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Tag Archives: Program Management

What’s in a Name?

Posted on May 14, 2015 by | Leave a comment

When it comes to effective communication, a clear, concise and easily defined name for something is essential if you want people who are not directly involved in your special disciple to understand your message.  Jargon and ambiguity destroy understanding and damage credibility.

Potentially one of the major reasons senior executives still fail to understand ‘project management’ within their organisations is the fact that the project management profession uses its special terms in a multitude of different ways……

There are four generally recognised focuses within the overall domain of ‘project management’ Portfolio management, Program management, Project management and the overarching capabilities needed by an organisation to use project, program and portfolio (PPP) management effectively.

The starting problem is implicit in the above paragraph, ‘project management’ can be used as a ‘collective noun’ and mean all four areas of management or specifically to mean the management of a project.

The next problem is if project management means the management of a project, exactly what is a project?  The current definitions for a project are very imprecise and can apply to virtually anything. A more precise definition is discussed in Project Fact or Fiction.

Program management is fairly consistently defined in the literature and involves both the management of multiple projects and the realisation of benefits for the organisation. There are still legacy problems though; the ‘Manhattan Project’ to create the first atomic bombs during WW2 was a massive program of work involving dozens of separate projects.

Similarly, Portfolio management is fairly consistently defined. The core element of portfolio management is deciding on the best investment strategy for the organisation to meet its strategic objective through investing in new selected projects and programs and reviewing current ‘investments’ to ensure the project or program is continuing to deliver value (and closing those that are not to redirect the resources to a better ‘investment option’.

Both Program management and Portfolio management are relatively new concepts and have the advantage of being developed at a time where wide reaching communication was relatively easy allowing a consistency of though and definition. Where the real problems emerge is in the realm of the overall organisational capabilities to use PPP concepts effectively.

The management space around the core PPP management functions includes:

  • Governance
  • Multi-Project management
  • Organisational enablers such as PMOs, etc
  • The ‘management of projects’ (Prof. Peter Morris)
  • Benefits realisation
  • Organisational change management
  • Value creation

In general terms this area of management responsibilities can be picked up if ‘project management’ is used as an overarching term. Some times, some aspects get absorbed into people’s definition of portfolio management and program management. But this ‘absorption’ does not really help develop clarity; for example,  whilst benefits realisation is generally seen as part of program management, this does not help deal with the realisation of benefits for the 1000s of project that are not part of a program, etc.

Apart from project, program and portfolio management as defined I believe the global project management community, including academia and the major associations need to make a focused effort to develop a ‘standard’ naming convention for these various aspects of ‘project management’ – if we cannot be consistent in our use of terms our stakeholders will be permanently confused and confused stakeholders are unlikely to be supportive!

I feel there are three distinct aspects to this ‘fuzzy space’:

  • The second is the ability of an organisation to effectively select and support its project, program and portfolio management efforts. This includes the ‘management of projects’, organisation enablers and multi-project management: The Strategic Management of Projects.
  • The third area is the link between PPP, operations, strategy and value, encompassing benefits realisation, value creation and integration with organisational change management (which is an already established management discipline). I don’t have a good name for this critical area of our professions contribution to organisations but it is probably the most important from the perspective of executive management.

The overall architecture of the discipline of PPP management looks something like this:

The challenge is to start moving towards a consensus on a naming convention for these aspects of ‘project management’ so we can start communicating clearly and concisely with all of our stakeholders.  Hopefully this post will start some discussions.

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PMI Standards Round-Up

Posted on April 15, 2013 by | Leave a comment

The three standards released by PMI at the beginning of this year were the:

PMBOK® Guide Fifth Edition
Standard for Portfolio Management Third Edition
Standard for Program Management Third Edition

As a consequence, the global PM community now has a set of basic standards that will remain stable for the next four years through to the next cyclical update scheduled for late 2016. The tight integration between all three standards means minimal duplication of ideas and best practices.

