There is a constant debate about what is best for managing Agile or Waterfall projects. Flexible methodologies seem to be better because the result is immediately available, and you can stop at any time. The cascade method is more applicable to large projects, such as the construction of a nuclear power plant.

These arguments have always been and always have been incomprehensible to me. After all, first of all, we must meet or exceed the customer’s expectations, so the project management system must be such as to interact with the customer as much as possible, demonstrate results, form expectations, and discard unnecessary things. It doesn’t matter whether you fill in the Backlog or WBS, whether you allocate the Product Owner role or not. It has already reached anecdotal situations when the” fashion” for the word Agile is so secure that employees can only express their attitude about the effectiveness of this method in a whisper in a private conversation, so as not to pass for retrogrades and ineffective employees.

We must admit that many coaches use these disputes only as a speculative opportunity to attract attention to their courses. But some believe that Agile is something new, modern, previously unknown, and Waterfall is something archaic, useless, and labour-intensive.

Yesterday, for example, I came across an interesting article, “4 Reasons Why Waterfall isn’t a Fit for your Team”.

In it, the Waterfall is blown to smithereens, and seven assumptions are used for this purpose. Or at least I counted that many.

Assumption 1: A Waterfall is an approach where one stage sequentially follows another.

Of course, this is not the case. Any project manager knows that the most obvious way to speed up work is to parallelize it. Only in this case, we also know that integration risks are increasing, and we need to provide additional effort on testing the results obtained. We even know that there are projects of this scale that are divided into dozens of parallel threads, the results of which are tested at certain points, called “quality gates.” And it would be impossible to complete these projects without a calendar plan or a technical task. Therefore, we can say that Waterfall not only does not prevent us from performing work in parallel but also suggests that we will need to do something with the integration of the results obtained.

Assumption 2: Waterfall prevents changes.

It does not prevent but allows you to identify the need for changes and evaluate them. You can’t do without an analogy here. Imagine that you are building a house. It has windows of the same size, and the supplier is ready to ship you windows of a different size. It would be better if you did not have a plan where you calculated all the loads, the necessary overlap and the number of bricks? Or is it better to evaluate the changes in advance and choose the best solution: take new windows and redo the project or search for windows from other suppliers? In some cases, refusing to change is not a bad thing. For some reason, we have begun to forget that following the plan is a good thing, and changes do not always add value. Moreover, having a plan allows us to understand that we are dealing with a “change” that deviates from the original task statement.

Assumption 3: Waterfall is not focused on creating a product.

This means that when we see only works in the work plan; we focus on “work,” completely forgetting that we need to get something “product.” So is this a lack of method or omission of the project manager who did not provide for the regular receipt of “products” in the plan and an assessment of their suitability for the customer? You decide what to put in your plans: a description of the work performed or a story of the necessary results. This is entirely independent of the method used. You can also use agile to plan “work execution” rather than” getting results.”

Assumption 4: the Waterfall is a wasteful detailed planning work.

This is a common problem for new tasks: I can imagine what I need to get, but I have absolutely no idea how I should get it. So why should I plan ahead until the very end if I don’t know what will happen in a month? The answer is that you don’t need to plan something you don’t know. I first got acquainted with PMBoK when it was already in the third edition, but I am sure that in the first edition, the “incoming wave” method was already present. The essence of it is that you plan only the period closest to you and evaluate all the others expertly, with the degree of accuracy that is sufficient for you to make a decision about the feasibility of implementing the project. As a result, you have a detailed estimate of the cost of the next work and an expert view of the value of the entire project. We use similar methods, such as planning poker, in agile.

Assumption 5: The client doesn’t know what they want, and Waterfall exacerbates this problem.

First, the client does not always is unknown what he wants. I had projects where the client knew exactly what they wanted. Secondly, if the client still does not know what he wants, he can still think about it in advance, spend time on it. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the client says “great” after the first, second, third, or fourth sprint, and after the fifth, “this is not what I wanted”? Just as Waterfall does not cancel regular communication with the customer, Waterfall does not prevent the consistent demonstration of results and validation by the customer. Here the problem is not in the method, but in the fact that we need to regularly check with the client that we are doing what he needs.

Assumption 6: Waterfall involves testing at later stages when any changes are costly.

This is not a question of the method, but the project manager. If we see that the schedule involves later testing, these are additional risks. Testing should be carried out immediately after the development, and you should organize the work in this way in any method of organizing project management.

Assumption 7: In Waterfall, the client can be blackmailed with fixed requirements.

Also, a theoretical argument. We all understand that a satisfied customer is the foundation of any business. A happy customer will come to us again, bring their friends. Therefore, no one will usually shake the signed requirements in front of the client if the client is important. On the other hand, it is useful to remind the client that we deviate from the original task statement, so that decisions will be more balanced and conscious. Moreover, you can also do this by referring to a series of completed sprints during the implementation of the agile project.

As you can see, there are no terrible project implementation methods as well as there are no management methods that guarantee better results compared to others. When choosing a project implementation method for yourself, first of all, do not turn off your head, evaluate which way is best suited to a specific situation, and, if necessary, combine them.

I often hear a question from novice project managers – to what degree of detail to paint your calendar plan? I usually answer this question briefly: with the degree of detail that will allow you to correctly manage the project and promptly identify if something went wrong, but at the same time, so that the number of works fits into several hundred because otherwise, it will be difficult to control the overall picture.

However, let’s focus on this issue in more detail.

So, the first principle: be sure to decompose the work.

If your plan is too top-level, your project will run slower. This will happen because the project is a coordinated team effort. Most often, the result is not immediately transmitted to the customer but goes through several stages of production or “rework,” i.e. when the results of one group’s work are used by another group within the project team. And if the work is divided too large, then the errors inherent in the work of one group will be revealed late, only at the time of transmitting the results to the next group or even to the customer’s specialists. I. e. the smaller the work is divided, the earlier it will be possible to identify the error and correct the performers.

On the other hand, the second principle applies: Reasonable sufficiency in decomposition.

Indeed, if you get too carried away with decomposition, you can create problems for yourself at the implementation stage. First, you will have to spend much time on micromanagement. Each work must be tested and accepted, which means that you will have to decide on every small issue that could be left to the performer. Secondly, when you reduce the amount of work, you reduce the degree of responsibility of performers, reduce their professional interest. Third, with a large number of small jobs, it becomes difficult to determine priorities for their implementation, which will inevitably lead to the execution of light and unimportant work before the performance of important, but more time-consuming.

So, to sum up. The decomposition of works is necessary when the results of the work of one contractor will be used by another contractor to prepare the final product of the project. Therefore, the first milestones of decomposition are the moments when the product moves from one performer to another. At the same time, we must make sure that this milestone does not account for too much work performed, to reduce the number of corrections in case the transferred product does not meet the requirements. To do this, we must provide for regular transmission of results between performers, for example, every 2-3 weeks. This way, we will improve interaction within the team and not spend much time on micromanagement.

Successful projects for you!

The popularity of Agile today exceeds all boundaries. Everyone talks about it at conferences on project management, analyzes it in numerous articles, and publishes photos of whiteboards in social networks. I even heard mentions of Agile on the First channel.

This popularity did not arise from scratch. Agile allows you to bypass the bureaucratic procedures inherent in “traditional project management,” eliminate or significantly transform the role of the project manager, and reduce losses on “excessive planning.”

But on the other hand, the high popularity leads to the fact that many teams approach the implementation without a clear understanding of the applicability of Agile for their company. As a result, the company does not get the expected benefits, and the project team is disappointed in the new management method. Just today, I read an excellent article on this topic, “Selecting a Project Management Methodology for Your Organization.” I want to share with you the most exciting moments from this article, as well as my thoughts on this issue.

It is imperative that organizations determine if they are good candidates for agile before they rush to make changes and potentially set themselves up for disappointment.

I can’t disagree. First of all, you should evaluate the applicability of Agile principles to the management system that has developed in the company. Agile requires the appropriate environment and will not work in the wrong context.

“Being agile” is much more involved than the project management methodology.

Also a valuable thought. Often, we believe that introducing a new methodology to a company will solve all the problems, but we forget that the method does not revolutionize just by its appearance. The company itself must comply with the Agile principles to support the rules that will be incorporated into the methodology.

If the root cause analysis indicates the number of change controls is due to indecision of the person(s) providing requirements, agile may not be a viable solution, as effective agile frameworks require empowered decision makers.

The author suggests, first of all, to understand what is inefficient in the existing management system and determine the cause. The reason may be that the use of Agile will only exacerbate the problem; even more, it will manifest itself. If you don’t have a strong Product Owner, or if the customer is not ready to receive regular training on new project products, consider whether flexible management methods apply to you.

This should help avoid a common mistake of “Let’s just train our people on a new methodology and we’re done.”

Employee training is an essential and necessary part of changes. But not the only one. Just by training your employees, you will not change the management system. Training should be part of a plan to change the management system. Often I observe that everything is limited to training. Employees will forget what they were taught in 3 months if they do not use their knowledge in practice.

However, the key to implementing any level of change to an organization must be based on actual data—and one cannot take the decision lightly. Be willing to perform an organizational assessment and develop a change/adoption plan based on its result; that will set your specific organization on the path to achieving the results desired.

This is the last thought that I have singled out for myself, but it is crucial. I always recommend that you audit your project management system before making changes. When you rely on the results of current and professional research of the company, you can develop the right solutions. And Agile may or may not be part of the development plan. When creating competitive advantages, it is vital to understand and build on your strengths. What is often forgotten when “in a hurry” to implement Agile by order of the management.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the competition between Agile and Waterfall, fueled by publications that are sometimes deliberately provocative, is often artificial. Agile and Waterfall are both right and left hands, use the method that best suits your project in this environment.

Another typical mistake when implementing project management, which we will discuss in this article, the negative consequences of which are not immediately noticeable, but begin to increase as the maturity of project management in the organization increases, is ignoring the issues of accumulation of successful experience.

After the first steps to implement project management in the organization, the results are apparent; the share of successful projects increases, and the transparency and consistency of management increases. However, without a well-thought-out system for sharing project experience between project managers, and without building a database of project knowledge, your organization will become increasingly dependent on the personal qualities and success of project managers. If they leave or are employed on other projects, you will not be able to guarantee the quality of the project.

The project management system must be improved continuously. Successful practices from a single project should become part of the system. To provide our clients with continuous improvement of their project management systems, we offer audit services for project management systems and project management information systems. Once you have implemented a project management system, after some time, you may notice that the system is no longer effective. This is because the company is growing, developing and expanding, and the project management system, instead of developing with the company, remains the same. Audit of project management systems will help to identify the level of the current development of the system and its compliance with the company’s level of development, strategic goals and current needs. Based on the results of the audit, we provide the customer with a detailed report and a plan for the development of the project management system.

Let’s return to the main elements of the project management system. So, you have a development plan, the regulations are approved and executed, and the management, with the help of the project management office, regularly monitors and coordinates project activities. What’s next? And then, you need to take care of the convenience of your project managers and your project office.

