Project Management Learnings and Musings

Posted on | December 2, 2009 | Author: | lindsayascott | No Comments

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Last week was a busy old week for project management events and learnings. Last Monday I went along to ESI’s Centre of Excellence seminar which is a group they have set up for senior people within PMOs. Held at the Charing Cross hotel, there were about 40 people in attendance, all there to hear about “Governance and Cross Project Learning – Making it Real and Making It work”. The seminar kicked off with a presentation on “Embracing the Governance of Change” which outlined the current thinking in change governance and presented the challenges governances presents. The Director of Global Training from TetraPak then shared his case study on “Building a Project Management Culture”. With over 1500 projects annually, TetraPak face some real challenges whilst building their project management capability. Interestingly, project management is not regarded as an attractive career path and there is a real lack of suitably qualified project managers (great business managers, yes, with the right project management skills, no). They are in the middle of developing their project management capability and on the list of things to do;

Increase competence
Introduce governance workshops (over 50% of current projects are not executed with the proper governance structure)
Ensure steering group are also included in governance workshops (these are workshops with examples of real life project issues)
Capability development continues – PMP certification, career paths defined, assessment tools and competence profiles.

The second case study from ASML was much more about developing or embedding the project management culture within the organisation. The Project Stepping initiative looked at making a step change in project management within the organisation and centred on the methodology (based on PMI’s PMBoK), training, workshops and coaching. Making the changes permanent within the business rely heavily on supporting the project managers when they are back in their jobs after training. Coaching is something that has become embedded in the organisation and now they’re looking at the set up of a PMO to “institutionalise support”.

Their current situation;

80% of projects have “good” project plans using MS Project
Delivery to the triple constraint
Much increased transparency in project performance
Ongoing investment in people, tools and processes

Last Thursday I also went along to the APM’s Women in Project Management Festive Dinner which was held in Manchester. Apart from dinner with a great group (and not just women you know!) we also heard from Helen White on Effective Stakeholder Engagement. Helen has extensive experience of developing and overseeing the implementation of strategies relating to housing, regeneration and community development and most recently worked on an Academy based project. The talk was short and informal (it was a festive dinner after all!) but it was a great discussion on stakeholder influence (or manipulation) and also whether these types of skills are inherence or innate in project managers who show an exceptional talent for engaging stakeholders. Due to the nature of Helen’s work, stakeholders were sometimes the press but more often than not, were residents and members of the public. Often the projects were changes that really affected people’s lives and neighbourhoods and emotions ran high and tempers frayed. We discussed the fine line between “influencing” stakeholders and straightforward manipulation. Helen pointed out that stakeholders only feel really engaged in the project if their input and actions can actually have some bearing on the outcome. If its too late for the stakeholders to have any real impact, and it’s just a case of being seen to engage stakeholders or going through the motions, it’s only a matter of time before it comes back to bite you. She also mentioned that on her latest project, the press caused some real difficulties for the project. Unfortunately at the beginning of the stakeholder planning it was decided by the end client that the press and media relations were not to be chosen and actively managed as a stakeholder. Hindsight is a great thing and no doubt for similar future projects the advice from the project manager should be delivered in a stronger message from lessons learnt!