Whilst each of the PMI Credentials tends to focus on one of these three standards, the key thing from an organisational perspective is they are integrated, and after this round of upgrades better integrated than ever!

The Portfolio Management standard focuses on the investment decisions needed to select the best projects and programs to start and maintain to achieve the organisations strategy within its resource constraints. Selecting the ‘right projects and programs to do’.

For guidance on ‘doing them right’, the Program Management standard focuses on the business outcome and integration aspects of program management and the PMBOK® Guide covers off the basic skills and capabilities needed to deliver the project outputs efficiently.

Each standard can be used in isolation; however, the real power lays in using all three as a framework for organisational improvement – Creating an effective Project Delivery Capability (download our PDC White Paper). The final missing link, PMI’s updated OPM3 standard will be released later this year.

This means that organisations interested in developing a best practice capability across the ‘enterprise’ aimed at achieving the maximum sustainable value from its investment in projects and programs now have an ideal opportunity to buy into current thinking via these standards and time to develop improved processes.

We have enjoyed working through the standards and writing this series of posts on the improvements (for previous posts click here) – but 4 months down the track we now consider these ‘new’ standards business as usual, have consigned the ‘old’ standards to history, and will make this our last post on the updates. Our very last PMP and CAPM course based on the ‘old’ standards will be run at the end of May (course details) and then we will be 100% aligned to the new and improved versions. We encourage everyone else to do the same.

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The Standard for Program Management—Third Edition

Posted on March 21, 2013 by | Leave a comment

The most noticeable thing about the new Standard for Program Management – Third Edition is that is has gone on a major diet! The 2nd Edition was 271 page long (plus appendix), the 3rd Edition is less than half the size at 106 pages plus appendix. Unfortunately the price has not moved in the same direction.

The Standard still provides a detailed understanding of program management and promotes efficient and effective communication and coordination among various project management groups. The major updates include:

  • Program Life Cycle has been assigned its own chapter for the third edition to provide the details of the unique set of elements that makes up the program management phase.
  • The third edition highlights the full scope of program management and clarifies the supporting processes that complete the delivery of programs in the organizational setting.
  • A more detailed definition of program management within an organization is provided, including the fundamental differences between project management and program management.

The major focus of the revision seems to be removing a lot of the ‘project management’ information that is found in the PMBOK® Guide and focusing on the role of program management in organisations, the unique characteristics of program management work and the role of the program manager. A shift from process to principle, that is aligned with the Program Management Role Delineation Study that forms the basis for the PgMP examination.

The framework in the Third Edition is:

  • Introduction
  • Program Management Performance Domains
  • Program Strategy Alignment
  • Program Benefits Management
  • Program Stakeholder Engagement
  • Program Governance
  • Program Life Cycle Management
  • Program Management Supporting Processes

The relationship between the Program Management Performance Domains that makes up the bulk of the standard is illustrated below.

In addition to the core standard, Appendix X4 on Program Management Competencies, and X5 on Program Management Artefacts are very succinct and useful.

A couple of shortcomings in this version of the standard are firstly the limited recognition of the different type of program that organisations run. The PMI standard is very much centred on the ‘strategic program’ defined in the GAPPS typology discussed in our White Paper Defining Program Types. In particular the GAPPS ‘Operational Program’ typology has been largely ignored in the PMI standard.

The other is the classic confusion between the Enterprise level executive management responsibilities that are critical for the support and oversight of the work of the Program Manager and Organisational Governance, typical of documentation produced by working managers. What the standard describes as ‘governance’ is the critical management responsibilities of senior executives to adequately support oversight and manage the process of ‘program management’. Governance is the process of oversighting the whole management system, that is performed by the ‘governing body’ which is the Board of Directors in most commercial organisations and their equivalent in other types of organisation – governors govern, managers manage! For more on this critical distinction see: WP1084 Governance Systems & Management Systems. The contents of the ‘governance’ section are good, just miss-labelled.

