Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Smart Organizations Sync Talent With Strategy
Categories:
PMI Pulse of the Profession
Categories: PMI Pulse of the Profession
| For all the talk of an economic recovery, many organizations continue to obsess over headcount. But a smaller (and smarter) group is focusing on getting the right people on the right projects -- positioning those people and the organization itself to grow. The payoff can be huge, according to PMI's Pulse of the Professionâ„¢ In-Depth Report: Talent Management. On average, 72 percent of projects meet their original goals and business intent at organizations with significant or good alignment between their talent management and organizational strategies. Now put that up against the 58 percent rate at organizations with moderate or weak alignment. Despite the potential ROI, only 10 percent of organizations report significant alignment. That stat takes on added significance when you consider what's shaping up as a true talent crisis. Pulse data revealed four in five organizations report difficulty in finding qualified project management candidates to fill open positions. Some organizations are resorting to some serious poaching -- check the battle for project talent between Silicon Valley tech titans Apple, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook. China Road and Bridge Corporation is adopting a more long-term approach, according to China Daily. Looking to build talent in a strategic market for its projects, the company is sponsoring a group of Congolese students to study engineering and project management in Xi'an, China. In this case, organizations that align talent management and strategy have an edge, reporting less difficulty in filling open positions. Organizations that align talent management to organizational strategy are also more effective at implementing formalized career paths, with 83 percent moving new hires to advanced project management positions. Among organizations with weak alignment, that number drops to 62 percent. The MD Anderson Cancer Center, for example, clearly outlines the path up. It requires 10 years of experience (including five years of project management) and a Project Management Professional (PMP)® credential for senior project managers who manage highly complex strategic projects that span three or more organizational boundaries. Establishing a career path not only makes employees feel like the organization has a vested interest in them, it also helps the organization spot -- and close -- any skills gaps that might prevent it from delivering on its business goals. Recruiting and retaining top talent will only get organizations so far. They need to measure results, too. Across the board, organizations with strong alignment are more likely to measure outcomes such as staff turnover, learning development, and employee engagement, retention and productivity. U.S. space agency NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), for example, tracks the effectiveness of its professional development courses by assessing enrollment numbers and feedback from senior leadership. Armed with that information, the PMI Global Executive Council member knows what's working -- and what's not. No doubt, creating a talent management program comes with a hefty price tag. But consider the danger of skimping: On a US$1 billion project, organizations with significant or good alignment of talent management programs to organizational strategy put US$50 million fewer dollars at risk than organizations with moderate or weak alignment. With those kinds of numbers on the line, the bigger question is: Can an organization afford not to make the investment? |
10 Commandments of Email Communications
| To yield expected results, a distributed project team must first speak the same language when it comes to communications. With that in mind, I developed a basic set of email communications rules called the Project Communication Decalogue. I require everyone on my team to adhere to it when emailing each other, and I introduce it the first time I meet with a new team or member. When everyone is on the same page, it makes for leaner, cleaner communications.
From experience, the adoption of these rules takes a few weeks. But once you get buy-in from all team members, email communications become a smoother process, freeing up time to focus on much more important project tasks. What are your basic email communication rules? How do you get your project team to speak the same language via email? |
How Fit Is Your Portfolio?
Categories:
Portfolio Management
Categories: Portfolio Management
| We all know a healthy project portfolio is aligned with an organization's overall strategy. But how do we get there? First, define "project portfolio." A bunch of independent projects does not make up a portfolio — it is simply a group of projects. A portfolio is composed of multiple projects aligned to help the organization execute its strategy. Second, define "portfolio management." Portfolio management enables organizations to identify, select and prioritize the investments that will maximize business value. The major components of portfolio management include supporting strategic objectives, ensuring value creation, prioritizing projects based on their relative importance, managing the flow of benefits and integrating stakeholders around business objectives. Here are a few questions to help determine how well your organization is managing its portfolio:
If some of your answers were "no," don't worry — you are not alone. But implementing good portfolio management can be a great challenge. Enterprise project management professionals usually joke that it is a "simple" three-step process:
Step three, in particular, is very difficult — yet it is the core of portfolio management. Portfolio management is the art of getting more than the sum of its projects' results. To do so, corporate strategies must be laid out clearly. This helps portfolio managers to measure value that would not be generated by any individual project. While software tools make it easier to simulate portfolios to help in decision-making, portfolio management ultimately depends more on governance and appropriate processes than on calculations. The portfolio also needs to be flexible enough to cope with changes in strategy and environment, which is why portfolio managers must perform regular check-ups — a portfolio that fits your organization needs to link to its strategy at all times. How healthy is your organization's portfolio? How do you monitor it? Share your thoughts below, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
What's the Story? Stakeholders Want to Know
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| There is nothing like a good story to connect with project stakeholders and team members. Storytelling has been used to communicate sophisticated ideas for millennia, ranging from the parables in the Bible to the morals found in fairy tales. Done right, storytelling is a captivating way to explain why your project (or a decision within the project) was initiated, what it will become and the benefits that will follow. Creating a good story requires skill, and while you may never become the next J.K. Rowling, applying some effective development techniques can help you hone your own storytelling style. The "story spine," a tool created by U.S. playwright Kenn Adams, helps project professionals craft well-structured stories. The outline is a series of sentence fragments that prompt the narrative elements of your story. You can even use it in a group setting -- perhaps during an exercise in which you ask team members to craft a story to explain the technical decisions made by team. The template is as follows, with a project management example in italics on securing buy-in to solve an emerging risk issue: The Platform introduces the issue or topic.
The Catalyst explains why this is important today.
The Consequences explains the journey and the "problem."
The Climax is the turning point that leads to the proposed solution.
The Resolution is the final -- and positive -- solution to problem.
So next time you need to sell an idea to management or to your project team, why not try a good story? Have you ever tried telling a story to gain buy-in from stakeholders? What technique did you find helpful? |
The Customer Mindset Is Always Right
| In most cases, project managers are assigned to projects after the development of strategic initiatives and project charters. Seemingly, we have little to do with strategic planning and more to do with operational implementation. Although I agree that the latter is an important element of our profession, it is also a reactive one. Our value proposition is not fully used in the strategic planning needs of the organization. I increasingly expect project management to go beyond being a reactive role and become proactive. And one method of doing so is becoming customer-service-oriented. Now, I am not referring to the traditional definition of "customer," but rather defining the organization itself as the project manager's single true customer. Thus, becoming customer-service-oriented enables project managers to evolve into business leaders by:
The diagram below illustrates the concept of increasing the customer approach to project management. The project manager gains experiences and increased value by being customer-service-oriented. The repetitive experiences add up to knowledge that project managers need to, over time, drive customers to better outcomes and experiences. The focus on customer service ensures project managers are aligned with the interests of a project and an organization's purpose. According to the research of Dr. Jay Kandampully and Dr. David Solnet, a "service vision" improves an organization's overall performance. They illustrate two case studies, Dell and Southwest Airlines, of companies that used service orientation to create a competitive differentiator in their industries. Project managers can do the same for the profession. Once they harness a customer-serviced-oriented mindset, they can put it into practice to proactively interpret organizations strategy, align leadership and rationalize organizations' critical projects. The first steps toward redefining the profession as proactive instead of reactive are to offer services with this approach in mind, such as:
In my own experiences in leading the business transformations of multiple organizations, I have noted they tend to begin with an initial reactive approach of a cost reduction effort. They then mature to designing a service culture to offer global end-to-end processes, with service-level agreements that ultimately enable it to achieve its strategic growth plans. What other approaches do project managers need to redefine their role from being reactive to proactive? |