Project Management
QTE Solutions has a successful history of managing large and complex projects on behalf of our customers. Current and completed projects have ranged in scale and scope from single site implementations to highly integrated deployments including customized software development.
A significant key to QTE Solutions success is our adherence to a high quality, repeatable project management process. QTE Solutions invests in people and the tools necessary to deliver projects on time and on budget for our customers.
Key elements of our approach:
Project Management
In order to deliver and complete successful projects it is imperative to engage in a thorough discovery process with the client. Through this process we find that there are open questions, flawed assumptions and unclear objectives that need to be clarified before a realistic and actionable project plan can be created and agreed.
The issue that is most common is that project teams must balance the need to start work on a project immediately with the desire to construct a thorough and accurate project plan before kicking off the project. At QTE Solutions we have found that an excellent method to strike that balance is to perform detailed planning on near term activities while maintaining clear, high level milestones for intermediate and longer-term objectives. As the project progresses the relevant details become apparent and future task planning to support the stated milestones can be refined. This approach is sometimes referred to as “Rolling Wave Planning
Below are some attributes of the QTE Solutions Project Management (PM) approach:
- Well-structured / phased
- Integrated with other plans and objectives (e.g. with parent Project Plans, test plans, other business requirements, etc.)
- Regularly scheduled coordination with other Project Managers is critical to overall success
- The plan needs to be of sufficient detail to successfully coordinate activities
- The project must be properly staffed
- The project team must possess the required resources – both internal and external – to achieve its technical and functional objectives
- There must be frequent and effective communications within the team, with management and with users.
We utilize Microsoft Project for defining and communicating task schedules, resourcing, etc.
Document Library:
A repository to collect, collaborate and share team documents such as the Project Plan, reports, reference documents, etc.
Calendar:
A project team calendar lists key dates and is aligned with the Project Plan. It can be used to communicate and remind team members of times and dates for meetings, deadlines, etc.
Risks and Issues Logging:
Project Risks are logged and tracked on the Team Site. They are assigned to individuals and have explicit due dates. Related documentation to the risk or issue is attached to the log entry.
Budget Tracking:
Project budgets are closely managed and frequently reported, typically weekly. The report clearly shows plan/budget, actual-to-date and a projected completion estimate.
Project Actuals, Projected and Budget Total and Trend Line
Status Reports
Weekly Status reports are designed to provide project managers and executives an easy way to understand the current standing of the project scope, schedule, budget and risks of the project. It contains a schedule of key milestones, a summary of budget standing, a listing of risks and issues as well as listings of activities completed and not completed in the current period / activities planned for the upcoming period.
Pilot Phase Recommendations
QTE Solutions recommends that we design the project plan to include a limited scale Pilot phase and a full Production Deployment phase.
Pilot phase efforts allow QTE Solutions to:
- Prove out the integration and define all of the business events.
- Refine our assumptions about production requirements.
- Refine our assumptions regarding functional integration requirements.
- Catalog all of the requirements more completely.
Conducting a Pilot and choosing the right metrics to assess will support a much better architectural design and detailed production rollout plan. This fits nicely with the Rolling Wave Planning methodology noted above. It reduces project risk by increasing certainty in design and planning. A major deliverable from the Pilot phase would be a detailed budget and project plan for the full- scale production rollout phase to follow.
