A Discussion about Content

Program Management. Its utterance often brings disdain from those who just don’t comprehend what it means.

Often when you look at large projects the first thing that gets cut is the project management costs, only to find out later that the project has come of the rails, the first thing they do is blame the poor sap who has 4 jobs plus 1/8th of his time dedicated to the project management responsibilities of the ECM project only to  fire him, and replace him with 1/8 of an new FTE, all in hopes that the project will magically be brought back on track.

What I find so darn interesting, is that companies will spend millions on ECM software, but won’t invest in the management to ensure its success. I mean if your going to spend that much on the software why cut corners on the implementation?

The follow table from Doculabs articulates this in the percentage of management spend vs. the percentage of failure.

Project Management Spend as a % of total Budget - Doculabs

Interesting that when a company spends 3% of the total project budget on management the failure rate is 50% but when you raise the investment in management to 10% the failure rate drops to 10%.

Executives, really need to ask themselves when embarking on the implementation of an ECM platform do I want to be successful.  (We will discuss success in later posts)

I’ve mentioned it before but the implementation of an ECM platform needs to be considered a Program.  There are far to many facets for an implementation to be handled like a single threaded development project.

When you deploy a solution for the enterprise, you will have more work than you will know what to do with.  As an example from my days at York International where I deployed Documentum across the enterprise, one of the factors that struck me was the number of project request I received in a given day.  One of the first things that had to be implemented was a demand planning solution to help prioritize and manage the expectations of the various business units whom were requesting projects.

Then there is the infrastructure management, the upgrade planning, the various system integrations, the unit testing and the support.

Also there was the actual requirements gathering for the various projects,  multiple work streams needed to be managed, development environments needed to be managed, along with staging and obviously production.

Case and Point:

How do you manage like project requests? This is always an interesting discussion. So let me tell you a little story.  I was consulting for a huge firm not so long ago where I was preparing a road-map vision for them.  During the interviews of the business units what i found was several of the business units had the same exact problem.  In this case it was the management of contracts and related collateral.  Sales needed them, Consulting needed them, Legal needed them, purchasing needed them, and on and on.  Now when you stand at arms length from the company you see that you can solve this with a single solution.  However when your up close and personal you realize that each of those business units was funding a project to manage contracts independently of the other departments.  In this case it would have meant 6 different projects, probably 3 different technology solutions, and none of them would have been to inter-operate between the other departments.

There are many things that this example illustrates, but for the sake of this post, had the customer not had the foresight to implement the proper program management and project planning events, this would have gone unnoticed and the company would have incurred a significant cost.

Fundamentally setting up a program management solution is paramount to the successful implementation of ECM.  Setting up a Center of Excellence (COE) or a dedicated PMO for these implementation vastly improves the odds of success.