State of PM Practice

Conversation with Mr. Arun Gupta, Group CIO K Raheja and Shoppers Stop

Arun is the Group CIO at the K Raheja Corporation which has business across infrastructure, realty and retail among others. He has a rich experience in the industry as an IT business leader and is recognized as a “Business friendly” and “Strategic CIO”, a leader in aligning IT and business. He has been featured by Economic Times as “The CIO who never spoke Technology”.  Arun is also an active blogger and pens down his observations @ http://cio-inverted.blogspot.com

What is the process your organizations uses to translate strategic initiatives into front-line action and results? How do you assess/manage the demand pipeline and prioritise accordingly?

The management team comprising of the CXOs together define the strategic direction of the organization.  Based on this direction discussions on initiatives required to achieve the strategic objectives are formulated. These initiatives are then broken down into buckets based on time priority of long, medium, and short term.  Strategic initiatives may be long term in nature as they potentially deal with capability development.

The initiatives are then translated into the Balanced Score Card of the organization which are then further broken down into KRA/KPI for the business and functions of the organization.  Project proposals along with budgetary approvals for the initiatives are reviewed in the management meetings. Management and leadership team decides on these initiatives based on consensus and on many occasions projects are prioritized for implementation based on available bandwidth in the organization. For the approved initiatives which are funded the tracking and monitoring is done by the functions and presented to the management team.

This process doesn’t necessarily work all the time for all the initiatives; this may be due to multiple reasons including but not limited to priority focus changes, time estimates mismatches and inability to foresee all the risks and uncertainty.  Also the tactical review discipline is an area for improvement as review is critical to success from an executive perspective.

What are your top 3 or 5 problems with programme/project delivery? How are you currently addressing these 3/5 problems? What support do you get from other CXO’s in addressing these issues?

Business understanding in the partner eco-system is an area of concern and many assumptions are made by the business and the partners when conceptualizing the project.  Patience to go into the details and critical skills of appreciative inquiry and deep interrogation is missing at times. We realized this after specific issues faced on few of our projects as rework on them was going out of control.  Going forward we have now incorporated multiple validation steps which ensure details are discussed and captured as we progress in the lifecycle.  Although on the surface the validation processes seems to consume time it improves delivery as rework post go-live is reduced

For the organization the measure of success of the initiatives is more than just being on time and budget.  Focus on post implementation benefits realization vis-a-vis the baseline was an issue.  Although projects have a business case when it’s proposed and approved, the challenge was to measure the actual realized value.  We have now initiated the process of capturing benefit realized post implementation.  This is important to get the buy-in from other functional heads and by setting an example.  Also delivery teams now have benefit targets to achieve and demonstrate as part of their initiatives.

The third and largest issues remains in the “People” domain as the discipline to execute and follow a structure or processes not just in projects but in general are required for making efficiency gains.  Like most organization, we don’t claim to have an answer for this but in our experience so far, mentoring and coaching people is the way to work on this issue.  There are many things being done here and most of them at an individual leadership level.

Does your organization have a PMO? At what level is it? What are its role and responsibility and how is it being measured? Is the practice of PM actively promoted in your organization? Can you share some of the details?

Our organization does not have a formal PMO in place and at this juncture we don’t seem to be in need of one.   Each of the business and functional leader has a view of its portfolio of initiatives and the same is presented to the committees.  The recognition of PM as critical business skill is not present in function other than IT and infrastructure team.  Apart from nominating people to project management training program there is currently no organization initiative focusing on this.  However, few years ago PM capability development was initiative but due to the slowdown the initiative lost momentum and focus.  Apart from this there is a strong need to align business and functions to the PM discipline.  Apart from interventions in individual organization one needs to include PM as a core subject in formal education. This will assist in building the recognition of this discipline.  And I agree industry needs to start demanding these skills in graduates and management professionals along with pushing the institutions to deliver this.

As a CIO of an owner organization, do you see a difference in the project management practice used by the service providers and by owner organization? What are some of the key differences?

From an industry perspective the key difference is the structured approach that service provider use in defining and managing projects.  Although there are improvements required in estimation, planning and scheduling but compared to owner organization they are more structured.  However, most IT service providers and their consultants lack the ability to decipher the (client) organization context and align the project and/or delivery to it. Understanding the business context and the stakeholders is a major area for service provider to focus on as the key to success lies in alignment of these. We have seen inordinate issues in implementation due to lack of stakeholder alignment and business understanding.

Rigour of review, alignment to business/organization context, balance opportunity with capacity/bandwidth when moving initiative to implementation, mentoring and coaching of managers to adopt a disciplined approach, building PM discipline in academic curriculum