Alternative Measures

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Cost Management   Quality   Requirements Management   Risk Management  

I want to take a little bit of a different angle with this article. This month’s theme is agile or alternate project management, and I want to interpret the latter emphasis. I want to encourage you to be creative--to look for different ways to managing your projects--to be “alternative”.

I don’t know where or when someone first had the idea to take an agile approach to solutions development, but I am fairly sure that it would have been within an innovative organization (I don’t see it being born or nurtured in an international bank or major federal government department). Large-scale organizations--whether public or private--thrive on a slowly evolving, mature project management approach that offers consistent and repeatable process and standard deliverables. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying to be innovative.

Mature or stale?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you should reject your PMO’s long-established project management methodology in favor of an innovative alternate approach; there has been a lot of time and effort put into getting your tools, techniques, processes and policies to where they are today. But that doesn’t mean that you should blindly follow those processes without questioning them.

Most organizations today have some form of …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.