Aligning Strategic Business Goals with Project Goals

I have been busy with a new gig creating a Project Management structure using Intuit's Quickbase web service. The project request form is set up as a set of gates that require more work and more information as the project moves through the process. This has helped the company to have a common process for projects, to track projects as they move through the approval process, and to track approved and active projects.

The tool allows you to easily create and modify the form, apply rules to the fields, and control access. We have the ability to store things on the Intuit server or to link to documents in our SharePoint within the firewall. I also set it up to limit edit permission for some fields based on the person's role. Over the five months that we have been using it, it has proven flexible enough to allow changing the entire form layout, adding the off shore development team and their managers, and shifting the information as we change the process flow.

There were a number of things driving the company to set this up and use it. The major reason was the failure to get projects done on time. As is the case in most growing companies, resource assignment and usage was not visible to management. With a number of business development people getting new customers the delivery dates overlapped and created too many urgent projects. These were starting to displace the important projects, and the negative impacts on the Engineering resources were not visible.

Creating the structure and process flow was the easy part. Changing behavior so that the tool is used, people enter the right information in a timely manner, and management shifts from wanting to do everything to limiting the work to what can get done at the right level of quality is the current challenge. Currently we are working through the issues around ranking and comparing marketing (Return on Investment (ROI) focused) projects, with Engineering (process improvement and quality focused) projects, and maintenance (adding and improving data, and implementing fixes focused) projects. All of these are important. The key is balancing all of these as we move forward.



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