Case study in project governance

Project governance is essential for any project's success. In this case study, you'll see how a large enterprise faced several challenges in its Dynamics 365 implementation project and how it improved its project governance to overcome them.

The situation

The enterprise used legacy home-grown applications to manage its sales and customer service processes. It wanted to switch to a new cloud solution, Dynamics 365. This was a complex and mission-critical project for the company, and its first cloud deployment in a traditional IT landscape. The company needed to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) in six months and then roll out the solution gradually to its users.

The implementation team aligned the scope with the business priorities and agreed on clear project goals. But it didn't define clear processes for some key aspects of the project. It didn't have realistic timelines for the planned activities or an understanding of the technical and business complexity. It didn't have a well-defined project organization structure or adequate and qualified resources. And it didn't provide effective project updates for the steering group or fully understand the product capabilities and requirements.

The challenges

As soon as the project started, complexities emerged early on. But the team didn't review and adjust their activities accordingly. This led to negative impacts such as poor quality of deliverables, misunderstanding of requirements between customer and partner, a high number of defects during initial testing cycles, and incomplete implementation of requirements due to lack of skilled resources on the project. The final go-live date changed constantly, resulting in a delay of six to eight months. Worse, customer and partner had a complete lack of trust.

After many discussions between customer and partner stakeholders, the enterprise decided to change its approach. The team defined a clear project organization structure and set up processes to monitor and manage the project effectively.

The solutions

The team implemented several activities as part of their project governance processes. They identified training needs for both the customer's business and IT teams so they could understand the cloud and Dynamics 365 capabilities. They established an architecture board that reviewed architectural decisions and gap analysis. For any gaps identified, the board provided input to the change control board to ensure that changes were managed without affecting timelines. They assigned industry and product architects to the project to avoid domain knowledge gaps and perform a clear fit gap analysis.

The steering committee had senior management support to make relevant and necessary decisions throughout the project. They outsourced some activities such as performance testing and vulnerabilities testing so that the existing team could focus on their core functional scope.

These controls and processes helped the team redefine their project timelines and go live within that timeframe. They also applied and tailored these learnings to other projects to avoid similar high-cost impacts.

The takeaway

Project governance isn't an afterthought. It's a flexible backbone for the entire project. You need to set it up from the beginning and adjust it as needed.

Tip

This is one of many case studies that show how project governance is the most critical factor for a successful project.