Project Management

Project management is recognised as a specialised form of management where it is used to attain a series of business work tasks, strategies and goals encapsulated in outlined schedules, budget, and time. Its essence is to facilitate achieving companies’ strategic goal to be competitive in the market. Obviously, project management is an axiomatic tool used when executing any IT project regardless of its size. This study will focus on project management (PM) related to change management and some planning at stream level (level of implementing certain components of a larger system such as implementing crew management system in a Sabre enterprise system). Confirming the latter, a senior airline manager (SAG) stated: “Your project is a failure as simple as

that without proper project change management, because for any change, you can change the process, you can change the technology you need to change the people.”

For this study, a senior executive (SAF) affirmed the undertaking: “It is definitely disruptive. I mean no matter how well it is planned and how well it is executed, it is disruptive. You are bringing in multiple cultures as you are bringing in multiple ways of doing work, methodologies, the trend, priorities, competing priorities within the vendors themselves so managing all these is not easy no matter how much effort is putting to it.” Various literature reviews have indicated the importance of PM in enterprise systems especially ERP where many have included PM as a critical success factor in enterprise systems deployment (Davenport, 2000). The project manager role emerged as salient and can have a serious aggregated effect on overall MES undertakings. The critical success factor in enterprise implementation mentioned in most of the studies related to ERP was project management capability. Furthermore, some scholars have considered the project manager’s knowledge and experience of enterprise systems such as ERP to be the most important factor affecting the success of enterprise implementation (Trepper, 1999; Nah et al., 2001; Ngai et al., 2008).

Project management underpinned by skills and knowledge in managing efficiently and effectively all the resources available before, during, and after the deployment besides the coordinating and scheduling skills, surely have a appreciable effect on MES. Due to the immense complexity involved in MES initiatives and the high interdependencies generated from the overwhelming number of tasks, an effective project management emerged to be absolute

196 happening as opposed to in a linear way, then you really need to be very careful but the core thing is that there will be a lot of more risks identified which have to be very close monitored and very closely dealt with as they become issues”

(Vendor director) (SPA).

Nonetheless, without having skilled project managers such projects would fail as they are the people who endorse organisational support by shaping the implementation process. Project management capabilities encompass leadership to plan and govern project tasks, schedules and responsibilities (Sumner, 2006; Ngai et al., 2008; Snider et al., 2009). Furthermore, Srivannaboon and Milosevic (2006) contended that project management was not only important in any implementation but also affected business and IT alignment. They focused on various project management elements such as organisation, process, tools and metrics which in return help in blending the IT and business together. Kumar (2003) also emphasised that project management that related project success with built in key performance indicators such as reduction in the work force or increase in performance had more success.

Project size does reflect massively on the success of any project, and large scale projects become difficult to manage; however, applying project management in enterprise system projects is regarded as being even harder (Alleman, 2002). Kumar (2003) argued that wide implementation of enterprise systems and the high risk associated with heavy commitment of resources made the project management far more complex than any other software packages. By no means would single enterprise compared with multi enterprise systems deployment in this study; especially, with such a magnitude and extra

interdependency generated from the nature of MES. This was expounded by ASP vendor (SPA): “It really introduces a lot of risks if you do, you know, if you try and do all these projects at the same time. So it is really a lot of, I think the key point is it introduces a lot more risks which leads to very close monitoring and management.” Airline executive (SAM) upheld that “[b]ig bang would require meticulous planning; meaning understating exactly what you want to put in the new architecture, taking your time in doing that.” Vendor director (SPD) further added: “The main disadvantage is the risk of it [the MES undertaking], because if everything is not planned out carefully, the impact on the business could be severe or can be prolonged.”

Project management in multi-enterprise implementation should offer adaptability and agility to sustain the ever-changing tasks and cope with a large number of processes, supported by a project management office and effective IT governance. Nonetheless, Alleman (2002) contended that having responsive project management methods will give better stakeholder participation, increase in business value, and improved returns on assets.

Project managers and teams influence the success of the overall endeavour and their indispensable role has been revealed in research regarding enterprise project management. This was confirmed by Snider et al., (2009) in their study on the influence of project managers it was found that successful cases were devoted to program manager capability and skills. They also suggested that the project manager role was more successful if handled by an external consultant.

However, Dezdar and Ainin (2011) not only related the project manager role to the success of ERP projects but also his team. Ara and Al-mudimigh (2011)

198 ensuring success of ERP implementation, suggesting he should have traits such being flexible, decisive, a quick learner, popular, and disciplined, with business and technical experience and political influence. Furthermore, they identified that the project manager should focus on fostering the success of the enterprise project. A senior ASP manager (SPF) contended that MES initiative

“comes down to the programme management, to the project management to the project teams and that is from both parties from the vendors and the airlines. If you have good project managers, if you have good programme manager, if those guys can talk to each other properly, if the chemistry between these guys really works, I don’t see any problems.” Project manager should emphasise on the following areas defining the scope, interfacing issues, identifying gaps, project scheduling, and progress monitoring (Trepper, 1999).

Moreover, the success of such enterprise projects depends heavily on the project team members as the enterprise systems covers a wide spectrum of business processes, thus requiring a multi-skilled implementation team (Davenport, 2000; Kumar, 2003). The constitution of the team varies from one organisation to another; in this study, the teams were formed on the basis of three categories: first was the IT representative, second was the business representative, and finally the vendor representative. “As you may know for each of the initiatives we had a project manager for that initiative and the project manager was made a sort of the owner of the project and he would coordinate with the vendors” as it has been explained by an airline executive (SAK). Every stream is guided by the three project managers who have their own team as in the figure below:

Figure ‎4.10 A Sample of Organisation Structure for a Platform

Figure 4.10 above shows an example of an operation platform with many projects running at the same time. These platforms are headed by two program managers one from IT and the other from business. The final say always tends to be the business manager in all cases and they decide whether a certain project is to go a live or not. On the other hand, IT is holding a pilot and co-share position to make sure that alignment at all levels is happening, bounded by the organisation’s strategy and business goals. Therefore, each platform is managed by two program managers and there will be many projects under each platform. Each of these projects teams consists of three project managers whose prime role is to manage the project collaboratively. All issues are raised with program managers which in return report to PMO. A senior airline manager (SAG) confirmed: “The areas where the IT guy was weak and let the business lead and you can check that, all of these projects have failed and projects that have very strong IT project manager and was leading the business making the

Operation

200 IT had the best successful factor or the big success right. We think it is an important factor but it shouldn’t be the only factor so in some of the cases we have people who have good knowledge of the business but zero project management.”

Changing the scope of the project might be one of the most cumbersome parts when handling enterprise systems project management. Modifying the scope during project implementation is becoming an inevitable process for the wide business process spectrum the enterprise systems covers. It is challenging to manage these changes especially when many separate projects are run by different (project managers, companies, locations) are executed in parallel and have dependencies on each other. Nah et al. (2006) emphasise defining the scope of the project in ERP projects and other authors considered this vital also; however, as enterprise systems run in parallel, defining scope seemed impossible knowing the number of tasks and activities required. It is always a debate between clear scope definition and time allowed for the task. In this study, the question arises of how much time is required to calculate and plan for the scope; considering the size of such an undertaking it is likely that a new version will arrive before defining the scope. In such situations, it is always a compromise between time and plan.

Evidently, in such projects, the challenge is not to come with the best scope plan but how to handle the changes in the scope most effectively. The vast number of parties included in MES makes coordinating tasks across different enterprise implementation an arduous task. Various collaborations have to be facilitated with internal and external stakeholders to ensure a delivery of homogeneous solution to the vast majority of end users in the organisation.