The standard plan framework establishes the high-level activities that need to take place across all projects. To drill down, Pilewski and the project planners, managers and developers use software from Primavera that provides dashboards and progress reports for project tracking. They can compare original estimates with actual costs, see if milestones are met, list activities required for completion, or view all the projects that a functional group in IT is working on. Primavera also provides the data to the project management office, which uses it to identify when different IT functions should be brought into a project or when activities such as building test plans need to take place. All the company’s 126 projects follow Pilewski’s framework, so they’re measured the same way; the same activities are monitored across all projects using the software; and the data that project planners feed into the software is consistent and yields apples-to-apples comparisons across projects.

Notably, the standard plan framework does not specify how project and functional managers should perform each of those 25 steps, which distinguishes it from a traditional project methodology. By outlining what they need to keep track of instead of how they need to keep track, says Pilewski, the framework gives project managers the flexibility to break down their own work. In addition, they can use the framework in conjunction with any application development methodology, he says. That’s important because project managers can find standard project management methodologies too rigid and constraining.

"Companies are too big and too complicated to standardize on everything," says Patrick Boylan, CEO of Intellilink Solutions, a boutique consultancy specializing in project management. "They need to find a way to get some form of control over projects while also giving the IT department the flexibility it needs to respond to clients." A.G. Edwards has done exactly what Boylan suggests using its standard plan framework.

The Art of Persuasion

Although the standard plan framework is flexible, it was a tough sell inside the IT department. To win over the staff, Parker and Pilewski used various tactics. First, Parker appealed to his team’s sense of professionalism. He knew they weren’t happy that projects took years to complete. In one-on-one conversations, meetings with individual teams and formal town hall sessions, he told his workers that the framework would help them meet their milestones.

Pilewski then identified the project managers receptive to new ideas and hungering to improve their effectiveness. He asked them to get involved in pilot projects—a small product acquisition project and a large infrastructure application upgrade—where they used the standard plan framework for the first time. Pilewski then used those project managers as evangelists to get the rest of the team on board.