"If you want to alter the course of your project's history, you must communicate at the executive level." IBM white paper, 2004IBM's Project Management Centre of Excellence was promoted and eventually ingrained its approaches as core corporate value. They adapted the project perspective and refined it into a system for corporate delivery; governance for suites and programmes of projects. In essence this is a 'project of projects' approach and is applied across the entire organisation. A traffic light system monitors both direct and indirect controls. Direct controls are the typical outputs of any project: a schedule, scope, and performance against both. Indirect controls address the project's context, its environment and politics: overall benefits, stakeholders' involvement, risk mitigation, and delivery of benefits.
(figure 1. IBM 7 Keys HUD)
The model generally runs on a monthly cycle. These shared and relatively simple measures apply to all projects in the organisation (globally). The data is simple enough to be meaningful, aggregated and comparable across projects. The dynamics of the model are similar (if not identical) to the 'Deming cycle'; plan, do, check, act. In IBM's case for each project; 1) assess the state of the 7 keys over the period (1 month), 2) plan adjustments and change, 3) act and implement, 4) resulting in new status of the 7 keys.
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