Practice shows that as the number of projects increases, the need for centralized coordination of resources and preparation of consolidated analytics increases. If you don’t provide your project office and project teams with a well-developed project management information system, then gradually you will begin to drown in the flow of reports, resource allocation approvals, budgets, and project execution calculations. For the project office, coordinating the project portfolio will become an administrative nightmare.

Today, the choice of solutions for project management automation is quite extensive. However, we did not have a single implementation when the customer was satisfied with the basic functionality of the project management information system that the developer initially laid down. No matter how functional and developed the solution is, you will most likely want to make changes to it that align specifics of your organization’s business process. If we talk about Microsoft solutions, you should understand that you are buying the final solution, and the improvements that you want to implement are possible but will be quite expensive.

Another common mistake when choosing IT-platform is that at the initial stage of implementation, the possibility of integrating the project management information system with the company’s accounting systems is not taken into account. It is much more convenient when the list of employees is automatically updated based on information from the personnel department when payment of the invoice is automatically displayed in the project budget, and registration in the system of the act of acceptance and transfer of works is automatically linked to the project calendar plan. With a strong team of developers, we offer our clients services for implementing project management information systems, as well as providing services for further support and development of the system.

Most likely, to support the changes that are taking place in the company, you will decide to allocate a separate structure – the project management office. The filter that the project management office builds when determining to open projects leads to the fact that small and often conflicting projects are no longer initiated. This generally results in saving the company’s resources by reducing the number of small projects that are implemented in a decentralized manner without a single development plan. Also, balanced resource coordination allows employees to switch less from task to task and, as a result, work more productively.

The control and accounting function of the project management office is also vital for the company’s management. All projects are evaluated according to the same criteria and management has the opportunity to compare and select projects. The control and accounting function has gained significant importance in state bodies, where the project management office is understood as a structure that more closely monitors the execution of orders issued to the project team.

But the project management office will not work correctly if you have a blurry definition of the functions of this department. And you should define the services depending on what type of project management office you want to organize. If the project office is integrated into an existing management structure that manages the implementation of projects, but it is necessary to increase the transparency of management, then it is logical to create a so-called “project office” with an additional consulting function. If your project management office coordinates commercial projects and the main task of the office is to maximize the profitability of the project portfolio, then a centralized model of the project management office will bring more results.

The project management office ensures transparency of the structure of all projects in the organization, increasing the level of coordination and consistency. It provides more clarity by focusing on strategy, loosens the boundaries between the company’s divisions, and creates and maintains an internal environment for effective project management. If you are starting to form a project management office, our specialists will help you select employees for your project management office by conducting a search, initial selection and comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

If you are not ready to create your own project office, but you understand the importance of this department to implement and maintain the project methodology in the organization, you can contact me for outsourcing project office functions. Outsourcing of tasks of the project office is a service that allows you to save your time and reduce costs in most cases. If a company decides to implement project management or faces a new niche for itself, trying to achieve everything on its own, it ultimately leads to losses.

Experimenting on its own, starting from scratch, the company spends a significant amount of time and resources, reducing production rates, distracting key employees. All this can be avoided by attracting project specialist for the duration of the entire project or at critical points of the project. As a result, employees of the customer company get a unique opportunity, without wasting time searching for the right solutions, to use the knowledge and experience of the specialist and avoid many mistakes.

Another problem that we often encounter when implementing project management applies to organizations that add a project management structure on top of an existing one. In other words, when the matrix management structure is formed. There are two management levels in the organization: the current functional level in the organization, and the newly introduced one – the project one. Misalignment of these contours in most cases leads to the levelling of the results of the control system restructuring, and sometimes to deterioration of the system’s manageability as a whole.

Particular attention should be paid to the feasibility of solutions included in the project management regulations. It is often tempting to use examples developed in other organizations to write your own rules. However, a direct transfer of practices and approaches that have been successfully applied in one organization is likely to fail within another organization. Each company is unique in its characteristics and management features, so the proposed solutions should always be tested for feasibility. When working out the project management regulations, we always pay special attention to the organizational and role structure of management, carefully distributing the powers and responsibilities of participants, thus reducing matrix conflicts. It is also worth mentioning that to overcome the matrix conflict, the involvement of the top management of the organization, which we noted earlier, is essential. If the organization’s manager demonstrates his interest in building a project-oriented management system, he regularly uses the management system to monitor project implementation. When adjusting the project portfolio, the number of matrix conflicts decreases.

After you develop and approve the regulations, you will need to organize training for employees. All participants in the project activity should be guided by the established rules, understand the background to the appearance of specific requirements in the regulations and be motivated to fulfill them.

The resistance of employees often hinders the introduction of innovations, and sometimes reduces all efforts to nothing. Do not forget that ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. The success of the company is primarily the success of its project teams, so make sure that your employees are the most competent specialists. I will help you choose the most suitable training course for your employees, organize and conduct it. You can take the training either on the site of your training center or ask me to arrange a field session for your employees.

The quality of a project management system is determined by how well its blocks are coordinated and worked out. And the first problem that the implementation team often faces is the lack of involvement of management in the process of upcoming changes. Usually, management actually shows a genuine interest in implementing project management, but the project does not provide activities that allow employees to demonstrate their enthusiasm. To avoid this problem, schedule General meetings with employees at the initial stage of implementation, allowing you to show interest in the emergence of project management in the organization.

At the first stage, the main task is to formulate a plan for the development of project management in your organization, to ensure the involvement of management in the process of organizational changes and to demonstrate to employees that the incipient changes are carefully planned and develop both the organization as a whole and each employee.

Depending on the depth of development, project-oriented activities in the company can be represented as:

• implementation of individual projects;
• implementation of project portfolios;
• program implementation;
• implementation of project-oriented activities in General within a multi-project environment.

In general, the depth of project management development is related to which objects (projects, portfolios, programs) are managed in the organization. Based on the level that your organization has reached, the activities that need to be included in the project management system development plan will also be determined. For example, if you have successfully organized the management of single projects and portfolios of projects, and now you face the challenge of managing software projects, it is imperative for you to determine the features of implementation phase completion of projects. A highlight of project programs is a significant shift in the level of effort towards the implementation and completion phases. This is due to the peak of integration processes at the end of the implementation of projects included in the program, bringing together parallel work performed, as well as the need to correct accumulated errors detected during the integration of project results.

To develop a development plan at the proper professional level, you will need to analyze the readiness of the management system for upcoming innovations, coordinate your ideas with the management’s vision, explain the best and applicable project management practices for your organization, correctly identify stakeholders and take their interests into account. At this stage, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our customers ‘ business processes, determine the organization’s readiness to implement project management, and jointly develop a development plan that takes into account the key features of the organization. Attracting an external consultant at this stage is also justified because it allows you to evaluate the organization’s activities with a fresh look and develop a development plan based not only on the experience of the company’s employees but also on the expertise of the consultant involved.

It is imperative to carry out the initial regulation of project management. At this stage, you will have a choice.

The first way is to develop regulations and start implementing projects only after they are approved. This option is suitable for you if the start of project implementation is not possible without delineating the responsibilities and powers of stakeholders, formalizing the processes for implementing the project management information system and establishing rules for project implementation that all project managers must start executing simultaneously.

If this path is more suitable for you, then the problems that you will have to face are obvious. The fact is that it is challenging at the initial stage, without testing solutions in practice, to provide a procedure for implementing projects that will be feasible in all aspects, be useful and take into account all the features of the organization. The experience of an external consultant who has developed and implemented more than one project management system will allow you to prepare professional project management regulations at the first attempt and not miss the necessary details.

However, if this is possible, I recommend using the second way to develop the regulation – pilot implementation. If you are not sure how to formalize project activities, where to start work, which is essential for your management system, and what is secondary – begin with a pilot project. Select a project that is important to you and can be implemented within a few months, assign it to the head of your most potent project manager and set him an additional task to get not only the products provided by the project but also to develop regulations for the implementation of similar projects. Thus, your rules will include only those things that bring results within the framework of the project implementation, only those requirements without which the project implementation is impossible. Perhaps, the introduction of changes by parallel testing them in practice is the most effective way to develop project management regulations.

It would be best if you started with pilot projects for another reason. In addition to defining the work rules that apply to your organization when implementing a pilot project, you will also prove the effectiveness of the project approach by the fact that the pilot project was completed.

Naturally, for such projects, it is crucial to have a professional team with sufficient experience to offer solutions in the event of various obstacles to implementation, and adequate speed to formalize the process in a short time, so as not to delay the receipt of the leading products of the project. The pilot project team should include both the customer’s specialists who are sensitive and understand the specifics of their business and the consultant’s specialists who have the necessary experience in building project management systems and organizing project offices. It is on the pilot project that practices will be fixed, which are translated into subsequent projects, so it is not very easy to overestimate the importance of attracting the most valuable employees to pilot projects, both on the part of the organization and the role of the consultant.

However, the implementation of the project management system through pilot projects has its drawbacks, which are that the degree of responsibility and influence of the pilot project manager on the development of project management regulations increases. In this case, there is a conflict of interest when the pilot project manager tries to make life easier for project managers by infringing on the benefits of other participants while working out the project management procedures. Focusing on the implementation of a single project within the framework of the pilot implementation can have a negative effect when errors are embedded in the regulations that do not allow the solution to be replicated on other projects of the organization. Again, forming a mixed project implementation team will help prevent such mistakes. In this case, you can rest assured that the best practices will be recorded and will form the basis of the project management regulations.

“A large project requires a huge number of highly qualified specialists, and we don’t want to approach each project as if we are starting over.”
John Kinungi, it Director at OHSU

If you are thinking about increasing the effectiveness of your projects, then you should implement this systematically. At the moment, project management systems are applied not only in commercial project-oriented companies but also actively integrated into public administration at an entirely new level, which was impossible to imagine ten years ago. If earlier project management was considered as a separate activity, applicable where targeted investment management is required, now the principles of project management cover all areas of the organization’s operations.

There are two main reasons for this. First, the current position of the Russian economy determines the careful planning of funds spent. Second, increased competition poses new challenges to companies in terms of their performance and the ability of their management systems to adapt flexibly and respond to changing conditions promptly. In these conditions, competent project management becomes a competitive advantage that allows the company to spend resources only where it is necessary and ensure that results are obtained on issues that are strategically important for the company. The project-oriented management style has proven to be effective, both in terms of increasing the transparency of management and in terms of flexibility and the ability to respond to changes in the external environment of the project promptly.

But to meet the expectations placed on project management, it is necessary to build a project management system thoughtfully. Our practical experience in implementing project management systems, both in our clients ‘ organizations and in our group of companies, reveals the main problems that you will have to face along the way. Many of these problems can be characterized as a lack of systematic implementation of project management when some aspects of the system remain forgotten or insufficiently developed.

First, let’s define what we mean by the “project management system” to clearly understand the components of this system and communicate in the same language. The project management system generally consists of 6 interconnected blocks.

Blocks of the corportate project management system

Strategy. First of all, you need to determine the state of project management in your organization and what tasks are a priority for its development.

Regulations and instructions. Next, you must define the rules for the projects that will be included in your system. Although no two projects are the same, and each time you have to face something new that is not described in the regulations, the methodology is still essential. It allows you to apply standard proven techniques wherever possible and saves you time so that you can focus on what is unique and meaningful about your project.

