Congratulations, you’ve just been asked to lead a big reengineering project. Huge..with very significant impact and exposure. Now what?
Like many things, successful projects are dependent on the pre-work…..the work you do before the project is formally underway. This can sometimes seem bureaucratic, and a waste of time, but if you can’t answer the following questions, the team is guaranteed to struggle. I went through Rummler-Brache training…it was one of the best programs for reengineering.The List for Defining the Project:
- What is the critical business issue, problem, opportunity?
- What are the critical process issues that will be the focus of the project?
- What is the name of the critical process?
- What are the process outputs?
- What is the first step, and what is the last step?
- Who is the receiver of the outputs and what is the initiating process input?
- What is the range of inputs?
- Who are the suppliers of the inputs?
- What other processes touch this process?
- What are the key performance measures, current level of performance, required level of performance and by when?
- Who are the key stakeholders? How will they be involved? How are they affected?
- Roles and Responsibilities: name, function, and role?
- High Level Project Plan: Phases, dates, requirements of the team.
- Project Support Requirements
- Risk analysis and management.
- Project constraints and assumptions
When you first start out, you’ll want to try and answer these questions on paper. As you progress and gain more experience, you won’t have to be as structured, but I guarantee you’ll need to at least have a point of view on all of them.