ProjExc - Project Management Consultants

Realising Benefits

At recent meetings with prospective clients, and chatting with fellow delegates at Project Management events a number of people have talked to me about how their projects and programmes not delivering the benefits the business expected (not meeting objectives).

No surprises for us, but interesting therefore that the Birmingham Chapter of the APM (Association for Project Management) is holding a briefing next week on Benefits Realisation and Benefits Mapping. Peter Hawkins will be exploring benefits realisation techniques, with an emphasis on how benefits mapping is a valuable tool for a range of project and portfolio activities. Subjects covered will include:

• Why is benefits realisation important?

• Benefits realisation tools and techniques

• Benefits mapping.

For more details on the event click on this link to the relevant page on the APM website.

Project Excellence – elements for success

Project Excellence is increasingly becoming the key to business success. We often work with our clients on a "three-legged stool" model of project excellence and how to keep the balance right for business projects:

Element 1 – Processes
The first of the 3 elements of project excellence (and so business success) is getting the process or methodology right. Balance is critical. Too simple and there is no benefit, too complex and no-one can follow it.

Element 2 - Tools
The second of the 3 elements is equipping project managers with appropriate tools and templates. We consider the scope of these tools, their purpose and how to avoid common pitfalls (like buying an expensive tool that doesn't fit the business process). On our PM Portal we list many of the PM tools which we commonly come across in our consultancy work.

Element 3 - People (Usually Leadership)
Finally, the people angle. It is imperative that project managers are given the skills appropriate to achieving success. It sounds simple but this critical element is all too often overlooked. In addition to the usual "hard" project management skills (planning, estimating, reporting, risk management, quality management, ....) we find that leadership and client relationship management are an increasingly critical element in the competence toolkit.

If you'd like to know more about how ProjExc can help sort the elements out for your organisation call us for a free, no obligation chat on 0121 250 3534, or visit our website to find out more.

Aston Centre for Project Management Practice

Just popped up on the web, and neighbours of ours! According to their website, their principle aim is to develop real time, real life solutions that actually work for project managers and to use their experiences to guide the future development of practice. They aim to do this by:

• bridging gaps between both research and knowledge and knowledge and practice
• being practitioner focused – identifying solutions that work
• developing a collaborative multi-disciplinary project management community of practice
• helping companies build stronger bridges

This seems very interesting. Let's hope that they are successful. Hopefully we'll meet up soon, and I'll pop some more info onto this blog.

The cost of failing to plan

Sadly no surprises to those of us at ProjExc, from an article discussing the cost of failing to plan a project. For the full article, refer to onrec.com.

The article explains that UK companies are wasting millions of pounds every day on development projects because their planning process is flawed from the outset. They refer to a new survey of 500 professional project managers showing a third of technology assignments in the digital, media and telecoms industries are doomed from the start because they have been so poorly conceived.

The survey from PM3 Consulting, says companies often fall at the first hurdle because they have failed to establish a coherent or realistic business case for a project. "Most worrying is the inability of these companies to identify the real benefits of a project or what it will really cost," say the consultants "As a result projects run over time, over budget, deliver poor quality products and often fail to realise any tangible business benefits at all."

Like the consultants who delivered the survey ProjExc believe the answer is to get experienced project managers in place. We also believe that as well as competent project managers, they usually need a toolbox with appropriate processes, systems and of course that elusive leadership ability at hand.

The research found that "many companies can't articulate what they want from a project, yet 89% recognise that they need a project manager to take overall control,", and that over half of companies (51%) have unrealistic expectations of their projects and 56% do not define their project success criteria.

Project Management – Must Have Skill for the Future?

Faster, better, cheaper. We have all experienced these being the drivers for businesses as they seek to improve operational efficiency. Our world is changing and shrinking, and so incremental improvement no longer guarantees competitive advantage.

In our experience, business leaders are looking for a new model for success by deploying step changes, creating a capability to implement the strategic imperatives of their organisation. Big business is now embodying a business model where a programme/project director is on the board, responsible for delivering change as it is needed. They oversee the choice and deployment of business changes that deliver competitive advantage consistently, quickly and accurately. As such Project and Programme Managers can be seen as the "Creator of Competitive Advantage" and bring their skills to the boardroom not just the backroom.

