, techniques and tools necessary to manage projects successfully help to make these dream real, where management is keen on enabling business value creation. It is this change that project managers must react to if project management has to have an impact in digitzation. PMs must lead this gospel in propelling efficiency and growth in the industries.

As a PM how do you know when to initiate digitization? What are the key pointers that a process, product or service needs digitization?

How does this process get addressed to other stakeholders?

Digitization it is 🙂