PMI defines tools and techniques for each project, program, and portfolio areas. We have an opportunity to next define interfaces that bind project, program and portfolio process with the general management process areas of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, controlling and motivating. Why? The budget spent on projects is just one area of spend that is in the control of senior leadership. We are spending the organizations money but how relevant are we to improving organizational results vs. other organizational change projects or sales enablement efforts. I could name other examples but projects are just part of the system of management efforts. Let’s define how we rate vs. other initiatives that can improve results that are important to management or our customers.

Most importantly, Organizational Project Management aims to improve maturity and effectiveness of the organizations we serve not just to deliver projects. We want to measure, and improve internal processes and external linkages to the general management and operations of our organizations.

In your experience, are these concerns that matter to your management or your next promotion? Would love to hear.

Project work is important. This blog spends a lot of time talking about how to improve the tools, techniques and disciplines around performing project, program and portfolio work. Staying focused on incrementally improving project management domain disciplines is needed to improve consistently and predictably delivering project results. The only problem is that many organizations don’t need incremental improvements. They need big improvements to stay ahead of the big economic, customer, market and external pressures that the market or other stakeholders demand.

So the question to big bang improvements lies in two areas.

1)       Aligning project work with strategic direction

2)       Providing project work that benefits operations or provides revenue from customers

The portfolio domain has identified practices that allow project spending to be identified, tracked, monitored and optimized. The Organizational Project Management COP wants to additionally influence leadership actions that facilitate successful discussions when monitoring the health or re-optimization of projectized spend.

The program domain states that benefits must be indentified. The Organizational Project Management COP additionally wants to discuss practices and philosophies that apply this concept to real project practices.

In your experience, which one is your organizations biggest pain point; aligning to the strategic direction or providing project work that really helps operations or grows revenue? Would love your comments.

So what is business acumen? According to Merriam-Webster it is discernment, especially in practical matters. For project managers in each project domain it could mean:

·         Projects: Appropriately tailoring project management tools and techniques to the complexity and risk of each project

·         Program: Ensuring communication among disparate stakeholders and recognizing and addressing communication issues among disparate project stakeholders while balancing their needs with project goals

·         Portfolio: Implementing governance disciplines while keeping the focus on delivering benefits to the wider organization under time and political pressures.

Discernment choices come a thousand times each day. What issue do I address? How many issues do I address before I risk being buried and not seeing the wider picture for the urgency of the moment. When do I need to motivate resources to participate collaboratively vs. removing decision choices from stakeholders who use those choices to resist change? How much time to I make to grow myself and grow others?

Discernment comes from understanding what is needed to move yourself and your organization to the next level of alignment to enterprise strategy.

What does having business acumen look like?

·         Identifying the corporate strategy

·         Identifying your project, program or portfolio path

·         De-prioritizing anything that isn’t helping you get there

That’s business acumen. That’s being a project manager that can carry on a conversation with senior project management leadership. Those conversations allow you visibility to be assigned to new enterprise project work.

What is organizational agility? Merriam-Webster calls it nimbleness. If the organizational strategy changes, how fast can the portfolio be optimized for the new strategy?

PMI has a new community that is launching this Friday; the Organizational Project Management (OPM) Community of Practice (COP.) It is a virtual community of project management professionals that wants too:

“Integrates project, program, portfolio management practices with management infrastructure of an organization.”

Project managers can help organizations not just implement projects but implement the right projects that delivers benefits that management cares about. It is really a change of focus:

·         From projects to what projects deliver

·         From execution to excellence

·         From best practices to competitive advantage

Do you agree that the definition of project manager success is changing? If so, what is your prescription for helping project managers address the challenge of making project work count?

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 10 minutes.

What’s the story behind the topic of Proven Business Leader Actions for Project Success

Michael explains that one of the reasons that this topic seems to get so much traction is the convergence of mutual interests between the business leaders who are working toward implementing their strategic vision and the extraordinary focus given by project managers toward delivering results. In a June 1999 Fortune Magazine article it was reported that the number one reason for business leader failure was “…bad execution. As simple as that: not getting things done, being indecisive, not delivering on commitments…” I believe that it those business leaders today who are working to avoid his type of failure who have recognized and embraced their dependency on project management.

What can leaders do to improve project execution?

