The Project Office
The following roles are pivotal for the system implementation to be managed effectively:
- Project Leader/Sponsor;
- Project Manager;
- System Owner and
- Project Champion(s).
Organisations always remember to appoint a Project Manager, but often do not understand the importance of the other roles or forget to assign the responsibilities of a Project Leader/Sponsor and a System Owner. Depending on the scale of the project, the same individual could be assigned to all or any of these roles, but the abilities and qualities required for each role are different and it may be that one person cannot boast them all. It is most likely, though, that an organisation could assign the responsibilities of at least the Project Leader/Sponsor and the System Owner alongside the day-to-day roles of one or two internal employees.
As well as these roles, system implementations require the expertise and energy of a wide range of additional staff, including:
IT staff;
central and departmental administrators;
teaching staff and learning technologists;
software functionality experts consultants;
technical experts and
system trainers.
What may not be obvious is that many of these individuals will need to be involved for 100% of their time for months or sometimes even years and will need to work as a cohesive team. The best way to achieve this is to set up a project office that will house the key implementation staff and that also has 'hotdesking' facilities for staff who may be involved in a more temporary way - e.g. an expert user in a particular field.
It is unrealistic to assume that internal staff can remain at their normal desks where they will be subject to the usual business distractions. Also, working together in the same office environment increases team-building, develops new allegiances and helps to develop more uniform working styles. In fact, moving staff forces action on back filling into departments and the sooner the empty desks are filled by staff with a temporary promotion, on a temporary secondment, on a fixed-term basis or by a retired former employee, the more likely the project staff will be able to truly focus on the opportunities and problems before them. The cost of achieving this has to be weighed against the cost of failure.
Further advice on setting up the Project infrastructure and costing is available in the Project Management infoKit.
