Last week I wrote about the 5 critical success factors for project, programme and portfolio management flagged by the PMI Pulse of the Profession research report. The study, which was released last month, also looked at trends to watch this year.
PMI says that slow economic growth and shifting market priorities are driving organizations to adopt increasingly innovative approaches to growth. This year (even though we are already a quarter of the way through it) PMI believes that companies will use a wide variety of techniques to promote that growth and focus on creating and maintaining a competitive advantage. The research team has identified 5 trends. Let’s look at each of these.
1. Portfolio management
The difficult economy means that businesses will continue to prioritize project portfolio management. The research shows that more than half of the survey respondents say that project portfolio management is in frequent use in their organizations. This is an increase of 5% over the results from last year, which shows that the use – in a structured way – of portfolio management is on the rise.
Over two-thirds of organizations now have a Project Management Office (PMO) as well, which is another contributing factor to the increase in portfolio management. In times when non-valuable services are being cut, it is good to see that the value of the PMO is being recognized for selecting and managing projects to successful completion.
2. Iterative project management
Companies need to be more nimble and respond to market conditions quickly. This has driven an increase in the rise of what PMI calls “organizational agility”. PMI believes this will lead to the increased use of iterative and incremental project management methods such as Agile.
The survey also reports that 63% of companies have standardized their project management practices across all or most of their enterprise. Have they standardized to Agile methods? Or are their standard approaches flexible enough to incorporate agile ways of working when this is the most appropriate way to get projects done? You can be standardized and still nimble, in my opinion, and I wonder if failing to realize that is why the remaining 37% of companies haven’t standardized their project approaches yet.
3. Change and risk management
Being iterative is great when the projects allow this way of working, but you still need solid change and risk management practices. The PMI study identifies that as organizations continue to strive for agility, change management and project risk management will become even more important core competencies.
These are part of the standard tool kit for project managers, so we shouldn’t have any difficulties rising to the challenge.
4. Talent development
In a competitive market, companies can take the pick of their employees. It is more costly to hire a new employee than to keep an existing one, so it is in the interest of enterprises to hold on to their staff. The experienced staff knows the ways of working and the organizational culture, which can create cultural shortcuts and make getting projects done an easier task.
Developing project management teams is a way of ensuring that companies keep their competitive edge. You do want some new ideas in the team, so some turnover is good, but you also need experienced, well-trained people to lead significant change projects.
5. Benefits realization
Benefits. What’s the point of doing projects unless we get some of those, right? Unsurprisingly, PMI has identified that in these difficult economic conditions, organizations have been and will continue to increase their focus on benefits realization as a measure of project success.
Fortunately, we seem to be doing OK with delivering benefits. The survey reports that 64% of projects successfully met their original goals and business intent in 2011. Hurrah! What are you doing to ensure your projects deliver to their stated benefits? Assuming, of course, that your project business case has identified the benefits of the project in the first place - using a tool like Seavus DropMind at the beginning of the project to capture all the possible benefits is one way of drawing on the skills of the team to identify potential benefits and how you will track them.
These 5 trends may not seem astounding – because they are not. This year, it seems to me as if companies are fastening down the hatches and focusing on being better at the basics. There is no silver bullet that will fix all project problems. It’s not about qualifications or new software. It’s about being very, very good at the fundamentals of project management, and using that as a basis to deliver solid professional projects. That’s the way that companies will gain a competitive edge, see a return on their investment, reduce organizational risk and save money.