IT project management: Balancing speed and quality

Computerworld - "Do more with less" is the mantra heard up and down the corridors at many companies. But the phrase has taken on new meaning for IT project managers. Cost-focused organizations are demanding deliverables within weeks instead of months -- with functionality that offers immediate, bottom-line benefits.

But as IT managers try to apply principles of the rapid application development (RAD) approach and other agile project management methodologies, they're taking care not to forsake testing and quality in exchange for speed.

"It's an uphill battle. Everyone realizes that if you sacrifice quality today, you're going to pay for it in the future," says Kevin Heard, a project manager at Clarkston Consulting, a Durham, N.C., consulting firm that serves the life sciences and consumer products industries. "If you focus on quality today, it will, in the long term, pay benefits -- even if that leads to a slightly longer project cycle."

The inherent conflict that exists between rapid project management and quality control "compounds itself if you work in an environment that constantly churns projects," says Chuck Tatham, vice president of marketing and development at Changepoint Corp., an IT services provider in Richmond Hill, Ontario. That's particularly true, he says, when staff resources are spread thin and project managers need to quickly identify available skills.

"You need to emphasize people, the communication part of it, and you have to be very adaptive in your planning. Use a baseline and hold your people to that baseline," says Margo Visitacion, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

On the Fast Track
IT project managers must also ensure that the project scope can be realistically achieved under a compressed time frame, adds Visitacion. Project managers say business leaders are increasingly urging them to cut corners to deliver needed functionality on time. For instance, one IT manager at a Midwestern manufacturer says he's being pressured by senior business leaders to rush an ERP implementation by bypassing critical business processes.

"There's always a lot of pressure" from executives to take shortcuts on IT projects, says Ken McLennan, senior vice president of business solutions at Fujitsu Consulting in Edison, N.J. He says project managers must be good facilitators and help business executives understand the risks of cutting corners. "If companies are seen making mistakes and that gets publicized, that could hurt their share price, so there's a tremendous balancing act going on," McLennan says.

Project managers and other IT executives say they've taken steps to strike a balance between the need for speed and adequate testing and quality control. Eighteen months ago, The E.W. Scripps Co. established "an extremely abbreviated" project life-cycle methodology, called FastTrack, says Oscar de Jongh, managing director of the project management office at the Cincinnati-based media conglomerate.

With the FastTrack approach, a project's scope is laid out in a one- or two-paragraph e-mail message, followed by a checklist of repeatable, auditable processes that project teams must follow, such as defining project requirements, estimating resources and testing, says de Jongh. Those processes must be completed before a project can be closed out. The approach blends characteristics of so-called waterfall project management techniques, where tasks are laid out sequentially and designed to overlap, with two-to-20-hour time frames for project completion.

This is true even for small projects like changing the size of an advertising window on one of E.W. Scripps' media Web sites, says de Jongh, whose firm manages IT projects using software from PlanView Inc. "I've seen it all happen in the course of an eight-hour day, and it works," he says. "It's as much about cultural change as anything else."

Nationwide Insurance Cos. is applying an agile project management approach to an effort started in May to replace its distributed customer-facing systems for its property and casualty insurance agents, says Jack Probst, assistant vice president in the office of IT process and governance at Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide. Rather than roll out a new set of systems to all 25,000 agents at once, Nationwide is applying a proof-of-concept approach, testing pieces of functionality with selected agents before extending prototypes of the system across the country.

The project draws upon a quality-focused framework that Nationwide began using in 2003 called Solution Delivery. The framework, based on IBM's Rational Unified Process methodology and an agile project management approach, has delivered marked quality improvements, says Probst. For instance, tests of customer-facing systems being implemented in various states have shown that the systems have achieved or exceeded the quality equivalent of CMM Level 5, a set of software development standards set by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute.

Probst says Nationwide plans to begin auditing its projects by the end of March once it has incorporated portfolio management software from Redwood City, Calif.-based Niku Corp. into the Solution Delivery framework.

Dice and Deliver
Sometimes necessity really is the mother of invention. For Primary Industries and Resources SA (PIRSA), an economic development agency within the Government of South Australia, a waterfall approach to replacing 20 legacy systems with the Primary Industries Information Management System (PIIMS) was taking too long and wasn't able to deliver the business requirements sought by end users, says David Blair, director of information services at PIRSA in Adelaide.

So PIRSA, which began developing the Unix-based system in late 2001, decided along with project partner Fujitsu Consulting that it would complete the core system using a waterfall approach and then develop additional functionality using a RAD methodology.

After completing the core system in June 2002, PIRSA and Fujitsu broke the project into features that they could deliver to end users each month, starting in November 2002, such as tracing the origins of diseased animals for the Animal Health business unit, says Vanessa Beer, a Fujitsu consultant.

Using the RAD approach, end users "are able to see and touch the system all the time, and they're constantly being trained on the new features," says PIIMS project manager John Cock.

And by shifting from the waterfall approach to the RAD technique, says Beer, "developers were delivering exactly what the businesses required, and there was no documentation hurdle between them. They didn't get hung up on, 'This is what I want, and you didn't deliver it.' "

Joe Zucchero, executive vice president and director of the project turnaround practice at The Casey Group, an IT services firm in Parsippany, N.J., says the chief contributor to a drop in project quality is overworked team members. "If you have people working 60 to 70 hours a week over a period of time, quality is going to drop," says Zucchero. "Savvy organizations understand that, and they're not always going to plan a best-case scenario."

For Heard and his peers at Clarkston Consulting, skimping on quality isn't even a consideration. "In any FDA-regulated environment, quality cannot be compromised ... even if that leads to a slightly longer project cycle," Heard says.