project management - ITM Platform | Projects Programs Portfolio

Project offices deal with common difficulties regardless of sector, company size or its geographical distribution. A survey done to more than 400 companies reveals that there are common patterns.

In June 2017, ITM Platform launched an online questionnaire composed of 17 questions aimed at studying the maturity of PMOs. We wanted to discover what Project Managers consider the most difficult factors in the management of a PMO in three different aspects: the organization itself, the human resources/project teams and cultural factors, such as the presence of sponsors that promote the performance of the project office.

The questionnaire has a double dimension.

First, it is designed to find out what are the main barriers of existing project offices.

Second, it allows other companies to find out if they need to implement a PMO in their organizations to face their current challenges.

Depending on the answers, the questionnaire provides tips and resources related to the implementation of a PMO, project management methodologies and change management processes.

We have prepared a simple infographic with the most notable results.

How do you think you would stand in comparison? You can still do the test:

The PMO questionnaire, in detail

The questions

The questions were the followings:

Organizational factors

1.Are at least 30% of the activities of your organization based on projects?

2.Do you have departments or transversal functions?

3.Has your organization grown and needs new procedures?

4.Do you have problems with meeting deadlines, cost, scope and quality?

5.Is the information shared in your organization uniform?

6.Is it difficult for your team members to internalize the priorities of the organization?

7.Have you noticed that the work progresses in a spontaneous or decentralized way?

Factors related to talent

8.Is there a training deficit among your project managers?

9.Is the experience of your project managers unequal?

10.Have you detected that your most valuable workers are over-designated?

11.Are your project members interchangeable between projects?

12.Do you have reliable metrics to measure the performance of your team?

Cultural factors

13.Is there a clear agreement on the priorities of your organization?

14.Do you have enough internal leadership to implement project management?

15.Do you have sponsors among senior managers?

16.Does your organization have a “continuous learning” culture?

17.Do you intend to rely in a new PPM tool?

Here are the results we had at the beginning of December 2017:

It stands out that only question 13, about the consensus of business priorities, obtains a balanced percentage of yes and no. In all the other questions, one of the options is clearly the most common.

Attributes of project-based organizations

A quick consolidation of the answers shows that there are common challenges for PMOs, like features that must be met to be a project-based organization, and other responses that indicate that the organization is not project-oriented.

8 of the questions are useful to define if a company has the main traits of a project-based organization that has a project management office or that needs one.

An organization needs a PMO (and has the conditions to implement it) when:

More than a third part of the time of the employees is dedicated to projects
The company is structured as a “Matrix Organization” (that is to say: it has equipment, projects and transversal functions)
Team members are assigned to professional categories and are interchangeable
There are project leaders with the ability to make decisions that go beyond the unitary managements of projects.
Management understands the need to centralize the administration of the project portfolio.
There is a culture of continuous learning
The advantages of using a portfolio management tool are known

PMO challenges

On the other hand, the questionnaire identified 8 common challenges that motivate the implementation of project management offices:

The organization needs new procedures
Projects are not always successful: There are delays, extra costs or poor result at the time of delivery
Information is not uniform, or there is no single source of validated project data, such as a PPM software
There are difficulties for project teams and project managers to assimilate the priorities and apply them in their daily work
There are differences among project managers in terms of experience, knowledge and training needs
Projects fail because there is a lack of organization and coordination between PMs.
The most valuable experts are overloaded with work and have become bottlenecks.
There are no reliable metrics and KPIs to measure the performance of projects in their execution.

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More visual, better UX: portfolio management made even easier

ITM Platform is the vendor of choice for companies with multi-project portfolios and complex teams that don’t have the purchasing power of a global enterprise. Many of the most dreaded managerial questions, like How are projects doing? or Where is the company headed? can be responded with ease by any company that has adopted ITM Platform’s lightweight portfolio framework.

During the last few weeks we have been busy unrolling the latest release of ITM Platform 2.0. Under the codename “smarter”, the new build is a significant upgrade for a very simple reason: it doesn’t change the scope of the product –it just makes use and navigation more pleasant and productive. This means nobody will have to learn anything new or adapt their work processes to smarter.

