How achievable is your portfolio of projects in 2018?
In his excellent blog Paul Every, Solitaire Consulting outlines
some of the challenges of managing projects.
Key points
1. By
January you will have agreed delivery strategy supported by business cases
2. You
have budget and plans, but not necessary resources
3. You
have non-strategic projects that are demanding attention
He then offered some simple but useful self-assessment
questions about how realistic your ambition is and the offers a list of
benefits of using a PMO (Project Management Office) to help co-ordinate and
manage and external project delivery resources to help deliver.
I won’t offer the detail because I’d like to encourage
people to have a read of the article, which you can find here.
SOME REFLECTIONS
My experience is that surprisingly few organisations have
an agreed delivery strategy supported by business cases. At best they have a
vague idea of what they want to achieve but less about how. Today’s businesses
are more agile and responsive, which impairs the ability to design, communicate
and deliver a consistent and coherent plan.
In a world of mission, vision, sound-bites and style,
business cases, budgets and plans are generally a tool of persuasion than a
blue-print for delivery. Often they contain more rhetoric than understanding.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LEADERSHIP
A Project
Manager is someone who can deliver exactly what is required, on-time,
on-budget, to-specification with low-risk and high-communications
A Project Leader
is someone who can help the client develop clarity on exactly what they need.
This may be by workshop, facilitation or prototyping. Once that clarity is
there developing and delivering is much more straight-forward.
There is no doubt that businesses can benefit from a PMO and
external project delivery resources to help deliver. But first and foremost
what is needed is the ability to understand the aim and context and then manage
the necessary coalition of compromise in order to do a few things well rather
than many things badly.
IMPACT OF FAILURE
The failure to co-ordinate and manage is less about the
non-delivery of projects but the impact it has on the people who become
cynical, suffer change fatigue, and ultimately loose trust in the vision and
leadership of the organisation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Rogers is a Qualified Change Practitioner and PRINCE2
Project Manager, with an MBA in Management Consultancy. Past projects have
included the incorporation of Ports of Jersey and Operations Change and Sales
Support for RBSI and NatWest. He is a tutor/lecturer for the Chartered
Management Institute.
CONTACT
TimHJRogers@AdaptConsultingCompany.Com
+447797762051 Skype: timhjrogers TimHJRogers@gmail.com
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