Project Management Journal June 1998 vol 29 Number 2 page 6The Internet as an Enabler of the Bell Atlantic Project Office
John Scanlin, Bell Atlantic, Project Management Center of Excellence, 7125 Rivenvood Dnve, Columbia, Mar land 21046 USA
Internet technology is a fast path to consistent, quality practices for the
delivery of products and services.
I believe the underlying drivers can be found in the worldwide evolution of quality programs such as ISO 90000, the Malcolm Baldrige program in the U.S., and the focus the Project Management Institute has brought to the project management discipline with the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification program. This paper shares how Bell Atlantic is making practical use of the intranet and Internet to drive consistency into its project management practice during the turbulent times of telecommunications deregulation and mega-mergers.
Expectation for prime contractors providing products and services has risen in proportion to the complexity and geographic footprint of projects. Takeovers, buyouts, and mergers of banks, brokerage firms, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and regional phone companies, to name a few, are driving the requirement for consistent, repeatable project management practices both from the customer as well as internal IT and engineering organizations.
Without best practices becoming the standard and a documented methodology for continuous improvement, companies will not reach their projections for economies of scale. Even more important than the financial objectives is the fact they will fail in measuring up to rising customer expectations for on-time deliver and quality. Today, the paradigm for timely, accurate, and available information has moved from market differentiater to becoming essential for survival. Local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) have become the central nervous systems for corporate entities, sensing changes in the external and internal environment and responding with actions to protect, maintain, and grow the business.
It was this latter reason, rising customer expectations for our products and services as evidenced by customer satisfaction indexes (surveys), that provided the impetus for an empowered team of Bell Atlantic project managers in the Washington, DC, area to focus on certification of its project managers and bring consistency to disjointed practices across the company. Living in the shadows of the federal government and one of the largest PMI chapters in the world, it was obvious to some of us that there was a rising demand by our customers for more professional project management behavior in the use of tools and methodologies.
Faced with a multitude of practices, some documented and others spontaneous, the mission of driving a core competency across a seven-state region, soon to double in size with the impending merger of Nynex with Bell Atlantic, was a formidable challenge. We would have to demonstrate good repeatable processes not just in selective departments but across the enterprise. If the lessons learned in a project in Virginia are reoccurring in Maine, Mexico, or New Zealand, there might be pockets of excellence but not corporate best practices rating of 4.5+ on a project management maturity model. Simply stated, there was considerable hidden cost in our processes, impacting cost, schedule, and quality of services.
The project management team expanded to a regional task force, establishing a formal career path with position descriptions, corporate endorsement of a professional development program through George Washington Univeristy, and the creation of a Project Management Center of Excellence (PM CoE) to sustain and drive a core competency of project management. Bell Atlantic was moving toward a goal of all employees with a legitimate business need having access to the intranet by the end of 1997.
With a limited budget to execute the strategy the intranet/Internet was the only viable method for the PM CoE to establish a data repository for a widely dispersed and loosely knit network of project managers.
The PM CoE Web page was created to communicate standard processes, templates, tools; inform internal clients about training classes, internal videoconferences, and networking opportunities; share lessons learned; and recognize outstanding achievement or performance.
Since communication consumes somewhere between 75% to 90% of a project manager's time, it was essential that the information be current and available upon demand to leverage the wealth of experiences being accumulated. Since there was no corporate mandate to one specific practice, ready access to successful project templates, with documented risks and lessons learned, based on proven principles from the PMBOK Guide, was the lure for the time-stressed project manager. The following describes both content and planned sections of the PM CoE Website.
A graphic of the four phases of a project decomposes into further refinements of each phase until the lowest layer (e.g., risk planning in the implementation phase) lists the templates or checklists detailing the current prioritized risk plan and status of mitigation actions. This allows an alternate presentation of project steps of both the macro- and micro-view to customer and sales account manager in something other than a Gantt chart.
Templates
By technology such as SONET, Frame Relay, Centrix, ATM, basic templates for customization by project and completed projects with notation are available by hyperlinks.
6 Project Management Journal June 1998
These tend to compress the development time of the project plan, with standard milestones and deliverables (agendas, meeting notes, risk plans, action items), which drives consistency, while facilitating the knowledge transfer from the experienced to the less experienced project manager
Resources
These vary from organizational charts for roles and responsibilities to escalations, job openings for career development or project phasedown, contacts for mentors, and recognition for completion of master's certificates or professional certification
Perhaps the most valuable section of the Web site is the practice of documenting lessons learned in a consistent manner to share with the rest of the peer community. Cultural factors will either inhibit or facilitate the openness of this sharing. Senior project managers are expected to lead by example. Members of PMI, of which Bell Atlantic has several corporate memberships, are required by their oath to share their knowledge. Project managers beginning new projects are required to review this section
Training
Nowhere is the value of the intranet more obvious than when we went to an online catalog with the assistance of our training vendor, ESI International. Incorporating the corporate endorsement and expectation with class schedules by location and course schedule facilitated both the information delivery and accuracy, while decreasing the costs, and improving the PM CoE visibility of interest via page hits. Online registration is an enhancement planned once the conversion of the two different systems is completed.
Status Reporting
Maximizing the potential for providing ~current" status at the project, program, and strategic initiative level still remains a challenge. Driving to consistent standards in format and content to allow HTML formatted reporting via Office '97 tools such as Excel on the intranet has made good progress. More work is required before an executive can select a project by status and "drill down" to the details in the scheduling software. The potential exists to establish "extranets" for customized external customer access for status reporting and change management. This is the next logical step beyond "electronic bonding," which is used today for customer ordering and incident reporting.
The project management span of control continues to be stretched as project footprints have grown from metropolitan, state, regional, national, and now global village! Face-to-face and telephone communication is now E-mail and videoconference. Scope creep is controlled and facilitated by electronic documentation, statements of work, change control, and regular reporting. E-mail via the Internet and its worldwide directory architecture is the infrastructure that enables this global reach.
What's next?
Why not video clips from the project sponsor or remote site walk-through as part of the electronic project notebook? Weekly audio conferences via the net for project status? Remote sites for training or professional development after hours via distance learning? Chat rooms to prioritize actions, resolve issues, or communicate resource imbalances?
If you think any of'these initiatives are a stretch, you had better book yourself into the next project management conference where you can learn how your competition has already done much of this and more. If you are not already part of the above solution or its champion, are you part of the problem?
7 Project Management Journal June 1998John Scanlin, former director of Bell Atlantic's Project Management Center of Excellence, has recently accepted a position with ENTEX Information Services Inc. as a regional program manager. He has been involved in the development and delivery of customer-focused solutions as programmer, project manager, consultant with IBM and Bell Atlantic and now project management infrastructure development at ENTEX. Comments or questions may be sent to scanlin.john@usa.net.