Death by Process: How Not to Consolidate Four Processes into One

As my client began her new position as head of her company's enterprise project management office, she started off with the bold step to consolidate the processes and deliverables currently in place. She freely shares her lessons learned here.

The projects spanned across all aspects of IT. Infrastructure, ERP, custom development, mobile applications and business intelligence were the largest and most influential projects. There were hundreds of simultaneous projects in play. She researched all of the phase gates and deliverables currently being used by the different methodologies and thought this was the perfect place to start streamlining everything into one methodology. She collected templates and sample deliverables and then corralled all of the most senior representatives from these projects (the "Senior Leaders") into an all day session.

Her intent was noble and utilized one of my favorite facilitation techniques... a shared visual space (in this case a wall) and sticky notes that represented all of the deliverables. The idea was to show that many deliverables were redundant and could be done away with. Keep in mind, most of these delivery methodologies had between ten and forty deliverables that were commonly used, a subset of which were strongly encouraged for each project.

My client acknowledges she lost control of the meeting at this point. These senior leaders refused to remove any deliverables from the board and actually started to add more deliverables to the mix to "ensure quality delivery."

The net result was nearly 90 deliverables and 9 phase gates that became a part of their methodology.

Personally, I struggled greatly with the Rational Unified Process at my last employer when it was en vouge there back in 2002-2004. I felt the deliverables were too many, too redundant and too complex to readily understand, which ultimately reduces the efficacy of any software management solution. If my team of highly qualified engineers can't quickly understand and benefit from the process, what value is it to me? We live in an environment of high job turnover and can't afford to train engineers for weeks on end before they join a team and can contribute.