|
Project management is often implemented in an ad hoc way, in an uneasy marriage with deeply entrenched corporate command and control structures. These outmoded corporate structures are no longer able to effectively accomplish the organization's mission, yet they are extremely hard to change. Implementing project management is often an uphill battle, waged by people with vision against people clinging to current paradigms and familiar surroundings.
If my company currently has no consistent project management processes or tools, how do we start improving our ability to manage projects? What is the sequence of activities to make it happen? What is management's role in these efforts? What kind of obstacles can I expect and how can I overcome them?
- Click here for Burning Questions and know-how on Implementing Project Management
- Among our Papers and Presentations:
- Bill Kern's When Management Isn't Buying: Six Internal Selling Tools That Work will arm you with tips and advice on selling project management methodology to your organization.
- Getting our organizations at peak project performance takes more than just training. Knowing how to successfully accomplish all the tasks, issues, and challenges a PM faces often requires more than formalized training. For most effective skill development for all our PMs, we need support mechanisms that help managers continually apply what they've learned in courses and expand their knowledge and capabilities as they encounter a wide variety of projects and situations. Check out our presentation "Paths to Practical Know-How: Crucial Learning Beyond Training" for ideas on how communities of practice and project support groups can promote ongoing knowledge and best practices exchange among their project managers, and provide project facilitation, consulting help, and online how-to resources to ensure just-in-time learning throughout our projects.
- The presentation "High-Impact Low-Overhead Project Management" covers concepts and techniques that the author has found extremely useful for introducing some high-impact project management fast. These techniques are especially helpful in organizations with little or no prior project management background and experience. The focus is on using techniques that do not involve a high level of project mechanics or new tools to help teams avoid problems that drive project failures. The techniques also do not require long process improvement efforts to see some fast results; they are simple to explain and implement, and they can be deployed just-in-time on a project. Key subjects include using team kick-off meetings, setting up relationships with outside vendors and development partners to avoid project-killing issues, and determining the highest leverage project techniques for your situation and getting them working on multiple teams fast.
- Improving things requires changing things. Whatever you're trying to improve- project performance, your development processes, how cross-functional teams work together- chances are you're asking someone to change... And they just may not go along quietly! Overcoming Resistance to Change explains key reasons people resist change, and approaches for getting past each kind of resistance.
- In many organizations, functions are king and getting work done cross-functionally is difficult at best. For years companies have tried to solve this problem by changing the culture or restructuring, but functional silos still don't necessarily cooperate with one another. Business processes are riddled with rework and long cycle times; projects are late and don't satisfy their customers. The paper "Matrix Management Reinvented" by Paula Martin, who has extensive field experience with matrix organizations, discusses what it takes to make it all work, including getting alignment around goals, projects, and roles, achieving collaborative management, and what's required of individuals.
- For a front-lines look at some techniques for implementing better PM in a company, and improving product development practices, see our interview with Neil Love titled Career Highlights and Favorite Techniques - Improving Project Management and Increasing Its Perceived Value. In the interview Neil provides examples from his various PM-related roles for coaching executives on how to add value to projects; helping groups see what aspects of their processes should be tackled first and getting them to do it; helping cross-functional groups work together better to improve project outcomes; and more.
- Need to show that doubting-Thomas executive the value of better project management? Here are some interesting links:
- Check out our Company Program for Ongoing PM Learning. It provides one framework for a comprehensive ongoing training and support program for your PMs to make sure learning opportunities are available right when they need them. Combines normal courses, brown bag community seminars, self-paced learning, lessons learned sharing, document sharing, and coaching into a full program. This kind of program is critical to improving your organization's overall PM capabilities through supporting individual project managers.
- Our Project Manager Support Survey provides a survey form to help you find out what training and coaching your project managers and team members need on their projects, which will help you develop their skills to grow the PM capabilities of your company or department.
- The Project Support Group Survey and Results template provides a survey approach for use by a new or proposed "Project Support Group." Such a group is formed in some organizations to support all its project managers, especially newer project managers who may need training, mentoring, or coaching. (It may include one or two people or more.) Project Support Groups (PSG) are a great idea and can deliver valuable support to project managers that helps their skills develop and their projects go well. However, various functional managers and executives may not understand the charter of such a group and may not agree with or appreciate some of the important services a PSG can provide. The purpose of the survey is to get input what services the PSG should provide to project managers, or determine attitudes of managers/executives toward the services already being provided and provide a forum for discussing and agreeing on the goals of the PSG. The file provides questions for a survey of functional managers and other stakeholders, in a format for communicating the results and implications of the survey responses.
- Our Budget for Project Management Support Group template provides an example budget for the non-salary expenses of a Project Management Support Group chartered to support the project managers in an organization. The template was originally created for a 2-person PMSG supporting 30 project managers, with a charter of providing training opportunities, books and publications, coaching and mentoring, recognition, and other support, to enable this mix of (mostly) new and (some) experienced PMs to grow their skills and have ongoing support as they executed critical projects. This template can be customized easily for company-specific line items and different sized PMSG and project manager groups.
- Check our book list for books on Implementing Project Management.
-
The following files define recommended deliverables for the first 4 phases of a Software Release Life Cycle, focused on planning a major software release composed of multiple projects. The guidelines provide a one-to-two page detailed definition of each deliverable in the phase, defining Purpose, Audience, Prerequisites, Driver (who should drive or take responsibility for this deliverable getting done), and a detailed checklist of "recommended accomplishments" - what the deliverable should contain. These phases provide an upfront process that ensures all sources of requirements are considered, while helping cut through the clutter of all the things that COULD be included in a software release, to ensure the release focuses on important features and projects, AND is humanly possible to complete in the alotted time!
Phase 1: Preliminary Requirements Gathering
Phase 2: Scope Definition
Phase 3: Planning and Negotiation
Phase 4: Release Plan Refinement
|
Return to Top