Five essential project management skills for RM and IG professionals.

• Author: Lebedeva, Anna
• Position: Records management - Information governance

The just-released results of the Forrester Research/ARMA International RM Survey conducted during the second quarter of 2015 show the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is considered one of the most valuable credentials for records and information professionals to earn. Whether you're pursuing the PMP or not, this article identifies and tells you how you can develop and use several project management skills that will help you be more successful in your career.

The success of an organization's information governance (IG) program depends on the contributions and collaboration of people in many functional areas, including records management (RM), legal, compliance, information technology (IT), and information security. As the conductor who often will lead this orchestra of cross-functional staff, an IG professional must have many skills to ensure that the members play in tune, rather than create a cacophony.

Having project management (PM) skills is one key for leading the orchestra to deliver a great performance in implementing complex IG initiatives. This is because whether they are building an IG program, developing a retention schedule, implementing a legal hold process, or developing strategies for defensible disposition, IG professionals are probably running multiple projects, or initiatives, concurrently.

Among the PM discipline's knowledge areas that can directly benefit IG professionals in their daily work are these five:

1. Gathering business requirements and defining scope

2. Building and managing a project plan

3. Managing stakeholders and communications

4. Managing timelines, risks, and issues

5. Managing change

   This article examines each to show how they can help IG professionals drive IG initiatives to successful completion.

   Gathering Business Requirements, Defining Scope

   Gathering business requirements is the first activity to undertake once an IG initiative is approved, although it might sometimes be necessary even before approval. Without well-defined requirements, the IG professional cannot plan the project, the IT team will not know what to build, customers will not know what to expect, and there will be no way to validate that the end result will satisfy all stakeholders' needs. In fact, one of the most common reasons projects fail is because business requirements were not defined or were poorly defined.

   The business requirements lay the foundation for:

1. Defining scope

2. Testing deliverables

3. Measuring success

   Defining Scope

   Business requirements define the scope of a project and enable everyone involved to agree on what will be delivered and what the end result will be. Requirements always need to be documented clearly, in great detail, and in understandable and unambiguous language to allow better estimates of the timeline, budget, and resources, and to provide a method for controlling requirements changes.

   An essential part of defining the scope of an IG initiative is identifying deliverables that are out of scope. Thus, if the project, for example, is about implementing an enterprise content management system, but the web content management module is not part of the initial implementation, it needs to be clearly stated in the scope statement. All stakeholders should formally accept the scope statement before the project progresses.

   Testing Deliverables

   Business requirements are also used to build a test plan, with each requirement becoming a testable item. If IG professionals do not reconcile requirements against deliverables, they most likely will end up with a system or a process that is useless. The consequences of that will be severe, resulting in wasted company resources, lost time, unmitigated risks, and missed opportunities, to name a few.

   Not every IG initiative will have a formal testing phase, but there will always be some form of validation. In either case, it is important to test or validate as early as possible in the project's life cycle in order to identify gaps in requirements and take corrective actions without impacting the timeline, cost, and scope.

   Measuring Success

   The...