Delivering Project Results
Rosemary Hossenlopp, founder of Project Management Perspectives is the facilitator of an audio series by key project management professionals on what Business Leaders must understand about accelerating execution of strategy through project work.
She interviews Russ McDowell
, PMP with PMI and, participated in creating three of their OPM standards. He has extensive experience in teaching all levels of PM, PMO and maturity models. He has his Electrical Engineering degree Masters in SE from Carlton University in Ottawa Canada and is a senior member of IEEE.
The project management industry is facing challenges. One of them is showing that we actually deliver benefits to the business.
Click here to listen to the interview. Approx 7 minutes.
What’s the story behind the topic of delivering project results from enterprise strategy?
A large revelation to me in my career was when I realized that the importance of projects to organizations was not in the project itself but how it fit into the “bigger picture”.
There are many reasons that organizations are under increasing pressure to show and achieve these benefits on an faster pace today than every before:
- Globalization of the competitive market
- “shrinking world” – telecommunications, travel, virtual teams, etc.
- Increasing pace of technology innovation
- Increased pace of sharing of information and knowledge – again leading to new / innovative markets and approaches
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Legislative requirements
- Demographics
In short, organizations – businesses, governments, non-profits have to be more “nimble” today in changing directions and achieving their objectives
The key is that business executives, and here I include what many would not normally include as “business”, i.e. public service – governments, non-profit organizations, and even professional societies like PMI or IEEE,
They are – have to be – focused on achieving increased benefits for their organizations.
Benefits are not necessarily measured by monetary returns, but also by impacts made, public awareness of their role, social benefit, etc.
How does Organizational Project Management increase the linkage between projects and corporate strategy.
The project is only a part of a much larger puzzle. For example, most costs are involved in the post-project phase. Projects need to prepare for the hand over, need to not make short term decisions that are good for the project, but detrimental to the longer term
This is where projects – projectized activities come in…this is their forté.
Through the focused nature of projects, they are ideally situated to play the key role of providing the bridge from the organizations strategic vision to the delivery of capabilities enabling those benefits
There is a message here that both project practitioners and organizational leaders need to appreciate in order to fully benefit from what projects can do.
This will allow organizations to not only survive, but thrive in these fast paced times and lean markets
How do you select the right projects?
4 Critical questions
- What are we trying to accomplish and why
- How will we measure success
- What other conditions must exist
- How do we get there
Leads to the Logical framework
- A mechanism for selecting / prioritizing / approving the most important projects
That selects the projects, e.g., invested in right projects. How do we know we made the right investment?
Outcome “An outcome is ‘something that follows as a result or consequence’” – Merriam Webster online dictionary
Outcome management is the set of activities for planning, managing, and realizing of the desired outcomes from the initiatives” – Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Organization only benefits from the capabilities that result from the project deliverables
Traditional project management focuses on the deliverables from the project. Did it meet the criteria from the “triple constraint” – scope, cost, time
But that’s not what is important to the organization. In the long run the organization has made that investment in the expectation of benefits. Most projects deliver “capabilities” (either enhanced or new). It is only once the organization uses these capabilities will they be able to determine if the benefits from those new capabilities are realized.
The project team is no longer in existence at the point where the benefits can be measured. Thus something outside the tradition “project” management has to focus on this. This is a role for either program or portfolio management.
This confirmation of the attainment (or not) of the anticipated benefits is what provides the organization with feedback on their approach to making investment decisions. Without this feedback, it is impossible for the organization to be able to measure and hence improve on their processes for making the investment decisions. This is analogous to the “lessons learned” that we talk about in project management.
This author has decades of experience that allows he/her to state that Organizations can Deliver project results from enterprise strategy.
How can organizations have a larger degree of success in implementing their strategies? The answer lies in the promise of organizational project management. It’s inherent capabilities that focus on implementing change to provide new or improved capabilities that the organization can use to derive benefits from
The understanding of how to determine the key areas that hold the most promise of attaining their strategic goals – most organizations have many more “good ideas” than they have resources to implement. Therefore to thrive, they need to be able to identify the right ones for investment, and ensure that investment is run properly.
By understanding what we mean by organizational project management. We are able to determine where we may need to improve those processes in our organizations. In other words, improve our maturity level in those OPM processes that are important to our organization. The goal of improving these processes is to provide an organization with more predictable results from your investments.
The result….an organization that is mature in its selection of the “right projects”, the assurance that the projects will be “done right”, and the measurement of the benefits achieved after the project to confirm the investment decisions. In short – an organization that is mature in its’ project processes, yet nimble in its ability to go after new opportunities and successful in the fields that it aims for.
This is start of the path to making project management a strategic asset of your organization.
Russ McDowell can be contact at http://www.russona.com/
Tags: Business Executives, Carlton University, Changing Directions, Competitive Market, Engineering Degree, Enterprise Strategy, Key Project, Legislative Requirements, Management Perspectives, Maturity Models, Mergers And Acquisitions, Ottawa Canada, Pmo, Professional Societies, Project Management Industry, Project Management Professionals, Technology Innovation, University In Ottawa, Virtual Teams, World Telecommunications
