You and your client need to review progress, requirements, relationships and all the other complex parts of an assignment. You must do this before, during and after the assignment.
Review and Assess the Assignment
When you start an assignment you will consider the reporting needs and control requirements. This will help you to:
- Ensure the assignment is producing the required results.
- Monitor the schedule, resource and cost plans.
- Ensure the Assignment remains viable against its business case.
Do make sure that you receive (or produce) reports throughout the assignment, these reports will include:
- regular progress reports
- post-completion evaluation/retrospective (of the way the assignment was run)
- Post-completion review. This will help you to assess if the assignment benefits have materialised.
Schedule the reviews regularly as well as by “as required”. To get the timing right you will need to identify the deliverables, events or other needs. Used sensibly you can identify potential problems, changes or issues early
Contract Renegotiations
Contract renegotiations may be required, so consider the end-of-contract options:
- Re-sign with the vendor or client
- Work with another vendor or client
- Move to internal resource management
Successful management means that an ongoing relationship is maintained with the client during the assignment, however, you should be ready for a renegotiation. This is mainly because the nature of IS assignments makes it difficult to predict needs and resource usage, so long-term contracts for services will need to change over the life of the contract.
Evaluation of the assignment process
End Assignment Report
You must analyse how the assignment was managed and identify lessons learnt. You can do this with an End Assignment Report. This will show:
- achievement of the assignment’s objectives
- performance against the plan (estimated time and costs versus actual)
- effect on the original plan and business case over the time of the assignment
- lessons learned
- A post-assignment review plan.
Post-assignment review
The post-assignment review is used to assess whether the expected benefits stated in the business case have been realised. It will also help you to investigate any problems that have arisen from use of the solution.
If necessary, you will identify follow-up actions that are needed. Auditing for compliance using quality parameters. You might need to consider these as well:
- Customer satisfaction
- Staff satisfaction
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness.
Auditing for improvement using key performance indicators
You could use the “Balanced Scorecard’ to help you make improvements. The balance should be found between these four perspectives:
- Customers: what do our Customers desire?
- Internal processes: how do we generate the added value for our Customers?
- Learning & growth: how do we guarantee we will keep generating added value in the future?
- Financial: how did we do financially?
Note how the first three questions focus on the future, the last question reviews what went before.