Large Programmes / Innovative Projects and Mobilisation

One of the challenges that I have faced on numerous occasions is project / programme mobilisation (by which I mean getting the piece of work started with people on board). First there is a need, something that is going to drive a stakeholder to spend money. In my experience something does not happen without a reasons, someone somehow needs to identify a need and then convince someone else to pay for it to be fixed. Once this has been done there will be a limited number of people who understand the nature of the initial problem and in a lot of cases have an idea as to how to fix it. This understanding often comes from the "don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions!".

Once funding situation is in hand the next thing to do is shape up an understanding of the need or problem space is in more depth. There are a number of means of doing this, however a word of warning would be to keep this fairly simple as you are still in the problem domain at this stage and your audience is predominantly a business one. As you are doing this your next steps will be from project management for dummies. Namely get a Project Initiation Document as this will shape up what needs to be done and add some good discipline to it as well. As part of the process that PID generation requires you will need to pull together an organisational chart and a start for ten plan.

Once you have the org chart and a plan the next steps are going to be pulling the right people into the right spaces, without loosing the initial aim of the project, which is not easy. My personal experience has been mobilising from a handful of people to several hundred. Do not underestimate the length of time it can take to find hundreds of people work on a specific piece of work. Aside from the main challenge of actually finding the people it becomes increasingly difficult to get someone started and actually working. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who will more than happily do nothing and get paid for it! My personal experience is that recruiters are not technical or familiar with the business and as such they can never really understand your requirements (which might change anyway). As a result get the recruiter to whittle the numbers down and then spend 20 - 30 minutes tops doing a telephone interview. Trust me it will save you hours in the recruiting process. Outline the role as you see it and ask the question 'Is this something that you think would fit your skills / experience profile'. You will always get a yes by the way, but then ask 'how?'...

Personally I like to get every person onto the org chart so that they have an understanding of how they fit into the organisation, however resist the temptation to release a new org chart every day. Look for stability, in the EA space we are naturally adept at handling ambiguity and change as this is what we do, however many people in the delivery space are less well equipt to deal with significant rates of change. When people hit the ground make sure that they have things to do (and reading documentation is not one of them!)... Becoming involved in things as they are happening is the most efficient way of getting up to speed with what is going on. People learn by doing and interacting (and some by then researching what they have done and the conversations that they have had!)..

One last thing, get the message out, people like to understand what they are doing and why.. Forget the knowledge is power thing, it is old hat! Explain to people the purpose of what they are doing, keep the vision..