Catapult Project Methodology
The MSF disciplines—Project Management, Risk Management and Readiness Management—are areas of practice that employ a specific set of methods, terms and approaches. These disciplines are important to the optimal functioning of the MSF Team and Process models.
MSF has a distributed team approach to project management that relates to the method's foundational principles and models. In MSF, project management practices improve accountability and allow for a great range of scalability from small projects up to very large, complex projects.
MSF, as a framework for successful technology projects, acknowledges that project management is accomplished through responsibilities and activities that extend beyond those belonging to one individual on a team. The more widespread the need for these activities and responsibilities across the team, the greater the ability to create highly collaborative self-managing teams. This is one more reason the MSF is a perfect fit for Catapult: we hire the best talent and empower them with all the resources they need to ensure a project runs smoothly and delivers value.
For projects that require multiple teams or layers of teams, the project management activities are designed to scale and allow for effective management of any single or aggregated team. So even if you engage Catapult for multiple projects, or one very large one, you can have one point of contact that ensures everything is running on time and on budget.
You undertake technology projects to support ventures into new businesses and technology territory with an anticipated return on your investment. Risk management is our response to the uncertainty and risks inherent in technology projects, without getting in the way of the creative pursuit of opportunity.
MSF’s proactive risk management means that the Catapult project team has a defined and visible process for managing risks. The project team makes an initial assessment of what can go wrong, determines the risks that must be dealt with and then implements strategies for doing so. The assessment activity is continuous throughout the project and feeds into decision making in all phases. Identified risks and concurrent action plans are tracked until they are either resolved or turn into issues and are handled as such. Below is a diagram of the proactive risk management process.
This six-step risk management process is integrated with the Team Model through definitions of role responsibilities and with the Process Model through specified actions and milestone deliverables, creating a comprehensive approach to project risk management. The process ends with the learning step—the capture and retention of the project risks, mitigation and contingency strategies and executed actions for future review and analysis.
We use the MSF Readiness Management Discipline to measure the current versus the desired state of knowledge, skills and abilities of our staff. This measurement concerns the real or perceived capabilities of these individuals at any point during the ongoing process of planning, building and managing solutions and ensures that we are ready to meet even competing client needs.
The MSF Readiness Management Discipline provides guidance and processes for defining, assessing, changing and evaluating the knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for project execution and solution adoption. Each person performing a specific role on a project team must be capable of fulfilling all the key functions that go with that role.
Individual readiness is the measurement of each team member’s current state with regard to the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to meet the responsibilities required by his or her assigned role. Readiness management is intended to ensure that team members are fully qualified for the work they will need to perform.