Summary
Overall this is a significantly improved standard – a lot of duplication and redundancy has been removed, and the key functions and processes of program management and what organisations need to do at the enterprise level to support programs are well though through and laid out. This new standard is available in Australia from: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Books.html#PMI

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PMBOK® Guide 5th Edition now in stock

Posted on January 14, 2013 by | 1 comment

Stocks of the new PMBOK® Guide 5th Edition, the Standard for Program Management 3rd Edition and the Standard for Portfolio Management 3rd Edition are now in Australia. These updated standards continue PMI’s efforts to enhance their suite of international standards to remain at the forefront of project management standardisation.

We will be posting more comments after a careful read.  Some initial thoughts are in two earlier posts:
PMBOK 5th Edition some key changes #1
The 5th Edition of the PMBOK gets communication!

For more information and to order these new PMI standards for free delivery in Australia visit: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/Books.html#PMI

Note: These new PMI standards are not required for current examinations – PMI will be updating their examinations in Q3 of 2013 to align with the standards and we will be updating our PMP, CAPM and PMI-SP training in Q2 in readiness for the change over.

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The failure of strategic planning

Posted on July 23, 2012 by | 11 comments

Projects struggling for management support are one of the key indicators of a sub-standard value creation system that is failing to make full use of the deliverables created by projects and programs. But the problem is likely to be much deeper; surveys consistently show that between 15% and 80% of projects undertaken by organisations cannot be linked to the performing organisations strategy. These ‘ferrel projects’ are either symptoms of inadequate governance, or symptoms of inadequate strategic planning!

In many organisations, and particularly in business areas focused on system support such as IT the typical path taken by an innovative idea through to some confused delivery of value is a straight line from the innovation, to a business case, to a project that has to seek management support and the surviving projects eventually deliver their outputs to a bunch on unprepared and unwilling end users. The generation of value is far from certain!

Over the last few years, Portfolio Management has started to emerge. Portfolio management should have a strategic focus and make selections based on strategic priorities but in most current implementations tends to be a process oriented, stand alone function. Certainly by applying capacity constraints the number of projects that fail due to lack of organisational resources will be reduced but the focus on value creation is minimal. Management support and organisational change are not central to the process. There is literally a ‘fence’ between the executive ‘strategic planning’ processes and innovation within the organisation.

Most authorities describe project and programs as the ‘change agent’ responsible for creating the ability to implement strategic initiatives to grow and improve the organisation. For this to occur, the strategic planning system needs to be far more engaged with the organisation and central to the process of innovation, guided and supported by the organisations executive!

Within a value driven framework, the strategic planning process should be central to innovation, initiating work to develop prospective ideas, and receiving all of the innovative ideas to enhance the organisation from every source. Innovative organisations such as Google actively encourage innovation and experimentation within parameters but have careful selection processes before burning money on significant projects. They are also prepared use the innovative ideas to inform strategy, and to take significant strategic risks if an innovation warrants the speculation on a ‘whole new future’ for the organisation.
Within this framework, the evolution of the strategic plan is a cyclical process, possibilities and ‘blue sky’ ideas are communicated to the governing body, who formulate, review and update the overall strategic guidelines as new ideas and possibilities emerge.

However, my feeling is there is a tactical level missing from strategic thinking that will be needed for this process to work effectively. The overarching ‘strategic guidance’ needs to be fairly stable and take a long view and only be updated as needed (possibly twice a year). Based on this strategic guidance, a detailed strategic plan is developed at a ‘tactical level’, to frame the current implementation of the strategy. This process needs more rigour and more flexibility (the two are not mutually exclusive) compared to the high level plan, should only take a medium term view and be updated continuously. Based on this plan, feasible ideas that support the strategy are authorised for the development of a value oriented business case.

The creation of this flexible but rigorous tactical-level strategic process would place the ‘plan’ at the forefront of processes such as Portfolio Management and virtually eliminate ferrel projects.

