1. Project Management Week-11 [11/09/2009]

2. An Overview of Lecture 11 Reinventing Project Management for your Organization  This lecture explains what executives and managers need to do to take full advantage of the new approach for the benefit of their organizations. The lecture concludes with predictions about the future evolution of project managements.  In this chapter we review the main lessons presented and then outline action items that executives can undertake to put into practice the ideas presented here and turn their organizations’ project management into a tangible competitive asset.  Concluded with a few thoughts about the future evolution of project management.

3. Recap of Managerial Lessons  As projects become mainstay of organizational environment time ripe to unleash the power and energy embedded in projects. The troubling low rate of project success makes it imperative that organizations pay more attention to their project activity and to the potential and competitive advantage that projects can bring. Unfortunately projects have been often left to their own devices Focused on time, budget, and performance goals as the rigid drivers of success, project management has missed a key point: that project are always put in place for business reasons.  Improving project management presents a great opportunity. In a time when every organization must keep changing, no new strategy, investment plan, idea, innovation, or business can progress or succeed without projects.  The time has come to learn a set of new rules, which will show executives and teams that there is a better way than the old approach.  Diamond, offers a new road map and a new language that managers and teams can use to plan, communicate, and make decisions about projects and about the best way to run them.

4. Main Lessons in APM-I  PM is not about delivering a project on time, on budget, and within requirements. Its about serving a customer need and creating business results to support the company’s short and long-term objectives.  Project management is not a linear, predictable process. Project planning, therefore, is not a one-time activity; done once at start. Rather it is an adaptable, flexible, and iterative approach, adjusting to changes made along the way, according to the project’s progress and the dynamic changes in the environment.  Project planning should very earlier on identify expectations from project in terms of your company’s needs and those of your customers. Instead of setting time, budget, and requirements goals as the major drivers of project success, you need to decide how the project will be judged when completed.  This judgment can typically be based on five dimensions: efficiency; impact on the customer; impact on the team; business success; and preparation for the future. Each dimension might consist of several relevant measures. If needed, you should identify other specific dimensions and metrics that are relevant to your industry, business, or project. You should also identify your failure criteria namely, what can go wrong and take the steps that will protect you if it happens.

5. Main Lessons in APM-II  Project management is not a universal activity but a situational and contextual, and does not subscribe to one set of rules. KSF for projects if use of an adaptive project management approach, adapting your project management style to the environment, the goal, and the project task.  To help managers identify potential risks and benefits and select the right management style for each project, this book uses the diamond model and the diamond analysis tool, which classify a project based on its novelty, technology, complexity, and pace. Each dimension includes three or four project types and affects project management in its own way.  Novelty represents the uncertainty of the goal and the uncertainty in the market. This dimension measures how new the project’s product is to markets, customers, and users, and thus how clearly you can define the project requirements up front. Novelty includes three project types: derivative, platform, and breakthrough. If affects the accuracy of market data and the efforts, time, and number of iterations (including prototypes) it takes to finalize and freeze the product’s requirements.  Technology represents the task uncertainty in terms of the technology used – that is, how much new technology is required to complete the project. The technology dimension includes four project types: low-tech, medium-tech, high-tech, and super-high- tech. Technology affects the length of time and number of iterations it will take to get the design right and freeze it, and the degree of intensity of the technical activities such as design, testing, and prototyping as well as the technical skills required by the project manager and team.

6. Main Lessons in APM-III  Complexity is based on the complexity of the product and the task. This dimension includes three types: assembly, system, and array. Complexity affects the kid of project organization you need and the level of bureaucracy and formality required for managing it.  Pace represents the urgency of the project how much time there is to complete the job. Pace includes four types: regular, fast/competitive, time-critical, and blitz. This dimension affects your planning and reviews, the autonomy of the project team, and the involvement of top management, particularly in the most urgent projects.  To select a portfolio of projects, you can classify projects based on their business goals, whether they deal with existing or new businesses, and whether they are directed to internal or external customers. This distinction creates four groups of project proposals. You should allocate project resources to each group based on the organization’s policy and strategy. Only then should you select individual projects within the groups based on specific criteria for each group.  Innovation should be managed according to its type. The diamond model enables you to select the right management approach for each type of innovation.

