Process Flexibility: Creativity or Chaos?

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.

  Risk Management  

Regardless of which methodology (or methodologies) your organization uses to manage project execution, the purpose is to provide a framework that is consistent across all of the initiatives that the organization undertakes. The benefits of this are obvious: the ability to compare performance across initiatives, the capability to evolve processes and develop best practices, the provision of a consistent project environment for team members and the alignment of the management of each project with the established guidelines for the organization.

However, at some point a consistent, repeatable approach becomes a restrictive set of rules that prevent project managers from being able to develop creative solutions to the unique challenges that they are facing. In these situations, the process framework becomes a barrier rather than a support and the chances of project success suffer as a result. In this article, I want to look at ways that organizations can provide flexibility to their project managers without damaging the effectiveness and credibility of their project approaches.

Every situation is unique
We know that every project is unique, and so it follows that the way that every project is managed also has to be unique. That’s why we need the skills and experience of project managers to lead our projects rather than just asking anyone to execute a series of …

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