At ProjExc we do provide that resource on an interim basis (full or part-time) for businesses, but more importantly, we help organisations to build the capability up for themselves. That in our view is critical, because the competitive advantage of today is the basic competitive requirement of tomorrow.

Want some help for your organisation? Call or email us – you will find the details at www.projexc.com

Project Leadership Competence

Project Management is widely recognised as a critical factor in project success. ProjExc firmly believe that competence in project leadership is an essential part of a successful project manager's toolkit. We find that a successful Project Leader needs to be able to:

•    Develop the project vision
•    Build the project management team and lead the team through the key steps of the project management process
•    Lead the project team through the four stages of team development (Storming, Forming, Norming and Performing)
•    Demonstrate excellent communication skills: verbal, both one-on-one and with a group, and written skills.
•    Understand and use interpersonal relationship skills such as constructive feedback, conflict resolution, managing individual styles and personalities
•    Demonstrate high level facilitation skills
•    Be skilful at influencing, persuading and negotiating across the organization and removing obstacles for the team
•    Have the ability to accept criticism, feedback and input from others
•    Use skills in using tools and approaches such as brainstorming, organizing, decision making, project management, conflict resolution, and so on.
•    Sell and promote the project both within and often outside the organization.

Recognising this, Steve Harland our project leadership specialist has helped us to develop a number of project leadership development modules which can be structured around the specific needs of a business to provide a tailored project leadership programme. Typically these fall into 2 broad categories, i.e. Team Communication and Relationship Building, and Creating a High Performing Project Team.

Six Sigma

This post has been prepared by the ProjExc Manufacturing and Supply Chain Specialist, Clifford Hobbs. It is an excerpt from a more detailed review of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies to improve business performance, which no doubt come to light in future posts on the ProjExc Blog.

Introduction - Six Sigma is a highly customer focused improvement tool that is underpinned by a philosophy of rigorous measurement.

'a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining and maximising business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding of customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data and statistical analysis and diligent attention to managing, improving and reinventing business processes'

The term 'sigma' means "Standard Deviation". Standard Deviation measures the variability in a given distribution or population of events and can therefore be applied to a process.

Motorola developed Six Sigma in the mid 80's. It was then successfully championed by Jack Welsh at General Electric in the 1990's. Their success stories have prompted many western (and in particular USA) manufacturers to adopt Six Sigma. More recently companies in the service sector have started to introduce and adopt Six Sigma practices.

There are many aspects of Six Sigma that are similar to Total Quality Management (TQM), which preceded Six Sigma and in many peoples view has now been superseded by Six Sigma.

Overview - Sigma can be translated into the number of defects per million "events".

Six sigma represents 3.4 defects per million events and is regarded as the ultimate goal for process performance - as close to perfection as is practicable.

This following gives the sigma to defect conversion ratio:

Six Sigma = 3.4 Defects per Million
Five Sigma = 230 Defects per Million
Four Sigma = 6210 Defects per Million
Three Sigma = 66,800 Defects per Million
Two Sigma = 308,000 Defects per Million
One Sigma = 690,000 Defects per Million.

The ultimate goal of a Six Sigma programme is to reduce the number of defects per million opportunities to 3.4 - the equivalent of a 99.997% quality level.

Methodologies - There are different approaches to implementing Six Sigma although the main principles are as follows:

1.    Identify core processes and key customers
2.    Define customer requirements
3.    Measure current performance
4.    Prioritise, analyse and implement improvements
5.    Expand and integrate the Six Sigma system.

The Six Sigma approach is strongly focused on ensuring effective processes from the perspective of the final customer. Critical processes are identified as part of the analysis of customer requirements, and statistical methods are applied to measure the variation of these processes against customer/market determined "tolerances". Techniques such as SPC and Design of Experiments are used to identify the root cause of poor process capability or to monitor processes in real time.