Templates. Organizational structure. IT-solution. The project manager and other participants will need assistance in implementing the project. To prevent the project team from being distracted by bureaucratic procedures, lengthy approvals, and routine operations, you will need to provide them with document templates and work out a management structure that will facilitate the project’s implementation, rather than oppose it. Another critical component of the system is the IT-solution, which will help the project manager and the team to perform operational project management, jointly develop and store documents, communicate and report on the project implementation to the administration.

Trained and motivated staff. Ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers, as well as improving the competencies of the project team, is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. Investing in the development of employee competencies helps to promote project management.

The popularity of Agile today exceeds all boundaries. Everyone talks about it at conferences on project management, analyzes it in numerous articles, and publishes photos of whiteboards in social networks. I even heard mentions of Agile on the First channel.

This popularity did not arise from scratch. Agile allows you to bypass the bureaucratic procedures inherent in “traditional project management,” eliminate or significantly transform the role of the project manager, and reduce losses on “excessive planning.”

But on the other hand, the high popularity leads to the fact that many teams approach the implementation without a clear understanding of the applicability of Agile for their company. As a result, the company does not get the expected benefits, and the project team is disappointed in the new management method. Just today, I read an excellent article on this topic, “Selecting a Project Management Methodology for Your Organization.” I want to share with you the most exciting moments from this article, as well as my thoughts on this issue.

It is imperative that organizations determine if they are good candidates for agile before they rush to make changes and potentially set themselves up for disappointment.

I can’t disagree. First of all, you should evaluate the applicability of Agile principles to the management system that has developed in the company. Agile requires the appropriate environment and will not work in the wrong context.

“Being agile” is much more involved than the project management methodology.

Also a valuable thought. Often, we believe that introducing a new methodology to a company will solve all the problems, but we forget that the method does not revolutionize just by its appearance. The company itself must comply with the Agile principles to support the rules that will be incorporated into the methodology.

If the root cause analysis indicates the number of change controls is due to indecision of the person(s) providing requirements, agile may not be a viable solution, as effective agile frameworks require empowered decision makers.

The author suggests, first of all, to understand what is inefficient in the existing management system and determine the cause. The reason may be that the use of Agile will only exacerbate the problem; even more, it will manifest itself. If you don’t have a strong Product Owner, or if the customer is not ready to receive regular training on new project products, consider whether flexible management methods apply to you.

This should help avoid a common mistake of “Let’s just train our people on a new methodology and we’re done.”

Employee training is an essential and necessary part of changes. But not the only one. Just by training your employees, you will not change the management system. Training should be part of a plan to change the management system. Often I observe that everything is limited to training. Employees will forget what they were taught in 3 months if they do not use their knowledge in practice.

However, the key to implementing any level of change to an organization must be based on actual data—and one cannot take the decision lightly. Be willing to perform an organizational assessment and develop a change/adoption plan based on its result; that will set your specific organization on the path to achieving the results desired.

This is the last thought that I have singled out for myself, but it is crucial. I always recommend that you audit your project management system before making changes. When you rely on the results of current and professional research of the company, you can develop the right solutions. And Agile may or may not be part of the development plan. When creating competitive advantages, it is vital to understand and build on your strengths. What is often forgotten when “in a hurry” to implement Agile by order of the management.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the competition between Agile and Waterfall, fueled by publications that are sometimes deliberately provocative, is often artificial. Agile and Waterfall are both right and left hands, use the method that best suits your project in this environment.

Another typical mistake when implementing project management, which we will discuss in this article, the negative consequences of which are not immediately noticeable, but begin to increase as the maturity of project management in the organization increases, is ignoring the issues of accumulation of successful experience.

After the first steps to implement project management in the organization, the results are apparent; the share of successful projects increases, and the transparency and consistency of management increases. However, without a well-thought-out system for sharing project experience between project managers, and without building a database of project knowledge, your organization will become increasingly dependent on the personal qualities and success of project managers. If they leave or are employed on other projects, you will not be able to guarantee the quality of the project.

The project management system must be improved continuously. Successful practices from a single project should become part of the system. To provide our clients with continuous improvement of their project management systems, we offer audit services for project management systems and project management information systems. Once you have implemented a project management system, after some time, you may notice that the system is no longer effective. This is because the company is growing, developing and expanding, and the project management system, instead of developing with the company, remains the same. Audit of project management systems will help to identify the level of the current development of the system and its compliance with the company’s level of development, strategic goals and current needs. Based on the results of the audit, we provide the customer with a detailed report and a plan for the development of the project management system.

Most likely, to support the changes that are taking place in the company, you will decide to allocate a separate structure – the project management office. The filter that the project management office builds when determining to open projects leads to the fact that small and often conflicting projects are no longer initiated. This generally results in saving the company’s resources by reducing the number of small projects that are implemented in a decentralized manner without a single development plan. Also, balanced resource coordination allows employees to switch less from task to task and, as a result, work more productively.

The control and accounting function of the project management office is also vital for the company’s management. All projects are evaluated according to the same criteria and management has the opportunity to compare and select projects. The control and accounting function has gained significant importance in state bodies, where the project management office is understood as a structure that more closely monitors the execution of orders issued to the project team.

But the project management office will not work correctly if you have a blurry definition of the functions of this department. And you should define the services depending on what type of project management office you want to organize. If the project office is integrated into an existing management structure that manages the implementation of projects, but it is necessary to increase the transparency of management, then it is logical to create a so-called “project office” with an additional consulting function. If your project management office coordinates commercial projects and the main task of the office is to maximize the profitability of the project portfolio, then a centralized model of the project management office will bring more results.

The project management office ensures transparency of the structure of all projects in the organization, increasing the level of coordination and consistency. It provides more clarity by focusing on strategy, loosens the boundaries between the company’s divisions, and creates and maintains an internal environment for effective project management. If you are starting to form a project management office, our specialists will help you select employees for your project management office by conducting a search, initial selection and comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

If you are not ready to create your own project office, but you understand the importance of this department to implement and maintain the project methodology in the organization, you can contact me for outsourcing project office functions. Outsourcing of tasks of the project office is a service that allows you to save your time and reduce costs in most cases. If a company decides to implement project management or faces a new niche for itself, trying to achieve everything on its own, it ultimately leads to losses.

Experimenting on its own, starting from scratch, the company spends a significant amount of time and resources, reducing production rates, distracting key employees. All this can be avoided by attracting project specialist for the duration of the entire project or at critical points of the project. As a result, employees of the customer company get a unique opportunity, without wasting time searching for the right solutions, to use the knowledge and experience of the specialist and avoid many mistakes.

Another problem that we often encounter when implementing project management applies to organizations that add a project management structure on top of an existing one. In other words, when the matrix management structure is formed. There are two management levels in the organization: the current functional level in the organization, and the newly introduced one – the project one. Misalignment of these contours in most cases leads to the levelling of the results of the control system restructuring, and sometimes to deterioration of the system’s manageability as a whole.

Particular attention should be paid to the feasibility of solutions included in the project management regulations. It is often tempting to use examples developed in other organizations to write your own rules. However, a direct transfer of practices and approaches that have been successfully applied in one organization is likely to fail within another organization. Each company is unique in its characteristics and management features, so the proposed solutions should always be tested for feasibility. When working out the project management regulations, we always pay special attention to the organizational and role structure of management, carefully distributing the powers and responsibilities of participants, thus reducing matrix conflicts. It is also worth mentioning that to overcome the matrix conflict, the involvement of the top management of the organization, which we noted earlier, is essential. If the organization’s manager demonstrates his interest in building a project-oriented management system, he regularly uses the management system to monitor project implementation. When adjusting the project portfolio, the number of matrix conflicts decreases.

After you develop and approve the regulations, you will need to organize training for employees. All participants in the project activity should be guided by the established rules, understand the background to the appearance of specific requirements in the regulations and be motivated to fulfill them.

The resistance of employees often hinders the introduction of innovations, and sometimes reduces all efforts to nothing. Do not forget that ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. The success of the company is primarily the success of its project teams, so make sure that your employees are the most competent specialists. I will help you choose the most suitable training course for your employees, organize and conduct it. You can take the training either on the site of your training center or ask me to arrange a field session for your employees.

The quality of a project management system is determined by how well its blocks are coordinated and worked out. And the first problem that the implementation team often faces is the lack of involvement of management in the process of upcoming changes. Usually, management actually shows a genuine interest in implementing project management, but the project does not provide activities that allow employees to demonstrate their enthusiasm. To avoid this problem, schedule General meetings with employees at the initial stage of implementation, allowing you to show interest in the emergence of project management in the organization.

At the first stage, the main task is to formulate a plan for the development of project management in your organization, to ensure the involvement of management in the process of organizational changes and to demonstrate to employees that the incipient changes are carefully planned and develop both the organization as a whole and each employee.

Depending on the depth of development, project-oriented activities in the company can be represented as:

• implementation of individual projects;
• implementation of project portfolios;
• program implementation;
• implementation of project-oriented activities in General within a multi-project environment.

In general, the depth of project management development is related to which objects (projects, portfolios, programs) are managed in the organization. Based on the level that your organization has reached, the activities that need to be included in the project management system development plan will also be determined. For example, if you have successfully organized the management of single projects and portfolios of projects, and now you face the challenge of managing software projects, it is imperative for you to determine the features of implementation phase completion of projects. A highlight of project programs is a significant shift in the level of effort towards the implementation and completion phases. This is due to the peak of integration processes at the end of the implementation of projects included in the program, bringing together parallel work performed, as well as the need to correct accumulated errors detected during the integration of project results.

To develop a development plan at the proper professional level, you will need to analyze the readiness of the management system for upcoming innovations, coordinate your ideas with the management’s vision, explain the best and applicable project management practices for your organization, correctly identify stakeholders and take their interests into account. At this stage, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our customers ‘ business processes, determine the organization’s readiness to implement project management, and jointly develop a development plan that takes into account the key features of the organization. Attracting an external consultant at this stage is also justified because it allows you to evaluate the organization’s activities with a fresh look and develop a development plan based not only on the experience of the company’s employees but also on the expertise of the consultant involved.

It is imperative to carry out the initial regulation of project management. At this stage, you will have a choice.

The first way is to develop regulations and start implementing projects only after they are approved. This option is suitable for you if the start of project implementation is not possible without delineating the responsibilities and powers of stakeholders, formalizing the processes for implementing the project management information system and establishing rules for project implementation that all project managers must start executing simultaneously.

If this path is more suitable for you, then the problems that you will have to face are obvious. The fact is that it is challenging at the initial stage, without testing solutions in practice, to provide a procedure for implementing projects that will be feasible in all aspects, be useful and take into account all the features of the organization. The experience of an external consultant who has developed and implemented more than one project management system will allow you to prepare professional project management regulations at the first attempt and not miss the necessary details.

