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The S.M.A.R.T. methodology is a simple tool issued for the first time by George T. Doran in his paper called “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives.” Since then, the SMART acronym has had several adjustments and sometimes changes to the original words, however, the core of the message remains the same: Create sustainable projects.
This powerful acronym is a simple way to have a mnemonic word to enclose the main characteristics of an important and impactful project.
As most of the readers know now, the SMART acronym stands for:
Specific: A clear target for improvement.
Measurable: Quantify the result of the outcomes that indicate progress or performance.
Assignable: A clear set of tasks that someone will specifically do.
Realistic: A project with achievable goals within the company resources.
Time-related: A specific time frame for the project goal.
Despite the modified words through the time, we will keep these original words since we are vintage IT guys.
The SMART approach is a good way to limit the scope of the projects and promotes critical thinking about the possibilities of being successful (or not) in a given goal. Since IT is an evolving area, the use of tools to create extraordinary results for critical projects is a must.
In order to develop SMART projects in IT you first are required to start with the right questions, how to determine every stage of the SMART acronym to make my project actually SMART.?
Lets to start with these right questions:
1. What is the problem?
2. How do I believe I will fix it.?
3. What should be the outcome if we make this change?
4. How many resources do I need to achieve this goal? (People, money, time).
5. What are the KPIs to control the outcomes?
Starting from these simple questions, we might have a big portion of our SMART project. Here the explanation about every stage of the SMART project.
Specific.
Having a specific goal and well-delimited boundaries in a project is essential for the project buy-in. Here the list and examples about how to make the right questions to make it specific:
What.- What is the specific purpose of the project, what do you want to accomplish with it.
Why.- Specific reason why we must resolve this problem. What are the benefits of the project once completed, what other issues we are facing because of the current issue.
Who.- Specific person who will be responsible of the specific task or tasks to achieve this project completion and problem resolution.
Where. – Specific area of scope where this project will impact the company/business.
Which.- Specific areas where this problem is affecting the company/business performance.
When.- This question is related to the time boundary. When it will start, and then, when it will be finished out.
Once you complete these questions you are now all set to say your project has a specific scope and delimited area of influence. In IT, this is usually delimited to our Servers, Network, Telecommunications, Services, SLAs, Cybersecurity, Databases, Web services, Software Development and/or Service desk, there might be others, like Finance and HR, however, those are the typical areas where we have most of the influence.
For instance, I had the project where I planned to reduce the IT costs on new branches openings and improve the IT resources utilization.
What: Reduce IT costs on new branches openings.
Why: Reduce new infrastructure costs, IT Operational Costs, reduce the human resources required to setup the branch (costs), reduce Cybersecurity threats (reduce frauds-costs) and improve the branches’ network performance.
Who: IT Director/Manager/3rd Party
Where: US
Which: Long time and high level of expenses before/during/after the branch opening. Deficiencies in the use of the local IT human resources.
When: 6 months, from the project start to the finish.
Measurable.
This is a simple task if you already have KPIs as part of your performance IT review, however, this is not limited to the technical resources, but the financial and human resources areas of IT. In the previous example the performance indicator was the expenses submitted by IT on every new branch opening. In our project, the company used to spend more than 25,000 dollars to open a new branch, and the use of the IT human resources to install and configure the new IT infrastructure was creating high service desk delays for the other 2,000 branches and the main offices. The hypothesis of the reduction of the IT expenses on every new branch opening has to be built against the historical data of the previous branches’ openings. This is somehow easy; the finance department can provide the expenses related to these past projects using their data and share it with you to compare the current costs against the new proposals with hypothetically lower costs.
Current costs.
Network wiring: 8,500.00
Network Switch/Routers: 2,500.00
Computers: 5,000
Trip/Hotel/meals for IT personnel: 9,000
Time frame: 25 days
I would say these are the average expenses from the last 20 branch openings. None of them worth the expense since they were not adding value to the process the way they were applied. This is important for the SMART project since it contains the costs as a KPI for every new branch. The company didn’t have this metric as KPI, however, I started to track it to see the cost per opening and then provide them with the before and after results.
Assignable.
