Enhancing Engineering Project Management Through Process Alignment (original) (raw)
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Business process management: establishing and maintaining project alignment
Purpose -The aim of the research was to develop a model for establishing and maintaining alignment of purpose in business change initiatives. Design/methodology/approach -The research methodology combined a synthesis of the literature across the diverse fields of change leadership, project management, and organisational alignment; and a parallel analysis of two industrial case studies. Findings -From an analysis of the cases, and a synthesis of the literature, a Project Alignment Model was developed. To help industrial project leaders operationalise the model and hence maintain alignment in their projects, the key points from the Project Alignment Model are also presented as a checklist. Practical implications -Managing change is increasingly relevant for all industries and companies, and the rate of change is predicted to increase. Project managers in this environment must have more than just technical delivery skills; they need to be good leaders, capable of influencing strategic direction, and skilled in managing the political dimensions of their projects. The model presented will help these leaders improve their change management capability. Originality/value -The developed model can be useful both as a descriptive model and as a prescriptive model. Used descriptively, the model can help structure the analysis of change projects. As such it could be a useful research instrument. Academics could use the model to analyse change projects and structure their findings in a way that allows ready cross-case comparisons. Such an approach can, by categorisation, lead to a more detailed understanding of the factors affecting project alignment and successful change. Used prescriptively, the model can guide project managers in creating and maintaining project alignment, and in doing so increase their chance of success in implementing change.
Process and project alignment methodology: A case-study based analysis
Computer Science and Information Systems, 2016
Process descriptions represent high-level plans and do not contain information necessary for concrete software development projects. Processes that are unrelated to daily practices or that are hardly mapped to project practices, cause misalignments between processes and projects. We argue that software processes should emerge and evolve collaboratively within an organization. With this propose, this article describes the ProPAM methodology and explores the details of its static view. We also present a case study to validate effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The aim of the case study was to analyse the effects of using ProPAM in a IT organization.
A case study applying Process and Project Alignment Methodology
Software Process Improvement (SPI) is one of the main software development challenges. However, SPI standards and models (CMMI, SPICE) have not been always adopted with success. The current problem is a lack of strategy to implement successfully these standards and models. To undertake this objective is essential observe real life experiences and detect process and project mutual relationships. Without this alignment it will not be possible to find out how process management is really important to achieve organization's strategic objectives. This paper proposes a methodology that allows the definition, evaluation and improvement of an organization software development process. This proposal, called a Process and Project Alignment Methodology (ProPAM), allows the specification of an organization development process, as well process and project alignment. ProPAM presents the following life cycle: (1) process definition; (2) project definition considering a base process model; (3) project coordination and monitoring and (4) process improvement assessment. This paper also provides an overview of the action plan to be taken within the software organizations that intent to conduct a SPI initiative. This plan includes two distinct phases: (1) specify the development process and (2) analyze projects, starting an SPI effort. In order to evaluate ProPAM, a study case is undertaken. The case study is performed following the action plan and presents all the steps of the ProPAM. Final results show that, when the organization started using ProPAM, process and project alignment reduced project planning time and effort. ProPAM also introduced new organizational practices that result in a SPI program.
2015
Nowadays, because of the increasing complexity of systems and projects, more and more people focus on the systems of systems. At the same time, Systems Engineering and Project Management are considered as two independent activities during the development of systems of systems, but many inconsistencies appear between Systems Engineering and Project Management teams during engineering projects although their relationships is needed to be integrated as they get involved in large scale systems of systems. For the most part, these inconsistencies are due to a not close enough coordination and sometimes a lack of communication. As a result, there is a great need for international companies to understand the standards or guides from both domains to better integrate them and enhance their chances of success. Although numerous Systems Engineering and Project Management standards or guides have been published to help people get better organized and improve the quality of products or services, a lot of their projects still fail due to the poor integration of both domains. At the same time, the number of small and medium enterprises has quickly increased because the social division of labor is becoming more and more meticulous with the rapid development of the science and technology. The ability for small and medium enterprises to analyze and apply the Systems Engineering and Project Management standards or guides is not the same as for international companies, due to their limited resources. So the aim of this paper is to select two references from the most frequently used standards or guides in Systems Engineering and Project Management domains, the ISO/IEC 15288 and the PMBoK, and to illustrate how to help the systems engineers and project managers to compare and align the references from both domains quickly and effectively.