But if it’s true that an image is worth a thousand words, it’s even truer that my explanations can’t replace your own experience of the platform.

Do you want to see the new ITM Platform? Open a free trial here

In any case, here’s a quick guide to what has changed so you know what to look for.

3 new productivity tricks

1. Favorite any page

ITM Platform’s navigation is guided by the permanence of a lateral menu that lets you know where you are exactly at any given moment. See, for example, how clearly the user’s view is labelled in this case: Management -> Projects -> Tasks -> Purchases

However, it can take a few clicks to get there. In order to help our customers abbreviate these paths, we have created a “favorite” section with navigation shortcuts in the home page.

In order to save a favorite, simply click on the blank star shape next to the page name. You can save any page in ITM Platform and have a practical list of the areas you are using more intensively!

2. Social communication follows you wherever you go

The new social panel can be open and hidden in any page. It also features full context sensitivity, so you select the type of message that you want to see at any given moment: system alerts and notifications, direct messages, general messages or notes on any aspect of the project you’re currently browsing.

View of the social panel in a Kanban task

3. Quick report export

You can now export full reports to an excel spreadsheet instantaneously, without having to load the data inside ITM Platform. This process optimizes performance and is perfect for any customized reports that are downloaded on a regular basis for project status meetings.

3 graphic improvements

1. New look and feel in the dashboard section…

2. In Gantt charts…

3. And responsive design for all your screens

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The 7th area of knowledge of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) is focused on project communications management. This proposal is addressed to the creation, compilation, distribution, storage, recovery, and final disposition of all the information for it to be accurate and appropriate.

As in any other area, the information follows the communication management 5W and the project manager should take them into account if they want to succeed.

Our starting point are the communications which, sometimes, are even more important than the technical project itself because they allow information to flow normally without misunderstandings or confusions within the project management.

Project communication management is divided into three main parts:

Communications management plan
Use of communications
Control of communications

Communicate with your entire project team with a collaborative tool. Try ITM Platform for free.

1. Project communications plan

The right project communication, both with the members involved and with the interested stakeholders, is crucial for the plan to be carried out successful. Many projects don’t catch on due to poor communications. Therefore, heavy focus must be on the initial strategy that will lead to the achievement of the goals.

The PMBOK guide states that we have to identify basic or standard needs: progress updates and newsletters to investors among others. The contents of these communications must have been planned in advanced and this planning is captured in the strategy itself in two different sections: exit and entry.

The entry or internal communications section includes:

Project management plan
Record of the interested people
Enviromental factors of the enterpirse
Assets of the organizational processes.

In order to do that, as in the two following points, the tools and techniques used are linked with information technology, communication models, methods and meetings.

The exit or external communications section includes:

Management plan
Project documents with their corresponding updates

It cannot be ignored that project planning deliverables are communication tools and that project managers are communicators who collect, unify and distribute information so that the team can act in a coordinated way. The documents are valuable, but they do not speak for themselves.

2. Management of project communications

During the project execution stage, the management of the communication is crucial. The communications with the agents involved or part of the involved target groups must be identified in the communications management plan.

For example, if the project was about developing a programme for the urbanisation of an area, the agents involved or affected by the project could be the owners of the land and the administrations, even though the consumer is the final buyer of the house. If we don’t correctly manage the communication with the agents involved who are not participating actively on the project development, we may receive negative opinions that might complicate or even stop the development of the plan.

We must ensure everything and not facilitate random communications. The creation, distribution and storage of communications is an important process within project management and it requires the full attention of its manager.

3. Project communications control

Considering that communication plays an essential role in the development of our project, having strong and strict control is a mandatory task that provides security and confidence. In order to do so, it is very important to analyse the given results and to make reports from these.

The project manager must be part of the Control and Monitoring team to know, which is the state of each stage, task or activity with the objective of supervising its functioning and to check that it achieves the set goals. In addition, the manager or person in charge of the plan oversees quality control, scope and other control elements and he/she must also ensure that each actor receives appropriate communication and assesses possible changes to improve processes.

