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Project Management

Notes each other. But if the BPM doesn’t have the required project management capabilities
there can be a conflict of authority: the BPM is in charge - the “boss” - but the IT PM needs
to tell them what to do and how to do it. Hoping that the BPM and IT PM will complement
each other and work well together is not enough, we have seen this go bad a large number
of times. Roles and responsibilities, especially for the project management tasks, is the
foundation of a project and if that goes wrong it is very difficult to correct. So it’s best to
get it right at the start. Having more than one person in a project with a role of “project
manager” is confusing. There should only be one. This can be resolved by only giving the
overall project manager this role and the IT PM is called an “IT work stream lead” or “IT
team lead”. Some IT project managers have great difficulty accepting this; after all it says
“Project Manager” on their business card, and they expect that to appear as their role in
every project as well. Of course a project role and a job title are completely different
things, but we have found that this “role inflation” has crept into the way people see
project roles. My goal was to ensure that when a project was setup, it had a good foundation
to be successful. Of course the project team members still need to work together well to be
successful, but giving the team a good foundation allows them to focus on delivering
together, instead of trying to work out who they should listen to. I started looking for a
solution to this dilemma.
What did I Find?

My analysis led me to the conclusion that we needed a capable and experienced project
manager to be responsible for the project management, and someone with the right
authority and “organisational credit” to be responsible for the change in the business. As
the experienced project managers available for our IT projects are nearly always from IT
they do not have the authority or credit in the customer’s organisation. And the main
customer contacts, the potential candidates for the BPM role, often don’t have the project
management capabilities. Looking at how MSP describes the programme structure, the
key players are the SRO (Senior Responsible Owner), the Programme Manager and the
BCM (Business Change Manager). The key here is that the BCM does not report to the
Programme Manager or vice versa; and that the Programme Manager is responsible for
the day-to-day management of the programme while the BCM is responsible for delivering
change and benefits. Why couldn’t this work in a project as well? With a team of project
managers I worked through the roles and responsibilities in a typical project, with the aim
of making this work. The project managers were motivated in this too, as they had
experienced the problem first hand! The result was a proposed project structure as shown
in figure 1.

Figure 1: Proposed Project Structure

Corporate Management

Project Steering Group
Senior User Sponsor Senior Supplier

BCM PM

Change Agents Team Members
= from the customer
= from the supplier(s)
= delivery specialists

Contd...

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