How OPM Improves ROI in High-Technology and Knowledge-based Projects
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 Rashed Iqbal, the Project Manager at Optical Research in Pasadena, CA. Rashed is a PMP, a Ph.D, a Certified Scrum Master and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has over 15 years of experience in high-technology industry.
The project management industry is facing challenges. One of the is showing that we actually deliver benefits to the business. Rashed is here to discuss how Organizational Project Management improves ROI in high-tech and knowledge-based projects.
What’s the story behind the topic of How Organizational Project Management (OPM) improves ROI in High-Technology and Knowledge-based Projects?
As a business manager, the ROI you get depends upon two key factors: your investment and your returns – you would want to maximize your returns while minimizing the investment needed. In addition, you need to be nimble and agile in responding to market dynamics and to customer demands even to get a chance of investing in expectation of a return.
High-technology and knowledge-based projects are complex and often involves R&D components which not only add a factor of further uncertainty to the outcomes bur also make the invest needed very hard to determine a priority. It’s also more challenging to introduce processes in R&D environment and at workplace where knowledge-based work is a dominant factor.
A well-defined but nimble and highly integrated technical and management infrastructure is needed to improve productivity, reduce ambiguity in project outcomes, and for effective monitoring and coordination.
This is what OPM is: it binds tactics to strategy, or in other words, projects and programs with business outcomes. This binding needs to factor in the idiosyncrasies (or peculiarities if you will) of the very operation you are trying to maximize ROI for – high-technology and knowledge-based in this case.
So what are some key issues that project work must consider about returns and investments?
Achieve repeatable success in complex projects while minimizing process overhead
• Five key activities of a knowledge-worker are
o Defining problems and breaking them into manageable pieces
o Searching information and knowledge
o Analyzing information
o Synthesizing and verifying solutions
o Integrating results
• Provide tools to help in brainstorming in an unstructured manner and in recording the results for later use
• Develop accessible knowledge banks
o Workers spend more time in searching for knowledge and information and less time processing it
• Define and introduce “invisible” processes by using knowledge of how knowledge-worker and researchers analyze information and synthesize solutions.
• Meter all these activities for effective monitoring of execution
• Note that effective execution is the key to better ROI. Poorer execution increase your I and makes your R fairly ambiguous.
Tags: Ambiguity, Business Leaders, Business Manager, Business Outcomes, Customer Demands, Dominant Factor, Expereince, Facilitator, High Technology, Key Project, Management Infrastructure, Management Perspectives, Market Dynamics, Optical Research, Pasadena Ca, Pmp, Project Management Industry, Project Management Professionals, Project Outcomes, Rosemary, Scrum Master, Technology Industry
