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Even in a specialized world like project management, there are current trends and popular kids (often newcomers), while other issues, skills and areas are relegated to a second row or altogether ignored. Here are ITM Platform’s candidates to those second row components in project management that are worth discussing more in-depth.

1. Project Evaluation

Project Evaluation should be a methodical and un-biased assessment of your projects, both completed and ongoing. Post Project Evaluation completes the project management process once the product is in use. It provides feed-back in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, etc. in order to learn for the future. There are two main stages:

Immediately, evaluation seeks to identify isolate learning moments, transform them into lessons so that they can be applied to the next project – that’s the moment they turn into lessons learned
A longer term review to determine what, if any, adjustments should be made to company policies and procedures

2. Project Integration Management

The objective of Project Integration Management is to co-ordinate the diverse components of the project by quality project planning, execution and change control to achieve the required balance of time, cost and quality.

Project integration management ensures the effective integration of a project into the organization’s total business and co-ordination of the diverse components of the project. This includes setting up the planning and control systems for project selection, planning the total project and co-ordinating the activities in the other eight knowledge areas. It also includes working with everyone in the organization who is involved in the project, not only the immediate stakeholders.

3. Management tools and techniques

The objective of using management tools and techniques is to optimize specific activities in the development of a system. Although much of the attention is paid to the selection of planning tools, some areas that are often neglected from this point of view are:

Growth Management. Beyond the adoption of prediction metrics that can measure the growth of an organization, it is essential to have scalable tools to accompany an organization when it goes through a transition between different maturities. By combining ease of use with the full benefits, ITM Platform is specifically designed to support these processes.

Using Project management tools such as ITM Platform will help automate management processes and make your company more efficient.

Talent development should go beyond measurement and remuneration by objectives, seeking to introduce a learning loop between project performance and work performance of team members.

4. End-customer orientation

Although this is the fundamental focus of agile philosophy, putting yourself in the place of the end user is a form of empathy that is always lacking and which there are few formative options. Here are some strategies that demonstrate customer orientation:

Work in startup mode beyond the initial phase of creating an organization: the business orientation is to respond to what the customer is looking for.
Responding swiftly to customer complaints and questions.
Dealing respectfully with community issues.

5. Creativity

Essential to conceive solutions for customer problems, they are typical of engineers and product owners, but obviously extend to project managers. In one way or another, creativity is an essential skill in project management. As opposed to the regular and standardized world of operations, there is no one-size-fits-all for projects.

But creativity in project management is not a voiced desired for the extremely original or the never-seen-before. It’s, put simply, the ability to identify what’s should be happening when placed under a new situation.

Project managers require a taste for recalling their past experiences, and those of the projects they interact with, to come up with a combinatorial solution that applies to the current context. That’s creative project management.

6. Coaching and Development

By employing their coaching skills, supervisors assess the training and professional development of team members with the aim of offering them opportunities for improvement, such as new experiences that allow them to develop new competencies. Although project management certification is a recognized goal, it is often important to be able to identify intermediate training and experience objectives.

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Sometimes we can't start all the projects we would like to. This often happens with internal projects: how many CIOs will undertake all projects that are demanded by the heads of each department? And how many find solid reasons to explain which projects are initiated, in what order and why?

Whenever you have a hard time deciding which projects you should run, you can base your decision on the evaluation of different scenarios. Here's an example.

Try ITM Platform for free and start to prioritize your projects strategically.

An example of using scenarios

Imagine that there are three internal projects that are difficult to compare: the implementation of a new document management system (DMS), the development of a new product and the internal training of the entire sales force. And also, as we said, we do not have enough capacity to finance them all.

Estimation of cost and importance

The first step in setting the scenarios is to assess their cost and importance:

Number	Project	Importance	Cost estimate
1	DMS	17,73%	$15,777.00
2	New product	47,05%	$90,091.00
3	Training	35,22%	$64,144.00

Suppose that the maximum budget that can be allocated to these projects is $150,000, less than the total of 170,000.

How to value a project

With ITM Platform, the value of a project depends on how much it helps to achieve a business objective. This criterion allows you to group very different projects by programs and to develop scenarios more complex than the one of this example.

Test yourself on how to generate scenarios linked to your goals with ITM Platform.

1. Count Scenarios

The next thing is to know what all the alternatives are. In this case, there are 8 scenarios or possible situations considering that we can choose (blue) or discard (red) each of the projects.

