In business, the stakes are high, and the price of failure can be even higher.
To maintain a competitive edge, we need to delight our customers, deliver what we promised, be responsive to market conditions, and stay one step ahead of our competitors.
This is where having high quality professional project management support, whether internally or via an external partner, can help your organisation deliver results, on time and in full, to better serve your customers, and realise the strategic vision of the business.
In this month’s newsletter, we’re going take a closer look at the value that having professional project management brings to an organisation. I’ve divided this into three broad areas where high quality project management practice can add value to an organisation: Purpose, Planning and Process.
In each section, the aim is to offer you some insight and business context, along with a few action points or thought-provoking questions, so you can reflect on these within your own organisation, and see if you can make any changes to help you reach your goals faster.
Purpose (and Cross Purpose)
If you’ve ever played an old-fashioned pinball game, you’ll know the purpose of the game is to quickly react to the changing direction of the ball, and use “flippers” to flick the ball back up into play to stop it falling to the bottom and ending your turn.
I’ve worked with organisations in my career who have a similar approach to project delivery – a ball is launched (e.g. winning new business or implementing new systems) and team members scramble to react.
Having effective project management in place means that instead of working in this reactionary way, work is much more purposeful, and aligned with the strategic objectives of the business.
At a strategic level, having a clearly defined roadmap which delivers against the company vision and objectives helps to provide a “North Star” to align the purpose of proposed work against the bigger, longer term picture. Delivery against the organisational strategy can be a key factor in determining which proposed projects are accepted, and which are not.
It’s really important to note here that where there is purpose, there is also the risk of “cross purpose” – where people mistakenly believe they have a shared understanding, but are actually working against each other, usually without realising.
One of the clearest examples I’ve seen of this is with customers who have undergone a rapid expansion in their business, and there isn’t yet a clearly defined vision and strategic roadmap as mentioned above. This often results in a “say yes to everything” approach, which leads us back to the reactive “pinball” scenario as opposed to the purposeful approach mentioned above.
Here is where professional project management can support – by establishing proper project initiation processes, businesses can determine with purpose what programmes of work can and will be delivered.
Here are some questions to reflect on within your organisation – do you think you could strengthen any of these areas to delivery projects with purpose?
- What problem does the proposed project aim to solve?
- What results have a cost-benefit analysis produced for this project?
- In what ways does the project support the organisational strategy and company vision?
Planning for Success
Once a project has been through a purposeful review to ensure alignment with your organisational goals, a planning process can take place to define the project delivery and key baselines such as the schedule and budget.
Without going into too much detail, there are different methodologies on whether you have a lengthy and detailed planning stage at the stage of the project, or if this is iterative throughout the project lifecycle.
One thing that is constant though is that a project plan should exist, and it should be constantly monitored and adjusted throughout the project lifecycle to stay on track with key deliverables.
A project manager is responsible for creating project plans, including (but not limited to) scope, schedule, budget, risk, communication and stakeholder management. They monitor progress against these plans, and course correct where needed to keep the project on track.
Depending on the type of project, and your organisational structure and procedures, these plans can be lengthy documents, or a high level statement of intent with supporting charts or tables. The key is that someone is responsible for having a plan in place for these key dimensions of the project to ensure the delivery is high quality, on time, and on budget.
It’s because these plans are in place that the person responsible for the project delivery can support the business by answering key questions about the status and health of the project:
- “Where are we with…..?”
- “What are we doing about…..?”
- And all important, “Are we on track with……?”
What’s more, because a project professional is ready to answer these questions, they are proactive in spotting emerging trends, risks and threats to the project, and putting in place strategies to mitigate them. In the simplest possible terms – nobody wants to be caught out – meaning they stay on top of all these things and more!
Here are some questions for you and your organisation on your planning approach – do you have these plans in place already?
- Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for project teams (a RACI matrix is a great visualisation for this)?
- A defined stakeholder and communication strategy – including the who, how and when?
- A robust risk management plan, including mitigation strategies, owners, and a clearly defined escalation process?
Process: Repeatable, Scalable and Consistent
One of my favourite things to talk about is process.
Sounds boring, I know!
The reason why I love to talk about this so much is because it can make or break your project, and all the projects that follow, so it is essential to have defined and clearly understood project management processes within your organisation if you want to deliver against your goals.
If you’re purposefully driven to deliver your project in line with your organisational vision, and you’ve spent time with initial planning, the last thing you want is for it to unravel because there aren’t clearly defined and well adopted project management processes in place.
Project and programme management professional qualifications (there are a number of them out there) all boil down to a framework of clearly defined and repeatable processes, that an organisation can tailor to their own needs and “rinse and repeat” for each new project.
What’s more, processes should be scalable, meaning as your organisation grows, processes can help facilitate that growth, as well as quickly highlighting any pain points to resolve.
The first step to ensure you have robust processes in place is simply to understand what your current end-to-end project management process looks like – right back to our initial “purpose”, and up until the project is considered closed.
A second, and equally critical step after identifying the processes that exist is to determine who in the business knows these processes, and who is actually using them in practice.
A Project Manager and Business Analyst pairing (one of my favourite partnerships in a project team!) can spend some time defining and visualising the “as is” process, and identify any weaknesses that exist to propose a “to be” process that helps deliver the organisational vision.
Having these defined processes in place not only makes delivery of your project roadmap more efficient and have a better success rate in the short term, but in the long term enables your team to grow, to onboard new team members and new customers more easily, and to better equip the business to take on greater challenges.
Some food for thought – how does your organisation manage the following:
- Do your projects all have a clearly defined document set, or folder structure, in a consistent format and in an accessible place for the team?
- Do you audit these documents to test that your processes are actually being followed?
- Do you follow up with analysis on any non-conformance to the process to understand the root cause, remedial and preventative actions?
To Finish
All organisations are under pressure to deliver more, in less time, with fewer resources.
Having professional project management in place, whether internally or through a partner like Pyramid CC, can help your business work more efficiently to deliver your goals, through three key areas:
Purpose: Reducing wasted effort and resources by ensuring projects align with the organisational vision and strategy.
Planning: Proactive planning and management with clear deliverables, roles and responsibilities to keep the project on track.
Process: Defined, clear and well adopted processes which are repeatable and consistent to ensure a quality delivery.
Taking time to reflect on and strengthen any of these areas within your own organisation will add a huge amount of value in terms of effective project delivery, as well as driving progress towards the longer term goals of the business.
