Putting Together an ECM Project Team

Part 3 – The Project Team

In previous blogs on this same subject, we have discussed the role of Executive Management in the overall Project Team effort.  And what elements from the  internal organization would likely comprise an effective team.   In summary, vibrant and effective executive leadership is likely to be critical in solidifying the vision for the project.  The target of effort to achieve project acceptance and enthusiasm is cascading in that the focus of executive leadership is middle management.  The components of a project team may be different for each organization or type of organization – whatever best suites the particular organizational structure, and what special considerations there might be in the project (i.e. does it involve web content, collaboration, integration with ERP or SharePoint environments, etc.).

The Role of Line of Business Managers in the Project Team

As your project will likely either be addressing a limited requirement of a single department or two, or will be the start of an enterprise wide implementation of ECM, it is always recommended that it focus on a manageable quantity of work – normally one or two Departmental or workgroup solutions.  Enterprise wide ECM, ERM, and Business Process Management implementations usually start with one or two departments.   The Department(s) chosen for the Project are normally those where enthusiasm for improvements is high, cooperation is supportive, and where the business entity will benefit highly from the application of ECM technologies.

Starting with one or two areas that have been carefully selected based on their high potential for success and strong need for improvement, permits the rapid and clear demonstration of  ECM technology benefits – and that strong example can assist in the acceptance of the larger project to come across the enterprise.

Departmental management and supervisory involvement and strong support is crucial.  The organization’s line-of-business (LOB) managers understand the routine and cyclical “problems and challenges” of business operations.  They are operational experts within their areas of responsbilbity, know the character of the staff resources they have to work with, entity strengths and weaknesses, the potential to accept change, and what “change management” efforts should be implemented.   These LOB Managers and supervisors routinely “concentrate on organizational effectiveness through current processes” they will become the bridges that will carry the success of the ECM project forward into routine of daily work production.

The LOB Managers and other key supervisory or lead personnel need to be considered for the Project Team for either full involvement, or participation in the development of specific new process or workflow designs.

• They are most cognizent of what is done in their departments and why, what documents are received and how they are processed, the various sources of data (paper from internal and mail sources, voice mails, emails, internet provided input, etc.).
• They understand the decision criteria in the flow of work, the point where specific processes are needed, risks to successful processing, exception processing, and all the rest of the challenges that will need to be considered in a process design.
• They also know which other business areas need access to their documents and data.
• They usually have the only available insight into key details regarding operational systems, processes, and policies that support their organization’s mission.

When you apply ECM and BPM technology to an organization’s routine processes, you must have input and significant levels of planning participation from the managers and key personnel who are most familiar with operations so they can ensure that the new system will be successful in meeting objectives at all meaningful levels.  These people are needed to allow the project team to reach all objectives through consistent operational production.

From time to time this blog will continue with the subject of project team challenges, some considerations to remember, use of supporting vendor resources, and some recommended methods for implementation.

Neil W. Lindsey, ECMm, CDIA+

Project Manager / Senior Business Analyst
ImageSource, Inc.

PUTTING TOGETHER AN ECM PROJECT TEAM

Part 2 – The Project Team

I discussed in the last blog on this general topic that the strong support of the intended Project by executive management is a critical factor for success – they need to support the projects sponsor, and smooth the path of challenges that sometimes occur when change is contemplated.  Vibrant and effective executive leadership is likely to be critical in solidifying the vision for the project.  The target of effort to achieve project acceptance and enthusiasm is cascading in that the focus of executive leadership is middle management, and then it effort fans out to focus on users and supervisors. 

What Will be the Right Team
The right team of players, working together to hone the vision, is required to construct the concepts to be considered, refine the concepts, and to develop strategies to support the selected conceptual structure to fruition.  The people on the team are as integral to your project’s success as the solution, the project plan, the software tools, and infrastructure that is chosen.

Forming the right team is not easy – as not all leaders and users welcome new ideas and changes to the routine process.  But the executive support and the right team members are just as important for for standard ECM projects success as these factors are vital for business process management (BPM) and integrated implementations.

The primary key role types that are required on any ECM project team are listed below.  The exact position titles and numbers of team members recommended for participation will differ depending on an organization’s size and individuals’ skill levels. It is important that the eight classifications of people resources below are part of the Project team.

