Sen for business projects: operations, IT and change

Business projects rarely fail on the idea. They fail on the plan: unclear owners, a budget built apart from the schedule, and risks nobody priced. Sen puts these in one place.

These are the eight planning threads the Krong course is built around. The highlighted ones are covered here. What are the planning threads?

Start with the business case

The Business case tab holds the problem, the goal, what is in and out of scope, the budget and the sponsor. Everything else hangs from it. If a task does not serve the goal, it does not belong.

From scope to schedule

Break the scope into work packages. Give each a duration and a predecessor. Sen finds the critical path, so you see which tasks set the end date and which have float. Add milestones for the dates the business cares about, such as a go-live, and gates for the decisions that must be made first.

People and capacity

The RACI says who does what. The Resources tab turns it into people needed per team per week, and marks weeks when a team is over capacity. This is where many business plans quietly break: two projects need the same team in the same month.

Money and risk

• Budget each work package. The total, the contingency and the earned value baseline follow.
• Score risks and link them to the tasks they affect. Contingency is then set against real risks, not a flat percentage.
• Use the Cash flow tab to see the monthly spend and the S-curve for finance.

Adoption

Many business projects deliver a system and then discover nobody uses it. Plan the adoption work as tasks, with owners and dates, in the same schedule. Track the benefit with a KPI that has a target and an owner.

Reporting upward

The status report gives a sponsor one page: RAG by area, what changed since last week, decisions needed and the next milestones. It is built from the live plan, so it is never stale.

Questions people ask

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