Assembling the right team is almost as important as all of the other project management tasks you will tackle throughout the life cycle of your project. The author recommends thinking of the team as a holistic organism, a single body that has to work as one entity, and offers some tips for pulling together a great team.
Projects are strategic in orientation through delivering outcomes and benefits related to an organization’s strategic goals. The best way to ensure individuals, teams, and organizations understand strategy, is to involve them in developing it. This paper assesses how companies can align individuals and teams with organizations, together with processes that support them, so that projects are set up for success
Commonly released with little or no advance notice, task order contracts are notoriously difficult to staff. The author’s “Progressive Staffing Implementation” pushes the recruiting process far earlier than the announcement of an individual task order and uses Six Sigma techniques to provide planning guidance for the throughput recruiting needed for successful staffing.
This article describes an approach to answer a recurring question from upper level management: Do we have the right people managing our projects? It provides a systematic tool to determine whether there is a good fit between business needs and the project managers’ skill profiles. The resulting action plan may provide the required starting point to improve the efficiency of the project management workforce.
In this article, the authors describe how two very different industries — enterprise cloud computing and government research and development — are leveraging varied methodologies to satisfy market demands. The agile-based project management used in the first case is compared with aggressive, concurrent engineering combined with traditional project management in the second case. The corporate cultures that influence each industry’s choice of methodology will be discussed.
The purpose of this article is to give the project manager a few tips on what he or she should be doing in an entrepreneurial environment. These tips are framed in the context of operating in a small- to medium-sized business. Although these tips can be implemented during any phase of a business life cycle, they are most pertinent when the business is experiencing a growth phase.
Organizational culture is made up of the attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors of its employees and underlying assumptions. If an organization’s culture is not supportive of project management, project management tends to be viewed as an additional burden and interference to the daily work. If there is no effective project management office and no standard processes, procedures, measurement, and organization culture across projects, projects will operate differently from one project to the next as well as from one department to the next. Project culture within an organization can essentially can make or break the projects undertaken by that organization.
Studies indicate that 80% of information technology project challenges are caused by people challenges. The author believes that project success rates would significantly improve if greater attention was paid by all project managers to the human side of project management. The article provides a framework for understanding personality traits and explains the need for continuous improvement of “soft” skills.
Six factors: power, ignorance, greed, momentum, appearance, and necessity define the ‘Pigman Principle,’ and often result in irrational decisions being made by otherwise rational leaders. The author explains how to identify which factors influence your project’s sponsors and how to leverage these factors to manage your interactions and communications with sponsors more effectively.
No matter their sector or location, organizations face a highly complex business environment that demands innovation and the agility to respond to shifting global priorities. As a result, in today's complex global environment, the organizations that thrive are the ones that value project management. This article reports the results of PMI's 2013 Pulse of the Profession--the annual global benchmark research report for organization project and program management.