Posts Tagged ‘Capability’

Project Manager Capability Assessment for Projects from POME by Gautam Koppala

Project Manager Capability Assessment:

“Good Project Managers are willing to pay the price of achievement. Overcoming the negative is the price of achievement, the price of greatness.”

The Problem with assessing Project Management Capability:

Measuring Project Management capability has been a difficult exercise. Traditional measures have been based on project management metrics such as:

Projects completed on time and budget
Function point productivity
User satisfaction
Methodologies
Principles and Policies
Roles, responsibilities, and authority level

The other alternative is to have an expensive consulting house review your practices and give you a report on project statistics you probably already know. There is usually no money left to do anything after you pay the consulting bill for the project management assessment.

The Solution – How to assess Project Management Capability:

Highly responsive, customer focused company that fulfilled our needs in a timely and very professional manner. The survey, analysis, and report were delivered as expected and provided us with insights into where our organization can benefit from additional project management training. I highly recommend them!

The first decision is what to measure against. What is best practice? What project management metrics? Fortunately, the answer is relatively straight forward. The POME used Project Management Institute PMBOK, RUP, and ISO Guidelines for making a clear structure for successful project management.

Each of these is broken down into major areas to bring a more components that make up successful project management. By measuring against these areas, you can develop a quantitative map of you PM capability.

How to assess Project Management Capability:

In conjunction with a market research specialist, POME have developed a questionnaire that will provide the answers. The questionnaire is directed at people who have participated in a project in the last 12 months. Its better to distribute via email the questionnaire, collect the answers, and provide a report that benchmarks your capability in 9 major PMBOK, and other POME categories. It also provides guidance as to the steps you might take to improve performance.

Benefits of a Project Management Assessment:

You get a map of your organization’s project management strengths and weaknesses
You can focus on quick wins to improve productivity
Serious shortcomings are identified and can be targeted with major programs
Repeating the survey after a period measures improvement
As Project Manager, you can present numerical data to show the work required and results achieved.

The project Director/ Project Sponsor will assess based upon the competencies of the Project Manager, and would get an idea for the formal training recommendations

POME Prescribe:

About Leadership:

ü  Keep your approach friendly: People are not looking to make friends at work, but refraining from an aggressive approach towards your employees is a good idea. Be diplomatic and assertive, instead.

ü  When taking on a new project/responsibility at work, convey to your management the extent of authority you need in order to effectively execute your project. Ensure that you have the authority that you need before you start work on your project.

ü  Being people-oriented does not mean that you cannot be task-oriented (and vice-versa).

ü  One-to-one: Meet regularly with your team members on a one-on-one basis. When you apply this principle to your kids, it makes each of them feel special.

ü  Nobody appreciates a micro-manager: Don’t sit on the heads of your team members.

ü  Giving autonomy does not mean not keeping track of progress.

ü  Learn how to manage people (more difficult than it sounds, believe you me!), and the rest of your job will that much easier to execute.

ü  As a leader, you should have the ability to bind the team together and give them a sense of “we’re in this together.” For instance, as the head of your family, you can promote bonding by setting aside time for family board games, story-telling sessions, family picnics, family prayers and the like.

ü  Stay visible – As a leader, you need to be visible in good times, as well as when there are problems to address.

ü  Your reputation depends on your perceived credibility and integrity: A very basic item for leaders is to ensure that promises made are promises kept. If action is committed, it must be performed.

ü  Personality: As a leader, does your personality influence and inspire your team?

ü  Leadership CAN be learned. Focus on these areas to improve your leadership skills:

Initiative
Leverage your charisma to influence others
Lead purposefully and with commitment
Develop a result-oriented approach
Cultivate an attitude of optimism
Work on your self-confidence – especially for weakness areas (for instance, if you are particularly nervous around people with an intimidating body language, create a plan to tackle that, and come across as confident and in-control in their presence.)
Cultivate empathy so that you can encourage and nurture your team
Learn to identify winners – and nurture them
Learn to read between the lines to understand the underlying concern that prompted the dialogue
The ability to motivate people so that they stretch out of their “comfort zones”
Improve your decision-making abilities by learning from past decisions
Learn to see the big picture
Polish your Goal Setting skills
Develop Personal Goals and examine them at regular intervals
Effective Time Management

ü  Flexibility: While it is a good thing to be firm and stand by your decisions, It is important that you are flexible enough to realize when plans need to change. View planning as an ongoing process. That way, you can change course midway without too much damage, if the original plan is not working. Are you open to continuous planning and updating of the plan?

Gautam Koppala,

POME Author

Building Project Management Capability & Maturity

Building Project Management Capability and Maturity must be a priority for any organisation involved in delivering multiple projects and programmes. Having mature project management will have a direct impact on an organisations capability to consistently delivery successful projects and programmes. The alternative leads to projects going over budget and failing to deliver on promises made. For some organisations, these project failures can have a devastating impact on the success of the entire business. It can lead to products and services being late to market, other projects being cancelled or postponed due to tied in resources, and problems due to poor quality outputs.

