Selecting the Right Talent for Your IT Project: Part Two
In last week’s video, we talked about three primary sources of talent available for your IT projects, which included using your current employees, utilizing vendor professional services, or hiring an IT consulting firm.
This week, we’ll cover a useful tool that will help define your project and the resources you actually need.
An IT Project Charter
A project charter is a great tool to use that allows you to bring in your project sponsor and/or other key stakeholders to find the business case for the IT project. This tool excels at moving the project ball down the field by defining the project and the resources that you require. In the video, we show what a typical IT project charter from Darby Consulting looks like. The charter is a simple document that can range from three pages to 30, depending on the complexity of the project. It’s a high-level document that serves to give you and your key stakeholders a bird’s eye view of the upcoming IT project.
Let’s cover the elements of a project charter:
Define the Project
An IT project charter serves to define the project in a clear and concise format. In this document, you’ll break down the project into key phases, and identify the goals and objectives of the project, as well as the project organization.
Identify IT Project Roles and Responsibilities
One of the most critical phases of the charter is defining the right project team members. As you can see on the video, the charter identifies different work teams, the project sponsor, the project members, and other roles that are involved in developing and implementing this project. At this point in the document, you’ll want to drill down into the specific key roles required by this project, as well as identify their responsibilities.
Taking the time to clearly outline the project roles and responsibilities now will save time later, and allow you to manage an efficient and successful IT project.
Calculate the Resources Required
The last key piece of the project charter is to calculate the key resources required. With a Darby Consulting project charter, you’ll understand how much time (FTE) is required to be dedicated to the project by each IT staff solution or resource available to you.
The project charter helps you define how much of any given resource you actually need and helps your resources identify if they’ll be able to fulfill their obligations to the project before the project even gets started. This helps resolve problems before they begin, by allowing everyone involved in the IT project to get on the same page.
Next week, we’ll focus on the requisition form in our third video, as well as how to pull out the skills and expertise that are needed from each resource.
ABOUT DARBY CONSULTING
IT project delivery is what we do. For over 10 years, we’ve helped growing organizations consistently deliver successful IT projects – both software and hardware. We’ve pioneered innovative methods and tools tailored specifically for your success. And we’re affordable; we’ve built a cost-effective operating model so we can offer exceptional IT project services at prices that will surprise you. This means more projects completed on-time, higher end-user satisfaction, and increased growth for your organization.
Let us help you successfully plan and deliver your next IT project. Schedule a meeting today!