The principles behind Collaborative Project Management will allow organizations to move beyond technology to achieve real business benefits.

A reduced defense budget and defense acquisition reforms are placing increased pressure on the contractor Program Management Office (PMO). In this environment, the PMO is challenged to reduce costs and cycle times, while simultaneously improving product quality of weapon system procurements.

At the same time, a shrinking industrial base, government privatization and the movement towards more full service provider contacts is requiring longer and more complex program management oversight "through life" of weapons system contracts.

On the new business front, program managers are faced with demonstrating their collaborative capabilities both from a process (IPT - Integrated Product Team, IPPD - Integrated Product & Process Development) and systems (IDE - Integrated Digital Environment) standpoint in order to compete.

Although effective program management collaboration will promote significant cost and time reductions on existing programs and enhance competitive advantage, achieving a true collaborative business environment can be a daunting challenge.

Many early adopters have discovered that collaboration has not delivered the benefits they expected. Information technology problems are most frequently cited as the reason for lack of results, but they are, in fact, the easiest to solve. The more complex issue such as process, participants and performance remain unaddressed.

What's Gone Wrong?

In practice, many companies underestimate the importance of reconciling processes, such as labor collection across the enterprise project team, document taxonomy, WBS synchronization and earned value reporting frequency, and typically work out individual operating policies and procedures that sub-optimize the larger process.

Program teaming agreements and a focus on program deliverables do not necessarily guarantee equitable and efficient operation. Unfortunately, such teaming agreements typically do not detail the mechanisms and measures necessary to collaborate in the most effective way.

Some of the contributing factors that lead to lack of results from collaborative efforts include:

• Emphasis on technology; not process
• Roles and responsibilities of the participants are either not delivered or are worked out "on the fly"
• Reluctance to share information between enterprise participants
• Substantial differences among partners, suppliers and customer cost and schedule processes and systems
• Mixed messages among major customers and partners
• Software vendors touting wholesale replacement over integration

Collaboration will eventually provide substantial benefit, but only if adopters fundamentally change their approach and expand their focus beyond that of technology.

Recommendations for Successful Collaboration

To be successful, CSC believes that collaboration requires a new approach - an approach focused equally on process, participants, performance and technology.

Today, companies link technologies to enable information sharing and consider collaboration "90 percent in-place." However, the business processes around these technologies have typically not been optimized or consolidated. The consolidation of processes and the collapsing of process time frames have key benefits, such as:

• Overall program cycle-time and cost reductions
  
• Improved decision making through accurate and timely cost, schedule and general program information
  
• Contract compliance support (e.g., on-time Cost Performance Reporting)
  

Successful collaborators will adopt the principles detailed below to address the dimensions of collaborative program management.

Principles of Highly-Effective Collaboration

• Eliminate duplication in process, people and technology
  
• Designate one owner per process, based on "best fit"
  
• Establish IPTs to integrate enterprise processes and organizational silos
  
• Cultivate unnatural levels of cooperation
  
• Institute new operating model with detailed definition of process, roles, measures
  
• Encourage shared governance to drive radical changes in performance, cycle time reduction, total enterprise costs, etc.
  
• Maintain a balanced scorecard to reward new skills and roles for process owners
  
• Nurture organizational neutrality
  
• Promote changes to status quo, upstream and downstream
  
• Support coordinated technologies
  
• Instill a passion for state-of-the-art processes, practices, tools
  

The CSC "Bottom Line"

Companies that adopt these principals, thoughtfully choose their partners and have a resolve to focus on one program at a time will accomplish successful collaboration. To achieve this, companies must redefine their "rules of engagement" for program management by ultimately transforming a competitive environment into a collaborative one.

For more information about Collaborative Project Management, please contact CSC's Michael Gallagher by telephone at (610) 407-5895, or by e-mail at mgallag3@csc.com.

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