Project Management in BPPM Implementation - Part 7: Get an expert for milestone inspection

In today's economy, IT organizations are trying to do more with less.  Even you understand the complexity and magnitude of your BPPM implementation project, you may not be able to get as much budget as you requested.  For example, one of the BPPM customers told me that they could only get $23K for the entire BPPM implementation project comparing to $230K.

With limited budget, when it comes to hire consulting resources for a BPPM implementation project, many IT organizations have to hire the ones with the lowest cost even they are not confident about the resources' competencies.  What is worse is that they are not aware of many problems in their BPPM implementation until the project is claimed to be "completed".  Then they would have to re-do part of the implementation if they are lucky enough to get additional budget, or live with the crippled implementation as many IT organizations won't be able to get additional budget.

The #1 reason that many BPPM implementation projects are behind schedule and over budget is re-work.  For example, hundreds of PATROL agents were deployed 2-3 times because the PATROL agent deployment packages had to be rebuilt after they were already deployed.  If you can minimize re-work, you would have a much better chance to complete your BPPM implementation project on time, within budget, and with high quality.

The most effective way to minimize re-work is through milestone inspection.  At each project milestone, have an expert to perform inspection on what has been completed and look for any issues or potential issues.  For the above example, your inspector should perform quick check for anything that may cause re-work including product versions, product patches, installation accounts, installation directories, integration services, cells, CMA tags, etc.

It would be great if you have BPPM expertise in house.  If not, it is the best to hire an external expert who has been doing BPPM implementation for a long time.  Because it doesn't take long to perform a milestone inspection, this would be a small investment.  But this small investment will save you lots of major headaches in the long run.

This is very similar to building a home.  Several years ago, when I was building my first home, I knew nothing about home construction.  But I hired Bob as my home inspector.  Bob worked for home builders for many years before becoming a home inspector.  Based on his inspection results, I was able to get my builder to fix a long list of problems and potential problems before closing my home.  My small investment of hiring a home inspector has saved me from costly home repairs.

If your consulting resources are sent from a consulting company, performing milestone inspection by an expert in house or from a 3rd party can often make the consulting company raise your priority and send you their best consultants.