This is obviously a project portion of the big one, the opening of the new branch had its own PM and this person was in charge of the full process from the beginning to the end. When I came on board, I noticed the PM wasn’t so much experienced, so I decided to provide support and several tools to make these opening even more successful. On the IT perspective, I was assigned as the IT Champion for these openings. Of course I had an IT Support Specialist guy who used to be the “IT guy”, where people discharged all the IT responsibilities among the project tasks. I trained him and took other IT person to work as a team to achieve this goal. Both of them were great workers. So, bottom line, I was the main responsible for this project from the IT perspective and I had an excellent and well experienced guys who just required direction to make this job, easier, faster and more “profitable”. As a bottom line of this project, I was also engaged to improve the quality of the work done my team, from work hard to work smart. They were the guys who were at the branches, installed the network wiring, computers, routers, cameras, etc, so I was decided to remove these tasks for them and the company and become more like project coordinators than hardware installers, and I did it.
Realistic.
In order to have a REALISTIC goal you have to be 100% honest with yourself, with your team, and with your envision of the goal you are expecting to have. Having a realistic goal might be easy to determine if you have data and you make Data Analysis to determine correlations or regression analysis, just to say a couple of them. However, if the information is not organized, vague or incomplete, it can make the goal outcome a little blurry to foresee and difficult to envision it too. On the other hand, if you are an experienced professional and you have worked these same projects before in different companies, then the outcome is also easily to forecast and work thru it. In our case, I had previous experiences making this same project for different companies, so, the REALISTIC stage for me was easy to determine. Just be careful, if the people around you does not share your same envision, due to a lack of knowledge, envision, data or experience, then you might face some resistance to the project goal, even if the data shows the possible positive results. If this is your case, try to be patient and explain your realistic outcome as easy as possible and use as much data as possible to change their perception of the goal, share the benefits to their areas or customers, that will alleviate the possible tensions you migth face. If you don’t have experience using Change Management tools, don’t worry, I have a new post to speak about it.
Our goal: Reduce IT Cost in the new Branch openings.
This was realistic and very achievable.
Time-related
All projects have to have an end, this is important not only by procedure but for the people, the relief that the human brain feels after a project has been completed is very pleasant. Projects have to have a time bound in order to limit the scope, the actions and the number of the performed tasks. In our case, the old process for the new branches opening didn’t have any time bound, the result was that every opening was taking up to 25 day to complete, I was really surprised when I saw this information, it was too much time for a single branch. The costs reduction goal implied also to reduce the time spent in these new branches IT setup. So, we had to go from 25 days to 5 days to complete the IT infrastructure, from 0 to 100% of the IT network wiring, computers, setup, internet service, printers and scanners setup, testing and finally release it. By the end of the year, we were able to complete the projects in 4 days as an average. We broke our own goal.!
The final goal was reached out: Reduce the cost of the new branches opening from USD 25,000 to USD 7,000 USD.
This was a big achievement, we reduced the project cost up to 78% of the original budget. Other benefits of this SMART project was the network standardization, processes standardization, 5Ss implementation, cost control, suppliers development. The other aside benefit from this project was the reduction of the service desk tickets from these new branches, they were reduced almost 90%, this mean, we came from 100 tickets to just 10 in a year (tickets related to the network performance, cameras or any other device installed for the branch opening).
To summarize, the process was done as follows:
1. Determine your SMART project.
2. Apply 5Ss to the current process.
3. Make the process lean.
4. Train your team
5. Standardize the processes, computers, network and all devices to have just one brand across all the branches.
6. Have external suppliers.
7. Develop/train your suppliers.
8. Execute.
Final outcomes:
1. Cost reduction from 25,000 to 7,000 USD
2. Reduce service desk tickets 90% per new branch
3. Reduce work schedule for the IT Infrastructure from 25 to 4 days.
4. Standardize the IT process
5. Reduce stress for the IT team
6. Reduce complains from branches
7. Increase the IT team engagement with their own growth.
8. Created meaningful tasks for IT
9. Internal customers were happier now
10. Final customers were happy receiving better services every time they visited these branches.
Now, changes were made using several tools to achieve the goal in 4 days. Some of them were easily accepted, some others were not accepted in the first trial, but eventually they were adopted by the employees and some stakeholders. It is important to know and understand that SMART doesn’t come alone, actually, there is no project coming alone, we have to use different tools during the process, such as project management, change management, budgeting, 5Ss, Kaizen and several other tools that will support our projects in our companies, however, use the SMART approach can give you a good direction to achieve your project goal.
~ Bitvorous.
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