Application Management-Ensuring Timely Project Delivery

Timely delivery of the project is the biggest foundation for any successful businesses.  Timely delivery not only results in happy customers but also increases the confidence of the company. One has to maintain the quality of the deliverables keeping in mind the strict timelines. Hence application management is must ensure the project trail is well moving ahead meeting the expectations. For any project to be successful, industry standards cannot be compromised. Every individual top down from CEO to a new entry level trainee, each has to play his part of the role to ensure successful business implementation.

Each year every company invest an enormous amount of money in Technology, training, assets and in innovation. This is all to update for new businesses inflows. Today businesses cannot face the risk of lost opportunities due to missed deadlines. In such situations companies has to bear the wrath of customers and in some cases leads to substantial penalties. Hence these days companies plan much in advance of the project timelines, and some business has innovated automatic delivery models.

Companies chalk out a plan to structure the organisation to ensure smooth flow of work.

First are Roles and Responsibilities. Each organisation has to define who will do what to which level and to what extent. If the roles are well defined, expectations are clear with the employee and leads to less confusion and speedy delivery. Also in the application management, each level of project completion can be automated, and dependencies can be pointed out. Hence this facilitates proper planning of project delivery and any deviation from the proposed plan; the responsible person can be accounted. Another advantage of defining roles and responsibilities is that work is well defined according to the level of interest and capacity. Like one will do requirement gathering, another will do documentation of the architecture, and the third will do development, fourth will focus on costing and project management and so on.

On project delivery timeline deliverable quality and organisation policies must be strictly met.  Maintaining standards will propel project delivery and also improve the learning curve of newly on-boarded employees. Adherence to company policies will ensure that business does get entangled in any unnecessary legal or social complications. Also, it takes the customer into confidence that the organisation practices at ethical levels of business.

Second is an evaluation. One must evaluate the cost of the project implementation and the profit made. One must also keep aside some margin of error and the incurred cost to rectify them. Given the firm's capacity and capability of delivering projects in past, the evaluation process must define the decision-making criteria. It is always important to know where and when to invest capital to achieve the objectives of the business and get good returns in the firm.

Third are resources. Without the right resources, no project is every going to succeed. Hence it is the duty of the management that before engaging a project, one has to identify the right kind of resources with required skills and capabilities.  Also, the management must ensure that the resources that are hired or trained for specific reason or role in the project meet the requirement and provide value addition to the project delivery.

The fourth is setting goals and objectives. Each phase of the project must be marked with its goals and objectives set according to customer requirement.  This activity must be done from smallest to biggest project that is been executed in the organisation.  Every employee must be clear of his roles and responsibilities and how the goal of his activity will impact the overall business scenario.

The setting of goal and objectives must be done at the beginning of the project and must be revised time to time on changing customer requirements. There are many standard methodologies like agile, etc. which define the course of work.

Fifth is controlled. In application management, control of each phase is critical. In many cases, one part of the project is heavily dependent on the completion of some other part of the project. Hence Controls must be set at the administrative level to ensure a schedule that guarantees the end of the first part. Also, any situation going out of hand must be firmly dealt with proper controlling.

Sixth is to monitor the progress of the project time to time. This ensures continuity of the project and tackles bottlenecks. Project Monitoring at every phase ensures timely completion of the project as a whole. Monitoring brings accountability and also predicts the earlier decided scope, budget and time constraints are met or not. The results derived from regular monitoring will define the course of action of future decisions.

These above steps if properly implemented gets on project or product to customers and market on time. The experienced gained from such a structured approach helps in future leanings and provides the scope for further improvements.