Tailor Project Management Processes to Fit Your Projects
Your Challenge
Lack of upfront project planning can result in IT projects going over budget and time, resulting in poor stakeholder satisfaction and a widespread perception that IT is not delivering value.
While getting better at project management is the key, it’s common for organizations to overshoot and adopt best practices that far exceed their current levels of process maturity. This results in an excessive overhead that time-strapped project managers and teams typically can’t sustain for very long.
While it’s important that best practices be understood, it’s equally true that best practices aren’t always the best fit. These frameworks commonly set unrealistic expectations for resource-constrained IT departments, and in their clinical approach, fail to address the day-to-day challenges that project managers face on the frontlines.
A right-sized approach to your project management processes works best. Take what you need from those formal frameworks, and then tailor a process that’s going to work for your organization and for the variety of projects that come your way
Our advice
Critical Insight
Keep your systems dormant until disaster strikes. Prepare as much of your environment as possible without tapping into compute resources. Enjoy the low at-rest costs, and leverage the reliability of the cloud in your failover.
Avoid failure on the failback! Bringing up your systems in the cloud is a great temporary solution, but an expensive long-term strategy. Make sure you have a plan to get back on premises.
Leverage cloud DR as a start for cloud migration. Cloud DR provides a gateway for broader infrastructure lift and shift to cloud IaaS, but this should only be the first phase of a longer-term roadmap that ends in multi-service hybrid cloud.
Impact and Result
Calculate the cost of your DR solution with a cloud vendor. Test your systems often to build out more accurate budgets and to define failover and failback action plans to increase confidence in your capabilities.
Define “good enough” performance by consulting with the business and setting correct expectations for the recovery state.
Dig deeper into the various flavors of cloud-based DR beyond backup and restore, including pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site recovery. Each of these has unique benefits and challenges when done in the cloud.