1. Executives: provide the supporting vision and enthusiasm for the solution objective

2. Line-of-Business (LOB) Managers: provide important project support and key higher level objectives

3. Business Analyst: provide discovery and analytical resources, reporting, perspective and ideas

4. Records/Compliance Manager: assure objectives and solutions match mandates and requirements

5. IT/IS Manager: supporting infrastructure, including business & IT challenges into the plan

6. WorkGroup Manager/Supervisor staff:  provide working knowledge of operations being addressed and realistic possibilities on what will work and where the challenges will be

7. End users: discovering what will and won’t work and where the challenges for acceptance are

8. Project Manager:  This person is the organization’s operational leader of the project and the coordinator with outside resources – ECM industry experts, software vendors, conversion resources, Training, etc. 

From time to time this blog will continue with the subject of team challenges, some considerations to remember, use of supporting vendor resources, and some recommended methods for implementation.

Neil W. Lindsey, ECM^M, CDIA+
Project Manager / Senior Business Analyst
ImageSource, Inc.

Putting Together an ECM Project Team

Part 1 – Getting Started

From a user organization perspective, constructing an effective ECM Project Team needs to be on of the initial mandatory objectives and activities undertaken when implementing an ECM Project.  Achieving this objective in its totality directly links to the success of the implementation of any major ECM project within an organization – whether it be for a phased enterprise or a departmental initiative. 

Achieving this objective is a management challenge that must be supported at the top.  It requires Executive leadership that should initially lead to developing:

• an organizational vision
• clear and consistent motivation
• full mid-management support
• staff commitment at the user level that supports the executive sponsored vision developed by a qualified Project Team. 

With the above being understood, in an instance where the initiating champion of an ECM Project has a mid-level management role, that person needs to acquire an appropriate and committed executive level sponsor. 

In a typical scenario there initially needs to be a management level person(s) involved as project sponsor(s) who would likely be a department/division manager or line of business (LOB) manager.  As indicated, this person needs to acquire the active support and sponsorship of executive level management.  This could be a VP of Operations or the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the organization. 

The first sponsor tasks are to:

[1]   Develop and document the initial premise of the ECM initiative.

[2]   Select and organize an effective team of Project Team members who will work together with the sponsors to fully define and refine the project vision, and develop a strategies to plan the details and bring the project to fruition. 

The people selected for the Project Team, their planning and collaboration skills, their ability to understand the underlying concepts of both the change management and technologies necessary to implement ECM, and their ability to communicate effectively are going to be as important to the success of the ECM Project project’s success as the software, supporting expert resources, and project implementation team solution that is ultimately selected.

The successful ECM project will likely have new business processes implemented, improved workflows, integrations with existing systems, and will require changes in the way supervisors and users do their work.  The successful Project Team will be realistically creative, and individuals as Team members need to be open in their communication of ideas and the challenges to be faced.
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This blog will likely continue on this subject – with future installments discussing the recommended makeup of the Project Team members, the considerations that need to be covered, utilization of supporting partnership resources, and some recommended methods that should be considered to achieve implementation objectives.
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Neil W. Lindsey, ECMΜ, CDIA+
Project Manager / Senior Business Analyst
ImageSource, Inc.

 

  

ECM Best Practices: Training – How much is too much, how much is not enough?

How much is too much, how much is not enough?  That is the proverbial question. Often times when project budgets are being developed, training is a secondary consideration. Sometimes it’s not considered at all.  When you’re working with customers helping them to determine what kinds of training and how much should be included, the first thing should be clearly identifying what your objectives are (and qualifying them with the most affected stakeholder – the end users). At times you will find the answer to that question to be very different coming from the project sponsor vs. the End User management team, vs. the End Users themselves. Your ‘objectives’ often transcend the simple task of selecting classes. Hence, the need to clarify with all of your stakeholders…

First, who are your stakeholders in training?  The End Users are obvious.  What about Team Leads?  IT Support (i.e. desktop support, server support, and help desk)? Application Support (administrative and end user)? Change Management teams? What about your Project Sponsor? The list can go on and on.   How much is too much, how much is not enough?

