The Project
Postmortem
The final task has been completed, and there’s a collective
sigh of relief from all of the parties. But, sorry, you’ve still got a touch of
work left to go on the project. Once all of the implementation tasks in the
critical path have been completed, a project manager and the project team must
do a few chores to inspect their own work. This time should be worked into the
PND and shouldn’t take very long at all, maybe 1 to 3 percent of the total
project time.
Reviewing for
Quality
The primary task that you personally must be involved with
is to inspect the quality of the project. Of course, throughout the
implementation you will be sampling the project and confirming the quality, but
at completion you need to experience or test the project deliverables and
confirm that they are the required deliverables to complete the project. You
want to perform a final inspection before the project customer sees the
deliverable. The point of this inspection is to correct the mistakes that may be
present before the customer sees the deliverables during its scope verification
process.
To do this, re-create the experience that a typical user would
have when using the deliverables. If your project produced an application, use
it. If the project was to implement a network, log into a workstation and test
connections, print to a few printers, and access some network resources.
Evaluate the product from the end user’s point of view and review the results to
determine if the project deliverables are acceptable, as seen in Figure 12-4.
If you encounter problems, address them immediately so that
the responsible parties can react to them and find a solution. At this point of
the project, if you’ve done your job, there shouldn’t be any major surprises.
You may encounter a quirk that can be quickly addressed and solved, but overall,
things should be smooth and the customer happy.
Assessing the
Project Deliverables
Once you’ve completed the final inspection and the quality
of the work is acceptable and in alignment with the expected project
deliverables, you can enjoy the sense of satisfaction that comes from the
success of completing a project. There is a wonderful feeling that comes with
taking a project from start to finish. The project is now part of the company’s
life, and you helped get it there.
Examining the
Project’s Worth
Now that the project is complete, you may want to calculate
the worth of the project. This activity involves a bit of math magic, but it
allows you to predict the overall usefulness and profitability of your
implementation. You calculate the time saved, the new sales earned, and the
productivity gained to create a gross value of the project. The expense of the
project, the total cost of the implementation, is subtracted from the gross
value of the project to learn the project’s net value. From here you can create
formulas to predict the value of the project over the next six months, the next
year, or beyond.
Don’t get too excited by the math, however, because eventually the
infrastructure processes of the company will absorb your deliverables as a
matter of doing business. What happens is that your project’s deliverables, the
wonderful things that they are, will fall victim to the Law of
Diminishing Returns. In other words, the twenty minutes you take out of a
process will be consumed by some other activity.
The Law of Diminishing Returns, sometimes
called the Law of Variable Proportions, is a rule of
economics that grew from Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population,”
written in 1798. The law states that if one factor of production is increased
while other factors remain constant, the overall returns will eventually
decrease after a certain point, as demonstrated in Figure 12-5.When that point is reached is difficult to
say without serious analysis given to the process of a company.
Another way of viewing the Law of Diminishing Returns is to
imagine a cornfield that needs to be harvested. If you were to continue to add
workers to the field, each new worker you added would have less to do than the
worker added before him because there is less and less corn to harvest as
additional labor is added.
To apply this law to a technical implementation, imagine a new
application that allows workers to be more productive when entering human
resource forms and typical paperwork. Before the application, the workers had to
manually enter the forms into Microsoft Excel, save the file, and e-mail it to
the human resources department. The wonderful folks in human resources would
open the e-mail, open the file, and merge it into some master file.
Your application streamlines the process through an ASP web page
and pumps the information into a database. Now when users within the company
need to complete insurance forms, request days off work, request new ID badges,
or deal with any other HR-related issue, they can complete the process through
your company’s intranet.
The productivity of this application allows the processes to be
faster, better, and easier to complete. However, this level of productivity will
not affect other areas of the workers’ roles in the organization exponentially.
It will allow for additional time to complete other work, but the additional
time gained does not continue to grow on, and on, and on. Eventually the
productivity reaches a plateau, and the Law of Diminishing Returns reigns.
All of the project’s worth may not be measured in immediate
finances. The success of the project may create a feeling of satisfaction, new
pride in the company, and general happiness throughout the company driven by the
benefit of the new technology. For example, a project that replaces an outdated
and lagging technology with a new, proven technology can ease headaches and spur
productivity.
Third-Party
Review
A final method to measuring the worth of a project’s
deliverables to an organization is to call upon a third party to analyze the
before-and-after processes of a company. For example, imagine an implementation
of a wireless Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in a manufacturing environment.
The goal of this project is to shorten the process a forklift operator must use
to deliver a palette of the product to a delivery truck.
In the before example, workers pick up palettes of the goods the
company manufactures and then move the palettes to the trucks that will deliver
the product to the stores and merchandisers. The problem this project resolves
is that workers, after dropping off their palettes in the delivery trucks, would
have to drive the forklift back to a central base to get their next assignment
of the product to be loaded on the trucks.
The project created a wireless PDA device that will send a message
to the forklift operator on the floor to instruct him on the next product he is
to pick up and deliver to a specific truck. The process has been improved; the
worker does not have to return to the central base. Additionally, the palettes,
which are wrapped in plastic, have a bar code that the worker can scan from the
forklift to log the goods that are actually placed onto the delivery truck. All
steps within the process are logged and can be analyzed from the start of the
process to the end of a workshift.
A third party could evaluate the productivity before the
implementation and after. The process analysis would allow the consultants to
track the amount of product moved per workshift to predict the average amount of
productivity before and after the implementation. That information can then be
analyzed and tweaked, and the original project deliverables can be adjusted in a
new project to streamline the process again.
To complete the project, the information gathered by the
completed process would be analyzed and reviewed internally or externally. The
review would allow the company to see a true ROI and productivity gained on the
implementation. Far too often, organizations don’t invest in the time to
validate the promised benefits of the project. The verification of the benefits
is needed not only to show the return on investment for the current project, but
to afford success in future projects.
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