Michael illustrates the situation with a short story. This story is about George. Now, George is a fictitious name of a project manager at the CIA where I worked; he is actually a composite of the thousands of project managers at the CIA that I encountered when I developed and ran the CIA program for training and certifying project managers. And, according to the research, there are huge numbers of “Georges” working in organizations worldwide.
George discovered a technique that would allow him to address a critical limitation he was encountering establishing the needed level of authority to run his project; the technique involved writing and getting signed approval for a project charter document.
George recognized that by using this best practice technique he would dramatically raise the odds of his project success. But, as enthused as George might have been to employ this technique, disappointment and perhaps even frustration soon emerged when he was told that “we don’t do charters” in the element of the organization where he worked.
- The point of this story is to illustrate but one of the actions a business leader could take to permit and perhaps even encourage the Georges to adopt best practice project techniques; in this case the action would be to establish the use of project charter documents.
- By taking this proven business leader action not only will the project be more likely to succeed, but the strategic vision of the business leader that the project is linked to will also be more likely to succeed.

Improve Communication between leadership and project teams

The good news regarding this story is that the business leader actions for project success are largely known and understood. Project management practitioners have been engaged for quite some time in identifying the actions that they would like their business leaders to take for project success.
- Lists of these business leader actions can readily be adapted to suit the specific organization and situation; and project managers are quite adept at supporting the business leader with this.
- It doesn’t take much more from the business leader than a simple request of the project manager to list the actions they would like the business leader to take for project success; and by extension, the actions that will result in the success of the business leader’s strategic vision. Thus avoiding the number one reason for business leader failure; bad execution, not delivering on commitments.

Project Communication Challenges

The challenge for the business leaders is to understand that some barriers exist to their taking actions for project success. These barriers, both perceived and real, can limit and sometimes derail even the most dedicated business leader.
Fortunately, the barriers are understood and better yet, approaches already familiar to the business leader can be used to overcome the barriers.
Barrier busters such as servant leadership and such as structured communications can be adopted and adapted by the business leader to fit the project context. In fact, one very powerful barrier buster is to get help directly from the project managers themselves; by forming a project management council to help implement the business leader actions for project success.

There is a critical dependency between business leader success and project success and we have heard the good news that the actions available to the business leader to raise the odds of project success are well understood. We have recognized that barriers exist for the business leader interested in taking these actions and we have recognized that approaches already familiar to the business leader can be employed to bust the barriers.

Additional information about this and related topics can be found on Michael O’Brochta’s website at www.zozerinc.com

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/

Click here to listen to the audio interview.

Business leaders are facing challenges. One of them is ensuring that projects deliver benefits into an organization.

Sara explains that it is critical to facilitate the executive thinking process by clearly articulating why organizations are seeking for transformation or changes.
- Key question to is What do they want to transform themselves from and to?
- They must understanding current business performance and their delta between where they want to be and where they are.

If the reason for transformational change is clear, what is the next step?

Organizational Evaluation

- How to perform an effective organizational evaluation to identify potential “FAT” in the processes or missing best practices or capabilities that could help them be more effective doing the job.
- Or assessing people skill sets and competencies and identify development areas required to adopt required changes to their job responsibilities or functions in alignment with the company strategy, business objectives and goals.
- Are they using effective techniques and tools to do their jobs? Yes, we need to view the organization as the ecosystem that drive business results and be able to identify what needs to change to what.
- Analyze their culture and their behaviors.
- See their cultural ecosystem and get to the bottle of the issues and challenges.

Scope of Evaluation

Corporate Ecosystem is composed of:
- The human capital,
- Ecosystem of vendors, partners,
- The right strategy,
- The right business model,
- The right objectives,
- The right organizational enablers,
- The processes,
- The best practices and capabilities require to make the machine effective enough to produce money

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 10 minutes.

What’s the story behind your interest in the topic of How business transformation projects can produce bottom line benefits?

Folake replies that The credit crunch and economic slowdown, rising commodity prices, and global competition are affecting the way companies are being managed. More business leaders are responding to the economic slowdown by launching more transformation initiatives and spending more on them. These initiatives will primarily be driven by the quest for operational efficiency and the need to reduce costs and increase the bottom line. Therefore, in today’s change burdened world, transformation is a competency that required for companies to thrive. Understanding the dynamics of business transformation especially the elements of success and failure is essential for companies operating in today’s constantly evolving business environment.

