This article contains another excerpt from Paul Tinnirello’s book “New Directions in Project Management.” This is the fourth installment in a six-part series entitled Balancing Critical Project Success Factors. If you’re just tuning in, so far we’ve covered:
In this fourth segment we cover generating a commitment to ideas. The concept is building a commitment to ideas and implementation plans through particpation of the end user.
Build Commitment to Ideas or Implementation Plans through User Participation
Once common vision has been established, successful IT project plans regularly solicit the participation of those who must use applications on a daily and ongoing basis to refine the application and the strategy that will be used to install it. This commitment to participation has several benefits. With greater involvement, user knowledge of the factors that influence timelines and milestones increases, IT-user communication is enhanced and expensive missteps can be avoided and efficiency improved. Participation has a second benefit. It has been consistently demonstrated that involvement with project design enhances commitment to implementation. Giving the user community the opportunity to experiment with prototypes, recommend upgrades, and influence implementation plans early on and often increases the likelihood that the installed system will be well received and ultimately used.
Putting participation into practice presents the IT professional with a few challenges. For participation to work, users must trust the process, view their input as voluntary, experience the process of participating as rewarding, and see their ideas significantly affecting work products. IT professionals may have to intervene to insure these conditions will exist before asking for user participation. This means influencing user management. For user managers to support participation, IT professionals must illustrate that the benefits of participation exceed the risks to productivity created by having their people devote time to project work.
Paul C. Tinnirello is the editor of “New Directions in Project Management” from the Best Practices Series.