Yatish Prasad Dasari, Jindal Global Business School, Sonipat, Haryana.
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In a business context, agility typically refers to the
ability of an organization to incorporate the ideas of flexibility, balance,
adaptability and coordination under one umbrella. in productive and
cost-effective ways. Equipping business units with greater stimulus to respond
to the unexpected changing scenarios is a way of striking the right balance
between being Efficient vs. Agile business units. Let’s attempt to understand
this point from project execution point of view.
It is the process and structure that holds the key for
any project execution. The processes being established are by engineers and
project managers are much more than a sequence of steps they encapsulate.
Business process is the superset of workflow. And workflow is the task and
activities arranged in an order to be followed on the regular day to day basis.
Business processes, once defined, are modeled, automated, managed and optimized
to be effective, cost efficient and achieve high operational performance,
whereas the work flow ensure that the modeled is executed effectively on day to
day basis. It is these processes, which cover various technical as well as
project management tasks, thus benefiting in smooth execution of projects,
including a newcomer in the organization. These processes help managers and
engineers emulate past successes and avoid the pitfalls. Hence right process
design is the main means of using past knowledge.
The following are some typical examples of
project-specific process tailoring:
- Adding/removing work products and tasks.
- Changing milestones, and performing based on the state of completion of project.
- Tool / technique / formal work format used for each work product can be changed.
- Responsibilities for review, levels of reviews and approval can bring change in process.
- Detailed procedures for measuring completion of task, performance measurement, different forms of reports, applying changes required, on the go change request, etc. can make difference in a specific projects.
Figure:
Process Design for the Project
(Source: Knowledge
Infrastructure for Project Management, Pankaj Jalote, iiitd.edu.in)
In
one of the surveys carried out by Progress Software which surveyed in 400 large
organisations in the US and Europe had startling findings:
- Only 8% of 400 large organizations surveyed by team report business information in real time, only 19% report on an intra-day basis.
- 74% of companies surveyed said they are overwhelmed by the amount of information flowing through the business.
- 72% of those surveyed admitted that their business processes take too long to meet customer demand.
The
above problems needs ability of management to understand and respond to the
problems rather than waiting before it’s too long such that project slips
delivery schedules which affects the brand image of the organisation.Solution
to the above problems could be as follow:
- One of the ways to curtail such unresponsive practice is building an effective MIS structure which would help feeding in necessary information into the process usable for the appropriate job title holders.
- Analytical dashboards can be used by business analysts for gaining insights from a volume of data collected over time. It helps in identifying opportunities and areas of improvement for meeting project goals in an effective manner. Analytical dashboards make use of what if analysis, pivots to identify patterns and opportunities.
- Operational dashboards can also be used to track key performance indicators (KPIs), in short to understand whether the project is on or off time and by how much. It is also useful to identify potential operational issues as they occur.
Hence
it can be said having the right processes, effective MIS and leveraging the use
of dashboard at optimal levels will help in building Operational Responsive for
Agile Business Units.
References
2. www.iiitd.edu.in/~jalote/papers/KnowledgeMgmt.pdf
3 www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-tools/tfs.aspx