7. Main Lessons in APM-IV  Applying the adaptive approach to a project need not be difficult. First, you treat project execution as an iterative, and not a linear, process. This means you may need to go back to project definition and project planning based on the project’s initial uncertainties and later findings during execution. Second, during project execution you need to add a few new steps and action items to the conventional procedure of managing a project, and you adjust these procedures to the specific project types. During the planning phase, you should determine your expected success and failure criteria: the expectations of and the agreement between executives and teams about how to judge success and what can go wrong. At this stage you should also assess the impact of your project type on your project management approach, identifying the actions you need to take that are specific to the adaptive approach and to the project types.  For projects having high uncertainty, you may need to conduct small pilot efforts to help reduce uncertainties before a full scale commitment is made. Similarly, projects need to identify in between milestones in a modular way, where prototypes enable teams to make corrections in requirements, technical specifications, and design until they are frozen.

8. Main Lessons in APM-IV  Project plans may include three levels. First, you create a master plan that lists major milestones throughout the project and serves to report to and communicate with top management. Second, you create a series of middle level plans with a time horizon of a few months. You will update threes plans periodically and use them to report to and communicate with middle level management. Third, you write highly detailed work plans, which will be updated every month and will outline each activity of the project team members.  Projects can help improve operational efficiency in organizations and reduce cost. You should analyze project building blocks and work packages based on their outcome (tangible or intangible) and the work needed to create this outcome (inventive, engineering, or craft). These will determine the difficulty and risk involved in each block. You should then identify common building blocks across projects in the organization and create systems that will efficiently build these blocks. Similar assessments can be made about outsourcing entire projects, or parts of projects, based on the diamond model or the work package analysis.

9. Implement New Policies  Treat project management as the next core of your competitive assets. Raise the awareness of managers at all levels about the potential of their projects. Make it clear that project management is not the business only of project managers. It should be the business of every one at every managerial level: marketing, sales, advertising, manufacturing, engineering, quality, and so on. All have a part in project success. Create a career path for project managers, and appoint an executive to become a chief projects officer.  Treat your projects as investments, not costs. Your investment in projects is perhaps the best investment you can make for your organization, often more important than capital investments.  Get the best people to lead projects. Avoid the temptation (and the norm) to put your best people in charge of operations. Remember that it is easier to manage operations than complex, uncertain projects. Further operations will be profitable only if the projects that created them were selected correctly and done well.  Treat process building as a project. The models in this book are applicable not only to new product development or construction but also to process building process-based services.  Implement a mechanism to identify failure before it is too late. Use short planning and execution intervals and milestones, and not just dates.  Implement a policy that encourages project managers to overspend on the upfront planning plus prototyping that will enable quick, small implementations to resolve early unknowns in bigger programs.

10. Create on Organizational Framework and Handbook for Project Management Because every organization is unique in its environment, businesses, people, and technology, the models suggested in this course may fit most organizations but not all, and not fully, An organization should first decide what its need are in managing its project portfolio and individual projects. Your needs might include portfolio management, resource allocation, skill development, project organization, project locations, or other specific needs. After defining your specific needs, your must identify the most valuable models for classifying e.g. tech uncertainty may not be a viable dimension for a construction company but a primary concern in IT. However, other related dimensions may apply, such as complexity and pace. Similarly, a company in the pharmaceutical industry may need to distinguish projects according to levels of risk and the clinical testing required for each project type. The next step is to develop a handbook of project management that outlines the relevant models and dimensions for classifying your projects. Your handbook also should outline the related managerial implications for each project type. Process for small projects is not the same as for large projects, and low tech projects will differ from high tech projects. For example, your handbook might outline the life cycle and typical phases of various types of projects in the company, including the major milestones and approval gates. It should describe the decisions to be made at each gate, along with the required documentation. The handbook also should include specific tools, templates, and documents for planning, reporting monitoring, and coordinating projects, as well as selected software applications.

11. Develop a PM Training Program Based on your specific project management needs, you need to create a unique set of training packages for project managers at various levels and for various project types. Clearly, project managers for smaller projects will be younger and less experienced, and they will required fundamental training, whereas project managers who control projects of higher complexity, and particularly of higher uncertainty, required more advanced training delivered by more experienced people. You may also find it helpful to build an internal certification program, with accreditation levels that reflect several stages of project management maturity. Internal training should teach general knowledge about project management theory as well as practice and experience from the large world. Additionally, the program should present your own models and processes and should include the study of internal lessons and project case studies of previous programs (including failures) to carry the lessons over from generation to generation.