Second, what are your budgetary constraints? Within your project budget, you may have a line item for training, or even a separate line item for training for different phases of the project. This is the money originally allocated by the sponsor. How that money is spent may be rigidly defined, or it may be simply a line item budget number to be used at your discretion. With a little probing, you may be able to determine that ‘other monies’ are available from different budget codes or cost centers (unrelated to the project) that can also be used in a discretionary manner by the department managers. In those cases, with a well thought out justification, you may be able to pool that money in addition to what’s been allocated to the project to increase your available funding for training. In the case where you have line items for training for different phases of the project, close examination and analysis may reveal that there is an imbalance in the amounts allocated for some areas. Understanding that demographic need and the spread can help you level the available funds in other areas or phases of the project where you are deficient in the amount of money needed to support those particular initiatives.  How much is too much, how much is not enough?

Third, what are your logistics and operational contraints?  Training requires time and resources. Staff time, training rooms, systems\application environments, etc…  To train people, the traditional model involves taking them out of their work environment, putting them into a classroom, and running them through a curriculum based program that will orient them to the new systems and sometimes to the specific processes or application used in their jobs.  Point being you are taking people away from their jobs which directly impacts the organizations ability to do business. How do you compensate for that from an operations perspective?  Do you need to compensate for that from an operations perspective? When you’re trying to implement training in large organizations, these challenges become even more daunting.  How much is too much, how much is not enough?

Fourth, what are your timelines?  The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry…  I’m not sure that when Robert Burns penned that famous quote, he wasn’t thinking about project planning, schedules and interdependencies, but he could have been!  You can develop the most comprenhensive training plan possible, taking into consideration every possible need. Then you start to consider the functional dependencies required to pull that off (i.e. availability of systems, availability of facilities, etc…), the personell logistics (availability of staff, availability of trainers, availability of technical support, etc…), and the human factor (how much time will elapse between training, testing and GOLIVE when people will have to use the system) and you start to realize that you have created a monster. How much is too much, how much is not enough?

 Now, how does this all play out in the context of your objectives?

Stakeholders – You have to address all of them.  You don’t necessarily have to deliver to all of them. As quickly as possible assess what their critical functional needs and requirements are in relation to training. Be careful to note the difference between ‘nice-to-haves’ and ‘must-haves’.

Budgetary Constraints – Make a short list of the ideal classes and training Deliverables you would provide in a best case scenario. Ball park cost it and compare to your ‘nice-tohave’ and ‘must-have’ lists from your stakeholders. Identify the gap if one exists. Prioritize the stakeholders in the context of functionally (and successfully) completing the project.

Logistics and Operational Constraints – Now review your operational capability and capacity for delivering the training.  Do you have the required classrooms, computing resources and the application environment to deliver to the volume of people that need to be trained.  Even if all of those people can be spared from their jobs for the time it will take to train them, is it really necessary to pull all of them to accomplish your functional objectives?

Project Timelines – Now that you’ve considered your stakeholders requirements, budgetary constraints, logistics and operational constraints, consider your overall project timelines. Will your systems be online and functional in the appropriate time frame to be used for training.  Will tapping these systems for training impact other scheduled activities (i.e. development, system integration testing, user acceptance testing, etc…)? Can training be combined with other scheduled project activities in ways that create synergy and efficiencies in overall project execution? How much time will elapse between training and when you will count on users to participate in testing and actually take the system live?

Conclusions

1. The blue sky approach is that everyone will want training and as much as they can get. The reality is that you will almost never have the budget, available resources or the time for that, even if you can tap those outside-of-the-project discretionary departmental budgets. It’s up to you to ascertain what is really required to successfully launch. Typically it’s the end users, and some mix of application administration\desktop  support. This is where you engage the Project Sponsor and potentially the clients Project Director to help set expectations with the various stakeholders on what will be delivered. This is also where Change Management comes in. Help the client to understand the need that change management addresses, and suggest  creative ways that change management techniques can help to address the training of future hires and the additional training of people not included in the formal project training.
2. As an alternative to training everyone, consider ‘organic approaches’ that leverage departmental super users for propagating training within their departments. This approach done properly can also yield a secondary benefit of producing ‘product evangelists’ within the department that will culturally promote the use of the system from within. The production of computer based training (CBT’s) for training of the masses can also be a very cost effective alternative when largely repeatable tasks come into play. These can be produced much more cost effectively with current productivity tools than could be done even 3 to 5 years ago.
3. However you deliver your training, it will be more effective if it is delivered just prior to when users will be required to use the system. Typically this should be just before test, and then test should be immediately followed by the launch so that users are using the system while the skills and concepts developed in training are still fresh in their minds.

