Project Recovery Engagement
30 Days Free of Charge
According to a detailed study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their IT projects.
Another study conducted by Project Management Institute (PMI), indicated that 14% of IT projects failed completely, 31% didn’t meet their goals, 43% exceeded the initial budget, and 49% were late.
If you believe that your project is in danger of any of these outcomes, Proxet is here to help. We offer a team of experts in project and product management, software architecture, AI/ML and business analysis to help your company identify and fix problems that may lead to complete or partial failure of your project.
Most importantly, our help is free of charge for 30 days. Completely free of charge, with no hidden cost and fine prints.
Why Gratis?
While this program, among other programs, is part of our long-term sales and marketing strategy, we understand perfectly well how difficult it is to choose reliable partners.
Working with us during this no-strings-attached trial period, you can see our value first-hand and grow to better understand our technical expertise, experience, reliability, risk mitigation capabilities, and management skills. And once we prove ourselves, all we ask is to be considered for future projects.
Major Contributors to Project Failure
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Lack of a Scope Definition
Statement of the problem
In the absence of a proper scope document, you can never assign tasks, let alone monitor the performance of your team because you haven’t defined the scope of the project in the first place.How Proxet can help
If you do not have a scope document, Proxet will create one for you. Our team of experienced Product Managers and Business Analysts will produce a detailed scope document that highlights all the stakeholders’ requirements to enable your team members to understand what they have to do and set a clear direction and objective for them to achieve. -
Inconsistent Communication
Statement of the problem
Effective communication within any organization is important to keep all your team members on the same page, avoid confusion and keep them motivated. 57% of projects failed due to poor communication. This makes it one of the major causes of project failure.
How Proxet can help
To save your project from failure, Proxet will help you to establish clear communication channels and protocols between different teams. We will recommend and help you to adopt a project management system that enables smooth communication between different project stakeholders.
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Poor Planning
Statement of the problem
Lack of planning or poor planning can easily lead your project to failure. Multiple surveys also revealed that 40% of projects fail due to poor planning and lack of resources.
How Proxet can help
Our team typically consists of an experienced project manager, business analyst/product manager and system architect as well as Machine Learning expert in certain circumstances. These experts will evaluate your current plan and, if recommended, create a new one.
During the engagement we will be doing the following:
1. Identify and meet stakeholders to discuss their needs and expectations and establish a baseline for project scope, budget, and timeline.
2. Set and prioritize project goals.
3. Define MVP versions.
4. Identify the quantity and type of resources required.
5. Create a project schedule.
6. Identify the issues and complete the risk assessment.
7. Present all artifacts to the stakeholders. -
Selection of the wrong technology
Statement of the problem
No project manager can save your project if the chosen tools and technologies for the IT project are wrong. It is easy to be swayed by the latest, exciting technologies. Some project managers, under pressure from the development team, choose a programming language and environment because of personal preferences rather than technological suitability; others choose what is trendy and emerging.
Another hurdle comes when you make the right selection of tools and technologies, but you do not have skilled resources for the selected tools and technologies.
How Proxet can help
The Proxet process will start with evaluating the business problem and examining its nature. Once we have understood the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of the problem, we will proceed to unfold the ‘how’ of the solution.
Proxet will examine your technology selection and recommend changes, if necessary. The goal of the evaluation is to recommend programming languages and development, and operating environments which align with your business challenges.
We also can evaluate if your development team has what it takes to get the job done. This evaluation is performed by highly-experienced software architects and Machine Learning specialists with a minimum of 10+ years of professional experience.
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Poor Business Analysis Capabilities
Statement of the problem
68% of companies are more likely to have a marginal project or outright failure than success due to the way they approach business analysis.
In fact, 50% of this group’s projects were “runaways” which had any 2 of the following pitfalls: taking over 180% of target time to deliver, consuming in excess of 160% of the estimated budget, or delivering under 70% of the target required functionality.
How Proxet can help
The solution lies in recognizing that proper requirements definition is critical. Solid requirements planning establishes a clear connection between the business case, project goals, and the project outcome. Our team of experienced business analysts and product managers will make sure that all assumptions are explicit.
For example, if the business requests a specific requirement, our team will do the following:
1. Write it down.
2. Expand the requirement into a set of features.
3. Share the planned features with the company to get their feedback.
4. Rinse, lather, repeat until the technical team and the company are on the same page. -
Project Management Failure
Statement of the problem
If you go through the reasons why IT projects fail, you can easily see that most of the reasons have their root in flawed project management. More than half of your reasons can be either mitigated or avoided altogether if you have a professional project manager with substantial experience to manage your projects.
Project management may sound trivial, but it is the most challenging part of any project. For a complicated project, experienced project managers cannot be simply replaced by a SCRUM master or an agile coach with just a few days of training.