However, if this is possible, I recommend using the second way to develop the regulation – pilot implementation. If you are not sure how to formalize project activities, where to start work, which is essential for your management system, and what is secondary – begin with a pilot project. Select a project that is important to you and can be implemented within a few months, assign it to the head of your most potent project manager and set him an additional task to get not only the products provided by the project but also to develop regulations for the implementation of similar projects. Thus, your rules will include only those things that bring results within the framework of the project implementation, only those requirements without which the project implementation is impossible. Perhaps, the introduction of changes by parallel testing them in practice is the most effective way to develop project management regulations.

It would be best if you started with pilot projects for another reason. In addition to defining the work rules that apply to your organization when implementing a pilot project, you will also prove the effectiveness of the project approach by the fact that the pilot project was completed.

Naturally, for such projects, it is crucial to have a professional team with sufficient experience to offer solutions in the event of various obstacles to implementation, and adequate speed to formalize the process in a short time, so as not to delay the receipt of the leading products of the project. The pilot project team should include both the customer’s specialists who are sensitive and understand the specifics of their business and the consultant’s specialists who have the necessary experience in building project management systems and organizing project offices. It is on the pilot project that practices will be fixed, which are translated into subsequent projects, so it is not very easy to overestimate the importance of attracting the most valuable employees to pilot projects, both on the part of the organization and the role of the consultant.

However, the implementation of the project management system through pilot projects has its drawbacks, which are that the degree of responsibility and influence of the pilot project manager on the development of project management regulations increases. In this case, there is a conflict of interest when the pilot project manager tries to make life easier for project managers by infringing on the benefits of other participants while working out the project management procedures. Focusing on the implementation of a single project within the framework of the pilot implementation can have a negative effect when errors are embedded in the regulations that do not allow the solution to be replicated on other projects of the organization. Again, forming a mixed project implementation team will help prevent such mistakes. In this case, you can rest assured that the best practices will be recorded and will form the basis of the project management regulations.

I often hear a question from novice project managers – to what degree of detail to paint your calendar plan? I usually answer this question briefly: with the degree of detail that will allow you to correctly manage the project and promptly identify if something went wrong, but at the same time, so that the number of works fits into several hundred because otherwise, it will be difficult to control the overall picture.

However, let’s focus on this issue in more detail.

So, the first principle: be sure to decompose the work.

If your plan is too top-level, your project will run slower. This will happen because the project is a coordinated team effort. Most often, the result is not immediately transmitted to the customer but goes through several stages of production or “rework,” i.e. when the results of one group’s work are used by another group within the project team. And if the work is divided too large, then the errors inherent in the work of one group will be revealed late, only at the time of transmitting the results to the next group or even to the customer’s specialists. I. e. the smaller the work is divided, the earlier it will be possible to identify the error and correct the performers.

On the other hand, the second principle applies: Reasonable sufficiency in decomposition.

Indeed, if you get too carried away with decomposition, you can create problems for yourself at the implementation stage. First, you will have to spend much time on micromanagement. Each work must be tested and accepted, which means that you will have to decide on every small issue that could be left to the performer. Secondly, when you reduce the amount of work, you reduce the degree of responsibility of performers, reduce their professional interest. Third, with a large number of small jobs, it becomes difficult to determine priorities for their implementation, which will inevitably lead to the execution of light and unimportant work before the performance of important, but more time-consuming.

So, to sum up. The decomposition of works is necessary when the results of the work of one contractor will be used by another contractor to prepare the final product of the project. Therefore, the first milestones of decomposition are the moments when the product moves from one performer to another. At the same time, we must make sure that this milestone does not account for too much work performed, to reduce the number of corrections in case the transferred product does not meet the requirements. To do this, we must provide for regular transmission of results between performers, for example, every 2-3 weeks. This way, we will improve interaction within the team and not spend much time on micromanagement.

Successful projects for you!

Another typical mistake when implementing project management, which we will discuss in this article, the negative consequences of which are not immediately noticeable, but begin to increase as the maturity of project management in the organization increases, is ignoring the issues of accumulation of successful experience.

After the first steps to implement project management in the organization, the results are apparent; the share of successful projects increases, and the transparency and consistency of management increases. However, without a well-thought-out system for sharing project experience between project managers, and without building a database of project knowledge, your organization will become increasingly dependent on the personal qualities and success of project managers. If they leave or are employed on other projects, you will not be able to guarantee the quality of the project.

The project management system must be improved continuously. Successful practices from a single project should become part of the system. To provide our clients with continuous improvement of their project management systems, we offer audit services for project management systems and project management information systems. Once you have implemented a project management system, after some time, you may notice that the system is no longer effective. This is because the company is growing, developing and expanding, and the project management system, instead of developing with the company, remains the same. Audit of project management systems will help to identify the level of the current development of the system and its compliance with the company’s level of development, strategic goals and current needs. Based on the results of the audit, we provide the customer with a detailed report and a plan for the development of the project management system.

Let’s return to the main elements of the project management system. So, you have a development plan, the regulations are approved and executed, and the management, with the help of the project management office, regularly monitors and coordinates project activities. What’s next? And then, you need to take care of the convenience of your project managers and your project office.

Practice shows that as the number of projects increases, the need for centralized coordination of resources and preparation of consolidated analytics increases. If you don’t provide your project office and project teams with a well-developed project management information system, then gradually you will begin to drown in the flow of reports, resource allocation approvals, budgets, and project execution calculations. For the project office, coordinating the project portfolio will become an administrative nightmare.

Today, the choice of solutions for project management automation is quite extensive. However, we did not have a single implementation when the customer was satisfied with the basic functionality of the project management information system that the developer initially laid down. No matter how functional and developed the solution is, you will most likely want to make changes to it that align specifics of your organization’s business process. If we talk about Microsoft solutions, you should understand that you are buying the final solution, and the improvements that you want to implement are possible but will be quite expensive.

Another common mistake when choosing IT-platform is that at the initial stage of implementation, the possibility of integrating the project management information system with the company’s accounting systems is not taken into account. It is much more convenient when the list of employees is automatically updated based on information from the personnel department when payment of the invoice is automatically displayed in the project budget, and registration in the system of the act of acceptance and transfer of works is automatically linked to the project calendar plan. With a strong team of developers, we offer our clients services for implementing project management information systems, as well as providing services for further support and development of the system.

Another problem that we often encounter when implementing project management applies to organizations that add a project management structure on top of an existing one. In other words, when the matrix management structure is formed. There are two management levels in the organization: the current functional level in the organization, and the newly introduced one – the project one. Misalignment of these contours in most cases leads to the levelling of the results of the control system restructuring, and sometimes to deterioration of the system’s manageability as a whole.

Particular attention should be paid to the feasibility of solutions included in the project management regulations. It is often tempting to use examples developed in other organizations to write your own rules. However, a direct transfer of practices and approaches that have been successfully applied in one organization is likely to fail within another organization. Each company is unique in its characteristics and management features, so the proposed solutions should always be tested for feasibility. When working out the project management regulations, we always pay special attention to the organizational and role structure of management, carefully distributing the powers and responsibilities of participants, thus reducing matrix conflicts. It is also worth mentioning that to overcome the matrix conflict, the involvement of the top management of the organization, which we noted earlier, is essential. If the organization’s manager demonstrates his interest in building a project-oriented management system, he regularly uses the management system to monitor project implementation. When adjusting the project portfolio, the number of matrix conflicts decreases.

After you develop and approve the regulations, you will need to organize training for employees. All participants in the project activity should be guided by the established rules, understand the background to the appearance of specific requirements in the regulations and be motivated to fulfill them.

The resistance of employees often hinders the introduction of innovations, and sometimes reduces all efforts to nothing. Do not forget that ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. The success of the company is primarily the success of its project teams, so make sure that your employees are the most competent specialists. I will help you choose the most suitable training course for your employees, organize and conduct it. You can take the training either on the site of your training center or ask me to arrange a field session for your employees.

The quality of a project management system is determined by how well its blocks are coordinated and worked out. And the first problem that the implementation team often faces is the lack of involvement of management in the process of upcoming changes. Usually, management actually shows a genuine interest in implementing project management, but the project does not provide activities that allow employees to demonstrate their enthusiasm. To avoid this problem, schedule General meetings with employees at the initial stage of implementation, allowing you to show interest in the emergence of project management in the organization.

At the first stage, the main task is to formulate a plan for the development of project management in your organization, to ensure the involvement of management in the process of organizational changes and to demonstrate to employees that the incipient changes are carefully planned and develop both the organization as a whole and each employee.

Depending on the depth of development, project-oriented activities in the company can be represented as:

• implementation of individual projects;
• implementation of project portfolios;
• program implementation;
• implementation of project-oriented activities in General within a multi-project environment.

In general, the depth of project management development is related to which objects (projects, portfolios, programs) are managed in the organization. Based on the level that your organization has reached, the activities that need to be included in the project management system development plan will also be determined. For example, if you have successfully organized the management of single projects and portfolios of projects, and now you face the challenge of managing software projects, it is imperative for you to determine the features of implementation phase completion of projects. A highlight of project programs is a significant shift in the level of effort towards the implementation and completion phases. This is due to the peak of integration processes at the end of the implementation of projects included in the program, bringing together parallel work performed, as well as the need to correct accumulated errors detected during the integration of project results.

To develop a development plan at the proper professional level, you will need to analyze the readiness of the management system for upcoming innovations, coordinate your ideas with the management’s vision, explain the best and applicable project management practices for your organization, correctly identify stakeholders and take their interests into account. At this stage, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our customers ‘ business processes, determine the organization’s readiness to implement project management, and jointly develop a development plan that takes into account the key features of the organization. Attracting an external consultant at this stage is also justified because it allows you to evaluate the organization’s activities with a fresh look and develop a development plan based not only on the experience of the company’s employees but also on the expertise of the consultant involved.

It is imperative to carry out the initial regulation of project management. At this stage, you will have a choice.

The first way is to develop regulations and start implementing projects only after they are approved. This option is suitable for you if the start of project implementation is not possible without delineating the responsibilities and powers of stakeholders, formalizing the processes for implementing the project management information system and establishing rules for project implementation that all project managers must start executing simultaneously.

If this path is more suitable for you, then the problems that you will have to face are obvious. The fact is that it is challenging at the initial stage, without testing solutions in practice, to provide a procedure for implementing projects that will be feasible in all aspects, be useful and take into account all the features of the organization. The experience of an external consultant who has developed and implemented more than one project management system will allow you to prepare professional project management regulations at the first attempt and not miss the necessary details.

However, if this is possible, I recommend using the second way to develop the regulation – pilot implementation. If you are not sure how to formalize project activities, where to start work, which is essential for your management system, and what is secondary – begin with a pilot project. Select a project that is important to you and can be implemented within a few months, assign it to the head of your most potent project manager and set him an additional task to get not only the products provided by the project but also to develop regulations for the implementation of similar projects. Thus, your rules will include only those things that bring results within the framework of the project implementation, only those requirements without which the project implementation is impossible. Perhaps, the introduction of changes by parallel testing them in practice is the most effective way to develop project management regulations.

It would be best if you started with pilot projects for another reason. In addition to defining the work rules that apply to your organization when implementing a pilot project, you will also prove the effectiveness of the project approach by the fact that the pilot project was completed.