Aligning systems engineering and project management standards to improve the management of processes
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2014
For achieving the success of the project, relying on the systems engineering processes or project management processes is not sufficient and projects often fail due to deficient systems engineering practices or project management practices, or, at least, due to a lack of a coherency/consistency between the two aspects. So it is necessary to correctly implement systems engineering and project management processes during the whole project. This issue of SE and PM integration lies at the very heart of current research concerns. It is at the core of economic and industrial concerns. The goal of this paper is to analyze and compare the five important systems engineering standards (ANSI/EIA 632, ISO/IEC 15288, IEEE 1220, INCOSE Handbook and SEBoK) and the two project management standards (PM BoK and ISO 21500) to evaluate the consistency and inconsistency in order to facilitate the management of the projects and improve their possibility of success.
A Framework to Align Business Processes: Identification of the Main Features
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Article history: Received: 21 December, 2020 Accepted: 04 March, 2021 Online: 27 March, 2021 Information and Communications Technologies are developing faster today than ever before, giving an important contribution to the global economy. Organizations in developed and developing economies explore new technologies to gain advantage and add value. That evolution also brings an increasing complexity to the organizations’ management. The alignment of organizational practices with international standards and best practices worldwide accepted in this domain is a relevant topic. To identify gaps in Information and Communications Technologies management area, a brief analysis of international standards will be considered in the state-of-the-art. Considering that Information Technology Infrastructure Library and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology are the most used in the literature review, this paper will propose an Information and Communications Technologies manageme...
Integrating Systems Engineering with Project Management: a Current Challenge!
With increasingly complex systems, relying on systems engineering as an interdisciplinary method to manage engineering processes is essential for companies. However, too many projects still fail and industrial groups have argued that these failures may be related to the managerial techniques used. Indeed organizational processes are more or less specifically mentioned in System Engineering standards but in practice project managers tend to rely more on their own standards which sometime set forth practices not in line with those of the System Engineering domain, hence the reported discrepancies which very often lead to project failure. Thus to improve the companies' competitiveness when developing new products, cooperation between processes related to system development and project management is key to achieve performance and success. This paper presents arguments which tend to support this theory and details two ongoing projects that aim at integrating both domains.
Specifications of a method and tool to support the management of systems engineering projects
2014 International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE), 2014
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools are widely used by the industry. However, they are not sufficient to guarantee the success of projects and too many projects still fail. Industrial groups have argued that these failures may be related to the managerial techniques used. Indeed organizational processes are more or less specifically mentioned in Systems Engineering (SE) standards but in practice project managers tend to rely more on their own standards which sometime set forth practices not in line with those of the SE domain, hence the reported discrepancies which very often lead to project failure. Thus to improve the companies' competitiveness when developing new products, cooperation between processes related to system development and Project Management (PM) is key to getting performance and success. This paper presents arguments which tend to support this theory and introduces an ongoing project of method and tool that aim at integrating both domains.
Process Oriented Approaches in Enterprise Architecture for Business-IT Alignment
Procedia Computer Science, 2016
Business-IT Alignment (BITA) has been an issue for researchers of Information and Systems Technology (IST) area for the last three or four decades. Many authors refer to BITA as a concern subject of IST managers, in what regards its achievement, but also its maintenance. Nevertheless, all approaches seem to be time and resources consumers, contrary to what would be desirable nowadays: achieve and maintain BITA quickly, efficiently and sustainably. Enterprise Architecture (EA) construction, as a way to BITA, especially when a Business Process Management (BPM) approach is used, a list of best practices should be obtained. Using Case Study methodology, with a data set content analysis, this paper intends to highlight benefits of using it, in process oriented approaches' to EA construction aiming BITA. Besides contribute to EA construction using process oriented methodologies, it is also important to consider the contribution to the Academy, with the scientific knowledge' increase in this area. And also the contribution to both involved consultancy companies, as well as to the organizations, in this case Municipalities, deserves attention: organization's processes are improved and real problems can be solved.
ProPAMet: A Metric for Process and Project Alignment
Software Process Improvement (SPI) is one of the main software development challenges. Unfortunately, process descriptions generally do not correspond to the processes actually performed during software development projects. Process and project alignment is essential to really find out how process improvement is important to achieve an organization's strategic objectives. Considering this approach, this paper presents a new software SPI methodology designated by Process and Project Alignment Methodology (ProPAM). As a complement to be aware about project changes and facilitate the migration to an improved process, we propose a metric called ProPAMet to analyze the alignment between process and projects. To conclude, a case study contributed to validate the effectiveness of ProPAM and ProPAMet.