According to PMI Organizational Project Management (OPM) is the systematic management of projects, programs, and portfolios in alignment with the organization’s strategic business goals.

PMI has project, program, and portfolio standards. Next, project managers need to explore how to practically integrate that with the management infrastructure of an organization. Why? Our organizations have stovepipes. We appropriately look to optimize project management practices and inadvertently not always link that to how it improves the organizations we serve.

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.

Being a successful project manager with a track record of delivering projects on time and on budget is the minimum criteria for any successful project manager. Increasingly project managers are no longer solely evaluated on project performance, but they also need business acumen and organizational agility to survive industry and organizational upheavals.

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?

How do program offices go about answering the question of what value does a program provide the organization? A program is a set of related projects, managed in a coordinated fashion. The added cost of the program or project management office (PMO) is expected to be offset by the benefits of someone coordinating all the day-to-day project information flying around; cost, schedules and risks. In addition, the PMO has a more strategic reason for its existence; keeping a discussion of benefits alive.

OK, let’s define benefits? Simply put, why does the project exist? How does it help the organization?

Identifying and managing those benefits is a primary role of a PMO!

Benefits can be either:

* Quantitative; Examples include revenue gains, cost reductions or market share increases or metrics related to mission or business objectives
* Qualitative; Examples include customer satisfaction, market perceptions.

So what is quick ways to do quantitative alignment where business objectives are clear? I was working a new contract and needed to write some business cases. The business cases were due yesterday. Without a lot of time to research, I quickly found the division strategic goals and mapped the features of the projects to those strategic goals. It helped me visually frame whether these projects should be important. How? I checked for density; lots of check marks meant they were aligned with divisional goals. This quick and easy method allowed me to ensure that as a contractor, I wasn’t just following orders but I was allowing an organization to move towards improving their business.

What’s another quick way to do qualitative alignment with the business? Getting stakeholder support. In other cases where strategic goals don’t exist or there is stakeholder conflict, it is more important to align the projects with stakeholder buy-in. I was thrown in as a software release manager last year and was provided a messy, incomplete feature release; each of these would become a project. I cleaned it up and asked for input on what was important. Since the stakeholders were a wee bit hostile, I did this all face-to-face and quickly assessed what was important, sold it to management. The users were smart and experienced. Therefore I knew that their intuitive, gut-level support of the projects was intuitively the best way they knew to improve their organizational efficiency.

Which way is best; neither. You work with what you got when under severe timelines. But we always seek to deliver the right set of project and product solutions that allow organizations to best meet their needs. Another words, this is how projects delivery real benefits to the business.

Copyright 2009 PM Perspectives LLC