Portfolio management also has a central role to play in developing strategy. The current strategy informs the portfolio selection process, and information on current projects and programs, the viability of assessed business cases and other consolidated information is absorbed back into the strategic planning process. Based on these factors, the key job of the portfolio managers is to select the most strategically important business cases, within the capability and capacity limitations of the organisation, for initiation as projects or programs, and cancel or modify projects that no longer align with the evolving strategic plan.

The role of management is firstly to implement the executive guidance by supporting the Portfolio Management processes and the selected projects. More importantly, management is also responsible for managing the organisation so that the necessary change initiatives are implemented to make effective use of the project deliverables to generate valuable returns over the life of the initiative, frequently a period of many years!

Developing a value driven system similar to the one described in this post is primarily a governance issue. The organisations directors and executives need to lead the process and be closely involved in the strategic management of the organisation.

Strategic planning also needs to evolve from a fluffy ‘high level’ process to a far more useful function that actually sets the strategy for the organisation’s management to implement. Within this framework, the organisations governance systems and leadership need to ensure their management support the process and are focused on creating value.

The Value Chain

However, the value creation chain is only as strong as its weakest link, which includes effective strategic planning supported by effective governance that ensures management support for the overall process. A clear indication the strategic governance processes are not working is when projects and programs have to fight to receive executive support to ‘exist’ and the organisation’s measure of success is limited to the ‘iron triangle’ of time, cost and scope focused at the end of the project.

Successful organisations focus on the more difficult, but more important measures of benefits realised and the value created for the organisation as a result of the project deliverables being used by the organisation to support its strategic initiatives and generate lasting improvements.

Most of the work needed to make this process work is in management areas outside of the traditional Portfolio, Program and Project management (PPP) arena. But no organisation will achieve the optimum results from its PPP initiatives without the front and back ends of the overall value chain being of equal ‘strength’.

This is not rocket science, many successful organisations, particularly in mining and engineering achieve this type of integration in their core business. For more on the governance aspects see: Mosaic WP1073 – Project Governance.  

For more on the overall project delivery capability see: Mosaic WP1079 – Project Delivery Capability.

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Organisational Change Management

Posted on March 4, 2012 by | 1 comment

We have just posted a new White Paper that looks at Organisational Change Management. We have focused on ‘organisational’ for two reasons:

  • Firstly, any significant change is a change to the organisation – projects and programs cause the change but the organisation has to adapt to the change.
  • Secondly, the only valid purpose for a change is to create value and the only way to generate value is through sustained improvements (changes) in the way the organisation operates.

This new White Paper, WP1078 Organisational Change Management, consolidates and augments a range of posts over the last couple of years. The full set of original blog posts can be viewed at: /category/governance/change-management

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The Management of Project Management

Posted on January 29, 2012 by | 5 comments

A significant gap in the current standardisation of project, program and portfolio management relates to the senior management functions necessary to effectively manage the projects and programs initiated by the organisation.

Project Management, as defined by PMI, ISO21500 and a range of other standards commences when the project is funded, and concludes on the delivery of the outputs the project was established to deliver.

Program Management focuses on the coordinated management of a number of projects to achieve benefits that would not be available if the projects were managed in isolation. Different types of program have been defined by GAPPS ranging from optimising annual budgets to maintain a capability (eg, the maintenance of a railway system) through to creating a major change in the way an organisation operates.

Processes for identifying the best projects and programs for an organisation to invest in through portfolio management and tracking benefits realisation are also well defined within the context of strategic management, but are generally not as well implemented by organisations.

Finally the overall governance of organisations and its key sub-set, project governance is recognised as essential for the long term wellbeing of the organisation.

Within this overall framework, the element not well defined, that is essential to achieving the optimum benefits from the ‘doing of projects and programs’, is the organisation’s ability to manage the management of its projects and programs.