12. Develop Career Paths for Project Managers and Criteria for their Selection Training alone is not enough. If a company wants to make project management a core competitive asset, it should invest in project management in the long term and in the careers of its project managers. First, you need to develop clear guidelines and criteria for the selection of project managers. Project managers should not be selected based only on their technical competence (as is often the case). A clear set of criteria should be established based on, among other things, leadership skills, communication skills, organizing ability, self confidence and drive, and the ability to see the big picture. You would also do well to establish a clear career path in project management. Project management should not be a one-time assignment, but rather a profession, one whose expertise is treated as a company asset. People should be noted for their ability to climb the project management ladder up to an executive level (chief projects officer and CEO) The process of growing project managers should be monitored and managed. Young project managers should be given mentors and coaches to guide them through their early stages, and mature project managers should participate in the training program as instructors and advisers.

13. Create a Learning Environment Around Projects Every project effort creates a unique learning opportunity. Things change rapidly, decisions are constantly made, and mistakes are made. Lessons can be learned every week and at every milestone, and clearly at project completion. But few organizations have the habit of recording, documenting, and sharing project lessons throughout the company. For example, whenever a project is terminated, there are valuable lessons that must be learned. Yet managers (perhaps because of human nature) often tend to avoid discussing or dwelling on any failures; they would rather move on. Company executive and CEOs should instill a learning culture around projects. It should become a habit to summarize lessons learned in each opportunity or major even and to document a completed project (whether a success or failure) with a summary report describing the lessons learned. This report should be prepared after all team members have shared their thoughts during a long session of discussion about what went right or wrong and why, and then it should be distributed to the rest of the company, perhaps on its Intranet. In this way the company will retain its organizational memory and will be able to avoid repeated failures of the same kind. In addition, you should select several key projects as showcases and build an internal library of case studies based on them. These case studies, which should use a common format, will serve as learning tools for your in-house training and educational programs. Each case should involve a full case history, a learning case, and an executive summary containing a short list of the major lessons.

14. A Note About the Role of Educators and Scholars Project management education is typically focused on doing things in the traditional way. Most current educational programs teach students the basic tools of planning, scheduling, risk management, procurement, and the like. Ironically, however, most leading business schools don’t offer project management in their curricula, and the academic educational needs in this field are addressed mostly by engineering or technology management schools. As this book has shown, however, project management is applicable not only in technical environments. If, as we predict, the demand for better project management will keep growing, so will the need for education. This creates an opportunity for major business schools. First, project management courses should be added to current curricula. Second, the educational arena in management should be expanded, and academic programs should be developed in the new directions of adaptive and strategic approaches. Third, a similar role can be played by the consulting and training industry in project management. Furthermore, we believe that the current state of project management also provides a great opportunity for the research community. Researchers will find a rich, understudied field, with very little theory, where they can apply their experience and methods, develop new frameworks and find new grounds thus a constant stream of new ideas and new knowledge in a long ignored field.

15. Final Thoughts: What’s Next in Project Management? We began this course by discussing some of the shortcomings of today’s project management discipline namely, that the conventional discipline focuses too much on the delivery of projects on time, within budget, and to specifications, and the existing project management body of knowledge assumes that one size fits all. It is based on a rigid, linear, predictable model for planning and managing projects. In this book we have tried to build a practical, research based approach that is flexible and adaptive one that will enable companies to deal with the dynamics of change and uncertainty in modern projects in a literate and systematic way. So what’s next? It seems that project management will remain and even grow further as a central activity in most organizations. We hope that the ideas presented here will stimulate further development. More theories and frameworks will certainly be developed in the future, and they will give us a deeper and better understanding of the project phenomenon. Such theories and frameworks will influence future education, research, and project management in practice. We predict that in the coming years, project management will evolve to become a more strategic activity. Project managers and teams will learned how to better focus their attention on business results, rather than only on “getting the job done,” and they will deal more vigorously and rigorously with the expected effect of their project both on the customer and on the company’s bottom line.