Five Steps to Improved PM

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management 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, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

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The organizations we are a part of all practice project management to some degree--they must or we wouldn’t be here. But there are just about as many different PM practices as there are grains of sand on the beach. They may sometimes only have slight variations, but no two PM organizations--and no two PM practices--are the same. And unfortunately, a large percentage of them are ineffective to some degree--if not outwardly so, at least in the eyes of many of their PMs and (sometimes) their customers.

There’s no “perfect” PM practice or organization. If there were, then every organization would copy it and clone the project managers. If yours is struggling, what can you do to improve it? What can you, your PMO director or executive management do to fix it? If your organization learns nothing from what it did wrong, it is doomed to fail again. I’ve been part of organizations that created a PMO, watched it struggle and fail, deconstructed it and then re-created it only to watch it fail again. In each case, it was a complete waste of time, money and good personnel resources.

There’s no patented formula for creating the right PM practice. But here are five steps that your organization can take to improve on what it has (or had) and hopefully rise from the ashes with something that will work better than the last iteration:

Step 1: …

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