Project Management Approach and Methodology

Ingenuity Project Management Approach and Methodology Details

Ingenuity's standard Project Management techniques are advocated by a methodology developed after years of project management experience in a variety of industries, including companies large and small, and within the private and  public sector, including:

  • Developing detailed project plans that are continually updated and used to manage and guide the day-to-day activities.
  • Identifying and defining detailed project tasks, their duration, and dependencies
  • Accurately judging skills required to perform each task, and the assignment of specific resources
  • Establishing checkpoints to assess changes in scope preceding or succeeding milestones that have a significant bearing on scope going forward
  • Establishing and exercising quality assurance checkpoints throughout the life of the project.
  • Developing formal communication channels for team members and management.
  • Managing project issue resolution and coordinating all stakeholders to bring issues to resolution or develop measures for mitigation of issues
  • Communicating and coordinating project activities with all customer vendors involved in the implementation project management effort
  • Providing periodic status reporting to customer project team members, sponsors, and stakeholders.
  • Providing overall leadership to the customer project team, including implementation planning, change and configuration management, and, if requested, infrastructure service optimization.

Ingenuity always expects to work closely with our customer in the pursuit of a successful implementation project.  While Ingenuity will assume the responsibility for the project management of our customer's internal resources and oversight of any third party vendor or contractor project implementation activities, Ingenuity has found that its customers benefit from participating in the project assessment, planning and ongoing status reporting process.  By having participated throughout its key phases, there is ownership and buy-in to the end product.  Ingenuity, in turn, will benefit from the detailed knowledge that our customer has of its operation, current systems, and business imperatives.

Standard Project Milestones

The following project milestones are typical for an technical infrastructure type implementation project, such as a Frame Relay to MPLS wide area network migration project, using the following outline of activities as a guideline to ensure all activities are accounted for and executed in a timely and thorough manner for our customer's project:  

Project Planning

  • Project Kickoff
  • Define Project Scope
  • Review all business priorities and constraints
  • Define all roles and responsibilities
  • Develop communication plan
  • Determine project status reporting approach
  • Determine issue tracking and resolution approach
  • Schedule all status meetings
  • Develop project plan framework

Network Implementation Planning

  • Identify all sites and network elements in implementation scope
  •  Finalize network architecture
  •  Specify all equipment
  • Develop all equipment configurations
  • Determine extended DMARC requirements
  • Determine performance testing objectives and test plan
  • Review all network vendor implementation activities
  • Organize all sites into implementation phases
  • Apply rollout schedule to all phases
  • Develop detailed project plan with all implementation activities, activity duration, activity dependencies, resource assignments and complete project timeline

Network Implementation (repeated for each implementation site and phase)

  • Conduct site survey
  • Place circuit order (starting with head-end or hub sites)
  • Receive circuit firm order confirmation
  • Schedule vendor on-site to install circuit
  • Schedule circuit turn-up date and time
  • Activate change management procedures
  • Notify users at site of network change
  • Configure equipment
  • Activate configuration management procedures
  • Ship equipment
  • Conduct site preparation
  • Install equipment
  • Vendor turns-up circuit
  • Customer turns-up circuit and tests connectivity
  • Circuit accepted
  • Turnover site to managed services
  •  Disconnect order for old circuit placed and scheduled
  • Old circuit disconnected

Network Implementation Post-Mortem

  • Review overall network implementation effort
  • Review significant project issues
  • Document overall successes, failures and lessons learned

Ingenuity typically utilizes the latest release of Microsoft Project and Project Server as our preferred project management toolset.  We also use innovative means to communicate project status or solicit status from project team members, such as creating and managing project management focused websites and/or using a variety of status documents, depending on the preferences of our customer.

Ask us for project management customer references.