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.

Project Management Institute (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 will talk about how to integrate project, program, portfolio management practices with the management infrastructure of an organization.

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.

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. (more…)