Project Management Process Improvement (Artech House Effective Project Management Series)

Project Management Process Improvement (Artech House Effective Project Management Series), 9781580537179 (1580537170), Artech House Publishers, 2004

Regardless of the extent of your efforts to design and deploy an exemplary project management process, the realities always seem to fall far short of your expectations. Project managers and their teams do not use the processes you worked so hard to get accepted and approved. Some use the processes sporadically. Others modify them to suit their own purposes. Others ignore them all together and opt to use their own processes, which they believe to be superior to the ones offered by their organization. Risk underlies many of these decisions. Project managers would prefer to use the tried and true rather than expose the project to added risk through the use of unfamiliar processes. Only after prompting from you do they give the new processes a try. Their reluctance is obvious and you do not seem to have won any converts to the new way. The question remains: How do you win converts to the processes and support you are offering?

If you are experiencing these behaviors, I do not want you to think that they are due to any failure on your part. Much to the contrary, to have a project management process in place is a considerable accomplishment. You should be proud of having reached this goal. However, I want you to take the position that it is just an intermediate goal. The long-term goal is to have a fully developed and integrated portfolio of project management processes. Your initial offering is just that—initial. You are now dealing with a cultural change. As teams begin to use these processes, you will learn about the process shortcomings. These you will fix, and the cycle of learning and fixing will continue. This improvement cycle is a major focus of this book.

This book will take you through the steps you will need in order to mature your project management processes to whatever level your management expects. In addition to the process goals, you will want to achieve a certain level of adoption, and we will consider the steps to achieve that goal as well.

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