Project Recovery and Remediation

He that lives on hope has but a slender diet.

The Problem You May be Facing

Warning Signs of a Systems Project In Trouble

• Status reports fail to convey the true status of the project. You are surprised far too often.
• Estimates of costs to complete the project are unreliable and seem to be unreasonable.
• The intended users of the software are uncertain that the programmers understand their needs or, worse yet, feel their needs are understood but ignored.
• Everything seems to take too long, and every new need is met with defensive, rather than supportive, behavior.
• The software developers feel very overworked and under appreciated. They have a generally low opinion of the ability of the intended users to assist them in specifying and testing the system.
• The plans to correct the problem involve planned overtime, or rely on new technology.
• Management associated with the project seems unresponsive to the problems experienced.
• Third party software or services vendors who must supply key parts of the solution seem unresponsive.

If at least 4 of the 8 items above seem true of your situation, you really do have a problem on your hands.

What We Do

Our emphasis is to determine the root causes of the project's problems, gain consensus on the solutions, then to support you and your own staff to implement the solutions. In this way a project, once stabilized, stays stable to completion. While each project is unique our activities follow this general pattern:

Our Work Process
1. We agree to a general scope of services and work together to lay out an approach.
2. Our consultant(s) reviews available documentation on the history of the project.
3. Interviews and team work sessions are conducted with the key personnel involved.
4. We compare the facts of the project to our benchmarks on similar "distressed" projects and to practice profiles for similar successful projects. We "triage" our preliminary recommendations to arrive at a recommendation set that offers the greatest likelihood of stabilizing the project.
5. We present them to you and to others that you recommend. We refine the recommendations based on these discussions.
6. The refined recommendations are presented to all staff that will be affected by the corrective actions.
7. Without halting the project (in most cases) the corrective actions are deployed in a predetermined sequence.
8. We monitor progress, coaching your management and technical staff as required to ensure a permanent correction.

Representative Past Assignments

As you might imagine, disclosing the details of past assignments on a medium as public as a web page is a sensitive matter. SMR Representative Assignments summarizes some of our completed projects. Out of respect for our clients' privacy we have chosen not to disclose their names on this web site. We encourage reference checking, after direct discussions have established a mutual interest.