Keeping the Business in Mind

Guidelines to Analyze the Consequences of Noncompliance

During the project, the project manager needs to identify and manage legal, regulatory, and other
compliance requirements. Guidelines for analysis include:

• Define the legal, regulatory, and other constraints, and define the business rules based on
compliance requirements that will constrain the project solution and improve the likelihood of
maintaining compliance.
• Define parts of the potential solution subject to compliance requirements, the scope of the
compliance requirements, the scope of the compliance requirement, and the stakeholder
responsible for reviewing, approving, and signing-off on compliance of the component.
• Track and manage the review and approval activities related to compliance requirements.

Guidelines to Measure the Compliance of a Project

When assessing project compliance, it is useful to leverage quality management to both validate
compliance and identify noncompliance issues and potential corrective actions. Some guidelines include:

• Use QA outputs to confirm deliverables and process compliance and identify the needs for
corrective actions.
• Establish project tolerances and enable the project manager to either initiate corrective actions
within tolerances or to quickly escalate any noncompliance outside the tolerances.
• Establish a clear Quality Management Plan and execute it on an ongoing basis to identify any
noncompliance issues as early as possible.
• Establish where external audit teams can confirm and validate use of appropriate processes and
procedures and how results can enable the team to identify improvements.
• Leverage effective QA tools and techniques to assess quality deliverables and identify
improvements, corrective actions, or defect repairs required.
Guidelines for Assessing the Impact on Project Backlog Based on Business Environment Changes

Projects are often impacted by larger changes in the business environment, either internally or
externally. The project manager must maintain broad awareness of the potential impacts of these
business changes and how they affect the overall business case and value of the projects being
managed. Here are a few basic guidelines.

• Understand the project’s organizational context. Which organization’s will be using the
solution? How does overall workflow work? What defined roles and responsibilities are there
in supporting the workflow? How might those be impacted by an internal business activity like a
reorganization?
• Understand the external factors that my impact your project. Are there political risks or issues?
What would the economic impact of a downturn be on your project’s value proposition? What
technical innovations might impact your solution approach? What types of legal or regulatory
changes are being considered by your city/state/country that could impact your solution?
• How is your project’s work prioritized? If you are running an agile project, does your backlog get
regularly reviewed and refined to reflect current business priorities? Do you have an engaged
Product Owner who is ensuring that the backlog is correct, and who is available to answer
questions from the team to help them stay on track?
• What is the project’s governance model? What are the levels of tolerance delegated to the
project manager, and what issues must be escalated to the governance or steering committee?

Guidelines to Recommend, Plan, and Facilitate Changes

Here is a set of key guidelines for managing changes:

• Establish a single way changes are requested with a description of the proposed change, the
business value of the change, any risk and risk mitigation recommendations, and the likely cost
of the change.
• Ensure that there is a Change Control Board that can assess the change’s cost, risk, and value,
other potential impacts to the project, and make recommendations.
 • Based on the size of the change and the project’s tolerances, the project manager may approve
the change, or may be required to escalate the change for review and approval or disapproval
by the project’s Governing Board.
• Changes are not made only to hardware, software, or other systems; they affect people,
workflows, roles, and responsibilities, and the entire organization. Organizational change
management best practices should be followed, including building a compelling case for change,
getting the buy-in and commitment of key members of the stakeholder group, communicating
the change vision, and enabling other stakeholders to engage. Quick wins should be sought, and
consolidation and institutionalization of the change should be reinforced.
• Ensure changes are properly aligned and updates to other project artifacts, such as the project
plan, training plans, training artifacts, and software configurations or demonstrations.

Guidelines to Execute Continuous Improvement Steps

To get the most out of continuous improvement, follow these guidelines:

• Review the organization’s continuous improvement strategy.

• Develop a continuous improvement approach for your project, keeping in mind the project goals
and the expectations of the stakeholders.
• Use lessons learned from your project, as well as from other projects, as sources of continuous
improvement.
• For agile projects, use retrospectives as opportunities to improve the next iteration of the
project.
• Use lessons learned at the project level to improve the organization’s continuous improvement
process.