Managing Enterprise Environmental Factors for the project

Project managers generally focus on factors internal to the project while managing processes during project life cycle. Many times, despite their best efforts the project outcome doesn’t meet the expectations of the stakeholders. If you delve deeper into this problem you will find that it is due to ignoring the factors outside the project that have significant influence on the success of project. These factors are Enterprise Environmental Factors and they present challenges on all the projects bigger or smaller in every industry and have significant influence on the success of project.

In this article I have shared some of the key enterprise environmental factors that a project manager must address, their impact on the project and how he/she should influence them.

Organization Culture
This includes following factors, they can directly impact the motivation level of a team member , attrition rate and the productivity at team and individual level

• What is the level of openness towards new ideas, what is the openness in terms of relationship with superior?
• How strict the company is in enforcing policies and procedures?
• Work Authorization System, Are there Daily and weekly reports and structured status meeting to provide timely updates on project status?
• Working and non working hours.
• Risk tolerance
These factors directly impact the performance at team and individual level. An open culture where team members have clarity on project vision and how it is related to their personal goal has positive impact on project performance. To ensure this the project manager must communicate with the team on regular basis , constantly remind them about the project’s vision, prepare the career development plan of team members and plan structured review of their work.


Human Resource and Personnel Administration
Human resources and Personnel Administration related Enterprise Environmental Factors include

• Skill level of the resources in the project team and in the organization
• Policy for hiring and training
• Culture and Time Zone in case of Project teams distributed across multiple geographies
Awareness on the above factors helps Project manager in designing appropriate strategies and influencing the senior management to bridge the skill gap (through training or acquisition) and scheduling the project taking national holidays of cross cultural team into consideration

Infrastructure

It is important for a project manager to ensure that the required infrastructure for executing the project is in place and its cost is planned in the budget. This includes but is not limited to the following

• Desktop and Server machines to be used by team members
• Servers for inspection, backups and maintaining organizational process assets
• Projectors and conference rooms
• Internet connections and the available bandwidth
• Software licenses

Infrastructure related pre-requisites must be considered right from the planning phase of the project, in fact immediately after collect requirements and define scope phase is complete. Unavailability of adequate infrastructure on time can impact project’s critical path hamper the project’s performance.
It is important for a project manager to create a check list of infrastructural items required based on requirements and scope of the project and ensure their availability.

External Stakeholders

The decision that a project manager takes have impact on people, they can be internal as well as external to the project. Depending on the decision a project manager takes these people can become his strong supporters or blockers for the project. The project manager has to manage their expectations really well in order to succeed.

Some examples of external stake holders are:

• The other teams depending on the project e.g. Other teams that will use the tool developed by the project team,
• someone who is from the senior management but not part of the core project team,
• Customer, Vendor & Partner, Government etc

A stronger relationship with external stakeholders helps in winning their support and impacts the outcome of the project positively.

Marketplace conditions

Marketplace condition refers to business environment e.g. Technology trends, Availability of resources, Competitors strategy, legal implications of the project and government rules or regulatory restrictions that can impact the project. It is important for a project manager to be aware of business conditions that impact the project. Some of the key things that he should be aware of are.

1. Competitor’s strategy, it is critically important for the projects that are for a customer who has deployed multiple vendors for different projects. E.g. Pricing or technology strategy from a particular vendor can motivate the customer towards him and result in loss of project.

2. Technology trends in the market, a project can be done using multiple technologies, however over the period of time the business scenario changes, the new technology comes in and older one becomes obsolete. Awareness on technology trends in the market helps in providing right solution to the customer in terms of fulfilling his business need, reducing total cost of ownership and improving the quality.

3. Availability of human resources with the skills required their prices and sources from where they need to be procured. This helps in managing the time required for planning and acquiring the project team and in mitigating risks related to delay in acquiring the project team.

4. Vendors available for procurement of resources and their pros and cons. Procurement has impact on cost, schedule and quality of the project. Selection of right vendor reduces the efforts required to administer procurement and impacts the above mentioned constraints positively.

5. Legal implications of the project

6. Governmental rules and regulation or regulatory restrictions that could impact the project.