123	123	123	123
123	123	123	123

2. Quantify the scenarios

What is the investment required for each of the scenarios?

0.00	$64,144.00 $	$90,091.00 $	$154,235.00
$15,777.00	$79,921.00 $	$105,868.00 $	$170,012.00

As we know that the investment limit is $150,000, we can rule out the two combinations that exceed it.

0.00	$64,144.00	$90,091.00	$154,235.00
$15,777.00	$79,921.00	$105,868.00	$170,012.00

3. Assess the scenarios

What is the value obtained from each of them?

0%	35%	47%	82%
18%	53%	65%	100%

If we did not have limitations, of course, we would choose to launch all the projects. But in applying the financial constraints, we choose the scenario that brings the most value without exceeding budget.

Since two scenarios have been ruled out, it is necessary to choose the combination with the highest value among the remaining ones: 65% of projects 1 and 2.

Is it simple? When you try it on IT Platform you will no longer have doubts when selecting projects.

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airport terminal, airport with control tower , In this blog series we have already spoken about the different types of PMO following the classification of Casey and Peck in 2001, and the tracking function as a "weather station".

When the PMO acquires authority to establish action guidelines, its function can be compared with that of a control tower that establishes when a project can be placed on the runway, deploy the flight and know what the conditions will be of the environment and competition for airspace (ie equipment time and funding).

The control PMO, however, not only makes decisions to guide projects. If the “weather station” measures, the control tower defines procedures and standards. It then monitors its compliance and seeks improvements.

While it is always important to recognize the differences that each PMO must include to fit its parent organization, these are some of the typical functions of a control project management office:

1. Establishes standards for project management

Every project must meet standards that serve as a reference and which should be adjusted as much as possible from the initiation phase. It is recommended that the standards be flexible and allow a certain adaptation to the circumstances that may be present during the project. Standards can refer to different areas, such as:

Information and nomenclature. PMOs often provide report templates that allow the information to be treated in a homogeneous way, facilitating their comparison and analysis between projects. It is convenient to establish what types of reports are provided, the frequency with which they are issued and the structure they present.
Risks. What can be presented at what time, what is the probability that they will occur and what impact they may have on the project.
Configuration of the project or organization. This entails the establishment of responsibilities for each of the people involved in the project, so that important milestones and decisions are taken by the responsible parties in the shortest possible time and with all relevant information.

It is good practice for standards to strike a balance between structuring and facilitating work: they must be sufficiently elaborate to capture the complexity of the organization without falling into bureaucratic excesses. It is about making things simple, for everyone to be clear about what to do, how to do it, what their responsibilities are, and who to communicate their results, their doubts or the problems that may arise.

2. See how to meet the established standards

This consultation should have two approaches:

External focus. Document techniques for measuring risks, quantifying the progress of a project ... See similar cases in other companies and try to apply them to your specific situation.
Internal focus. Make sure that all team members and staff of your company understand and know how to implement the standards you have established. On the other hand, involve them in the detection of errors and in the suggestion of improvements. Everyone should feel part of the team in which they participate and collaborate in their success. A close view, from within, provided by the workers themselves, is an irreplaceable resource.

3. It promotes the compliance and the elevation of the standards

Organizations with a culture of advanced quality will find it easier to take this step. It is also important to consider incentives for those who strive to do their work to the best of their ability, for example, by including the adoption of standards in staff reviews.

4. Participates actively in the improvement of standards

In addition to rewarding those workers who suggest ideas that allow to improve the established standards, from the own direction of the project office it is necessary to work actively in its improvement. Accumulated management data is a great starting point for improvement. It will be important to consider what programs and areas of activity may suffer most from the adoption of change, to cushion the shock through raising awareness.

Process of implementing a control PMO

As with any other change management process that affects the entire organization, the beginning can be quite difficult.

However, there are some factors that help facilitate the process:

An extended recognition of the shortcomings for which it was decided to create the office
Leadership shared between senior management, middle managers and the management of the new PMO
The adoption of complete but simple software such as ITM Platform, which allows organizing projects in programs and analyzing complex information in a unified way.

If these conditions are not available, or if implementation difficulties are high, it may be advisable to start with a set of more basic functions, related to the centralization of information and the facilitation of decisions.

Being rigorous and exhaustive in the data collection allows you to gain the trust of the clients and the managers, who will later be more likely to adopt the changes proposed by the PMO, that could introduce new management systems for projects gradually.