PMIWIC West Boise Roundtable Meeting Notes – Sept 13, 2006

Topics of Discussion:

1. Integrating a newly acquired company into the organization
2. Communication of project health
3. Product driven organization

Integrating a newly acquired company into the organization

The situation discussed was about an organization that had acquired a company about five years ago but had not completely integrated the acquisition into the business processes and IT systems of the acquiring company.  It is now a corporate directive to do both.  Several suggestions were made:

• Gap assessment between the acquiring and acquired organizations
• Change management
• Make sure that the customer-facing teams (Support and Sales) are heavily involved so that the customer will not be negatively impacted by the integration.

Communication of project health

The question was raised as to how organizations report project health.  Several attendees responded:

• Red/Yellow/Green based on cost/schedule/scope.  Somewhat subjective.
• On Target: Yes or No; If a problem is reported, summarize down to a single word such as “resources”
• Schedule is often the most important of the cost/schedule/scope constraints.  In that case, the scope is adjusted (i.e. features dropped)

Product driven organization

Discussion centered on whether any attendees had seen (or been part of) an organization structured mostly around projects rather than around function or operation.  One individual said he had been part of a consulting company that was organized around accounts (projects).  Other than that, everyone had mostly been part of companies that were organized around function or operation.

Further discussion centered about the problems of pulling subject matter experts (SME) from the operations to be on project teams.  Often the SME does not have enough bandwidth to do both.  Operations had priority over projects.  This impacted the successful and timely delivery of projects.