Process and Governance Initiatives

• Project Management Method / Standard Operating Procedure
  
  

  To introduce additional rigor into project management processes, the team reviewed Oracle's Global Project Management Method and other approaches to project management including the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge. The decision was made to leverage content from each and define a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) that would be the single mandatory framework for the management of all projects in North America. The framework contains 13 processes in the management and delivery of projects, and maps them across the three stages of a project lifecycle (project initiation, project execution and control, project closure). Within each process and stage, there are discrete tasks and activities that are required to be undertaken and completed.

  Projects are reviewed by the NAPMO team to confirm that the SOP is being followed. This rigor provides Oracle's clients with consistency and repeatability in our execution.

• Quality Management
  
  

  Oracle Consulting also created a Quality Management team with the charter of providing clients, management, and project teams with independent and objective reviews of projects. These reviews evaluate the project's compliance to the processes in the SOP and assess potential project risks and issues along with the project response to them. Quality management reports clearly document findings and recommend corrective steps that can be taken so that the project and team can be better positioned for success. These project reviews target the more complex projects in the portfolio. They can be executed anytime in the lifecycle, from startup to close, and also leverage subject matter experts from other teams when necessary.

Additionally, a project quality plan is often put in place during startup review. This plan maps out the project review schedule for an engagement so that quality planning is 'built in' from the beginning.

The Quality Management team also consolidates the root causes of project difficulties and publishes an annual result of their findings. These findings are then fed back into training collateral, the risk management bid review team, and to the professional community.

• Portfolio Management
  
  

  A dedicated team of senior managers—who works with the field delivery teams on a daily basis—supervises portfolio management. These managers deliver project intelligence, portfolio analysis, and trends to each of the business units. The intent of this function is to monitor and report on each portfolio as a whole. In monthly meetings, this team provides key insights, visibility and analysis of indicators and proactively engages with the project and portfolio leads to reduce the likelihood of project issues. This frequent management reporting ensures early visibility, ownership, and intervention when necessary.

  This team also provides remote project mentoring assistance to the project managers of those projects within their assigned portfolio that may need additional attention.

• Program / Project Remediation
  
  

  For projects that require more dedicated attention than can be provided with a project review or remote mentor session, the NAPMO has a small set of very senior project management resources that provide, as needed, short-term on-site support to the project teams. This support can be either to remediate a problem project to get it 'back on track', or to help jump start a complex project during its initiation stage.