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Can Project Management Maturity Fuel Great Ideas?
Categories:
Program Management
Categories: Program Management
| My last post discussed how project portfolio management helps organizations achieve their objectives. Now I want to discuss how such success is possible. Achieving project management objectives relies on the maturity of project management understanding within an organization. It's not about the skills of the individual project manager. Rather it's about the organization's understanding of what is possible with project management. Apple is one organization making effective use of such maturity. The company has a reputation for delivering quality products by combining superior design with technology -- not focusing solely on innovation. With the iPhone and other iOS products, Apple gained a larger share of the market -- not by sacrificing its distinction as an organization, but by transforming it. Apple's product designers balance technology with humanity. While designers are both rewarded and pushed into continually brainstorming, researching and testing new ideas, the focus is on usability and simplicity. Apple's project teams worked out a way to "make the magic happen" through project management maturity. Organizational project management coupled with Apple's creative environment paved the way for achieving project successes and organizational objectives. The project to develop the iPhone grew from the iPod; the App Store grew out of the opportunities the iPhone provided. Their maturity was not only due to Apple's management skills, but grew from developing its own project management methods. Apple's strategy, fueled by its maturity, allowed these and other projects in the company's portfolio, to be managed with a greater chance of success than its competitors. As with all well-run organizations, project management maturity facilitates the implementation of ideas. What do you think? Does project management maturity spark great creativity? Editor's note: See more on project management maturity. |
Passive Versus Active Learning
Categories:
Education
Categories: Education
| Most project management training is based primarily on passive learning: listening to an instructor, looking at slides or reading, for example. This kind of traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. Active learning, on the other hand, puts the responsibility on the student. Whether in class discussions or written exercises, they're compelled to read, speak, listen and think. One of the most powerful active learning models is experiential learning. Participants find meaning in experience -- learning through reflection and doing. As ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius once said: "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand." Let's say you want to teach the importance of planning before executing, for example. Instead of just explaining it, try this lesson in experiential learning. Give a bag of LEGO parts -- the toy building bricks -- to a group of students and ask them to build a car in five minutes. When the time is up, show a slide with the project phases: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Then ask them to identify which phase applied to which part of building the car. I challenge you to consider experiential learning programs for project managers. They observe and evaluate the effects of a situation as they participate -- and then apply this learning on actual projects. Have you tried experiential learning? What are the pros and cons over passive learning? |
Is Your Project Among the Best of the Best?
Categories:
PMI
Categories: PMI
| There's no shortage of project failures in the news. So it's especially important to recognize the excellence, innovation and hard work that go into completing a successful project. There's no better way to do so than by nominating your project for the coveted PMI Project of the Year Award.
Established in 1989, the award is among the most prestigious honors in the project management profession. But you must act quickly -- nominations for the 2011 PMI Project of the Year must be received by Tuesday, 1 March 2011. PMI encourages nominations for projects from around the world, regardless of size or industry. The winner will be announced in October at PMI® Global Congress 2011--North America in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, USA. Last year The National Ignition Facility Project submitted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, USA, took top honors. The finalists included the Dallas Cowboys Stadium Project, built for the U.S. football team in Texas and the Norton Brownsboro Hospital Project in Kentucky, USA. Receiving a professional award will enhance your résumé or CV and your career prospects. And Project of the Year is just one of many ways to showcase your successes -- you can also join in the bid for other 2011 PMI Professional Awards. Excellence in project management can't be celebrated without your help. All of the awards require your nominations for a person, project, organization, training product or literature. The nomination deadline for other PMI Professional Awards is 1 April 2011. Submissions for the 2011 PMI Eric Jenett Project Management Excellence Award and the PMI Distinguished Project Award are accepted throughout the year. Have you submitted your nomination for a PMI award yet? |
Should Failure Be Part of Your Career Plan?
Categories:
Career Development
Categories: Career Development
| Failure is a hard word. But we really can't know our limits if we don't sometimes test them. So how do we reconcile the fact that we may "fail" sometimes and still be successful practitioners? I can't say that every project I've ever managed has been a complete success. Not all of them have been delivered to full scope, on time and within budget. Nevertheless, I'm happy with my career and believe I'm a successful project manager. Clearly, there's more to career success than simply stringing together a run of successful projects. I don't know anyone who has done so. (And if I did, I would wonder if they might consider taking on a more challenging project next time.) There's a component of success that has to do with achievement and pushing ourselves beyond personal limitations. Not everyone is so forgiving of our project failures, but we must see the failures in the context of personal growth and our overall career. Career success is in the eye of the beholder. Whether or not we consider ourselves successful has to do in part with how we react when our projects fall short of complete success. If we emerge from project failure smarter, wiser, stronger, better -- or just humbler from the experience -- we are prepared to achieve a greater level of success. It's scary, but I think in the end we will judge ourselves more harshly if we don't explore and extend our limits than if we stay comfortably within them. Net: Fail to succeed. What do you think? Can failure eventually lend itself to career success? |
WBS and Schedule Network Diagrams: Unsung Heroes of Project Management
Categories:
New Practitioners
Categories: New Practitioners
| If I asked you how to bake a cake, you'd probably tell me to mix the ingredients in a bowl, pour the batter into a tin and bake until golden brown. But that's a deceptively simple answer for what is actually a multi-tiered process. In project management, you must detail every step needed to get the project done and the precise order in which to complete them. New project managers may not be used to doing things this way. Work breakdown structures (WBS) and schedule network diagrams can help them in forming a project management plan. A WBS illustrates all of the work that needs to get done to accomplish the objectives of the project, in order of importance. To create a WBS, you subdivide project elements into manageable components and keep breaking them down until you reach the work package level. A schedule network diagram visually depicts of how all the tasks in your schedule string together. While the WBS shows you how many tasks you have to accomplish, the schedule network diagram shows the order those tasks need to happen. Most tasks people perform on a daily basis aren't explicitly dependent on the order in which they occur. And when order does matter, we usually engage in that activity naturally. Our natural ability to skip details and abridge processes can save us time in everyday life. But this "normal" behavior could lead to disaster on a project where some tasks must precede or succeed others. Project managers might lose an opportunity to shorten schedules or see which tasks can run in parallel, for example. Do you use a WBS or schedule network diagram in your projects? |