This week’s PMITLH Board message comes from your PMITLH Vice President of Programs, Lisa Hopkins.
My Philosophy of Project Management: How much is too much? How fast is too fast?
While the general idea of project management has become mainstream in most organizations, the efficacy of project management is continually dependent on the acceptance and enthusiasm for project management processes by organizational personnel at all levels. Even after executive and formal “acceptance” of project management philosophy and establishment of a PMO, there remains a delicate balance of acceptance / resistance that must continually be addressed.
Project managers and PMOs can be understood and forgiven for their desire to take the philosophy of the PMBOK and implement these tenets throughout their organization. But care must be taken to ensure that the PM requirements and processes are implemented in such a way and to such an extent that will help staff achieve their objectives rather than hinder them. As logical and simple as PM processes seem to project managers, they can be viewed as intrusive, overly administrative, and superfluous to staff. This “bad taste” can be difficult to eliminate once started.
Starting with the initial development of PM processes and continuing unabated throughout the daily operations of the agency, great care must be taken to scale the project management methodology to fit the agency and its projects as much as possible. Steve Jobs said “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make is simple. But It’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
PM methodology must provide the appropriate level of management, documentation, monitoring, and control for the level of project size and complexity. One must resist the temptation to view PM success by the library of documentation, complexity of monitoring and reporting, or stringency of activities. This must be tempered by the reality of the needs of the organization and the goals to be achieved.
Don’t:
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- Don't require a 10-page charter and a business case for a small or simple project.
- Don't have 6 different checklists when 1 would do.
- Don’t require 52 items of information about an effort when only 16 items will be considered, tracked, or used.
- Don’t create/update/automate/complicate documents, forms, or applications just to provide evidence of PMO activity or improvements.
- Resist the temptation to chase and embrace the newest, coolest, and most cutting-edge topics, processes, or systems just for the sake of it. Trying to implement Scrumban in an organization that is balking at accurately reporting project hours and activities in a MS Project type environment is doomed from the start and will only serve to engender more resistance to project management as a whole.
Do:
- Understand the business operations and goals that project management will support.
- Include a variety of organization staff in the discussion, development, detail, and implementation of PM methodology. Imposition of a methodology without input or understanding will result in limited success at best.
- Continually review and revise existing templates, forms, or applications to better meet the needs of the organization. Sometimes less is more.
- Actively engage organization staff to promote project management and provide training or assistance with PM requirements or methodology.
- Continually assess the level of adoption and resistance to current processes and strive to promote an understanding of the rationale and advantages of project management throughout all levels of the agency.
Project Management effectiveness is often demonstrated by the worksheets, templates, reports, PPM applications, metrics, and performance indicators that are generated by a project. The more important and difficult measure of effectiveness is the acceptance and adoption of the philosophy of project management and its advantages by all levels of staff and the resulting inclusion of the project management mindset to the organizational culture.
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“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci