Operational Excellence in Project Management

If you are looking to optimize project management in your organization, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and success, ISO 21502 might be the key you need. This international standard not only offers a structured and effective approach to project execution but also provides valuable tools to identify gaps, mitigate risks, and align projects with your company’s strategic objectives.

In this post, you will discover how to use ISO 21502 to conduct detailed diagnostics and create action plans that elevate project management maturity, utilizing more than 270 practices and 400 tools adapted to your context. Dive into this reading and transform the way your organization conducts projects, ensuring exceptional results.

ISO 21502 is an international standard that provides guidelines for project management. Published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the standard is titled "Project, Programme, and Portfolio Management — Guidance on Project Management" and offers a structured approach to executing projects efficiently and effectively.

Key Aspects of ISO 21502:2020

• Structure and Organization: The standard provides a clear structure for project management, covering everything from the project’s initiation to its closure.

• Project Management Principles: It defines fundamental principles that must be followed to ensure project success, including the definition of clear objectives, stakeholder engagement, and efficient resource allocation.

• Project Management Processes: It describes recommended processes and practices for managing a project, including schedule management, budget, quality, risk, and communication.

• Competencies and Skills: It highlights the competencies and skills necessary for project managers, emphasizing the importance of continuous development and professional training.

• Contextual Adaptation: It recommends that processes and practices be adapted to the specific context of the project, considering factors such as project size, complexity, and organizational environment.

ISO 21502 is a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes seeking to improve the effectiveness of their project management, ensuring that projects are completed on time, within budget, and to the desired quality standards.

Reasons for Conducting a Project Diagnosis Using ISO 21502:

• Identification of Gaps and Deficiencies: It helps to identify gaps and deficiencies in project management processes, enabling continuous improvement.

• Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness: It assesses whether resources are being used efficiently and if project objectives are being achieved effectively.

• Compliance with International Standards: It ensures that projects are in compliance with recognized international standards, which can enhance the organization’s credibility and reputation.

• Risk Management: It helps identify and mitigate potential risks before they become significant problems.

• Strategic Alignment: It ensures that projects are aligned with the organization's strategic objectives.

• Enhancing Communication: It improves communication among stakeholders, promoting a common understanding of project objectives and methods.

• Facilitating Audits and Evaluations: It facilitates the conduct of audits and evaluations, providing a structured basis for reviewing project performance.

• Competency Development: It identifies areas where the team may need additional competency and skill development.

The diagnosis utilizes a set of 60 questions distributed across four different domains. The result of the diagnosis is shown in the following figure.

At the end of the diagnosis, an action plan is presented to improve project management maturity. This plan utilizes a database with over 270 practices and 400 tools suited to the project context.

Therefore, using ISO 21502 as a reference for diagnosis helps establish a solid foundation for continuous improvement in project management, promoting better results and greater success in the projects conducted by the organization.

Globalization and economic volatility changed the dynamics of production chains, which required new organizational arrangements from companies, leading them to projectization. Additionally, project professionals are managing increasingly complex projects, which demand an extensive and specific set of competences. In this context, this paper aims to identify the competences of project professionals by project type. A systematic literature review was carried out using the Scopus and Web of Sciences academic databases. The research corpus consisted of 209 articles published between 1989 and 2022. As a result, this research identified 173 competences distributed in 14 different project types; some competences have a greater significance for a given project type. As a contribution, when dealing specifically with projects and competences, project professionals, companies, and educational institutions can learn about the fundamental competences by type of project, improve the processes of selection and diagnosis of the professional, adapt educational programs, or even establish plans for project professionals career.

Very useful for all of you, with surprising discoveries!

https://doi.org/10.12821/ijispm110403

Technology moves very quickly with power and functionality increasing as prices drop. While this is undoubtedly an opportunity, it is also a problem.

 What not to do when digitally transforming your organization.  

1. Don't set up a digital transformation office or hire a digital chief and leave them disconnected from the rest of the organization: they will make a lot of noise about nothing, have very little practical value,
2. Don't try to digitize all your processes without thinking where your priorities should be and where the most value should be. If you do that, you could spend a lot of effort on changing something that you don't really need to change.
3. Don't focus on technology to the detriment of end users (be they employees or customers) because if you do, your end users will simply reject your technology,
4. Don't think that a single change like developing a responsive website or digitizing your call center is the same as a digital transformation,
5. Don't be overly ambitious: if you try to do everything at once, you're likely to fail at everything,
6. When you worry that things aren't perfect, rearrange them back to where you were 5 years ago. 
7. Digital transformation is not easy.

