July 2005

PM Network

The professional magazine of the Project Management Institute
www.pmi.org

• In “You have to?” Michael Hatfield criticises the one-size-fits-all approach to the adoption of methodologies which he says is in danger of replacing real business and leadership tactics.

• In “Decisions by Design” Marcia Jedd explains that by focusing on the project outcome, decisions on issue and risk options become easier. The Strategic Decision Method (SDM) is used to determine the project parameters and develop a project profile.

• “Intelligent Business” In discussing how project management competency equates to smart knowledge gathering and best practice, Mike Oakman says, “Project management really is about people and working through people, so [we need to ensure that project managers] are people-focused and not just tool-focused. Communication is paramount to sharing concepts and intelligent strategy deployment.

• “Building Bridges” is an interesting paper by Karen Bannan which draws on common project management themes using the construction industry. For example:

Quality
“Some people are trying to enforce quality against people who have no mandate for quality – they just have to get things done as quickly as possible.”

Change Management
“Uncontrolled changes that lack management can cause a problem to go out of control. It is avoided by implementing two things : effective scope definition and effective change management processes, which both fall under pre-project planning.”
“Unnecessary change should be discouraged by establishing high return-on-investment thresholds for proposed changes. The productivity of all members is always adversely affected by changes and the total impact of change is never fully captured on a change order. The basic question is whether the return on investment in implementing the change significantly overcomes the costs of disrupting the execution of the original plan.”

Business Case
“The use of front-end loading* requires project managers to ask more questions about why a project is being done. Projects that employ front-end loading tend to succeed.”
* front-end loading is a term coined in this context by Prof WG Morris, University College, London

• “Deliverables” has some interesting statistics relating to project performance and the use of PMOs and portfolio techniques. There is a graph showing a positive correlation between development programs for project managers and project performance.
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