How much is too much, how much is not enough?

The short answer is that more is not always better. Users need to be able to do their jobs, nothing more, nothing less. We want to deliver the best solution, but we have to remain focused on our core objectives. If informal training with ‘Cheat Sheets’ at the users desktop is sufficient, go there. If it requires multiple language translations of End User Manuals and CBT’s with customized voice overs, go there. It’s about the right solution in the right place for the right people at the right time. It’s your job to understand and articulate what ‘right’ is.

Gene Eckhart
Program Manager
ImageSource, Inc.

Basics of Consulting for the ECM Project

Many organizations look for expert assistance in a quest to justify, plan, and develop the concepts for an Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) or smaller departmental system using this technology.  A provider of these services needs to have demonstrated expertise regarding consulting services focused on the application of the entire breadth of the disciplines associated with Enterprise Content Management.  General business process or management consultants seldom have the experience necessary to provide the requisite resources.  The solutions addressed by the consultation project need to focus each client’s objectives and how they may have to be addressed by the professional application of a combination of:

• Document Management
• Document Imaging / Image Management
• Digital and Physical Records Management
• Digital Asset Management
• Business Process Management and Workflow
• Reports Management (ERM / COLD)
• Content Addressable Storage
• eForms Design, Library management & business processes
• Legacy system and database integration for data sharing (i.e. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft)
• Legacy system integration for image enablement of third party applications
• Digital signatures and data encryption
• Large Document Viewing Enhancements
• Data capture technologies & custom document and data capture management
• OCR/ICR/OMR & bar code reading
• Data capture from Digital forms and Web forms
• Web Publishing & Content Management
• Web based information delivery systems
• Network Fax Systems and capture
• Collaborative Portals and resources
• File conversion, document migration, and scanning services
• Application Development and Programming Services for Custom Requirements

Consultants need to be able to actively provide expert participation and guidance in analysis to determine requirements/objectives, develop and validate goals and expectations, and apply capabilities of technology for application concepts, business processes, and design at the workgroup, departmental, and enterprise requirement levels per objectives. 

Consultants need to provide resources to advise and direct on project aspects such as technical design specification for hardware, ECM software platforms and components, the network infrastructure, conversion and migration of document information, the training program and facilities to be utilized. 

A consultant’s roll can consider numerous other ECM specific factors such as performance standards, operational and functional objectives, ROI analysis, Change Management considerations, and others which frequently need to be addressed, researched, analyzed, documented, and presented to the client when . 

ECM Consulting Services should also be able to address and provide guidance on the following when generating documentation to the client in the form of a Consultant Report, a Project Charter, and/or a subsequent full Project Plan with design detail:

• Current process documents and flows of work
• Project Scope Planning, Definition, and Management
• Definitions – Process Re-engineering to Technical Opportunities
• Project Deliverables Definition
• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) at the Project Plan level
• Conversion and Migration Services Requirements – Deliverables
• Standard and Advanced Training Curriculum Planning and Management
• Quality Control Strategies and Planning
• Project Cost Estimating Costing

Application Design for Project Standard Deliverables as well as Architecture Engineering Analysis and recommendations.  These can include conceptual to detailed Design for standard and custom system components and design details for:

• system configuration, and all standard software modules
• document/image capture including information capture considerations for workflows and business processes
• planning, design, and development for web-based resources
• interfaces and integrations with legacy systems as required by objectives
• Activity Definition, Sequencing, and Predication Planning
• Risk Identification and Management Planning
• Duration Estimation with Project Schedule Development and Control (Microsoft Project) when developing Project Plan level strategies plans.
• Project Team Development and Management with Resource Planning
• Communications, Information Distribution, and Performance Report Planning

The consulting organization may bring multiple experts to guide and participate with the client in the discovery and analysis process. Consultants, no matter what their expertise in a particular vertical application, should remain open to a client’s specific goals and interests and not automatically apply past experiences to the specifics of what solution a new client will need.  There should be an initial concentration on specifically defining business challenges, phased implementation priorities, and evaluations of the best opportunities for initial success. This process leads to business solutions that integrate with a client’s standing technology investment and unique business culture, and result in real returns if managed professionally.

Find out more about ECM Strategies and Project Planning at NEXUS 2009

Neil W. Lindsey, Project Manager
ImageSource, Inc.
www.imagesourceinc.com