Consistency and quality

There is always room for improvement. Two areas of real business opportunity relate to the themes of consistency and quality.

Consistency

You will have inconsistent business practices often due to a lack of visibility. It is common for project managers to apply quite different approaches to the specification and management of things such as deliverables, tasks and milestones. You now have the opportunity to standardise your approach. For example, it is good practice to specify a key milestone at the end of a key set of tasks. This provides a goal for the team to aim at and enables programme managers to track progress against those key milestones. Applying a greater level of consistency should free up project staff to concentrate on delivery rather than waste time on inefficient process.

Quality

The adage of "rubbish in, rubbish out" certainly applies here. This is an opportunity to tidy up your existing information and apply a greater degree of rigour to the way you manage your information in the future. Only quality information should be taken over into i-lign and you should always be looking to improve what you currently have in place. For example:

• You should have standard naming and numbering conventions.
• Excess words should be eliminated. Use just enough words to fulfil the necessary function. Task names, for example, should be brief. The Description field should be used to add additional detail, if required.
• Project plans and business cases should be brought up-to-date. You'll often find they are out-of-date and the project information is no longer valid.