At the overall organisational level, the management of project management includes developing and supporting the capabilities needed to provide executive oversight and leadership so that the organisation is able to undertake projects and programs effectively. This includes the organisations ability to develop and enhance its overall project management capabilities, develop project and program managers and project team members, implement appropriate methodologies, provide effective sponsorship, and achieve the benefits and value the projects and programs were set up to facilitate.

At the individual department level, the ability to manage multiple projects in an effective way is equally critical. Typically the role of a Project Director, multi-project management differs from program management in a number of key aspects:

  • There is limited correlation between the objectives of the various projects, eg a number of design and fabrication projects may each have a different external customer.
  • The function is relatively stable and permanent (programs close once their objectives are achieved).
  • The primary focus of this management function is resource optimisation, minimising conflicts and process clashes, and developing the project/program delivery capability of the department/facility.

A number of recognised roles such as the Project/Program Sponsor, project governance and PMOs contribute to the organisations ability to manage the management of projects and programs and develop effective multi-project management capabilities, what is missing is an overall framework that supports the ongoing development of these functions to facilitate the effective governance of projects, programs and portfolios.

Peter Morris and Joana Geraldi have recently published a paper focused on ‘Managing the Institutional Context for Projects’ (Project Management Journal, Vol.42, No.6 p20-32), this paper defines three levels of project management:

Level 1 – Technical ‘project management’; the processes defined in standards such as the PMBOK® Guide and ISO21500.

Level 2 – Strategic ‘management of projects’; the overall management of the project from concept to benefits realisation, starting with identifying and validating concepts, through portfolio selection to delivery and the creation of the intended value.

Level 3 – Institutional context; developing an institutional context for projects and programs to enable them to succeed and enhance their effectiveness. The focus is on creating an environment that encourages improved levels of success in all of the organisation’s projects and programs.

The theoretical framework described in Morris’ paper covers the same concepts (but from a different viewpoint) to the technical framework of organisational entities and roles defined in our White Paper, a PPP Taxonomy (and the linked White Papers focused on specific elements of the structure), see: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/WhitePapers/WP1074_PPP_Taxonomy.pdf

What developing the PPP Taxonomy identified within our White Papers, and Morris highlights in his paper, is the critical need for organisations to develop an intrinsic capability to manage the overall management of projects and programs. Over the next few weeks I hope to complete two additional White Papers to start filling this gap:
– The Management of Project Management – the institutional context.
– Multi-project Management – the departmental context.

In the meantime, a PPP Taxonomy defines the overall project governance and control framework these two critically important elements fit within.

On reflection, many of the project and program failures identified in our earlier posts as generic ‘governance failures’ are likely to be shown to be directly caused by the absence of systems designed to ‘manage project management’, this is still a governance failure but now the root cause of some of these failures may be able to be specifically defined.

This is an emerging area of thinking, you are invited to download the White Papers and post any thoughts, comments or disagreements, as well as make use of the ideas to help improve your organisations. There’s a long way to go, at present there’s not even a clearly defined term for this aspect of project governance/management……

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Project and Organisational Governance

Posted on December 28, 2011 by | 2 comments

One of the themes running through several of my recent posts is the importance of effective Governance. Both organisational governance and its sub-set project governance.

Good governance is a synonym for ‘good business’, structuring the organisation to deliver high levels of achievement on an ethical and sustainable basis. This requires the optimum strategy and the right approach to risk taking supported by sufficient processes to be reasonably confident the organisations limited resources are being used to achieve the best short, medium and long term outcomes.

Project governance focuses on the portfolios of programs and projects used by the organisation to deliver many of the strategic objectives. This process focuses first on doing the right projects and programs constrained by the organisations capacity to undertake the work – Portfolio Management; secondly, creating the environment to do the selected projects and programs right- developing and maintaining an effective capability; and lastly systems to validate the usefulness and efficiency of the ongoing work which feeds back into the selection and capability aspects of governance.

