In this article we will talk about the organizational structure to put in place in the context of strategic or business transformation programs.
These programs are by nature more or less unique within organizations and require a specific setup to address their challenges.
Introduction
Today current employees are asked every day for more flexibility and it is increasingly difficult to keep a work-life balance due to the ever-increasing number of concurrent initiatives decided by the board to maximize the stock value of the company or by senior management to improve the organization’s bottom-line. Innovation, sustainability, etc. have become part of the business landscape and generate new projects that have to be carried by a decreasing work force on top of business-as-usual.
In many strategic programs either driven by a technology change or a need to implement deep business changes, it is necessary to combine methodologies to address the different aspects of the program such as business process reengineering, change management and program/ project management.
Here follows a concrete proposal on how to do this.
We will look at deliverables from each methodology and define what we think is a natural sequence between them. Rectangles represent phases or process groups for each methodology. Below are the main deliverables.
In this article we propose to look at the way processes are implemented in organizations and identify key questions to evaluate whether they are properly sized.
What is your organizational culture and/or business context?
Over the last years we have had the chance to work both in what we would call process oriented and people oriented organizations.
Complementary to portfolio management, focusing on selecting the right projects, good project management practices enable to execute the projects right.
In this article we will focus on seven guidelines that will help implement pragmatic project management:
Many companies are looking for a higher return on investment on trainings.
How often people go off for a few a days to an inter-company/public training and then come back to work, try to apply what they have learnt and struggle with their own practice or with organizational constraints that might prevent implementing best practices, and eventually forget what they have learnt in a matter of months?
Having worked with several customers on organizational changes, we believe traditional off-the-shelf training alone cannot deliver up to the expectations.
Why?
In this last edition of the change management series, we will cover Key Performance Indicators. Based on the adage “What gets measured gets done”, we will look at how to leverage KPIs to monitor and drive change.
To introduce change, one should focus on changing behaviors first, then only in a second stage looking at results, because the expected results from these new behaviors come gradually from learning and practice. We therefore propose to use a combination of KPIs:
After looking at the main drivers of change in business, the types of change they generate and strategies to address their stakeholder needs, let us look in this article at examples of tools.
We will not paraphrase what you might find in other websites or articles, but rather share examples of our own work to show how we think some tools might help you.
After looking at the drivers and types of changes, let us now look at how to address the different stakeholders needs during the change.
In our last edition, we were wondering about the main drivers for change and identified 6 different ones: regulatory, customer, technology, competitiveness, growth and crisis. Our next question is how these lead in any way to the main change types that are initiated in companies nowadays, with the background assumption that there may be different challenges and different ways to approach and manage them.
Everyone experiences change on a regular basis. Whether at work or in our private life. And many say the pace of change is accelerating. For sure, change has become virtually impossible to avoid.
As a last step in bringing sustainable performance to organizations, we move from the project mode delivering new products and processes to efficient operations to deliver the benefits promised during the selection of the project.
In this article we will focus on five guidelines that will help implement sustainable process management:
While doing some research for a workshop I organized for Project Managers, I asked myself , like many other fellow project managers I assume, which, among all competencies that a project manager should master (there are many), are the ones that really make the difference? In these days of ever-increasing productivity needs, training should be extremely focused to ensure high return on investment. It seems therefore important to focus on a few key competencies rather than an all-encompassing set of competencies that are needed in different situations.
The PMO (can stand for Portfolio or Program or Project Management Office, depending on the scope covered and maturity of the organization) has become a fairly common function within organizations over the last 10 years. Five years ago, I covered in another article how a starting PMO could develop a project management culture in organizations with low maturity in this area.
Once a strategy has been defined, it has to be implemented. Ideas supporting this strategy have to be collected and shaped into concrete projects. The next challenge is to define which project proposals will provide the biggest business outcome for the available funding and human resources. Funding and human resources can be expanded to some extent (through bank credit or resource contracting) but in the short term are often a major constraint. Oftentimes one cannot completely outsource strategic projects.
Within an organization, there are two levels of strategies: corporate and business unit level strategies.
On one hand, Corporate strategies stated in the annual reports tend to look all very similar because they leverage macro-economic indicators (such as cost of labor and energy, expected economic growth in each country, etc.). For example which company did not want to increase revenues from emerging countries (BRIC- Brazil Russia India China) where GDP growth was much higher than Europe and the US?
This article is the first part of a serie focusing on the performing organization. Companies reaching a certain size (about 50 people) soon or later realize that they need to “structure” the organization to grow further. What used to work when smaller may no longer work, as the company needs to ensure that the service provided does not depend on specific individuals and that goals can be consistently met across the organization.
Performance is about consistently reaching these business goals.
Introduction: Different Metrics for Different Purposes.
When we are discussing metrics within project management, it is important to look at the big picture. In this respect, all aspects of portfolio, program, and project management, as well as the organization performance, should be considered. From this starting- point there are the following broad categories of metrics:
In industry segments where project management is not considered a core business, such as manufacturing (except in R&D), it can be more challenging to propagate project management best practices, even though at the individual level employees recognize that improvements should be made. It is even more difficult to promote the idea of a structured approach via a project management office. Project management maturity is typically not even at the standardization level (following the OPM3 model) in those companies: some processes exist but are not considered an enterprise standard.
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