Business Transformation a key executive management initiative that entails the strategic process,organizational change, and technology development focused around a clear vision, resulting in a significant change and substantial financial benefits to the organization.

What are key issues on transformation projects.

Business transformation can be achieved through new technology, business models and project management practices to improve performance and the bottom line.
More business are starting to realize that to survive this economy and prosper in the future, it has to transform its basic structure.
The transformation of a business is a change in culture and change in habits and change in attitude and often a change in purpose.

What are transformation drivers and the role of leadership?

Transformation Drivers

– Increased competition from competitors
– Industry consolidation
– Technological change
– Changing customer preferences
– Regulatory change/government policy

What is The role of leadership in Business Transformation Projects?

Transformation efforts require exceptional leadership abilities. The role of transformation leadership is key, if a transformational effort is not to get derailed.
The best transformation leaders are not ones who dictate their plans, but those who bring vision; inspire people with a sense of urgency; and then help them to bring their own creativity to the project
The transformation leader is responsible for championing the effort, leading the team and providing appropriate oversight on efforts where the organizations reputation is on the line.
Leaders must have both the capability to formulate a compelling vision and the skills to organize and manage the change processes.
These skills may reside in more than one person.
In addition to developing and communicating the vision, the leadership’s responsibilities involve developing a coherent transformation plan, maintaining a focus on key transformation goals, and managing external changes to complement internal ones

Business transformation can be achieved through efforts from alignment of People, Process and Technology strategies towards a strategic end.
In business transformation, there are four elements to consider
- Project Management Methodology
- Business Process Management
- Essential Change Management
- Benefits Management

There are also other aspects that apply to all four elements; such as governance structure, risk and project change management

Project Management can accelerate business transformation.

Through many projects, demonstrable business transformation has occurred and the organization has realized the many tangible benefits of applying project and program management discipline to the delivery of such projects.

Leadership needs to start thinking of projects in terms of Business-led transformation activities, spanning many functions.

The essential components of a successful business transformation

Shared future
– A compelling vision and strategic intent (with super ordinate goals), core values and fundamental principles have been co-created by the executives and stakeholders at every level and function of the organization, clearly articulated, widely owned and treasured.
– The entire organization is galvanized to fulfill the future and live consistently with the core values and fundamental principles.

Synergy
– Collaboration occurs naturally across all levels and functions.
– Communication is open, authentic, responsible and abundant.
– High-performance teams become the norm.
– Creativity and innovation blossom.

Achievement
– Breakthroughs and turnarounds flourish.
– The stuck becomes unstuck.
– Unprecedented and unexpected results appear throughout the system.
– A new level of sustainably high performance emerges.

Aliveness
– Employees flourish. They openly express their passion, commitment and creativity. They have a real sense of accomplishment. Accountability is natural and prevalent.
– A “possibility-based” culture becomes the norm.
– Individuals and teams are clear that they make a difference, and experience being in charge of their future.
– Growth and development — personally and professionally, individually and as teams — is a natural, highly valued aspect of work.

Barriers to success
– Transformation efforts will fail without the ability and willingness to change on the part of the people who are affected. An overview of the underlying changes required for successful Business Transformation and methods for obtaining buy in and generating momentum among stakeholders.
– Lack of prioritization
– Inadequate planning for implementation
– Under communicating the vision
– Lack of program management techniques for cross functional business transformation programs.
– Lack of the methods and tools for the analysis and management Complacency
– Failure to create short-term win
– Declaring victory too soon
– Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture.
– Not identifying the right solution
– Change Management

What makes a business transformation project different

We have shared that Business Transformation a key executive management initiative that entails the strategic process, organizational change, and technology development focused around a clear vision, resulting in a significant change in and substantial financial benefits.

Folake has decades of experience that allows her to state that
- Understanding the elements of success and failures in business transformation is essential for companies operating in today’s constantly evolving business environment.
- Business transformation is primarily driven by the quest for operational efficiency and the need to reduce costs.
- The key elements of success are for business transformation are, a compelling vision and strategic intent, open communication, and a pervasive culture.

She can be contacted at www.enovatemasters.com

Click here to listen to the audio interview.

The project management industry is facing challenges. One of them is showing that we actually deliver benefits to the business.

