What’s ROP ? It’s a valuable concept for Project Managers, Change Managers and Business Analysts. “Return On Project” is all about efficiency and effectiveness: categorizing the most common causes of wasted resources in the life-cycle of a project, you will be able to reduce them and consequently improve ROP (…and your career too…).
Please refer to: http://meetingofideas.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/rop-return-on-project-the-humble-beginning-07/ for my first Post about ROP – a sort of introduction.
Today I talk about: “1) Over-convoluted project workflow (‘I hate bureaucracy! I hate overhead!’)”
Project workflow includes “gates”, approvals, signed documents, “filtering” procedures, due-diligence, etc. Many of these steps are absolutely useful and valuable, others sadly are just worthless bureaucracy. The goal here is to find a good and very well balanced trade-off between overhead (that is, cost) and added value.
Remember, the project workflow does not make any direct transformation to the product/service that the customer is willing to pay for (the outcome of your project); it just manages the creation process.
Each time a step is performed/enforced, a cost is incurred, and there is also a significant risk of delaying delivery: it’s therefore vital to scrutinise the project workflow to eliminate unnecessary governance activities.
In my next six Posts about ROP, I will talk about the other six causes of wasted resources during the life-cycle of a project:
2) Too many ‘Not-yet-in-Production’ (that is, not yet ‘usable’) COMPLETED features
3) Uncontrolled piling up of new feature-requests (“…doesn’t it remind you of a bad game of TETRIS?”)
4) Project workflow bottlenecks (“Hurry up, Andy!! I’ve got five people waiting for your deliverable!!”)
5) Implementation over-complication (“‘Simple’ and ‘elegant’ is most often than not better than ‘fancy’ and ‘sophisticated’”)
6) Bad ‘feature-implementation’ prioritization (“Who cares that we can back-up our DB? We don’t have a DB yet…!”)
7) Bug-proliferation (“What does HTTP500 mean?”)
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Andy Cavallini – Business Analyst & Project Manager
Let’s talk about ROP (Return On Project), a ‘Project Management & Business analysis’ concept I am working on; ROP is all about efficiency and effectiveness: if the goal of your project is attained without wasting resources (…I think of time & money, of course…), then ROP is very high – don’t worry, we will work later on a significant measure for ROP…
Buongiorno a tutti, ecco un altro mio Post in versione inglese – spero vi possa interessare – ho già affrontato questo argomento un po’ di tempo fa…
Ciao, come qualcuno di voi saprà, questo blog ha un fratello “internazionale” in english (Meeting of Ideas), nato qualche tempo fa con il moltiplicarsi dei miei contatti professionali all’estero.