Many organisations take the decision to adopt ‘best practice’ project management principles in order to improve their project management capabilities. In the UK and many other countries around the globe, this usually means Prince2 – ‘Projects in a Controlled Environment’. Prince2 was developed in the UK by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and launched in 1996. It is used in many countries throughout the world both in the public and private sectors as the standard for project management best practice. It is comparable to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) as often used in the USA and elsewhere.

Although PRINCE2 sets out a framework for how individual projects should be managed, it doesn’t address how an organisation should be set up to use it. This takes a great deal of planning and time. In fact, the implementation of methodologies such as Prince2 within an organisation is a project in its own right and needs to be run as such. Some might even argue that the implementation of Prince 2 requires a Programme of work to implement it successfully. When Prince2 has been implemented correctly it has been embedded into the organisation in such a way that all projects are managed in the same way, taking into consideration the size and purpose of the individual project. A test of this would be a measure of the ease at which employees could move between projects without incurring prolonged period of acclimatisation. When the methodology has been embedded properly within the organisation, you would see the same repeatable processes and techniques used by all projects. When these processes are being continuously reviewed and improved this is called a mature process. The Prince2 Maturity Model (P2MM) defines such a scenario and allows organisations to gauge, by assessment their own level of maturity as well as identifying where improvements need to be made. The Prince2 Maturity Model should be the aspiration of all organisations seeking to implement a new Prince2 methodology or to improve an existing methodology.

Of course, the Prince Maturity Model was developed because so many organisations were failing to grasp the concept that Prince2 implementation affects the whole organisation and the way they manage projects. This basic fact is often overlooked by organisations that mistakenly believe Prince2 training is all that is required to achieve success in project management. If you train your workforce they become better at their job right? As logic goes, it looks a sound approach and is why many organisations have embarked on Prince training as a means to ensure that projects are properly managed. Of course, no one is suggesting that Prince2 training is a bad thing; but it is only one aspect of improving the success of projects within the organisation. Successful project management requires a three-strand approach: Knowledge, Expertise and an Embedded Methodology.

Knowledge refers to Prince2 training and certification. In many ways this is the easy bit. You pay your money and your project managers get trained.  Of course for the individuals it’s not really easy at all but you get the point. The projects managers return with an understanding about the project management methodology to play their part in the Prince2 organisation. However, whilst having an understanding of the Prince2 methodology and project management in general will be a big step forward, to become an excellent project manager requires the second strand; experience.

It mustn’t be overlooked that project management is first and foremost a management discipline. Project Managers are managers first and project managers second. This may feel unpalatable for many but it is true. The best project managers are not the ones who have the most project management qualifications but the ones with the most management experience; not necessarily in project management but in management per se. If you think about it, project management shares many of the generic management disciplines such as setting objectives, motivating staff, planning events, leading teams, enforcing ways of working, communication, negotiation, reporting, monitoring and control. Experience in these disciplines is far more important and hard to obtain that passing a Prince2 examination. I don’t say this to denigrate the Prince2 methodology or the training that is provided, which is usually excellent. I say this because if organisations wish to build a strong project management capability within their organisations, they can’t rely on rookie project managers with little or no prior exposure and experience in management. They can’t teach you experience, you have to acquire it over a period and usually by making mistakes. The lessons for organisations aiming to increase project management capability, is to ensure a mix of experience as well as qualifications.

The third and in many ways the most overlooked strand to building project management capability is that the Prince2 methodology (or any methodology for that matter) must be embedded within the organisation. I remember turning up at a large Local Authority in the UK to carry out an assessment of a failing project and to recommend a recovery plan. The Local Authority went to great lengths to explain to me that they were ‘a Prince2 House’. They had trained 13 of their project managers in Prince2 and told me that all of their projects were run according to Prince2. As I spoke to the project managers and interviewed various other stakeholders it became clear that the organisation was Prince 2 in name only. It had no repeatable Prince2 systems and processes into which the project managers could engage. I would expect to have seen a centre of excellence or programme office issuing templates, guidance documents, route maps, lifecycle models, tools, quality procedures etc. but found none. Instead, each project manager had designed their own way of working, together with their own document formats, planning methods etc. In short, there were no commonly understood processes, techniques and components, as one would expect from the Prince2 methodology. Further more, Prince2 training had not been extended beyond the project managers and therefore, key roles such as Senior User were simply not being fulfilled adequately. Attempts to set up project boards were hampered by stakeholder confusion about their role. As a result, they either didn’t attend project boards or sent a deputy without the appropriate decision making authority; which defeats the entire purpose.

To conclude then, if you want to enable your organisation to deliver successful projects and programmes, by all means select a good methodology or life cycle model. However, don’t rely entirely in training alone. Experience and cultural acceptance of the chosen methodology is just as important. Why not set up a project specifically aimed at implementing your chosen methodology. What better way to implement your new methodology throughout the organisation?

To see the article source please follow this link: Building Project Management Capability & Maturity

Related project management video:

About Rita Mulcahy, PMP – An expert in advanced project management, the PMP® Exam and risk management – A gifted instructor and author of the books PMP ®Exam Prep and Risk Management Tricks of the Trade – President of RMC Project Management, the Innovators in Project Management Training and Products since 1991.
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