 Market and competition factors, innovation dynamics and technological journeys are among the agile drivers of organizations

In the previous article I presented an  overview of the  Business Agility model  according to the figure below. Formulating the Business Agility strategy is a crucial first dimension of building agility. The definition of strategy allows the organization to carry out a course of action based on a clear understanding of the performance of the “why” (logic) and the “what” to do.

When formulating the strategy, it is important to consider the agile drivers of the organization, which are: market and competition factors in the industry in which your company operates; innovation dynamics and technology journeys; network and value chain; sociopolitical norms and trends; internal organizational aspects; and change factors. These elements must be considered when directing your Business Agility strategy.

Still on strategy, when efining agile objectives, it is necessary to formulate a strategic response for each one of them, reflecting on how these elements will help in this formulation. The agile objectives are: company priorities and business objectives; requirements and level of agility needed; target scenario to be achieved; critical success factors for each of these agile goals; and action strategy to achieve them.

But the organization also needs to plan for its agile capabilities and gaps. Once identified, it is then necessary to plan and act on each gap. Capabilities can be: culture; leadership performance; active; resources; between others. At this time, the use of the company's internal network is indicated, which can bring good values ​​in the search for these capabilities.

The next text will deal with the implementation of Business Agility.

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Becoming flexible and agile to meet the demands of products and services in a globalized and highly competitive environment is a constant challenge for organizations.

In a volatile and uncertain business environment, where customer demands are dynamic, competitiveness, competition and technological innovations ended up creating a scenario that forces companies to consider their ability to respond quickly. And this may be possible with some measures, such as: digitalization of business processes – which provide for the creation of new access channels for customers –; integration with partners; internal efficiency gains and creation of new products or services; or the ability to automate business processes in an integrated, synchronized and continuous way, supporting agility within the organization.   

Given the above context, Business Agility becomes a key player in business success. This ability to relate to customers, implement the operation and use the ecosystem of partners to continuously prosper in a dynamic and unpredictable business environment occurs through this concept that is much discussed in the market, Business Agility (BA) . 

We can define Business Agility as the ability of an organization to perceive changes in the environment and respond to such changes effectively and efficiently. The organizational implementation of BA must be carried out taking into account three critical dimensions of success, namely: Strategy, Implementation and Performance.  

In this article I describe these critical success factors, so that the next articles will bring you in detail each of these dimensions, their main elements and the composition of each of these elements, exemplified in Figure 1.

Formulating the BA Strategy is a crucial first dimension of building agility. Defining strategy allows the organization to undertake a course of action based on a clear understanding of why (logic) and "what" to do.

When formulating the strategy, it is important to consider the organization's agile drivers , such as the market, value chain, regulatory trends and internal organizational aspects, among others. Still on strategy, when defining the Objectives , one must take into account the business objectives, the company's priorities, the scenarios to be pursued and the critical success factors for these scenarios. 

However, the organization also needs to plan its Capabilities  and organizational resource gaps and thus devise a plan to fill these gaps. In short, your strategy to succeed must be composed of Drivers, Objectives and Capabilities.

With the strategy designed, the next step is its implementation. The implementation of the BA is related to the elements associated with the practical execution of the strategy. In this step, strategic objectives become implementation practices, that is, determine the practices or initiatives needed to achieve capabilities, measure and evaluate agility performance, and make corrections based on the results.

 At this stage, the Processes that need to be reviewed, People skills , human resources, technology and Infrastructure .

The last dimension is the verification of the agility performance , which is related to the elements to identify the adequate indicators to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the initiatives for the achievement of the Strategy. Once the BA has been defined and put into action, it's time to measure the results through a dashboard of relevant success metrics such as KPI, Agile Scorecard, Agile Maturity, OKR, etc. This makes it possible to check whether the resulting performance is satisfactory or not and undertake accordingly with appropriate decisions and actions.

Becoming flexible and agile to meet the demands of products and services in a globalized and highly competitive environment is a constant challenge for organizations. To deal with everyday challenges, disruptive technologies and innovation, business agility needs to be anchored in business skills and efficiency. Business Agility covers important aspects of business efficiency and provides an understanding of the effective operation of businesses where information technology plays an accelerating role. Technology, product and project management are some of the elements within this scenario, but these three isolated factors do not guarantee the effectiveness of Business Agility. 

In the next articles we will continue to describe the implementation of Business Agility, for that I will post here three more articles where we will detail each of the following topics: Agile Strategy, Implementation and Performance.