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Date
I started doing project management work before I knew it was project management work. Just like a lot of us, I “accidently” became a project manager. Then there was a time when I purposely did project management work. It was no longer an accident that I was doing it. The next logical step in the project management progression was to somehow manage a group of projects that have similar or related content is a coordinated way. Back in the day, at the 1998 Lucent-wide Project Management Conference, I gave a talk entitled Program Management - An Integrated(ing) Approach to Setting and Meeting Customer Expectations. That was in the relative infancy of program management at Lucent Technologies. The Project Management Organization was an outgrowth of the coordination of project management within an organization; putting the same face on how projects are managed across the organizations internal boundaries.
Project Portfolio Management is another progressive step in the overall process of managing projects to meet or exceed customer expectations. It looks closely at aligning organizational strategies and business goals with the projects the organization undertakes. I needed this first bit of information as background, as a foundation. Now I’d like to look at the overall, “overall” and the specific of the “specific”. Meaning, I’d like to kick this all up a level and look at the overall, governance, and the specific, IT governance, as it relates to sustainability.
Simplified, governance is the way an organization is structured in order to pursue its business. I believe that structure needs to be sustainable. When I refer to sustainable in this context, I am looking at the way an organization pursues its business with relationship to the social, environmental, and profit (Triple Bottom-line), rather than just its profit objectives. Of course, one of the objectives of a business is to stay in business. Even with a not-for-profit, there is a money making motivation to keep the operation afloat. So both for-profit and not-for-profit are included.
It is easy to relate governance with sustainability when you think about one aspect of governance is the adherence to regulations, as well as using best practices to gain efficiencies, and considering standards and industry recommendations. One of our assertions state “Project managers must first understand the green (sustainable) aspects of their projects, knowing that this will better equip them to identify, manage, and respond to projects risk.” This is also words for the governance body to take to heart. Can you think of any companies that have paid the price because they did not consider sustainability (environmental in particular) risks? Perhaps those organizations should have thought about including sustainability in their governance strategy.
IT governance is a subset of the overall management of an organizational strategy but has to be closely tied to the overall business strategy. Why is IT governance so important? The reason is that an organization’s IT can have the biggest impact to planet, profit and people. If you are a Google or an Amazon, you rely heavily on IT and can make a huge impact. Even if you are a one-person company, you probably rely on your computer and Internet connection more than you’d like. And, whether you are a mega-consumer sales company or a Craigslister, how you manage your power consumption, for instance, will make a difference on your businesses bottom-line, impact on the planet, and how your human resources (maybe just you) are impacted.
It is time to follow the continuum from green project management, to sustainable project management to sustainable program management, to sustainable portfolio management to sustainable governance. It is no longer adequate to address sustainability only from the project level. We all know, to be most effective, sustainability has to be part of an organization’s thinking, driven from the top, a strategy incorporated within its governance and particularly its IT governance.
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: May 12, 2014 03:34 PM |
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