“The decision process is further forward so accountability is share with business owners as well as IT.” –John Olmstead, Senior Project Manager, Cox Communications
Cox Communications is a prominent figure in the cable TV industry. They also offer services such as high speed internet, standard telephone, voice-over-internet telephone and recently entered the market as a wireless provider.
In an August web forum presentation, John Olmstead, Senior Project Manager for Cox Communications offered an overview of the organization’s methodology for project development and infrastructure delivery. According to Olmstead, “The process we implement at Cox allows you to still have your pilot, but what you have created will be analyzed in the assured process to make sure that it is ready for production.”
CCI’s Enterprise Solutions Group consisted of six sub-groups, many of which overlapped each other, throughout completion of various projects. Each group conducted project management and system development life cycle (SDLC) through their own methodology. The Delivery Management Organization (DMO) which was one of the six sub-groups, devised a common frame work for standardization purposes. This ‘Assured Framework’ allowed for all groups to think and work alike and allowed for better quality, cross functionality and the ability to augment each other’s teams. Along with this established framework, gating functionality was introduced to audit quality and stop the implementation of projects until problems and issues are rectified.
The traditional PMI model was followed and executed through the common phases including: initiation, analyzing, design, building, testing, and implementation. Each phase had specific tasks and deliverables to be completed.
Another implementation by the organization was the use of quality gates. According to Olmstead, “The quality gate is designed to help you succeed, so there are progress checkpoints before gates.” These gates, defined by the executive team, identified the significant projects of the organization. The determination process involved evaluation of the projects based upon preset criteria that. There were three quality gates identified by red, yellow, or green status. The project cannot pass a quality control gate until they have attained “yellow” or “green” standing. Because a gate review would inundate a project with so many deliverables, there are only three gates: alignment, execution and delivery.
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