Effective Management:

Managing Change

Project Management

New Approaches for the Era of Rapid Change

What is a Project?

Unlike repetitive business processes or ongoing operations, projects are defined as work that happens one time only. Each project produces some unique outcome and has both a clear beginning and an end.

What is Project Management?

Project management is the planning, organization, monitoring and control of all aspects of a project and the motivation of all involved to achieve the project objectives safely and within agreed time, cost and performance criteria. It is a set of tools, techniques, and knowledge that, when applied, helps you produce better results for your project. It contains the total amount of leadership skills, leadership tasks, leadership organization, leadership techniques and leadership measures for the performance of the project.

The Five Factors that Make a Project Successful

By: Eric Verzuh, the author of The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management

To be successful, a project must have⁴:

1. Agreement among the project stakeholders – the team, customer, and management  – on the goals of the project... More

GREAT Model

By: Michael S. Dobson

To make your project team function effectively, the first thing you need to know is the GREAT model: Goals; Results; Expectations / Performance; Accountabilities / Abilities; Timing.

The GREAT model specifies what people must know before they can work together effectively... More

Three Functions, Related Activities and Outputs

1. Project Definition

   Activities: to determine the purpose, goals, scope, outcomes, and constraints of the project; to identify stakeholders, their contribution and needs; to establish basic project management controls

   Outputs: charter; statement of work; responsibility matrix; communication plan

2. Project Planning

   Activities: to estimate resource requirements; to make detailed scheduling; to create risk profiles; to develop procedures for risk and change management; to build the project team

   Outputs: task list; network diagram, schedule; budget; resource plan; risk profiles, risk log, risk management plan; change request form; change management plan; cost-estimating worksheet

3. Project Control

   Activities: to lead the project team; to measure progress; to monitor the project for new risks; to take corrective action; to communicate progress; to close out the project

   Outputs: status reports for different audiences; cost-tracking guidelines; cost and schedule tracking charts; issues log; change request log; changes to scope, deliverables, responsibilities, communication plan, project deliverables; final evaluation close-out report

The New Business Synergies Approach

The business synergies approach is concerned with discovering possibilities for adding value to the organization, not with finding solutions within given constraints. This approach uses a framework for thinking about projects based on business concepts such as increasing economic value, or Economic Value Added (EVA).

The use of economic value as a decision criterion indicates a change in the way project success is determined and points the way toward the future of project management. While the old criteria of meeting outcome, cost, and schedule constraints will still be important factors for measuring the project progress, they are augmented by business factors that are used to measure project success.

The entrepreneurial approach to project management requires you to manage the project as if it were an independent business venture. But you must also manage with the larger organizational system in mind. You need to understand how the elements of the project affect the business as a whole and how elements of the business influence the project². This dynamic new approach to projects will serve you well whether your project is in a business, a non-profit organization, or a governmental agency.

 Best Practices  Google: 10 Golden Rules

• Make coordination easy. Because all members of a team are within a few feet of one another, it is relatively easy to coordinate projects. In addition to physical proximity, each Googler e-mails a snippet once a week to his work group describing what he has done in the last week. This gives everyone an easy way to track what everyone else is up to, making it much easier to monitor progress and synchronize work flow... More

Identifying Project Stakeholders

"Satisfy stakeholders!" is the project manager's mantra. For successful projects, it's not enough to deliver on the customer's demand; projects have to meet all stakeholder expectations. Identifying stakeholders is a primary task because all the important decisions during the initiation, planning and execution stages of the project are made by these stakeholders.

The five primary project stakeholders are the project manager, the project team, the functional management, the sponsor, and the customer.  In a larger sense, anyone who participates in the project or is impacted by its results is a stakeholder. Each stakeholder has an essential contribution to make, and all stakeholder expectations need to be met. Contribution made by different people to the project is the principal criteria for identifying stakeholders... More

Innovation Project Management: The Jazz of Innovation

The improvisation-driven model for innovation project management doesn’t discard structure, just as there is a clear structure to good jazz. In innovation, this structure is created through roadmaps, guiding principles, business processes, systems and organizational charts. Strategic-planning and road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of creative insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the odds that such flashes occur in real time. Thus structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation, experimentations, discoveries and innovation... More

Radical Project Management

As radical innovation projects are characterized by higher levels of uncertainties – technical, market, and organizational, –  patterns of their journey to the marketplace are unlike those in incremental innovation projects... More

Turning Failed Projects Into New Opportunities

To profit from experience you must be open and willing to learn, even from what some people might consider a failure. What may seem to be a failure can actually lead to new opportunities, especially if the knowledge acquired from the failed projects can be exploited. Effective learning questions can serve as a starting point for the assimilation of learning. "Learning questions should focus on both project content and the project-development process. The trick is to generate double-loop learning: to learn what works and what does not, and about the assumptions (business logic) that lie behind why it works or why it does not. During reviews, it is important not only to digest what is learned, but also either to renew the commitment and motivation necessary to keep the project going, or to terminate it."¹

References:

1. Getting Started in Project Planning, P.Martin and K.Tate

2. Project Manager's MBA, Cohen E. Graham

3. ICB – IPMA Competence Baseline, International Project Management Association (IPMA)

4. The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management,  Erich Verzuh