 

Within this framework, portfolio management is the key. Strategic Portfolio Management focuses on developing the best mix of programs and projects to deliver the organisations future within its capacity to deliver. This means taking the right risk and having sufficiently robust system in place to identify as early as possible the ‘wrong projects’, so they can be either be reframed or closed down and the resources re-deployed to other work.

It is impossible to develop an innovative future for an organisation without taking risks and not every risk will pay off. Remember Apple developed the ‘Apple Lisa’ as its first GUI computer which flopped in the market, before going on to develop the Apple Macintosh which re-framed the way we interact with machines.

Apple Lisa circa. 1983

Obviously no organisation wants to have too many failures but good governance requires ‘good risk taking’. Apple had no guarantees the i-Pod and its i-Tunes shop would succeed when it started on the journey of innovation that has lead to the i-Phone, i-Pad and Apple becoming one of the largest companies in the world based on capitalisation. As Richard Branson says – ‘you don’t bet the company on a new innovation’ but if you don’t innovate consistently, obsolescence will be the inevitable result.

The balance of project governance focuses around creating the environment that generates the capability to deliver projects and programs effectively, effective sponsorship, effective staff development, effective and flexible processes and procedures, simple but accurate reporting and good early warning systems to identify issues, problems and projects no longer creating value (a pharmaceutical industry saying is that if a project is going to fail it is best to fail early and cheap!).

Good questions outrank easy answers! Every hour and dollar spent on governance processes is not being spent on developing the organisation. The challenge of good governance is to have just enough reporting processes embedded in an effective culture of openness and accountability to provide an appropriate level of assurance the organisation’s resources are being used effectively; whilst at the same time allowing innovation and development. Restrictive and burdensome governance processes are simply bad governance – they restrict the organisation’s ability to achieve excellence.

To help organisations understand these key governance processes we have updated our two White Papers on the subject:
Corporate Governance: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/WhitePapers/WP1033_Governance.pdf
Project Governance: http://www.mosaicprojects.com.au/WhitePapers/WP1073_Project_Governance.pdf

For more discussion around the subject of governance see the previous posts on this blog.

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Project Governance

Posted on December 11, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Corporate governance is defined as aligning as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, the organisation and society. Good governance is good business!

Project governance is a sub-set of corporate governance, focused on systems that ensure the right projects and programs are selected by the organisation, and the selected ‘few’ are accomplished as efficiently as possible. Projects that no longer contribute value to an organisation should be terminated in a way that conserves the maximum value and the resources reallocated through the portfolio management process to more valuable endeavours.

The framework for effective project governance is laid out above, and is an executive management responsibility. Sponsors and the Portfolio Selection/Management processes provide the key link between the executive and the working project and programs (for more see our Governance White Paper).

The focus of this post is to look at the pre-selection activities that inform the portfolio selection processes. One of the key conclusions to be drawn from the Ombudsman’s Report discussed in my earlier post Cobb’s Paradox is alive and well  was that many of the projects that contributed to the $1 billion in failures were set up to fail – the projects had absolutely no chance of delivering within the announced parameters: the inputs to the portfolio selection process were grossly flawed (or were non-existent).

This appears to be a wide spread issue. Most project management standards such as ISO21500 and the PMBOK® Guide start with an approved project and a business case or similar that defines what has to be accomplished; this is the end of the portfolio selection process outlined above and is assumed to set realistic and achievable objectives.

What is missing, are the steps leading up to this point; the life of a ‘project’ starts with an idea, need, opportunity, requirement or threat (the ‘concept’). The organisation assesses and studies the ‘concept’ hypothesises options and solutions and frames a proposal that becomes the foundation of a future project. These key investigative elements of a project generally sit under the portfolio umbrella developing information to allow a proper decision to be made. In mining this can represent exploration, feasibility studies, ‘bankability’ studies and concept designs which between them can cost $millions, leading to project funding. Importantly, this ‘Front End Loading’ (FEL) is seen as the key to a successful mine in most major mining corporations.

