PM Building Blocks
Three (3) building blocks are the most essential features of a PM environment. A company investing in these infrastructure pieces will lay the ground work for a sustained movement into the PM arena.
The building blocks are described as follows:
- Governance:The "organization" piece of PM - it consists of the working and steering committees and other organizational entities and procedures needed to chose the "right" projects, decide on the size of the project slate ( the amount of money of number of people it will commit to projects on an annual basis) and determine project priorities and resource assignments.
- Process:The way we do 'the work" piece of PM - it consists of the inititiation, planning, implementation, management, closeout life cycle methodology and all the evaluation techniques to determine if we are working on the right project and how to bring it in on time and as close to budget as possible.
- Tools:The "information management" piece of PM - it consists of the collection of tools that will facilitate the above two building blocks. The tools will facilitate choosing of the "right" projects, prioritizing the projects, managing the resources assigned to the portfolio of projects, evaluating the completion status or proposed changes to individual projects, supporting virtual team communication and collaborations and a host of other functions.
Utowna firmly believes that moving from a functional organizational environment to a project oriented one is not a trivial change. We have found that far too many companies are being drawn into the PM arena for all the wrong reasons (e.g. to keep up with their peers, because they think the investment will be low, as a quick fix to address the backlash due to falling stock prices, or because they have an inhouse expert who is willing to do PM work for free). We find that these companies attempt to tackle all three of the building block simultaneously and most often do it while attempting to utilize a PM software tool. The most common complaints we hear from this approach are:
- We thought it would be easy.
- There is no cohesive plan - there's way too many "pieces" on the table.
- We don't see incremental value coming out of the program - it's all or nothing.
- How do we measure success? Once we have all the data they want us to collect, we don't see how we can use it to achieve the firm's goals.
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