Making Profits from Projects has always been major concern for Managers and Leaders.

Profit is for sure linked to Continuous, Relevant, INcremental and Measured Governance.

How this can be achieved?

How best you do things right the first time depends on usage of streamlined ONLINE processes. The best part is if problem spaces creation can be automated and profitability metric can be continuously monitored.

Problem Space Automation: Automate a problem space that suits your needs and continuously monitor the same to avoid ill effects out of any element in the problem space.

Profitability Metric - Usually captured as Cost/Hours. Plan figures during contract provide target measures. Actual figures are based on incurred cost and effort. If automated, this can be continuously checked to ensure Profitability.

This can be achieved with the help of a tool that supports the following features which in turn provide CRIM Governance.

Check for the extent of compliance of the below parameters. Higher compliance means higher profits.

Definition - Three dimensional coordinates of a Software Item in any Solution Space. All software items can be described in terms of three coordinates viz.. Life-Cycle, Elaboration and Process Area. Life cycle example is High Level Design, Elaboration example is Functional Specification and Process Area example is Specification. If it is possible to control and monitor in an automated manner the three current coordinates of a software in a repetitive manner, it is possible to deliver zero defect code.

Success depends on few key parameters like how frequently the plan is monitored, updated with necessary changes and shared. The intervals will influence success parameters. However all this will depend on right availability and application of the information base.

Best Practices - Apart from Standards and Guidelines, best practices can always have inputs from historical gaps. Gaps are inputs to risks and are identified and tracked along the life cycle. Online identification and tracking leads to creation of best practices that can be applied in subsequent assignments.

Best practice are also linked to customer collaboration.

Incremental customer collaborative efforts: Customer satisfaction, if achieved through incremental collaborative efforts, has more chances of long term success. This is synonymous to agile theory that is supplemented by regular feedback and reviews with customer. Thus the validation process is frequent and thus customer involvement is more like development project team. Frequency of such validation and reviews may be mutually decided upon. Aggregated customer feedback and reviews may be viewed online.

Reuse - One practical way to improve competitiveness is to increase reuse percent and thus be more proactive and productive. Use online systems to continually improve on reuse.

Skills - Availability of desired skills is of prime concern for most organizations. Building Organizational Skills can be easy using proper recruitment, training and knowledge management approaches. Proper definition of skill requirements for assignments and attaining the same through pre-defined question sets can help to identify right resources.

Knowledge - Knowledge Containers: Knowledge containers are effective channels of building organizational competencies. Create and track organizational competency build up using this utility. Knowledge containers are essentially competent resources based on which other resources can be generated. Knowing the inventory of such resources will greatly contribute towards profit.

Learning - Cooperative and collective learning is the best form of learning to create right resources. Anything outside is not the right resource. Often this gets unnoticed unless adequately automated. Key Challenge to any Organizational Success is the power to distribute knowledge and thus prevent knowledge monopoly build up. Knowledge monopoly harms the purpose of organizational existence. One way to avoid this is to encourage and reward employees to help towards knowledge dissemination. A useful measure would be to identify and track employees hours towards this activity in the form of clarifications provided to other employees. Also track hours on pending clarifications that is an indicator of lack of participation.

Risks - Save Tears: Streamlined and online uncertainty management is an inevitable parameter on equations that formulate continuous success.

QA and QC - Multistage QC and QA : Improve probability of success and reliability of delivery with multi-staged Quality Control and Quality Assurance stages. Proper QA And QC contributes to knowing problems early and identifying complexity.

Knowing your problems early: It is usual target to know your problems much before they would occur and then trace the same. This may be related to skills, features, stakeholders etc.. However more often then not the problem space becomes so complex that the track is lost. Automation of problem space is the most convenient approach towards mitigating this. This helps to tackle things in a more predictable manner.

Complexity as a a hexagon - Identification or change in Project Element Complexity will impact Stakeholder, Skills, Resources, Risks and Plan. The elements are inter-related to form the 6 faces of Complexity hexagon and needs to be assessed when any of the elements are changed. With scope elaboration, complexity or any of the faces may need continuous re-assessment and the impacts are best handled with proper automation methods.

Strength - Capability baselines are derived from organization aggregates on different project dimensions and may be system generated. The figures are target metrics for project performance and when compared with actual reflect project performance. When monitored regularly, helps to avoid crisis situations.

Navigate - Power to Navigate: If there is anything that a project member wishes most is the power to navigate easily anywhere and everywhere within the solution specification space. This can be achieved through an integrated searchable work area which is accessible to all. Transparency enables success. Transparency is utopia. Highest level of transparency is when stakeholders can view relevant information online as and when they desire. The proximity to this will contribute to motivation and thus success.

Continuous Appraisal - Contributes towards creation of a win-win platform for Supervisors and Subordinates. Real-time feedback mechanisms allows Supervisors to continuously assess performances and provides employees to understand their position regularly. This allows immediate corrective actions and thus promotes proper career building. May be followed up with usual bi-annual or annual appraisals where ratings are evidence based.

Auto audit - Generate audit reports automatically for the above areas. (adapted from SEI-CMM 5I and PMP concepts)