Our Services

Project Strategy and Execution Advising

Are Your IT Project Financial Outcomes Disappointing, or Downright Terrible?

Surveys of senior leaders reveal that less than 25% of IT projects deliver the expected ROI. Leaders are frustrated with surprise costs, cost overruns, timeline delays, and software that doesn’t work, and then when asking for solutions, getting technobabble.

Project Strategy

  • How to get consensus on defining what project success is?
  • How to discover and get approval of expectations of the final deliverables
  • How to get in front of unexpected changes and ‘scope creep’
  • How to build an “Agile Project Budget Approval” process. Ensure that when projects are approval they are projects aligned with leadership’s organizational priorities and within your current resource constraints.

Project Execution Advising

  • How to discover and get consensus on expectations and corresponding metrics
  • How to capture data, manage, and report metrics
  • Change Order Reviews – is that cost overrun a good idea? Why is the timeline getting longer?
  • Conflict Resolution – a ‘neutral third party’ to help move the project forward.
IT Project Management

Project Strategy and Execution Advising

Are Your IT Project Financial Outcomes Disappointing, or Downright Terrible?

Surveys of senior leaders reveal that less than 25% of IT projects deliver the expected ROI. Leaders are frustrated with surprise costs, cost overruns, timeline delays, and software that doesn’t work, and then when asking for solutions, getting technobabble.

Project Strategy

  • How to get consensus on defining what project success is?
  • How to discover and get approval of expectations of the final deliverables
  • How to get in front of unexpected changes and ‘scope creep’
  • How to build an “Agile Project Budget Approval” process. Ensure that when projects are approval they are projects aligned with leadership’s organizational priorities and within your current resource constraints.

Project Execution Advising

  • How to discover and get consensus on expectations and corresponding metrics
  • How to capture data, manage, and report metrics
  • Change Order Reviews – is that cost overrun a good idea? Why is the timeline getting longer?
  • Conflict Resolution – a ‘neutral third party’ to help move the project forward.

Senior Technology Leadership Coaching

Are you are in charge of IT? We can make your life better.

Here’s a Story

Over several months I worked with a senior IT manager to sort out how to best manage cyber security. The manager’s CEO and COO were very clear that his job was to deliver security that ensured both their customers’ and the cyber-insurers were happy, while not impacting sales or productivity.

As it turned out, he was constantly between a ‘rock and a hard place’.

As we got started, here is what we heard:

  • The company’s customers and insurers required the company to demonstrate strong security and indicated there would be serious consequences for failures.
  • The IT manager had previously hired an expert security group to design, build, and implement a security system.
  • The security group reported that based on their assessment, the company was in serious trouble and needed to implement over 300 tasks to make the company secure!
  • The company hired the security group for over $100,000 a year.
  • As the new security systems were rolled out they ran into fierce resistance from staff. Operations led a charge to stop using the new security because if was slowing them down.
  • Staff went into full revolt and began using their own personal devices and storage systems (Dropbox, etc.) to bypass company security.
  • Both the customers and cyber-insurers were not happy.

Where Do We Go From Here?

  • Build TrustI recommended was to go back to the beginning and build trust with the operational teams.  This was largely a ‘human factors’ problem.   We needed to first get consensus on just how they would all agree to work together.
  • Simplify, simplify, simplify – I took the 300+ recommendations, along with 40+ new policies, and boiled them down to match the priorities from the management team and feasibility of time and money.  We started out with less than 10 projects, and 20 polices written in plain language.
  • Use Current Project Management Processes – Using Agile project methodology, the project was managed in smaller increments and focused on getting compliance in small steps.
Desk

Senior Technology Leadership Coaching

Are you are in charge of IT? We can make your life better.

Here’s a Story

Over several months I worked with a senior IT manager to sort out how to best manage cyber security. The manager’s CEO and COO were very clear that his job was to deliver security that ensured both their customers’ and the cyber-insurers were happy, while not impacting sales or productivity.

As it turned out, he was constantly between a ‘rock and a hard place’.

As we got started, here is what we heard:

  • The company’s customers and insurers required the company to demonstrate strong security and indicated there would be serious consequences for failures.
  • The IT manager had previously hired an expert security group to design, build, and implement a security system.
  • The security group reported that based on their assessment, the company was in serious trouble and needed to implement over 300 tasks to make the company secure!
  • The company hired the security group for over $100,000 a year.
  • As the new security systems were rolled out they ran into fierce resistance from staff. Operations led a charge to stop using the new security because if was slowing them down.
  • Staff went into full revolt and began using their own personal devices and storage systems (Dropbox, etc.) to bypass company security.
  • Both the customers and cyber-insurers were not happy.

Where Do We Go From Here?

  • Build TrustI recommended was to go back to the beginning and build trust with the operational teams.  This was largely a ‘human factors’ problem.   We needed to first get consensus on just how they would all agree to work together.
  • Simplify, simplify, simplify – I took the 300+ recommendations, along with 40+ new policies, and boiled them down to match the priorities from the management team and feasibility of time and money.  We started out with less than 10 projects, and 20 polices written in plain language.
  • Use Current Project Management Processes – Using Agile project methodology, the project was managed in smaller increments and focused on getting compliance in small steps.

Keys to achieving IT Project Success.
The Dunham Group will assist and advise you with:

  • Building projects and systems to deliver objectives and budgets – regardless of your model. “AgileFall”, “WaterAgileCrashandBurn”, or “WhereCanIHide”.
  • Avoiding planning and ‘road map’ disasters.
  • Minimizing impacts and disruption on your operations when there are changes in IT.
  • Helping others embrace disruption and see how it can create positive change.
  • Managing change – understanding that your organization is made up of unique individuals. Added together these people will absorb and learn new ideas, and put them to work at the pace of their ability to absorb change – not faster!
  • Building projects and systems to deliver objectives and budgets – regardless of your model. “AgileFall”, “WaterAgileCrashandBurn”, or “WhereCanIHide”.
  • Avoiding planning and ‘road map’ disasters.
  • Minimizing impacts and disruption on your operations when there are changes in IT.
  • Helping others embrace disruption and see how it can create positive change.
  • Managing change – understanding that your organization is made up of unique individuals. Added together these people will absorb and learn new ideas, and put them to work at the pace of their ability to absorb change – not faster!

Ready to Drive Success with Information Technology?