Critical Success Factors
and Threats
Production houses all have
similar inputs and outputs, their points of differentiation are in the
talent of their people and how effectively they apply well designed
processes.
| Inputs |
Processes |
Outputs |
Staff
Sales
Client Requirements
Process Definitions |
Process Management
Client Management
Design
Development
Testing
|
Product
Client Relationship |
The critical success
factors for these units are:
-
an efficient and effective
development process
-
adequate skills applied to
well documented processes
-
access to excellent skills
sets to refine and develop productivity tools
-
sales processes that fully
define client requirements
-
adequate management of
client expectation
-
budget monitoring that
allows full control and prediction of the amount of effort charged
against completion of processes
-
estimating processes that
become continuously more accurate
-
clients who are well
organized and credit worthy
The measures of success differ
from unit to unit, however the declared measure of success for
WebDev Studios is profitability or return on investment for the
University, its key financial backer.
Other measures of success
could be provision of jobs for students, creation of jobs for the
principals, or opportunities for challenging, creative activities for the
principals. These latter measures are not the critical measures for
WebDev Studios, but they may be a by product of the creation of a profitable
unit.
One of the ways to manage
toward achievement of profit, is to monitor and mitigate the threats to
that profit.
For WebDev Studios, the
following threats should be assessed, monitored and mitigated:
| Process
Area |
Threats |
| Sales |
- customer expectations that are misaligned with unit
capabilities
- low numbers of client contacts
- sales targeted at unprofitable work |
| Proposals |
- poor estimates
- impractical functional design
- costing work below actual value
- accepting impossible deadlines
- proposing work that involves a large learning curve or
acquisition of many specialist staff |
| Development |
- poor execution of processes
- skills loss or mismatch of skills to assigned task
- increased scope of functionality without adjusted
costings
- expense blowout
- poor management of dependencies, creating a time overrun
- poor quality processes, templates and productivity tools.
|
|