The organization of your projects
The better your projects are managed, the faster they are finished and with lower costs. But those are not the only reasons to think about improving your project management. A company that is good in project management is also more capable of innovation, as the development of new products and new processes are usually the result of projects.
Doing projects however is not an easy task. It is a fact that organizations, both young and old, have difficulties in doing projects the right way. Because a project is about something ‘new’ ( a new product, a new improved way of working, a new collaboration), projects are in its very essence difficult to do. By definition a project team has to deal with more or less insecurities, which makes project management something else than ‘regular’ management.
The level of maturity of projectmanagement is represented on 5 levels in the table below:
project management maturity
|
1 |
Ad-hoc |
Every project leader and project team is more or less improvising |
|
2 |
Minimal |
Project team members and leaders use some project management techniques and skills |
|
3 |
Organized |
All project teams use the same set of techniques and tools for project management |
|
4 |
Integral |
Projects are managed in an integral way. Introduction of project portfolio management and program management |
|
5 |
Self improving |
The organization and the teams improves their own way of doing projects continuously by reviews, performance indicators and in other ways |
It is a great help if a company supports its project leaders and teams (and also, it can be an extra burden on the team if an organization is not supporting the project team). Doing projects better is not just a matter of educating good project leaders, in most cases you also need to look at the mother organization. However not all companies need to be on level 5 of project management maturity. For most organizations level 3 or 4 is good enough.
Implementing good project management
If your company does a lot of project at the same time, it is good to think about a systematic approach for doing projects in your organization. Implementation of a uniform method of project management takes some time and effort. But it will improve the performance of project teams and costs will be reduced. Realize that innovation also will improve. If your product is actually doing projects, customer happiness also will improve and in general workforce happiness will be better as project teams will be more in control.
The time needed to implement such an improvement of project management will take about half a year to a year. Please contact us to talk with one of our consultants.