quality of SMEs working on your initiatives/projects
availability of appropriate resources at the right time.
how have you handled this in your companies and projects,
what gates have you set. how have you documented this,
what have you done if the SME is not the right person, or the resources are not provided at the right time.
Who has the responsibility of ensuring that the SME has the right skillset to support the initiative. (You as a general program manager or owner of an initiative may not have the expertise in all functional areas involved to know what specifically is needed)
Re: calling all project/program managers especially Umar Talib
I can probably write a book in this subject and would not be able to cover all aspect and scenarios.
In general the toughest job is hiring or selecting the right people for your team. But before you can get that far, you need to define what your needs/mission/goals. If goals are not defined correctly, which is often the case, you may have the right SME at the start but they will not be right SME as the project progresses.
The key to success is managing change; as changes come into play, re-access all aspects of the project including your team and SME's and re-establish new criteria for success which may include bringing in new SME's. That is why it is critical to define a change management policy right at the start with Executive buy-in. Ad-hoc change management leads to disaster.
In addition to change management you need break down every project into small chunks/iteration and at the end of every iteration have a measurable result. I have known lots of PM and managers defining very good project plans and iteration but they still fail. Often the failure happens because they failed to define measurable results. Often what they thought was a good measurable result was in the gray zone or not applicable as changes came into play. That is why it is critical to take your time and define measurable results after each iteration and as changes come into play re-evaluate the entire project for impact.
Re: calling all project/program managers especially Umar Talib
Boston thanks for the indight but its still too high level.
I am looking for specific strategies, if at a client you are consistently not getting the right SMEs, what would you do to ensure that for the current project right SMes are brought in, and for future projects you get right SMEs, again you alone may not have a basis to write specifics on what constitutes a good SME from a particular functional area.
I am thinking of putting a process in place where the stakeholders from the functional area and I sit down to discuss what the role from teh SMe would be, what the needs are, and jointly draft SME skillset and SME rsponsibilities, time commitment etc. Get sign off on it, and then get the right SME on the team.
Re: calling all project/program managers especially Umar Talib
I doubled up reading your message Fraudz… in more than one way actually – this is something that I recently contended with in a project where my primarily role was more along the lines of a solution advisor. The project manager had assigned an SME for a privacy impact assessment of our project and we had a pretty difficult time in getting that SME on board with our project specifics. Moreover, the SME was only brought in on an intermittent basis – of course she was busy herself with a lot of other ongoing projects with other clients but I personally feel that this has a lot to do with the over-enthusiastic cost-cutting fever that has swept a lot of firms.
Khair, coming back to your question, in most of the projects that I’ve been involved with, I’ve learnt the importance of institutionalizing very well defined project management roles and work group roles. I really can’t express the difference it makes in having SMEs, Functional Analysts and Solution Advisors/Architects (depending on the business domain) work in tandem for a project manager. If your project’s work breakdown and responsibility assignments are setup that way, it will certainly make a huge difference.
Multiple SMEs ==> One FA ==> One SA ==> Rest of Project Team...
In terms of scouting SMEs, the one instance where I can say it worked best for a project that I was involved with was when we setup workgroups each with its own relevant process owners and a couple of domain users… the program manager sat on all workgroups as a steward.
Will write more on this later today… let me know if this is the type of information that you were looking for, or am I off-track.
Re: calling all project/program mgrs, product launch leaders etc especially Umar Talib
this is very helpful.
now how do you do bull**** check on the input from SMEs.
If the SME provides incorrect perspective, you can do some general sanity check on it but dont have the basis or time to investigate and formulate your own opinion, because if you start doing that it would just slow everything down. how are SMEs held accountable?
Re: calling all project/program mgrs, product launch leaders etc especially Umar Talib
Oops – totally forgot about this thread until now…
I guess when it comes to selecting the appropriate SME, it helps to know whether they’ve worked on a similar project as yours even before hiring them.
This is where the workgroup with the domain users and the process owner comes into play. In a prelude session, members from the workgroup should meet with the SME to ensure that he/she is what they claim to be, and they’d not impede the project while trying to get on board.
Once satisfied, the workgroup should work with legal to draft a memorandum of agreement with the SME. Assigning responsibility for the project failures such as not meeting requirements, cost overruns and schedule extensions is a challenge in all projects. If you’re involved in a project where accountability for the problem is more likely to be a political decision and not a technical one, then make sure that there’s someone on the project workgroup who has positional authority in the organization. For internal SMEs, this can act as a significant deterrent for shirking.
External SMEs are more challenging… in my last project, we adopted a paired teaming approach where the SME was paired with an internal member who was “borrowed” from the implementation team on an intermittent basis. The internal member would always be aware of the activities and progress of the SME and communicate with the program manager on a routine basis. This also helps nip any problem in the bud upfront and makes the overall process more reliable since you have two people working on it in parallel. Although a costly undertaking on the outset since you’re allocating an additional resource to the initial stages, it can alleviate future more expensive setbacks and snags. As always, you’d much rather have a proactive approach then a reactive one.