Mike Wyatt's Weblog

Project Managers - Skillsets Required

I received several comments regarding the need for vendor project managers from yesterdays posting. Unfortunately my comment tracking is not working properly so I cannot respond to the posters. Here are the points made and that I fully agree with and support:

1. Both the vendor project managers and the customer project managers should (*must*) attend at a minimum the introductory technical training on the product or products being implemented. For example, a PM with WebSSO experience may use incorrect assumptions or design biases based on previous experiences and not fully understanding the capabilities and boundaries of the provisioning product being implemented. Having a project manager that simply makes sure the project artifacts are up to date and the billable time and expense are entered may be important for financial management, those contributions have little to do with driving a project to successful completion.

2. Architecture is critical. Frankly I was surprised that readers somehow thought that I put project management at a much higher priority level than architecture. That's not the case at all. That said, the best architecture in the world will be next to impossible to implement without strong project governance including project management. I'll blog more about architecture in a future post. With direct experience with many provisioning and compliance solution rollouts as well as managing a team that has overseen hundreds of deployments, I can state emphatically that when projects fail they fail primarily due to either poor expectation setting during the sales cycle, lack of commitment by the customer to implement the required business process changes, lack of customer staff commitment due to other priorities and poor project governance and management. Yes, I have seen a few projects that have failed or at least struggle due to poor architecture and other that do not have the desired performance characteristics from a transaction throughput perspective but poor architectures are NOT the primary reason projects take years to rollout and don't meet intial expectations.

Finally, this is my first experience of having my content critiqued publically in the blogosphere. Check out James McGovern's response to my previous posting. It isn't surprising that an Enterprise Architect would put architecture as a higher priority critical success factor than project governance. While James is correct that any analyst will provide the feedback on the need for project management / governance, the point James misses is that despite the "common knowledge / common sense" understanding of the importance of project management and governance being importing, in practice it is surprisingly UNCOMMON.

James has a number of other comments related to fine grained entitlements and such. They are good topics to cover and I will be happy to respond in future postings. Feel free to email me directly (I'll update my template soon) at michael.wyatt@sun.com

Posted at 08:36AM Dec 19, 2006 by Michael Wyatt in Identity Management  |