8 Ways To Improve Organizational PM

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.

  Organizational Project Management  

There’s no such thing as a perfect project manager, but in many organizations, the project management environment makes it harder for PMs than is necessary. So as part of this year’s PM resolutions, I want to look at a number of ways that organizations can improve the quality of project delivery. So, let’s go!

1. Performance over process
Projects are only approved for one reason—to deliver needed business outcomes. While there has to be a degree of governance and control over how that is achieved, too many organizations are still placing too much emphasis on process, and not enough on ensuring that the business value is achieved. Organizations must embrace the ability to deliver work using traditional, agile, hybrid and even ad-hoc approaches if that’s what is required to achieve the best outcomes.

To do this, organizations must provide project teams (not just PMs) with autonomy to choose the method that works for them for the given piece of work. Organizations should provide frameworks that teams have to operate within; there is nothing wrong with a light governance model to monitor compliance with that framework, but there must be sufficient flexibility to allow teams to operate how they want.

Care must also be taken to ensure that initiatives like agile transformations don’t end up forcing everyone to use the same approach for …

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