The area referred to the entries includes, apart from the ones mentioned before, the registry issuance. The tools and techniques are based on the information management system, the judgement or criteria of an expert and the meetings.

In the exit section, we should include:

Information about the performance at work
Change requests
Plan updates
The documentation that refers to the organizational aspects of the assets that intervene in the processes

This article belongs to a series on the 10 areas of knowledge of PMBOK. Take a look at the articles already published:

The 10 areas of knowledge. 1: Project integration management

Integration with the ITM Platform Project Menu

The 10 areas of knowledge. 2: Project scope management

The 10 areas of knowledge. 3: Project Time Management

The 10 areas of knowledge. 4: Project Cost Management

Managing Project Quality: Insurance case study

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The professional training industry has experienced several game changing trends in the last decade. Until the arrival of the internet, in-company training used to be conducted face to face by consultants with pedagogic methods that resembled very closely what happens in a classroom. In spite of team exercises and group-focused sessions, trainers and coaches were the authority and the source of wisdom, knowledge and expertise.

What has changed in professional training?

Currently, most of the average training courses have been replaced with online experiences because they are cheaper to produce for vendors and take less time off employees’ schedules. An HR officer will always consider the benefits of letting their staff take a course at their own pace, rather than disrupting the daily operations of an entire group to put them together in a room, sit tightly and listen to somebody talk.

The perception has changed radically: if you need to absorb knowledge or just check a formal training requirement, online self-paced courses do the job and are only half as boring as ordinary face-to-face training. Moreover, they can be better tailored to what each learner needs.

Not all changes are for good: very often, online training is poorly designed and based on the very same rudiments of repetition and passive learning. Education guru Roger Schank and founder of Schank Academy is quite right when he points out that the principles of learning by doing are being ignored by most online education providers.

Roger Schank dixit: “Learning happens when someone wants to learn, not when someone wants to teach”

But the new ecosystem will never go back. Nowadays, if you want to justify spending thousands of dollars in offline training, there really needs to be a rationale behind it. You need to deliver outstanding learning experiences that are memorable, that change people’s perspectives and that will have an impact on how learners apply their experience to their job.

Training in project management

Project management has followed the same trend. There are a lot of formal requirements, particularly towards certifications, that can be met with dull courses. But everybody knows that learning the PMBOK by heart won’t turn you magically into a certified project manager: you still need the thousands of hours of practice. And even with that kind of experience, running projects -not to say a project management office- remains challenging for the smartest minds.

The job can be so daunting, even for experienced folks, that additional training is common. It can never harm. In fact, bringing a good coach to the office can be a great way of shedding light on unsurfaced problems or perceptions that might not be obvious to all… perhaps because there are power dynamics silencing some opinions, or simply because nobody ever has a full image of what everyone is doing.

So how does an extraordinary, memorable experience in project management training look like?

A good example is the trend of gamification, also called serious games. Serious games are designed with a purpose, rather than for sheer entertainment.

A great example is to teach the complexities and elaborate dynamics of SCRUM with LEGO simulations, a model developed by Alexey Krivitsky.

Krivitsky isn’t alone in the usage of building blocks to represent and simulate work environments. The importance of LEGO as a driver of serious games is such that the method LEGO Seriousplay has been registered. In this process, participants build their own model responding to the mentor’s questions.

It’s a great way of probing deeper and deeper into participant’s mental models and perceptions, thus helping surface unconscious conflicts in beliefs or priorities between members of a same team. When these differences became apparent, it’s much easier to talk them through and come up with creative solutions.

In fact, LEGO Seriousplay has been used to help project teams with memorable kickoff meetings where members can share, discuss, use metaphors , elaborate and negotiate using the mediation of the built model.

Teaching project management through serious games is a trend in and of itself, with specific research devoted to generating guidelines and extending its practice, or quite accomplished and entertaining online games like shark word or Unlock.

A scene of the project management game Unlock

It’s a brave world out there, but project management professionals have plenty of resources at their fingertips, including the possibility of using ITM Platform to teach project management through real world practice with a cutting-edge tool.

