Project Management Scaling
Project Management Scale – Acquisition Integration
Be careful how you scale the information technology integration project management effort. You might get it.
IT Infrastructure integration efforts can be brought to a standstill by excessive project management controls.
In one mid-size enterprise organization merger, the project management office (PMO) was often a valued change agent in the IT infrastructure conversion project effort. However, the type of project management controls and processes applied were often over-scaled, overly complicated and more suited for large scale government programs. If your project management team is oversized, you can expect excessive overhead costs and staff meetings driven by junior staff members adding little value to the process. A large project management organization may offer an excellent training ground for junior staff and contract consultants however, the resulting output will often be of low quality or unusable. The overhead administrative costs relative to the size of the acquisition may be unacceptable.
By scaling the project management effort to a mid-sized acquisition, a simplified set of project controls and a smaller project management staff may be sufficient.
Project Management Scaling
The first rule of organization is to scale to fit the size of the task.
For mid-sized acquisition efforts, consider limiting the project management staff to two or three key members. Ensure the project management staff reports to the acquiring company’s program management office. This will serve to appropriately size the integration organization to the task, provide appropriate governance and ensure alignment of the local project management teams with the acquiring company integration objectives.
Trim the fat.
Explore posts in the same categories: IT Infrastructure, Mergers and Acquisitions, Project Management
Tags: Consolidation, IT Infrastructure, it infrastructure merger, Joe Tighe, M&A, Program Management, Project Management, Scaling, Strategy
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October 9, 2008 at 7:38 pm
An excellent article about the overhead of Project Management and how to deal with it.
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February 14, 2009 at 12:19 am
Good point – folks often forget PM and controls are overhead.