I’ve noticed an increasing trend whereby organizations are recognizing the importance of project management discipline in executing everyday business projects. These could include things such as centralized systems in HR, IT or Finance, marketing activities, product development, client projects and items from annual strategic planning processes, to name a few.
I wanted to share a few tips with you that I’ve accumulated over the years that may help develop project management discipline:
- Develop a set of templates that work for your organization for planning and managing projects. The most typical ones would be project charter, stakeholder communications plan, project schedule, risk management plan, status report, cost tracking and project post-mortem.Save these electronically in a centralized area.
- Provide training to staff. People who work in project management roles (who may or may not be formal project managers) and potentially others should be provided training. In general, training need only provide a baseline at the fundamentals level.
For those who are formal project managers and manage larger capital projects, it may make sense to pursue a full certification from the Project Management Institute. What remains is to pay careful attention to the change management side:
- Have the CEO and other leaders stress the importance of project planning at every opportunity when addressing the organization
- Appoint a small team of advocates to own and head up the project management practice
- Integrate project management and planning as a competency that people are measured on in their annual performance appraisals
- Mandate that all projects should have a charter at the minimum
- Make an example of successful projects by highlighting and communicating the role of planning in achieving a great outcome
- Have senior people role model by using the appropriate planning steps for projects that they have some responsibility for
- Track project execution across the enterprise – they say “what gets measured gets done”
Kwela teaches an interactive Project Management workshop and can help with building internal Project Management structure. For more information please click here.
Russel Horwitz
Principal
russelh@kwelaleadership.com