Naturally, for such projects, it is crucial to have a professional team with sufficient experience to offer solutions in the event of various obstacles to implementation, and adequate speed to formalize the process in a short time, so as not to delay the receipt of the leading products of the project. The pilot project team should include both the customer’s specialists who are sensitive and understand the specifics of their business and the consultant’s specialists who have the necessary experience in building project management systems and organizing project offices. It is on the pilot project that practices will be fixed, which are translated into subsequent projects, so it is not very easy to overestimate the importance of attracting the most valuable employees to pilot projects, both on the part of the organization and the role of the consultant.

However, the implementation of the project management system through pilot projects has its drawbacks, which are that the degree of responsibility and influence of the pilot project manager on the development of project management regulations increases. In this case, there is a conflict of interest when the pilot project manager tries to make life easier for project managers by infringing on the benefits of other participants while working out the project management procedures. Focusing on the implementation of a single project within the framework of the pilot implementation can have a negative effect when errors are embedded in the regulations that do not allow the solution to be replicated on other projects of the organization. Again, forming a mixed project implementation team will help prevent such mistakes. In this case, you can rest assured that the best practices will be recorded and will form the basis of the project management regulations.

“A large project requires a huge number of highly qualified specialists, and we don’t want to approach each project as if we are starting over.”
John Kinungi, it Director at OHSU

If you are thinking about increasing the effectiveness of your projects, then you should implement this systematically. At the moment, project management systems are applied not only in commercial project-oriented companies but also actively integrated into public administration at an entirely new level, which was impossible to imagine ten years ago. If earlier project management was considered as a separate activity, applicable where targeted investment management is required, now the principles of project management cover all areas of the organization’s operations.

There are two main reasons for this. First, the current position of the Russian economy determines the careful planning of funds spent. Second, increased competition poses new challenges to companies in terms of their performance and the ability of their management systems to adapt flexibly and respond to changing conditions promptly. In these conditions, competent project management becomes a competitive advantage that allows the company to spend resources only where it is necessary and ensure that results are obtained on issues that are strategically important for the company. The project-oriented management style has proven to be effective, both in terms of increasing the transparency of management and in terms of flexibility and the ability to respond to changes in the external environment of the project promptly.

But to meet the expectations placed on project management, it is necessary to build a project management system thoughtfully. Our practical experience in implementing project management systems, both in our clients ‘ organizations and in our group of companies, reveals the main problems that you will have to face along the way. Many of these problems can be characterized as a lack of systematic implementation of project management when some aspects of the system remain forgotten or insufficiently developed.

First, let’s define what we mean by the “project management system” to clearly understand the components of this system and communicate in the same language. The project management system generally consists of 6 interconnected blocks.

Blocks of the corportate project management system

Strategy. First of all, you need to determine the state of project management in your organization and what tasks are a priority for its development.

Regulations and instructions. Next, you must define the rules for the projects that will be included in your system. Although no two projects are the same, and each time you have to face something new that is not described in the regulations, the methodology is still essential. It allows you to apply standard proven techniques wherever possible and saves you time so that you can focus on what is unique and meaningful about your project.

Templates. Organizational structure. IT-solution. The project manager and other participants will need assistance in implementing the project. To prevent the project team from being distracted by bureaucratic procedures, lengthy approvals, and routine operations, you will need to provide them with document templates and work out a management structure that will facilitate the project’s implementation, rather than oppose it. Another critical component of the system is the IT-solution, which will help the project manager and the team to perform operational project management, jointly develop and store documents, communicate and report on the project implementation to the administration.

Trained and motivated staff. Ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers, as well as improving the competencies of the project team, is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. Investing in the development of employee competencies helps to promote project management.

Another typical mistake when implementing project management, which we will discuss in this article, the negative consequences of which are not immediately noticeable, but begin to increase as the maturity of project management in the organization increases, is ignoring the issues of accumulation of successful experience.

After the first steps to implement project management in the organization, the results are apparent; the share of successful projects increases, and the transparency and consistency of management increases. However, without a well-thought-out system for sharing project experience between project managers, and without building a database of project knowledge, your organization will become increasingly dependent on the personal qualities and success of project managers. If they leave or are employed on other projects, you will not be able to guarantee the quality of the project.

The project management system must be improved continuously. Successful practices from a single project should become part of the system. To provide our clients with continuous improvement of their project management systems, we offer audit services for project management systems and project management information systems. Once you have implemented a project management system, after some time, you may notice that the system is no longer effective. This is because the company is growing, developing and expanding, and the project management system, instead of developing with the company, remains the same. Audit of project management systems will help to identify the level of the current development of the system and its compliance with the company’s level of development, strategic goals and current needs. Based on the results of the audit, we provide the customer with a detailed report and a plan for the development of the project management system.

Most likely, to support the changes that are taking place in the company, you will decide to allocate a separate structure – the project management office. The filter that the project management office builds when determining to open projects leads to the fact that small and often conflicting projects are no longer initiated. This generally results in saving the company’s resources by reducing the number of small projects that are implemented in a decentralized manner without a single development plan. Also, balanced resource coordination allows employees to switch less from task to task and, as a result, work more productively.

The control and accounting function of the project management office is also vital for the company’s management. All projects are evaluated according to the same criteria and management has the opportunity to compare and select projects. The control and accounting function has gained significant importance in state bodies, where the project management office is understood as a structure that more closely monitors the execution of orders issued to the project team.

But the project management office will not work correctly if you have a blurry definition of the functions of this department. And you should define the services depending on what type of project management office you want to organize. If the project office is integrated into an existing management structure that manages the implementation of projects, but it is necessary to increase the transparency of management, then it is logical to create a so-called “project office” with an additional consulting function. If your project management office coordinates commercial projects and the main task of the office is to maximize the profitability of the project portfolio, then a centralized model of the project management office will bring more results.

The project management office ensures transparency of the structure of all projects in the organization, increasing the level of coordination and consistency. It provides more clarity by focusing on strategy, loosens the boundaries between the company’s divisions, and creates and maintains an internal environment for effective project management. If you are starting to form a project management office, our specialists will help you select employees for your project management office by conducting a search, initial selection and comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

If you are not ready to create your own project office, but you understand the importance of this department to implement and maintain the project methodology in the organization, you can contact me for outsourcing project office functions. Outsourcing of tasks of the project office is a service that allows you to save your time and reduce costs in most cases. If a company decides to implement project management or faces a new niche for itself, trying to achieve everything on its own, it ultimately leads to losses.

Experimenting on its own, starting from scratch, the company spends a significant amount of time and resources, reducing production rates, distracting key employees. All this can be avoided by attracting project specialist for the duration of the entire project or at critical points of the project. As a result, employees of the customer company get a unique opportunity, without wasting time searching for the right solutions, to use the knowledge and experience of the specialist and avoid many mistakes.

Another problem that we often encounter when implementing project management applies to organizations that add a project management structure on top of an existing one. In other words, when the matrix management structure is formed. There are two management levels in the organization: the current functional level in the organization, and the newly introduced one – the project one. Misalignment of these contours in most cases leads to the levelling of the results of the control system restructuring, and sometimes to deterioration of the system’s manageability as a whole.

Particular attention should be paid to the feasibility of solutions included in the project management regulations. It is often tempting to use examples developed in other organizations to write your own rules. However, a direct transfer of practices and approaches that have been successfully applied in one organization is likely to fail within another organization. Each company is unique in its characteristics and management features, so the proposed solutions should always be tested for feasibility. When working out the project management regulations, we always pay special attention to the organizational and role structure of management, carefully distributing the powers and responsibilities of participants, thus reducing matrix conflicts. It is also worth mentioning that to overcome the matrix conflict, the involvement of the top management of the organization, which we noted earlier, is essential. If the organization’s manager demonstrates his interest in building a project-oriented management system, he regularly uses the management system to monitor project implementation. When adjusting the project portfolio, the number of matrix conflicts decreases.

After you develop and approve the regulations, you will need to organize training for employees. All participants in the project activity should be guided by the established rules, understand the background to the appearance of specific requirements in the regulations and be motivated to fulfill them.

The resistance of employees often hinders the introduction of innovations, and sometimes reduces all efforts to nothing. Do not forget that ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. The success of the company is primarily the success of its project teams, so make sure that your employees are the most competent specialists. I will help you choose the most suitable training course for your employees, organize and conduct it. You can take the training either on the site of your training center or ask me to arrange a field session for your employees.

The quality of a project management system is determined by how well its blocks are coordinated and worked out. And the first problem that the implementation team often faces is the lack of involvement of management in the process of upcoming changes. Usually, management actually shows a genuine interest in implementing project management, but the project does not provide activities that allow employees to demonstrate their enthusiasm. To avoid this problem, schedule General meetings with employees at the initial stage of implementation, allowing you to show interest in the emergence of project management in the organization.

At the first stage, the main task is to formulate a plan for the development of project management in your organization, to ensure the involvement of management in the process of organizational changes and to demonstrate to employees that the incipient changes are carefully planned and develop both the organization as a whole and each employee.

Depending on the depth of development, project-oriented activities in the company can be represented as:

• implementation of individual projects;
• implementation of project portfolios;
• program implementation;
• implementation of project-oriented activities in General within a multi-project environment.

In general, the depth of project management development is related to which objects (projects, portfolios, programs) are managed in the organization. Based on the level that your organization has reached, the activities that need to be included in the project management system development plan will also be determined. For example, if you have successfully organized the management of single projects and portfolios of projects, and now you face the challenge of managing software projects, it is imperative for you to determine the features of implementation phase completion of projects. A highlight of project programs is a significant shift in the level of effort towards the implementation and completion phases. This is due to the peak of integration processes at the end of the implementation of projects included in the program, bringing together parallel work performed, as well as the need to correct accumulated errors detected during the integration of project results.

To develop a development plan at the proper professional level, you will need to analyze the readiness of the management system for upcoming innovations, coordinate your ideas with the management’s vision, explain the best and applicable project management practices for your organization, correctly identify stakeholders and take their interests into account. At this stage, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our customers ‘ business processes, determine the organization’s readiness to implement project management, and jointly develop a development plan that takes into account the key features of the organization. Attracting an external consultant at this stage is also justified because it allows you to evaluate the organization’s activities with a fresh look and develop a development plan based not only on the experience of the company’s employees but also on the expertise of the consultant involved.

It is imperative to carry out the initial regulation of project management. At this stage, you will have a choice.

The first way is to develop regulations and start implementing projects only after they are approved. This option is suitable for you if the start of project implementation is not possible without delineating the responsibilities and powers of stakeholders, formalizing the processes for implementing the project management information system and establishing rules for project implementation that all project managers must start executing simultaneously.

If this path is more suitable for you, then the problems that you will have to face are obvious. The fact is that it is challenging at the initial stage, without testing solutions in practice, to provide a procedure for implementing projects that will be feasible in all aspects, be useful and take into account all the features of the organization. The experience of an external consultant who has developed and implemented more than one project management system will allow you to prepare professional project management regulations at the first attempt and not miss the necessary details.

