IT Project Health Checks Driving Successful Implementation and Multiples of Business Value

Project or program health checks provide tremendous value to businesses and pay for themselves by multiples of magnitude. No matter how well a project or program is performing, there are always activities that can provide better value, reduce costs, or introduce more innovation. IT project and program health checks can help organizations reach their goals and dramatically improve Return on Investment (ROI). IT Project Health Checks: Driving Successful Implementation and Multiples of Business Value offers a proven approach for evaluating IT projects or programs in order to determine how they are performing and how the eventual outcome for the initiative is currently trending. The project or program health checks provide a set of techniques that produce actionable recommendations that can be applied for any combination of the following outcomes: Drive more business and technical value from a program Set a project or program back on track for successful implementation as defined by executive management Rescue a program that is heading towards failure Act as additional insurance for initiatives that are too important to fail Protect executive careers by creating transparencywithin the inner workings of complex initiatives. The book shows how a review can quickly identify whether an initiative needs to be rescued even when the project team is not aware that it is hurtling towards failure. It also provides techniques for driving business value even when a project team believes it’s been stretched as much as possible. Other outcomes covered in this book include: Objectively develop a project Health-Check Scorecard that establishes how well a project is doing and the direction it is headed Demonstrate how to drive business value from an IT program regardless of how well or badly it is tracking Provide surgical advice to improve a project’s outcome How to usethe many templates and sample deliverables to get a quick start on your own health check. Designed to provide significant value to any member of a project team, program team, stakeholders, sponsors, business users, system integrators, trainers, and IT professionals, this book can help find opportunities to drive multiples of business value and exceed project success metrics.

Section A. Using the Power of the Health Check1. Use Project Health Checks to Drive Business Value 2. Health Check Prerequisites, Types of Health Checks and Success Strategies3. Health Check Evaluation Framework4. Health Check Reporting5. Roles and Responsibilities for an Effective Assessment6. Business Value Levers Section B. Conducting the Health Check Assessments 7. Laying the Foundation for a Meaningful Health Check 8. Spotting Early Warning Red Flags in the Initial Stages of the Health Check9. Reviewing the Documentation and Other Deliverables10. Conducting Interviews of Key Project/Program Resources11. Health Check Execution Considerations 12. Building the Risk and Mitigation Strategy Section C. Working with the Assessment Results 13. Interpreting the Discovery Results, Interview Answers, and the Warning Flags 14. Mounting a Project Rescue15. Bringing It All Together Section D. After the Assessment and Next Steps 16. Monitoring Progress through the Health Check17. Case Studies18. Conclusion

Sanjiv Purba is an award winning, hands-on Transformational Executive and Board Member with over 25 years of progressive Technology and Business experience within Industry and Consulting Organizations. He has built a long list of enthusiastic client references by delivering large complex business transformational projects as a CIO, Interim CIO, COO, or as a senior advisor. Several large programs he has managed have won client awards and have been identified as examples of best practices by SAP, IBM, and Oracle. Sanjiv works with C-Suite & Corporate Boards of mid-to-large sized companies who want to digitally transform their business and surgically leverage IT solutions such as ERP, CRM, HRIS & Data Analytics to maximize share price through effective implementation and ongoing Operations. A key aspect of this has been to conduct health checks to identify opportunities to make improvements from the current state of their programs by dramatically increasing business value. In other instances, project rescues or other project management interventions were successfully applied to bring programs back on track towards successful implementation. The author has held senior roles at a variety or organizations including Deloitte, KPMG, IBM, Microsoft, and IMAX. His most recent position is to run the digital transformation consulting practices at Prodigy Labs, a division of Prodigy Ventures Inc., based out of Toronto, Canada. Sanjiv has writtenmore than19 books and hundreds of articles for such publications as The Toronto Star and The Globe & Mail