Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations | Info-Tech Research Group

Your team is expected to manage projects off the side of their desks while also balancing heavy operational workloads.
The organization’s project management process is rigorous. While it might have its place on high-risk, high-complexity projects where the outcomes are unpredictable, it seems like a lot of documentation for the typical infrastructure project.
You still need your team to properly plan and manage their projects, but the rigor prescribed by the project management office (PMO) isn’t working. Your team is frustrated by governance requirements that don’t ultimately help to drive outcomes on their projects.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Project management best practices have traditionally neglected the unique planning needs of infrastructure projects, prescribing heavy requirements gathering, scope, and schedule management rigor where increased communication and stakeholder management tactics are in fact what’s needed.
With a high expectation of “get-to-action” (both internally, from infrastructure practitioners, and externally, from requestors and executives), infrastructure project leads can often have an allergy to project planning, and have a tendency to just “get to work.” While this might end up saving the individual practitioner some time, it can end up costing the organization at implementation time in the form of resourcing waste and stakeholder confusion.

Impact and Result

Breakdown the divide between stakeholder groups. Use the training and stakeholder alignment tactics and tools in this research to help promote better project management adherence, while improving relations between project and infrastructure leaders.
Shift the focus of your project managers and leads away from your processes, towards the fulfillment of the project. Provide project staff with a simplified process that will help to define scope, manage risk, communicate outcomes, and feed the portfolio, without drowning them in unnecessary documentation.
Tune your project management tools to fit the task at hand. Configure the Excel-based toolkit at the heart of this research to help anchor and guide your right-sized processes.

Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should right-size your project management processes for Infrastructure, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Right-Size Project Management for Infrastructure and Operations – Executive Brief

1. Develop a project management process for Infrastructure

This phase will help you define and configure a purpose-built project management tool and design a process around it.

Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Prince George's Community College

Guided Implementation

10/10

$2,720

2

The best part was exposure to the templates and explanations on how to best handle selected situations. I didn't have a worst part - but there w... Read More

Chemeketa Community College

Guided Implementation

7/10

N/A

N/A

Best - personable staff, helpful information Worst - applies broadly I just got back from a week away and would have got more out of the call... Read More

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Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

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Guided Implementation 1: Configure a purpose-built project management workbook

Call 1: Scoping call to determine the organization’s current state and to review Info-Tech’s Infrastructure and Operations Project Management Workbook.
Call 2: Develop project initiation and planning practices using the workbook.
Call 3: Cultivate project execution and closure practices for your infrastructure project managers using the workbook.

Guided Implementation 2: Document and communicate your project management processes

Call 1: Formalize your new project management processes in a process document and workflow.
Call 2: Prepare to communicate your new processes and to train project managers.

Author

Travis Duncan

Contributors

3 anonymous contributors

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