Raju explains that he has come across examples where strategic vision is effectively translated into action whereas in others it is not. Taking examples from India many programs have been successful e.g. Operation flood, the telecom revolution and the internet reservation system of the railways. In others there have been failures, e.g. a major political party - the BJP - lost the election because they could not relate to the grass-roots level happenings while painting a different picture at the top. So I am doing research to find out what works and what does not in converting strategy into action.

What can Project Managers learn from the geese?

Geese are often quoted as an example of teamwork, leadership and business alignment. However, organizations find it difficult to follow them implicitly. Some reasons are – humans and the organization that they form are not the same as birds and animals and further they are more complex. Nevertheless, some principles can be applied e.g. collective leadership, portfolio management and goal oriented behavior.

Organization project management can help in aligning strategy and projects - The base for OPM is the cascading relationship between projects, programs and portfolio and this has been well accepted by many standards, organizations and as a practice by some. Project portfolio management can be the key for linking strategy and projects. Organizations need to understand OPM more clearly and implement processes and practices in a more proactive manner.

What makes projects successful and thereby obtain results as stated by the strategic vision? The 3 Cs – Commitment, Culture and Communication.
- Commitment – by the senior managers and the executive and instilling it among other project team members
- Culture – understanding work culture with regard to organization, geography etc and creating an atmosphere to make things happen.
- Communication – ability to communicate the vision to all members of the project and obtain constant and real time feedback on operations at grass roots level. Larger the organization, the more difficult it is for this to take place.

Raju can be contacted at www.xtraplus.co.in

Satisficing is a decision-making strategy which attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution.

Project managers may make an intellectual or emotional choice to not fully examine all stakeholders, requirements or needs. The project then fall shorts on full business requirements or solution identification due to time or team pressures when operating in an uncertain environment.

An uncertain environment is where there is newness. Another words you have new:

- Staff
- Technology
- Stakeholders
- Environmental factors

A choice to satisfice is based upon trust. Trust that you know an organization. That you know it well. That it will understand the strategies undertaken and the risks that may occur.

Newness breaks trust. So what can you do to mitigate the risk associated with newness?

- Write business requirements assuming that your boss will change and you need to defend them
- Craft a business case defining benefits but also conflicts
- Create a project management plan that is tailored to the amount of newness represented by the project
- Plan for risks as if the environment will change
- Build a communication plan as if the stakeholders will change.

Satisficing is sufficient on small, low risk projects. This represents the best organization use of resources.

Satisficing is a sin on all other projects. Project managers must tailor project deliverables to the amount of newness represented by the project.

Reprinted [adapted] with permission from The 77 Deadly Sins of Project Management, © 2009 by Management Concepts, Inc. All rights reserved. www.managementconcepts.com

She interviews Jim Sloane, a Silicon Valley based OPM3 Certified consultant and PMP, and owner of his consulting and training company, Project Management Explorations.

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 6 minutes.

What’s the story behind your interest in Projects Must Deliver Benefits.

Jim explains that there is a gap between what executives expect and what project managers deliver. So a conversation needs to start between these organization roles, that identifies the common and not so common ground. Mostly the ‘not so common ground’.

Improvement needed in alignment between projects and operations.

- Getting alignment between projects and organizational strategy is a must, and can be accomplished by implementing processes that assure the project supports the organization strategy for business improvements.
- People management and change management are also important to achieve this important goal.
- Technology plays an important role too.
- The fly in the ointment is the changing nature of organizations and projects. Sometimes the business benefits are a moving target.

Understanding the benefits that projects produce is difficult. Any suggestions?

- I think the business case for the project must be clear about the intended benefits. This information must be in the charter for the project so the project lead is aware and understands the importance of the project.
- There must also be periodic reviews of the described benefit with operational people, to assure continued alignment between the project and the business benefit.
- Research I am doing indicates this focus is new to the project manager, and its importance is new to executives!
- So it looks like some information exchange between PMs and executives is in order. This will require some training of both roles, but I expect more for the PM, who has to learn the ‘language’ of business and effective ways to relate to the business.

How To improve information exchange between projects and executives

- Improving formalization of organizational benefits is required.
- Program management processes take into account governance and operations:
Corporate strategy
Delivery mechanisms for change (projects)
Business operations
Benefits management
- Formal portfolio management would achieve the same goal.

Senior leaders must work with project teams to create a more formal way of ensuring that projects deliver benefits.