It’s what our educational partners, including many leading institutions, are already doing. Universidad de Barcelona, Monterrey’s Technological Institute and the leading technological university in Brasil are simulating PMOs with ITM Platform, so their students strengthen their core project management capabilities:

Coordinate project work
Align project results with business strategies
Keep everyone in synch
Obtain live data of project progress
Collaborate on a shared environment in real time
Distribute responsibilities according to differentiated roles

Feel free to browse our educational partner page if you’re interested, or inquire about the possibilities of an in-company course with ITM Platform with an email at info@itmplatform.com

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Even though we all have seen Kanban boards, many of the principles that stand out this methodology are often overlooked when in practice.

If you are working in software development, in a technological environment or in a start-up, it is very likely that sometime you have used a Kanban board to visualize which tasks are still pending, which ones are in progress and which ones are already finished.

This is the Kanban MVP: three columns, three stages: to do, in progress, recently completed.

ITM Platform’s personal board sums up the pending work with Kanban.

This simplicity has been, in some way, a blessing, because boards have become hugely popular. However, in a way it has also doomed them – many people either use them or criticize them without knowing in detail the characteristics of this method.

For example, Kanban’s usefulness for managing work that doesn’t fit into any project is commonly ignored.

This makes Kanban an excellent tool accessory to manage a portfolio of projects, in which change demand also includes isolated tasks for which there is no formal coordinator or project manager.

Nevertheless, very few portfolio tools include Kanban among their characteristics; and very few online Kanban versions feature portfolio management.

If you fancy having both things, ITM Platform is on the of the few suppliers that can satisfy you.

Link your Kanban projects with a unified portfolio with ITM Platform.

Kanban vs agile vs SCRUM

In the software development world, it is common to consider that SCRUM is the best agile methodology, if not the only one. However, each methodology has its pros and cons. If you want to have a look at the main differences, here you have a helpful article.

SCRUM, for example, is only used for software projects and, in that field, it replaces traditional waterfall design methods in a much more efficient manner.

However, outside that field, SCRUM becomes very fragile, not to say useless. For example, it cannot be applied to design processes of new products that lack programming elements.

On the other hand, besides being used extensively in development (often mixed with SCRUM methodologies), Kanban has proved its utility in contexts where most of the work volume is operational. The classic example is industrial manufacturing, such as the Toyota factories where this method was invented. But the design of new goods and services of any industry can benefit from its structure.

The 3 principles of Kanban:

Visualize everything that is happening at any given moment. Each element and its stage can be seen within the context of all scheduled work, regardless of whether it’s a project or operational work.
Set caps for work in progress (WIP)There should be a maximum number of tasks that can be managed at the same time, and the visual boundaries of the board help us perceive that limitation. For example, if a quality control unit can manage a maximum of 5 batches, it shouldn’t accept the 6th one until it has one empty spot for it. This might not be very intuitive, but WIP limitation consists, precisely, on visualising bottlenecks in order to prioritise work in those areas and gather the resources required to solve them.
Improves work quantity. As soon as a task is finished, another one from the backlog is started. In order to do that, it is essential that the backlog be correctly managed, prioritised and categorised.

When should Kanban be used?

There are 4 situations in which Kanban should be used:

In operative environments where priorities change very often
When changes in requirements can be introduced any time
When work units are isolated tasks
When the incremental optimization of an already existing process is pursued.

What are Kanban’s advantages?

Maximum transparency
Continuous worflow
Equating the team’s capacity with the ongoing work
Focus on the duration of the cycle (how long it takes a task to go from backlog to be completed)
It allows assigning different WIP maximums to the consecutive stages and redirecting the work to improve the delivery time.

For example, regarding this last point, it’s very normal to have 4 stages within a programming team: To Do, In progress, Code Review and Finished. Allocating a maximum of 2 tasks to Code Review means that In Progress cannot take over more tasks right away. Therefore, programmers must spend some time checking code, a very unrewarding task that is often relegated. Thanks to this, we can avoid the bottleneck of having all the code written, but pending from review.

When teamwork and immediate communication are added to the board, benefits are crystal clear.