How Proxet can help
Every single project manager working for Proxet has a minimum of 5+ years of project management experience on top of the 5+ years of technical background, either as a software developer or quality assurance specialist.
We believe that a project cannot go from being on-budget and on-schedule to outright failure overnight. There is always a ‘troubled’ phase in between. Our project managers may help you to identify any warning signals and take appropriate actions timely.
If your project is already in trouble, our experts will help you identify the source(s) of the problem and propose appropriate steps to fix them.
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Scope Creep
Statement of the problem
Changing project objectives are to blame for 36% of failed projects. Requirements growth becomes a problem when you keep on adding functionality without allocating more time or budget.
Similarly, modification to existing requirements might also need more re-work, time and effort – affecting your project performance baselines. This approach can be disastrous for your project if you keep on improving the same deliverable again and again. Adding better ideas for your product when your product is in the development phase may result in immense scope creep.
How Proxet can help
Proxet will assign a team of experienced project and product managers with significant personal experience of battling scope creep. We understand the need to be flexible, we understand that the circumstances may change, and the job of the assigned team is to find the appropriate solution for conflicting priorities.
Typical solutions include enforcement of:
– Rigid change control procedures.
– Multiple, rapidly developed consecutive MVP versions of your product. -
Lack of Qualified Technical Resources
Statement of the problem
Project managers often use the word “resources” to refer to people, so “not enough qualified resources” refers to not having enough qualified people to complete the work for a project. This accounts for 22% of failed projects.
This is especially true when we are talking about senior developers, architects, team leads, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence specialists, who are notoriously difficult to recruit.
How Proxet can help
We have specialists who are highly skilled across a wide variety of technologies and can leverage a diverse and broad skillset to achieve tailored software products.
Our engineers are expert technologists. Whether the solution calls for .NET, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Python or Ruby, MySQL or Mongo, on clients’ servers, AWS, Azure or elsewhere, we have the diversity of skills and experience to get the project done effectively and quickly.
At Proxet, we use a broad category of ML/AI techniques and solutions and apply them to many interesting applications – from chatbots in healthcare to personalized advertising to self-driving cars in smart transportation. We specialise in NLP, Sentiment Analysis, Facial and Image Recognition and Voice Technology.
Our process. Crisis Management
We start the engagement with the creation of two-people project recovery team:
- Senior Architect
- Senior Project Manager
The team will begin with an assessment which focuses on determining the current real status of the project and the changes that need to be made in people, the product or service specifications of the project, and project management processes in order to improve performance.
The job of the team is to define what other specialists need to be added to the team (e.g. business analysts, product managers, ML/AI specialists, etc.)
The project charter delegates authority to the PRT. Because the PRT team are “outsiders”, it is important at the outset that the project manager (PM) and their team are committed to working with the Recovery Team (RT).
The charter process ensures that this is accomplished before proceeding. In this important first step, you are attempting to identify and agree on a number of critical elements which will be included in the project charter. For example, you need to:
- Define the mission with the sponsor
- Understand the project history and sensitivities
- Establish initial project team contact
- Determine the assessment approach
- Complete the charter and obtain approval
Using this model, the PRT will develop an assessment plan that:
- Is realistic and can be executed to achieve the charter’s objectives
- Will allow for an assessment in as short a time as possible
- Will ensure that accurate findings are produced
- Will minimize project team distraction
This model centers around two areas of activity at this stage: conducting the interviews and analyzing project data. To do this, the PRT will:
- Identify the critical documentation that needs to be reviewed and analyzed
- Identify the stakeholders who need to be interviewed
- Prepare the agenda and interview schedule
The PRT is now ready to execute the Assessment Plan which has three main areas of focus:
- Determining the true current status of the project
- Identifying the major threats, opportunities and problems for the project moving forward
- Establishing an extended team for the recovery effort
Executing the assessment plan includes:
- Conducting the interviews
- Analyzing the data
- Developing a rank-ordered list of findings
The focus of this step is on developing a recovery project plan and assembling an extended team to accomplish the work.
The development of the recovery plan takes into consideration how the PRT will address people and personnel issues, the specific project management processes that will be employed moving forward, and the decisions that need to be made relative to the product/service which is the output of the project.
To clarify, the PRT must:
- Focus on building everyone’s morale
- Deal directly with personnel problems
- Resolve serious leadership problems
- Add people to the project carefully, if at all
In recovery, you must begin with the end in mind. The “end state” the RT is working to achieve is a project that is no longer in recovery. It’s on solid footing with well-defined project control and management system, an achievable plan and a team that can get the job done.
This is accomplished, as in any project, through the process of executing and monitoring and, in this case, absolute focus on the inchstone plan developed.