Challenges of Disjointed Disciplines

Challenges of Disjointed Disciplines

Enterprise IT projects often face issues when disciplines operate in silos, each following distinct frameworks and priorities. Project management prioritises timely, on-budget delivery, which may overlook the time required for thorough analysis. Business analysis focuses on capturing detailed requirements, sometimes without considering scope creep or the impact on design and development timelines. This fragmented approach leads to misaligned deliverables and delays, as teams focus on individual outputs rather than the overall project delivery.

Large-scale initiatives typically involve contributions from multiple disciplines, each with its own body of knowledge and prescribed deliverables. Fully applying the academic standards of each discipline would require more time and resources than enterprise IT projects can sustain. Projects must balance rigour with practicality to remain viable. In contrast, quality-critical projects—such as those developing software for pacemakers, electric vehicles, or aerospace systems—must apply detailed standards rigorously for safety and reliability.

Integrating Disciplines for Successful Delivery

A cross-disciplinary model integrates project delivery principles with supporting disciplines into a cohesive framework. It supports team collaboration to align deliverables, share accountability, and address interdependencies. For example, a Solution Architect works with a Business Analyst to align technical designs with business requirements, while a DevOps Engineer collaborates with a Release Manager to streamline deployments. This approach enables solutions to meet both technical and business needs.

Tools to Support Cross-Disciplinary Delivery

Tools are essential for maintaining alignment and managing interdependencies across disciplines. A project deliverables roadmap provides a unified view of deliverables, timelines, and dependencies, enabling teams to anticipate challenges and track progress. For example, in a customer relationship management implementation, the roadmap validates that user experience design must be aligned with requirements before development begins. Collaborative platforms like Jira support real-time communication and issue tracking for continuous alignment across teams.

Benefits of a Cross-Disciplinary Approach

A cross-disciplinary approach promotes collaboration and shared accountability by integrating each discipline’s core principles into a unified framework. It moves away from isolated guidelines, enabling teams to work towards a common project goal. By merging insights and expertise across disciplines, teams are better positioned to deliver cohesive solutions, mitigate risks, and improve project outcomes.

Project Overview

M-Mart, a global retail chain, undertakes the StockSync project to modernise its legacy inventory management system. The initiative aims to enhance supply chain efficiency, enable real-time inventory tracking across 1,200 stores, and support an expanding e-commerce platform. The project demands integration of core project delivery disciplines (e.g., Project management, Business analysis, System development) and supporting disciplines (e.g., DevOps, Security management) to deliver a scalable, reliable solution. Initially, siloed operations among disciplines threaten the project’s success, highlighting the need for a unified approach to align roles, competencies, and deliverables.

Challenges

The StockSync project faces challenges due to siloed disciplines, each operating with distinct priorities and frameworks:

• Infeasible schedules: Project management develops a schedule based on a six-month delivery target, ignoring effort estimates from disciplines like System development and Test management. This results in unrealistic timelines, with developers reporting a 30% shortfall in allocated time for coding and testing.
• Limited cross-disciplinary understanding: Specialists focus on their roles without understanding interdependencies. For example, the Solution architect designs a cloud-based system without consulting the Security management team, creating compliance gaps that risk delaying deployment by two weeks.
• Misaligned deliverables: Business analysis produces requirements without input from Process analysis, resulting in specifications that omit critical workflow dependencies. For instance, initial requirements overlook integration with warehouse scanning systems, leading to a 20% error rate in inventory updates during early testing. 

Implementing Unified Project Disciplines

M-Mart adopts a cross-disciplinary model to integrate project delivery and supporting disciplines, leveraging collaboration, transferable competencies, and tools to address the identified challenges.

Realistic Project Planning

To address infeasible schedules, the Project manager collects effort estimates from all disciplines. Specialists provide input on task durations:

• System development estimates 12 weeks for coding and integration, compared to the original 8-week allocation.
• • Test management allocates 4 weeks for end-to-end testing for comprehensive testing of real-time tracking features.

Using these estimates, the team creates an 8-month schedule, which reduces delivery risks and achieves a 95% on-time completion rate for milestones, compared to the initial schedule’s 60% adherence.

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

The Project manager and Project assurance manager conduct regular cross-functional workshops to align disciplines. These sessions include specialists from Business analysis, Process analysis, Solution architecture, and DevOps, utilising competencies such as stakeholder engagement and technical design. For example:

• Business analysts collaborate with process analysts to map existing inventory workflows, identifying gaps like missing real-time data feeds. This enables the identification of requirements to support a seamless transition to the modernised system.
• The Solution architect works with the Security management team to incorporate encryption protocols, addressing compliance requirements early and minimising rework. 

The team employs a project deliverables roadmap to provide a unified view of deliverables, timelines, and dependencies. For the StockSync project, the roadmap validates that user experience and interface design align with requirements before system development begins. This prevents delays by providing developers with complete specifications. The team also uses Jira for real-time issue tracking, reducing communication delays by 25% compared to email-based updates.

Outcomes

The unified approach delivers measurable benefits of integrating project delivery and supporting disciplines:

• Achievable timelines: The revised schedule, based on cross-disciplinary input, enables on-time delivery of 90% of project phases, compared to the initial schedule’s projected 40% delay rate.
• Enhanced deliverable quality: Collaboration between business analysis and process analysis reduces specification errors by 15%, particularly around the real-time inventory updates across all stores.
• Improved compliance and reliability: Early involvement of Security management ensures compliance with data protection regulations, avoiding a potential $100,000 fine. DevOps integration streamlines deployments, achieving a 99.9% system uptime post-launch.
• Stronger team alignment: Cross-functional workshops promote shared accountability, with 85% of team members reporting improved understanding of interdependencies, as measured by project feedback surveys. 

The StockSync project illustrates how a cross-disciplinary model, supported by participants in specialist roles and collaboration tools, overcomes siloed operations to deliver a cohesive, high-quality IT solution.