However, if this is possible, I recommend using the second way to develop the regulation – pilot implementation. If you are not sure how to formalize project activities, where to start work, which is essential for your management system, and what is secondary – begin with a pilot project. Select a project that is important to you and can be implemented within a few months, assign it to the head of your most potent project manager and set him an additional task to get not only the products provided by the project but also to develop regulations for the implementation of similar projects. Thus, your rules will include only those things that bring results within the framework of the project implementation, only those requirements without which the project implementation is impossible. Perhaps, the introduction of changes by parallel testing them in practice is the most effective way to develop project management regulations.

It would be best if you started with pilot projects for another reason. In addition to defining the work rules that apply to your organization when implementing a pilot project, you will also prove the effectiveness of the project approach by the fact that the pilot project was completed.

Naturally, for such projects, it is crucial to have a professional team with sufficient experience to offer solutions in the event of various obstacles to implementation, and adequate speed to formalize the process in a short time, so as not to delay the receipt of the leading products of the project. The pilot project team should include both the customer’s specialists who are sensitive and understand the specifics of their business and the consultant’s specialists who have the necessary experience in building project management systems and organizing project offices. It is on the pilot project that practices will be fixed, which are translated into subsequent projects, so it is not very easy to overestimate the importance of attracting the most valuable employees to pilot projects, both on the part of the organization and the role of the consultant.

However, the implementation of the project management system through pilot projects has its drawbacks, which are that the degree of responsibility and influence of the pilot project manager on the development of project management regulations increases. In this case, there is a conflict of interest when the pilot project manager tries to make life easier for project managers by infringing on the benefits of other participants while working out the project management procedures. Focusing on the implementation of a single project within the framework of the pilot implementation can have a negative effect when errors are embedded in the regulations that do not allow the solution to be replicated on other projects of the organization. Again, forming a mixed project implementation team will help prevent such mistakes. In this case, you can rest assured that the best practices will be recorded and will form the basis of the project management regulations.

“A large project requires a huge number of highly qualified specialists, and we don’t want to approach each project as if we are starting over.”
John Kinungi, it Director at OHSU

If you are thinking about increasing the effectiveness of your projects, then you should implement this systematically. At the moment, project management systems are applied not only in commercial project-oriented companies but also actively integrated into public administration at an entirely new level, which was impossible to imagine ten years ago. If earlier project management was considered as a separate activity, applicable where targeted investment management is required, now the principles of project management cover all areas of the organization’s operations.

There are two main reasons for this. First, the current position of the Russian economy determines the careful planning of funds spent. Second, increased competition poses new challenges to companies in terms of their performance and the ability of their management systems to adapt flexibly and respond to changing conditions promptly. In these conditions, competent project management becomes a competitive advantage that allows the company to spend resources only where it is necessary and ensure that results are obtained on issues that are strategically important for the company. The project-oriented management style has proven to be effective, both in terms of increasing the transparency of management and in terms of flexibility and the ability to respond to changes in the external environment of the project promptly.

But to meet the expectations placed on project management, it is necessary to build a project management system thoughtfully. Our practical experience in implementing project management systems, both in our clients ‘ organizations and in our group of companies, reveals the main problems that you will have to face along the way. Many of these problems can be characterized as a lack of systematic implementation of project management when some aspects of the system remain forgotten or insufficiently developed.

First, let’s define what we mean by the “project management system” to clearly understand the components of this system and communicate in the same language. The project management system generally consists of 6 interconnected blocks.

Blocks of the corportate project management system

Strategy. First of all, you need to determine the state of project management in your organization and what tasks are a priority for its development.

Regulations and instructions. Next, you must define the rules for the projects that will be included in your system. Although no two projects are the same, and each time you have to face something new that is not described in the regulations, the methodology is still essential. It allows you to apply standard proven techniques wherever possible and saves you time so that you can focus on what is unique and meaningful about your project.

Templates. Organizational structure. IT-solution. The project manager and other participants will need assistance in implementing the project. To prevent the project team from being distracted by bureaucratic procedures, lengthy approvals, and routine operations, you will need to provide them with document templates and work out a management structure that will facilitate the project’s implementation, rather than oppose it. Another critical component of the system is the IT-solution, which will help the project manager and the team to perform operational project management, jointly develop and store documents, communicate and report on the project implementation to the administration.

Trained and motivated staff. Ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers, as well as improving the competencies of the project team, is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. Investing in the development of employee competencies helps to promote project management.

The popularity of Agile today exceeds all boundaries. Everyone talks about it at conferences on project management, analyzes it in numerous articles, and publishes photos of whiteboards in social networks. I even heard mentions of Agile on the First channel.

This popularity did not arise from scratch. Agile allows you to bypass the bureaucratic procedures inherent in “traditional project management,” eliminate or significantly transform the role of the project manager, and reduce losses on “excessive planning.”

But on the other hand, the high popularity leads to the fact that many teams approach the implementation without a clear understanding of the applicability of Agile for their company. As a result, the company does not get the expected benefits, and the project team is disappointed in the new management method. Just today, I read an excellent article on this topic, “Selecting a Project Management Methodology for Your Organization.” I want to share with you the most exciting moments from this article, as well as my thoughts on this issue.

It is imperative that organizations determine if they are good candidates for agile before they rush to make changes and potentially set themselves up for disappointment.

I can’t disagree. First of all, you should evaluate the applicability of Agile principles to the management system that has developed in the company. Agile requires the appropriate environment and will not work in the wrong context.

“Being agile” is much more involved than the project management methodology.

Also a valuable thought. Often, we believe that introducing a new methodology to a company will solve all the problems, but we forget that the method does not revolutionize just by its appearance. The company itself must comply with the Agile principles to support the rules that will be incorporated into the methodology.

If the root cause analysis indicates the number of change controls is due to indecision of the person(s) providing requirements, agile may not be a viable solution, as effective agile frameworks require empowered decision makers.

The author suggests, first of all, to understand what is inefficient in the existing management system and determine the cause. The reason may be that the use of Agile will only exacerbate the problem; even more, it will manifest itself. If you don’t have a strong Product Owner, or if the customer is not ready to receive regular training on new project products, consider whether flexible management methods apply to you.

This should help avoid a common mistake of “Let’s just train our people on a new methodology and we’re done.”

Employee training is an essential and necessary part of changes. But not the only one. Just by training your employees, you will not change the management system. Training should be part of a plan to change the management system. Often I observe that everything is limited to training. Employees will forget what they were taught in 3 months if they do not use their knowledge in practice.

However, the key to implementing any level of change to an organization must be based on actual data—and one cannot take the decision lightly. Be willing to perform an organizational assessment and develop a change/adoption plan based on its result; that will set your specific organization on the path to achieving the results desired.

This is the last thought that I have singled out for myself, but it is crucial. I always recommend that you audit your project management system before making changes. When you rely on the results of current and professional research of the company, you can develop the right solutions. And Agile may or may not be part of the development plan. When creating competitive advantages, it is vital to understand and build on your strengths. What is often forgotten when “in a hurry” to implement Agile by order of the management.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the competition between Agile and Waterfall, fueled by publications that are sometimes deliberately provocative, is often artificial. Agile and Waterfall are both right and left hands, use the method that best suits your project in this environment.

Another typical mistake when implementing project management, which we will discuss in this article, the negative consequences of which are not immediately noticeable, but begin to increase as the maturity of project management in the organization increases, is ignoring the issues of accumulation of successful experience.

After the first steps to implement project management in the organization, the results are apparent; the share of successful projects increases, and the transparency and consistency of management increases. However, without a well-thought-out system for sharing project experience between project managers, and without building a database of project knowledge, your organization will become increasingly dependent on the personal qualities and success of project managers. If they leave or are employed on other projects, you will not be able to guarantee the quality of the project.

The project management system must be improved continuously. Successful practices from a single project should become part of the system. To provide our clients with continuous improvement of their project management systems, we offer audit services for project management systems and project management information systems. Once you have implemented a project management system, after some time, you may notice that the system is no longer effective. This is because the company is growing, developing and expanding, and the project management system, instead of developing with the company, remains the same. Audit of project management systems will help to identify the level of the current development of the system and its compliance with the company’s level of development, strategic goals and current needs. Based on the results of the audit, we provide the customer with a detailed report and a plan for the development of the project management system.

Let’s return to the main elements of the project management system. So, you have a development plan, the regulations are approved and executed, and the management, with the help of the project management office, regularly monitors and coordinates project activities. What’s next? And then, you need to take care of the convenience of your project managers and your project office.

Practice shows that as the number of projects increases, the need for centralized coordination of resources and preparation of consolidated analytics increases. If you don’t provide your project office and project teams with a well-developed project management information system, then gradually you will begin to drown in the flow of reports, resource allocation approvals, budgets, and project execution calculations. For the project office, coordinating the project portfolio will become an administrative nightmare.

Today, the choice of solutions for project management automation is quite extensive. However, we did not have a single implementation when the customer was satisfied with the basic functionality of the project management information system that the developer initially laid down. No matter how functional and developed the solution is, you will most likely want to make changes to it that align specifics of your organization’s business process. If we talk about Microsoft solutions, you should understand that you are buying the final solution, and the improvements that you want to implement are possible but will be quite expensive.

Another common mistake when choosing IT-platform is that at the initial stage of implementation, the possibility of integrating the project management information system with the company’s accounting systems is not taken into account. It is much more convenient when the list of employees is automatically updated based on information from the personnel department when payment of the invoice is automatically displayed in the project budget, and registration in the system of the act of acceptance and transfer of works is automatically linked to the project calendar plan. With a strong team of developers, we offer our clients services for implementing project management information systems, as well as providing services for further support and development of the system.

Most likely, to support the changes that are taking place in the company, you will decide to allocate a separate structure – the project management office. The filter that the project management office builds when determining to open projects leads to the fact that small and often conflicting projects are no longer initiated. This generally results in saving the company’s resources by reducing the number of small projects that are implemented in a decentralized manner without a single development plan. Also, balanced resource coordination allows employees to switch less from task to task and, as a result, work more productively.

The control and accounting function of the project management office is also vital for the company’s management. All projects are evaluated according to the same criteria and management has the opportunity to compare and select projects. The control and accounting function has gained significant importance in state bodies, where the project management office is understood as a structure that more closely monitors the execution of orders issued to the project team.

But the project management office will not work correctly if you have a blurry definition of the functions of this department. And you should define the services depending on what type of project management office you want to organize. If the project office is integrated into an existing management structure that manages the implementation of projects, but it is necessary to increase the transparency of management, then it is logical to create a so-called “project office” with an additional consulting function. If your project management office coordinates commercial projects and the main task of the office is to maximize the profitability of the project portfolio, then a centralized model of the project management office will bring more results.

The project management office ensures transparency of the structure of all projects in the organization, increasing the level of coordination and consistency. It provides more clarity by focusing on strategy, loosens the boundaries between the company’s divisions, and creates and maintains an internal environment for effective project management. If you are starting to form a project management office, our specialists will help you select employees for your project management office by conducting a search, initial selection and comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

If you are not ready to create your own project office, but you understand the importance of this department to implement and maintain the project methodology in the organization, you can contact me for outsourcing project office functions. Outsourcing of tasks of the project office is a service that allows you to save your time and reduce costs in most cases. If a company decides to implement project management or faces a new niche for itself, trying to achieve everything on its own, it ultimately leads to losses.