Improvement cycles are core to Six Sigma. An example being as follows:

1.    Prioritise areas of improvement
2.    Define processes that contribute to problems
3.    Measure the capability of each process
4.    Analyse the data
5.    Control process variability
6.    Standardise methods
7.    Integrate methods into design/process cycle

There are many statistical tools that are used within Six Sigma including: Quality Function Deployment, Run Charts, Pareto Charts, Histograms, Fishbone diagrams, Process Mapping, Design of Experiments, Project Definition, F-tests, Chi-Square Tests, Multivariate Studies, Fractional Factorials and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis.

Summary - Six Sigma pulls together well established operational tools and techniques that have been around for a number of decades. Over the last few years it has become increasingly popular with larger organisations and non manufacturing organisations. This is because it is very customer focused and has a strong emphasis on measurement and delivery of quantifiable benefit.

However, introducing Six Sigma is a high profile company-wide event and therefore the consequence of failure is significant. It is very 'resource hungry', and as with any major change initiative, will require total commitment from across the organisation and the infrastructure and organisation to support it.

The focus of much of the approach is on advanced statistical techniques, which can be complex and inappropriate for the majority of organisations, where the real challenge is to build simple and robust foundations for improvement. The advanced tools have their uses within an organisation that has already put in place the basic foundations of operational good practice, but their premature introduction in the wrong circumstances can place Six Sigma in the 'next failed initiative' category, making further improvement even harder.

Success in a Six Sigma program is subject to the same influences as many other change programmes i.e. leadership commitment to the program, involvement of staff at an early stage, integration of the change programme into the business practices of the organisation, good change management skills, and a clear focus on the end goal. Six Sigma Programmes (and Lean Programmes) are usually total company initiatives involving significant roll out costs, training and dedicated resource.

Effective Six Sigma programmes build on organisational capability and culture such as Continuous Improvement, Best Practice, team working and a measurement focus.

Six Sigma should not be viewed as something new or revolutionary and distinct from the day to day disciplines that companies should build in to their operations.

Comments on this posting from ProjExc Manufacturing and Supply Chain Specialist, Clifford Hobbs, are welcomed on the blog, or if you would like to discuss the subject some more, then contact details can be found on the ProjExc corporate website.

10 Tips for Great IT Managers

I recently read a great article on ZDNET providing advice to IT managers challenged by the common problem of reaction overtaking their proaction.  The advice in summary provides 10 great tips:

1. Spend time (and money) developing your people
2. Get to know what your staff really does
3. Don't do it for them
4. Know the business and make sure it knows you
5. Treat communication as a busy, fast-moving, two-way street
6. Encourage everyone to work as a team
7. Provide feedback regularly and let employees know what you want
8. Hire well
9. Understand best IT practices, but don't just make them buzz words
10. Be a good project manager

The advice to be a good project manager is:
"Did your last project suffer scope creep? Most projects, particularly IT ones, don't fail because the project itself was bad. Most failures are a result of weak project management. If you haven't had any formal project management training, find and invest in a good program.  Don't fall into the trap of thinking that simply by having regular meetings, you are managing the project. And since IT usually has more projects than people, be sure to train lead workers with basic project management skills so you can delegate specific aspects of the project or even entire projects to their control."

This is good advice, but only part of the story.  In our experience at ProjExc, it is critically important that those managing projects (especially if it is not their main responsibility) are given the support of appropriate methods/processes and systems which match the methods, otherwise the investment in the training can be wasted or worse.

PM Development

PM Development

At ProjExc we will start to help your organisation to develop its Project Management Capability with a systems review, finding what's right for your business, rather than forcing you into prescriptive ways.

We work with what we call the 3 elements for Project Excellence - tools, processes and people. The review report will highlight the quick wins and longer term development targets that we identify.

This will enable successful methodology selection, development & tailoring, together with suitable project management tool implementation.

This works hand-in-hand with our effective development of the relevant people in your organisation through an appropriate mix of competence assessment, and structured competence development using facilitated team development. We can mix workshops, training events, e-learning and individual development & coaching, all with measured results.