The availability of seasoned, professional project management skills is a constant challenge for many small and medium enterprises. This is especially so when it comes to information technology initiatives, where costs may be high, impacts substantial, and risks potentially devastating.

Initiating New Projects

When capable full-time staffers are operating at or near their capacity in running the core activities of an enterprise, it's very difficult to determine which of their day-to-day operating priorities ought to be revised so that attention can be diverted to getting a new project underway. Once launched, for a project's results to meet or exceed the needs and expectations of its stakeholders, there will invarably be challenges that will involve balancing competing demands among:

• Scope, time, cost, and quality
• Stakeholders with differings needs and expectations
• Newly identified, or revised, needs or expectations

It's no wonder that project management has become recognized as a professional discipline. The methods and techniques for applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to a project's activities, in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations, have been studied, analyzed and systematically developed into a body of knowledge, also referred to as "best practices". Individual familiarity with such best practices can be developed through training, but they are honed in the face of practical experience, typically over the course of years.

Project Planning

Successful, seasoned project managers will also generally admit to their belief that there is a right way - and a wrong way - to conceive and plan a project that involves more that one person, and takes more than a week to complete. Planning a project in stages, or phases, characterized by explicit and achievable milestones that indicate progress along the way, is a well-established best practice that is often used in technology deployment projects.

For example, deploying a new enterprise application system into an environment that has no prior experience with such a system might be planned in four distinct stages:

• Feasibility Stage - preliminary project formulation and scoping, needs assessments, product evaluations, strategic systems design, and overall authorization
• Planning and Design Stage - development of base systems design, cost estimation, task scheduling, contract negotiations, and detailed task-level planning.
• Production Stage - procurement, infrastructure rennovations, systems installation and testing
• Turnover and Startup Stage - final system testing, user acceptance testing, and maintenance initiation.

Of course, this is by no means the only approach to planning a technology deployment project. Each project is an individual challenge in which all of the relevant factors must be taken into account in its planning and execution.

Project Management Expertise from Augury

Through a FiT:DELIVERY^TM engagement, Augury can provide your enterprise with an experienced Project Manager for whom "best practices" are second nature. In complete collaboration with your own team, Augury's Project Managers will plan, coordinate, monitor, track, document and report all aspects of your technology deployment project, pilot program, or new skills development program.

Augury offers FiT:ANALYSIS^TM, FiT:SECURE^TM and FiT:DELIVERY^TM services as individually quoted projects based on the specific nature, scope and scale of a particular project's goals.

FiT:SUPPORT^TM is offered as subscription services for a fixed, monthly fee that is based on the number of users and platforms in the enterprise.