Experimenting on its own, starting from scratch, the company spends a significant amount of time and resources, reducing production rates, distracting key employees. All this can be avoided by attracting project specialist for the duration of the entire project or at critical points of the project. As a result, employees of the customer company get a unique opportunity, without wasting time searching for the right solutions, to use the knowledge and experience of the specialist and avoid many mistakes.

Another problem that we often encounter when implementing project management applies to organizations that add a project management structure on top of an existing one. In other words, when the matrix management structure is formed. There are two management levels in the organization: the current functional level in the organization, and the newly introduced one – the project one. Misalignment of these contours in most cases leads to the levelling of the results of the control system restructuring, and sometimes to deterioration of the system’s manageability as a whole.

Particular attention should be paid to the feasibility of solutions included in the project management regulations. It is often tempting to use examples developed in other organizations to write your own rules. However, a direct transfer of practices and approaches that have been successfully applied in one organization is likely to fail within another organization. Each company is unique in its characteristics and management features, so the proposed solutions should always be tested for feasibility. When working out the project management regulations, we always pay special attention to the organizational and role structure of management, carefully distributing the powers and responsibilities of participants, thus reducing matrix conflicts. It is also worth mentioning that to overcome the matrix conflict, the involvement of the top management of the organization, which we noted earlier, is essential. If the organization’s manager demonstrates his interest in building a project-oriented management system, he regularly uses the management system to monitor project implementation. When adjusting the project portfolio, the number of matrix conflicts decreases.

After you develop and approve the regulations, you will need to organize training for employees. All participants in the project activity should be guided by the established rules, understand the background to the appearance of specific requirements in the regulations and be motivated to fulfill them.

The resistance of employees often hinders the introduction of innovations, and sometimes reduces all efforts to nothing. Do not forget that ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. The success of the company is primarily the success of its project teams, so make sure that your employees are the most competent specialists. I will help you choose the most suitable training course for your employees, organize and conduct it. You can take the training either on the site of your training center or ask me to arrange a field session for your employees.

The quality of a project management system is determined by how well its blocks are coordinated and worked out. And the first problem that the implementation team often faces is the lack of involvement of management in the process of upcoming changes. Usually, management actually shows a genuine interest in implementing project management, but the project does not provide activities that allow employees to demonstrate their enthusiasm. To avoid this problem, schedule General meetings with employees at the initial stage of implementation, allowing you to show interest in the emergence of project management in the organization.

At the first stage, the main task is to formulate a plan for the development of project management in your organization, to ensure the involvement of management in the process of organizational changes and to demonstrate to employees that the incipient changes are carefully planned and develop both the organization as a whole and each employee.

Depending on the depth of development, project-oriented activities in the company can be represented as:

• implementation of individual projects;
• implementation of project portfolios;
• program implementation;
• implementation of project-oriented activities in General within a multi-project environment.

In general, the depth of project management development is related to which objects (projects, portfolios, programs) are managed in the organization. Based on the level that your organization has reached, the activities that need to be included in the project management system development plan will also be determined. For example, if you have successfully organized the management of single projects and portfolios of projects, and now you face the challenge of managing software projects, it is imperative for you to determine the features of implementation phase completion of projects. A highlight of project programs is a significant shift in the level of effort towards the implementation and completion phases. This is due to the peak of integration processes at the end of the implementation of projects included in the program, bringing together parallel work performed, as well as the need to correct accumulated errors detected during the integration of project results.

To develop a development plan at the proper professional level, you will need to analyze the readiness of the management system for upcoming innovations, coordinate your ideas with the management’s vision, explain the best and applicable project management practices for your organization, correctly identify stakeholders and take their interests into account. At this stage, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our customers ‘ business processes, determine the organization’s readiness to implement project management, and jointly develop a development plan that takes into account the key features of the organization. Attracting an external consultant at this stage is also justified because it allows you to evaluate the organization’s activities with a fresh look and develop a development plan based not only on the experience of the company’s employees but also on the expertise of the consultant involved.

It is imperative to carry out the initial regulation of project management. At this stage, you will have a choice.

The first way is to develop regulations and start implementing projects only after they are approved. This option is suitable for you if the start of project implementation is not possible without delineating the responsibilities and powers of stakeholders, formalizing the processes for implementing the project management information system and establishing rules for project implementation that all project managers must start executing simultaneously.

If this path is more suitable for you, then the problems that you will have to face are obvious. The fact is that it is challenging at the initial stage, without testing solutions in practice, to provide a procedure for implementing projects that will be feasible in all aspects, be useful and take into account all the features of the organization. The experience of an external consultant who has developed and implemented more than one project management system will allow you to prepare professional project management regulations at the first attempt and not miss the necessary details.

However, if this is possible, I recommend using the second way to develop the regulation – pilot implementation. If you are not sure how to formalize project activities, where to start work, which is essential for your management system, and what is secondary – begin with a pilot project. Select a project that is important to you and can be implemented within a few months, assign it to the head of your most potent project manager and set him an additional task to get not only the products provided by the project but also to develop regulations for the implementation of similar projects. Thus, your rules will include only those things that bring results within the framework of the project implementation, only those requirements without which the project implementation is impossible. Perhaps, the introduction of changes by parallel testing them in practice is the most effective way to develop project management regulations.

It would be best if you started with pilot projects for another reason. In addition to defining the work rules that apply to your organization when implementing a pilot project, you will also prove the effectiveness of the project approach by the fact that the pilot project was completed.

Naturally, for such projects, it is crucial to have a professional team with sufficient experience to offer solutions in the event of various obstacles to implementation, and adequate speed to formalize the process in a short time, so as not to delay the receipt of the leading products of the project. The pilot project team should include both the customer’s specialists who are sensitive and understand the specifics of their business and the consultant’s specialists who have the necessary experience in building project management systems and organizing project offices. It is on the pilot project that practices will be fixed, which are translated into subsequent projects, so it is not very easy to overestimate the importance of attracting the most valuable employees to pilot projects, both on the part of the organization and the role of the consultant.

However, the implementation of the project management system through pilot projects has its drawbacks, which are that the degree of responsibility and influence of the pilot project manager on the development of project management regulations increases. In this case, there is a conflict of interest when the pilot project manager tries to make life easier for project managers by infringing on the benefits of other participants while working out the project management procedures. Focusing on the implementation of a single project within the framework of the pilot implementation can have a negative effect when errors are embedded in the regulations that do not allow the solution to be replicated on other projects of the organization. Again, forming a mixed project implementation team will help prevent such mistakes. In this case, you can rest assured that the best practices will be recorded and will form the basis of the project management regulations.

There is a constant debate about what is best for managing Agile or Waterfall projects. Flexible methodologies seem to be better because the result is immediately available, and you can stop at any time. The cascade method is more applicable to large projects, such as the construction of a nuclear power plant.

These arguments have always been and always have been incomprehensible to me. After all, first of all, we must meet or exceed the customer’s expectations, so the project management system must be such as to interact with the customer as much as possible, demonstrate results, form expectations, and discard unnecessary things. It doesn’t matter whether you fill in the Backlog or WBS, whether you allocate the Product Owner role or not. It has already reached anecdotal situations when the” fashion” for the word Agile is so secure that employees can only express their attitude about the effectiveness of this method in a whisper in a private conversation, so as not to pass for retrogrades and ineffective employees.

We must admit that many coaches use these disputes only as a speculative opportunity to attract attention to their courses. But some believe that Agile is something new, modern, previously unknown, and Waterfall is something archaic, useless, and labour-intensive.

Yesterday, for example, I came across an interesting article, “4 Reasons Why Waterfall isn’t a Fit for your Team”.

In it, the Waterfall is blown to smithereens, and seven assumptions are used for this purpose. Or at least I counted that many.

Assumption 1: A Waterfall is an approach where one stage sequentially follows another.

Of course, this is not the case. Any project manager knows that the most obvious way to speed up work is to parallelize it. Only in this case, we also know that integration risks are increasing, and we need to provide additional effort on testing the results obtained. We even know that there are projects of this scale that are divided into dozens of parallel threads, the results of which are tested at certain points, called “quality gates.” And it would be impossible to complete these projects without a calendar plan or a technical task. Therefore, we can say that Waterfall not only does not prevent us from performing work in parallel but also suggests that we will need to do something with the integration of the results obtained.

Assumption 2: Waterfall prevents changes.

It does not prevent but allows you to identify the need for changes and evaluate them. You can’t do without an analogy here. Imagine that you are building a house. It has windows of the same size, and the supplier is ready to ship you windows of a different size. It would be better if you did not have a plan where you calculated all the loads, the necessary overlap and the number of bricks? Or is it better to evaluate the changes in advance and choose the best solution: take new windows and redo the project or search for windows from other suppliers? In some cases, refusing to change is not a bad thing. For some reason, we have begun to forget that following the plan is a good thing, and changes do not always add value. Moreover, having a plan allows us to understand that we are dealing with a “change” that deviates from the original task statement.

Assumption 3: Waterfall is not focused on creating a product.

This means that when we see only works in the work plan; we focus on “work,” completely forgetting that we need to get something “product.” So is this a lack of method or omission of the project manager who did not provide for the regular receipt of “products” in the plan and an assessment of their suitability for the customer? You decide what to put in your plans: a description of the work performed or a story of the necessary results. This is entirely independent of the method used. You can also use agile to plan “work execution” rather than” getting results.”

Assumption 4: the Waterfall is a wasteful detailed planning work.

This is a common problem for new tasks: I can imagine what I need to get, but I have absolutely no idea how I should get it. So why should I plan ahead until the very end if I don’t know what will happen in a month? The answer is that you don’t need to plan something you don’t know. I first got acquainted with PMBoK when it was already in the third edition, but I am sure that in the first edition, the “incoming wave” method was already present. The essence of it is that you plan only the period closest to you and evaluate all the others expertly, with the degree of accuracy that is sufficient for you to make a decision about the feasibility of implementing the project. As a result, you have a detailed estimate of the cost of the next work and an expert view of the value of the entire project. We use similar methods, such as planning poker, in agile.

Assumption 5: The client doesn’t know what they want, and Waterfall exacerbates this problem.

First, the client does not always is unknown what he wants. I had projects where the client knew exactly what they wanted. Secondly, if the client still does not know what he wants, he can still think about it in advance, spend time on it. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the client says “great” after the first, second, third, or fourth sprint, and after the fifth, “this is not what I wanted”? Just as Waterfall does not cancel regular communication with the customer, Waterfall does not prevent the consistent demonstration of results and validation by the customer. Here the problem is not in the method, but in the fact that we need to regularly check with the client that we are doing what he needs.

Assumption 6: Waterfall involves testing at later stages when any changes are costly.

This is not a question of the method, but the project manager. If we see that the schedule involves later testing, these are additional risks. Testing should be carried out immediately after the development, and you should organize the work in this way in any method of organizing project management.

Assumption 7: In Waterfall, the client can be blackmailed with fixed requirements.

