5 Steps To Improve The PM Process – Part 1
For the next five articles we’ll be looking at what is a frustratingly common scenario within professional services organizations – an ineffective project management office , group or practice. What we’ll be stepping through is a proposed five-step process for getting from dysfunctional to functional and salvaging the project management practice within an organization before it’s too late. The hope is with some proactive work, some brainstorming, some acceptance of change, and a little luck, the organization can be saved wasted time and dollars associated with completely discarding what is already in place and rebuilding a new PMO or practice.
In this Part 1, we’ll start the discussion with a process that is usually a recommended practice at the end of every project…conducting a lessons learned session.
Learning lessons from what we’ve been doing
This can be a face-to-face meeting of the minds or it can be a phone call or series of phone calls, but this is where the rubber meets the road….this is the step to kick it all off. The key is this – we’ve acknowledged things aren’t going well in our PM practice and we need to take a time out and understand what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong and then move on towards trying to fix the bad stuff. If you have a PMO led by an effective PMO director, then that director should be the individual chairing this session…and likely this entire five step process (unless we realize that he is the reason for the problems). And if there is no PMO director, then the one or two senior most PMs in the company should likely lead this process.
Sit down with everyone associated with the PM practice and/or PMO and basically conduct some lessons learned discussions. Ask tough questions:
- What seems to work?
- What isn’t working?
- What failures are individuals seeing?
- What frustrations are they feeling?
- What are customers saying to us about our processes?
- What do project managers feel are the good tools that we already have in place?
- What do project managers feel are the missing links to success?
If the PMO or project management practice in the organization is failing and you’re trying to recreate it the right way, now is the time to learn from your mistakes. Be open-minded and ready to learn. In this discussion, all key internal stakeholders in projects should be participating.....all PMs, key department or team leads, senior company management representatives. Basically all individuals with a vested stake in the projects that happen in the organization.
The goal, of course, is to learn what people think is working and what they think isn’t working. Throw out the bad and keep the good. Listen, document, and pray you don’t relive the failure again as a result.
Summary
With this info-gathering session we’ve taken a cold hard look at the good, the bad and the ugly of what’s happening now in our PM practice. We’ve examined what we think is working, what we know isn’t working, and what we think might be a good idea to examine in more detail and hopefully improve upon. I won’t give you any more clues on the future steps of this five part process at this point because I want to you to keep coming back for more, but I will tell you that next we’re going to reach out to an outside entity for more help. It may be awkward – sort of like John Cusack’s character in the 2000 movie comedy High Fidelity where he goes back to his old girlfriends to try to figure out where he keeps going wrong in his relationships. But it will hopefully be eye opening and helpful.
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Note: this project tip was provided by Brad Egeland. Brad is a Business Solution Designer and IT/PM consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management, and project management experience leading initiatives in Manufacturing, Government Contracting, Gaming and Hospitality, Retail Operations, Aviation and Airline, Pharmaceutical, Start-ups, Healthcare, Higher Education, Non-profit, High-Tech, Engineering and general IT. Brad is married, a father of 9, and living in sunny Las Vegas, NV.
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