Project management techniques and best practices

Project Management Techniques:

Signatures Inc. is a company that focuses on manufacturing personalized products like coffee mugs and pens with company logos. The firm generates over $40 million in annual revenues with a workforce of more than 300 workers. Since the company is in the middle of a large multimillion-dollar SCM implementation, it has hired a project management outsourcing company to take charge of its project management efforts. The decision to outsource its project management initiatives is based on the challenges it has experienced in middle of this costly implementation process. Actually, Signatures' implementation of the expensive SCM project has been failing because of three major reasons. The three reasons are the use of traditional waterfall methodology, failure to follow SDLC and skipping the testing phase, and the development of the project plan during the analysis stage, which was never followed or updated by the old project manager. Therefore, the company needs to take necessary measures to get the already failing project back on track.

The first step in getting this failing project back on track has already been carried out i.e. determining areas where it started getting off track. The determination of reasons and areas the project started getting off track is crucial to understanding it and solving it eventually. In this case, the determination phase has contributed to the identification of three reasons or areas that will be addressed separately. The traditional waterfall methodology seems to be unsuitable for this project because of difficulties in complete specification and documentation of the end-product (Symonds, 2013). Since the agile approach may not be perfectly fit for this project, the issue will be addressed by adopting a combination of the two methodologies. The combination of these methodologies is fueled by the fact that projects, especially multimillion-dollar ones, need control and flexibility that is offered by the combination. One of the major challenges brought by the traditional waterfall technology in the implementation of this project is the seeming lack of control and flexibility in the process. The use of a combination of the two methodologies would enable the project team to have control and flexibility during implementation and avoid the disadvantages of each of these methodologies.

As previously mentioned, the second problem in the implementation of this project is the failure to follow the systems development life cycle and the decision by the developers to skip the testing phase. This issue will be addressed through scaling back the scope of work in order to get the project back on track. The scaling back process will involve evaluating the remaining work and examining which activities or options should be removed, particularly those that would not be core to the feasibility of the project. Notably, this process will also involve communication and working together with the project team and the firm's management to determine the required resources and expected duration of the project with the removal or addition of project activities. Scaling back of the project activities will also involve examining the feasibility of the testing phase in light of the new changes. If necessary, this project will be completed in its present state and a follow-up project executed to complete the remaining part and ensure 100% functionality.