Also, a theoretical argument. We all understand that a satisfied customer is the foundation of any business. A happy customer will come to us again, bring their friends. Therefore, no one will usually shake the signed requirements in front of the client if the client is important. On the other hand, it is useful to remind the client that we deviate from the original task statement, so that decisions will be more balanced and conscious. Moreover, you can also do this by referring to a series of completed sprints during the implementation of the agile project.

As you can see, there are no terrible project implementation methods as well as there are no management methods that guarantee better results compared to others. When choosing a project implementation method for yourself, first of all, do not turn off your head, evaluate which way is best suited to a specific situation, and, if necessary, combine them.

Another typical mistake when implementing project management, which we will discuss in this article, the negative consequences of which are not immediately noticeable, but begin to increase as the maturity of project management in the organization increases, is ignoring the issues of accumulation of successful experience.

After the first steps to implement project management in the organization, the results are apparent; the share of successful projects increases, and the transparency and consistency of management increases. However, without a well-thought-out system for sharing project experience between project managers, and without building a database of project knowledge, your organization will become increasingly dependent on the personal qualities and success of project managers. If they leave or are employed on other projects, you will not be able to guarantee the quality of the project.

The project management system must be improved continuously. Successful practices from a single project should become part of the system. To provide our clients with continuous improvement of their project management systems, we offer audit services for project management systems and project management information systems. Once you have implemented a project management system, after some time, you may notice that the system is no longer effective. This is because the company is growing, developing and expanding, and the project management system, instead of developing with the company, remains the same. Audit of project management systems will help to identify the level of the current development of the system and its compliance with the company’s level of development, strategic goals and current needs. Based on the results of the audit, we provide the customer with a detailed report and a plan for the development of the project management system.

Most likely, to support the changes that are taking place in the company, you will decide to allocate a separate structure – the project management office. The filter that the project management office builds when determining to open projects leads to the fact that small and often conflicting projects are no longer initiated. This generally results in saving the company’s resources by reducing the number of small projects that are implemented in a decentralized manner without a single development plan. Also, balanced resource coordination allows employees to switch less from task to task and, as a result, work more productively.

The control and accounting function of the project management office is also vital for the company’s management. All projects are evaluated according to the same criteria and management has the opportunity to compare and select projects. The control and accounting function has gained significant importance in state bodies, where the project management office is understood as a structure that more closely monitors the execution of orders issued to the project team.

But the project management office will not work correctly if you have a blurry definition of the functions of this department. And you should define the services depending on what type of project management office you want to organize. If the project office is integrated into an existing management structure that manages the implementation of projects, but it is necessary to increase the transparency of management, then it is logical to create a so-called “project office” with an additional consulting function. If your project management office coordinates commercial projects and the main task of the office is to maximize the profitability of the project portfolio, then a centralized model of the project management office will bring more results.

The project management office ensures transparency of the structure of all projects in the organization, increasing the level of coordination and consistency. It provides more clarity by focusing on strategy, loosens the boundaries between the company’s divisions, and creates and maintains an internal environment for effective project management. If you are starting to form a project management office, our specialists will help you select employees for your project management office by conducting a search, initial selection and comprehensive evaluation of candidates.

If you are not ready to create your own project office, but you understand the importance of this department to implement and maintain the project methodology in the organization, you can contact me for outsourcing project office functions. Outsourcing of tasks of the project office is a service that allows you to save your time and reduce costs in most cases. If a company decides to implement project management or faces a new niche for itself, trying to achieve everything on its own, it ultimately leads to losses.

Experimenting on its own, starting from scratch, the company spends a significant amount of time and resources, reducing production rates, distracting key employees. All this can be avoided by attracting project specialist for the duration of the entire project or at critical points of the project. As a result, employees of the customer company get a unique opportunity, without wasting time searching for the right solutions, to use the knowledge and experience of the specialist and avoid many mistakes.

Another problem that we often encounter when implementing project management applies to organizations that add a project management structure on top of an existing one. In other words, when the matrix management structure is formed. There are two management levels in the organization: the current functional level in the organization, and the newly introduced one – the project one. Misalignment of these contours in most cases leads to the levelling of the results of the control system restructuring, and sometimes to deterioration of the system’s manageability as a whole.

Particular attention should be paid to the feasibility of solutions included in the project management regulations. It is often tempting to use examples developed in other organizations to write your own rules. However, a direct transfer of practices and approaches that have been successfully applied in one organization is likely to fail within another organization. Each company is unique in its characteristics and management features, so the proposed solutions should always be tested for feasibility. When working out the project management regulations, we always pay special attention to the organizational and role structure of management, carefully distributing the powers and responsibilities of participants, thus reducing matrix conflicts. It is also worth mentioning that to overcome the matrix conflict, the involvement of the top management of the organization, which we noted earlier, is essential. If the organization’s manager demonstrates his interest in building a project-oriented management system, he regularly uses the management system to monitor project implementation. When adjusting the project portfolio, the number of matrix conflicts decreases.

The quality of a project management system is determined by how well its blocks are coordinated and worked out. And the first problem that the implementation team often faces is the lack of involvement of management in the process of upcoming changes. Usually, management actually shows a genuine interest in implementing project management, but the project does not provide activities that allow employees to demonstrate their enthusiasm. To avoid this problem, schedule General meetings with employees at the initial stage of implementation, allowing you to show interest in the emergence of project management in the organization.

At the first stage, the main task is to formulate a plan for the development of project management in your organization, to ensure the involvement of management in the process of organizational changes and to demonstrate to employees that the incipient changes are carefully planned and develop both the organization as a whole and each employee.

Depending on the depth of development, project-oriented activities in the company can be represented as:

• implementation of individual projects;
• implementation of project portfolios;
• program implementation;
• implementation of project-oriented activities in General within a multi-project environment.

In general, the depth of project management development is related to which objects (projects, portfolios, programs) are managed in the organization. Based on the level that your organization has reached, the activities that need to be included in the project management system development plan will also be determined. For example, if you have successfully organized the management of single projects and portfolios of projects, and now you face the challenge of managing software projects, it is imperative for you to determine the features of implementation phase completion of projects. A highlight of project programs is a significant shift in the level of effort towards the implementation and completion phases. This is due to the peak of integration processes at the end of the implementation of projects included in the program, bringing together parallel work performed, as well as the need to correct accumulated errors detected during the integration of project results.

To develop a development plan at the proper professional level, you will need to analyze the readiness of the management system for upcoming innovations, coordinate your ideas with the management’s vision, explain the best and applicable project management practices for your organization, correctly identify stakeholders and take their interests into account. At this stage, we conduct a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our customers ‘ business processes, determine the organization’s readiness to implement project management, and jointly develop a development plan that takes into account the key features of the organization. Attracting an external consultant at this stage is also justified because it allows you to evaluate the organization’s activities with a fresh look and develop a development plan based not only on the experience of the company’s employees but also on the expertise of the consultant involved.

“A large project requires a huge number of highly qualified specialists, and we don’t want to approach each project as if we are starting over.”
John Kinungi, it Director at OHSU

If you are thinking about increasing the effectiveness of your projects, then you should implement this systematically. At the moment, project management systems are applied not only in commercial project-oriented companies but also actively integrated into public administration at an entirely new level, which was impossible to imagine ten years ago. If earlier project management was considered as a separate activity, applicable where targeted investment management is required, now the principles of project management cover all areas of the organization’s operations.

There are two main reasons for this. First, the current position of the Russian economy determines the careful planning of funds spent. Second, increased competition poses new challenges to companies in terms of their performance and the ability of their management systems to adapt flexibly and respond to changing conditions promptly. In these conditions, competent project management becomes a competitive advantage that allows the company to spend resources only where it is necessary and ensure that results are obtained on issues that are strategically important for the company. The project-oriented management style has proven to be effective, both in terms of increasing the transparency of management and in terms of flexibility and the ability to respond to changes in the external environment of the project promptly.

But to meet the expectations placed on project management, it is necessary to build a project management system thoughtfully. Our practical experience in implementing project management systems, both in our clients ‘ organizations and in our group of companies, reveals the main problems that you will have to face along the way. Many of these problems can be characterized as a lack of systematic implementation of project management when some aspects of the system remain forgotten or insufficiently developed.

First, let’s define what we mean by the “project management system” to clearly understand the components of this system and communicate in the same language. The project management system generally consists of 6 interconnected blocks.

Blocks of the corportate project management system

Strategy. First of all, you need to determine the state of project management in your organization and what tasks are a priority for its development.

Regulations and instructions. Next, you must define the rules for the projects that will be included in your system. Although no two projects are the same, and each time you have to face something new that is not described in the regulations, the methodology is still essential. It allows you to apply standard proven techniques wherever possible and saves you time so that you can focus on what is unique and meaningful about your project.

Templates. Organizational structure. IT-solution. The project manager and other participants will need assistance in implementing the project. To prevent the project team from being distracted by bureaucratic procedures, lengthy approvals, and routine operations, you will need to provide them with document templates and work out a management structure that will facilitate the project’s implementation, rather than oppose it. Another critical component of the system is the IT-solution, which will help the project manager and the team to perform operational project management, jointly develop and store documents, communicate and report on the project implementation to the administration.

Trained and motivated staff. Ensuring professional growth and loyalty of project managers, as well as improving the competencies of the project team, is one of the priority goals in the formation and development of the corporate project management system. Investing in the development of employee competencies helps to promote project management.

I often hear a question from novice project managers – to what degree of detail to paint your calendar plan? I usually answer this question briefly: with the degree of detail that will allow you to correctly manage the project and promptly identify if something went wrong, but at the same time, so that the number of works fits into several hundred because otherwise, it will be difficult to control the overall picture.

However, let’s focus on this issue in more detail.

So, the first principle: be sure to decompose the work.

If your plan is too top-level, your project will run slower. This will happen because the project is a coordinated team effort. Most often, the result is not immediately transmitted to the customer but goes through several stages of production or “rework,” i.e. when the results of one group’s work are used by another group within the project team. And if the work is divided too large, then the errors inherent in the work of one group will be revealed late, only at the time of transmitting the results to the next group or even to the customer’s specialists. I. e. the smaller the work is divided, the earlier it will be possible to identify the error and correct the performers.

On the other hand, the second principle applies: Reasonable sufficiency in decomposition.

Indeed, if you get too carried away with decomposition, you can create problems for yourself at the implementation stage. First, you will have to spend much time on micromanagement. Each work must be tested and accepted, which means that you will have to decide on every small issue that could be left to the performer. Secondly, when you reduce the amount of work, you reduce the degree of responsibility of performers, reduce their professional interest. Third, with a large number of small jobs, it becomes difficult to determine priorities for their implementation, which will inevitably lead to the execution of light and unimportant work before the performance of important, but more time-consuming.

So, to sum up. The decomposition of works is necessary when the results of the work of one contractor will be used by another contractor to prepare the final product of the project. Therefore, the first milestones of decomposition are the moments when the product moves from one performer to another. At the same time, we must make sure that this milestone does not account for too much work performed, to reduce the number of corrections in case the transferred product does not meet the requirements. To do this, we must provide for regular transmission of results between performers, for example, every 2-3 weeks. This way, we will improve interaction within the team and not spend much time on micromanagement.

Successful projects for you!