Similar problems exist in major infrastructure projects, defining a solution to prison overcrowding can involve building a new major prison, building several smaller prisons, extending current prisons, changing the way criminal justice system works to reduce the need for prison places, or a combination of the foregoing options (substitute University/hospital/school, into the previous sentence to see just one dimension of the challenge). However, unlike mining, most government and many corporate organisations see effective ‘front end loading’ as unnecessary.

Other organisations use the process to formulate definitive solutions to problems they have no real understanding of (typical in ICT) and then pretend the defined solution has no associated risk (because it is defined) despite the fact the full dimensions of the problem the project is supposed to solve are still unknown, and are frequently changing over time.

The challenge, requiring informed judgement and effective governance is recognising which development processes suits what type of ‘concept’:

  • Sometimes, the ‘investigation’ requires a significant amount of work (eg, a bankability or feasibility study); this work may be treated as a project in its own right, and is time, cost and resource constrained with a defined deliverable (the report).
  • If the work is expected to flow forward and will only be stopped in exceptional circumstances, project phases work best, with some form of ‘gateway’ or transition review.
  • In other circumstances, studies are undertaken as part of the portfolio by corporate or PMO professionals with no dedicated budgets, assessing multiple proposals as an ongoing process, but once a concept gets the go ahead a project is created and a budget and resources allocated.
  • Other concepts (particularly problems) cannot be defined and an ‘agile’ approach is needed where elements of a partial solution are developed and put into use developing new learning that will then allow the next module to be developed in a progressive sequence. However, whilst this may be the most suitable and cost effective way of developing an effective solution, budgeting in a traditional ‘iron triangle’ concept of fixed cost, time and scope is impossible.

The challenge is recognising which type of project is being proposed (based on Project Typology), and then deciding which type of process will develop the best input to the portfolio selection process and what level of uncertainty (risk) is associated with the proposal once developed. Certainty is not important, what matters is appreciating the extent of the risks and the likely benefits, so an informed investment decision can be made. Most ‘game changing’ initiatives involve high risk, high reward projects that create a totally new future!

OGC Gateway™

The OGC ‘Gateway Reviews’ is a flexible process that addresses this part of major projects from the client’s perspective:
Gateway 1 = Business Justification, options identified and appraised, affordability, achievability and value for money established.
Gateway 2 = Procurement strategy, will the proposed strategy achieve the project objectives?
Gateway 3 = Investment decision, based on realistic project cost information (eg, tenders or bids) can the business case be confirmed from both the cost and the benefit perspective?
Gateway 4 = Readiness for service. The completion of the project work and a reassessment/confirmation of the expected benefits as the deliverable is put into ‘service’.
Gateway 5 = Benefits evaluation. Did we get what was expected now the project’s outputs are being used?

Summary

Most of the risks and rewards associated with a project or program are determined long before the project manager is appointed; if these decisions are wrong (or non-existent) project and program management cannot resolve the problem.

The role of effective project management is to deliver a realistic and achievable outcome efficiently; if the parameters for the project are unrealistic in the first place, the best project management can do is stop the situation deteriorating further! As far as I know, none of the various BoKs and methodologies, including the PMBOK® Guide has a ‘miracle’ process that will magically transform an impossible set of objectives into achievable set of objectives. Wishful thinking is not an effective substitute for effective project governance!

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Lessons Learned

Posted on November 9, 2011 by | 1 comment

The London Olympic Delivery Authority’s Learning Legacy is designed to facilitate the dissemination of the lessons learned from the London 2012 construction project for the benefit of future projects and programmes, academia and government with the intention of raising the bar within the construction sector.

The ODA are on the verge of delivering a massive program of works on-time and on-budget, the learning from this major undertaking can benefit everyone.  To browse and download the 250 documents see: http://learninglegacy.london2012.com/

There are four types of reports:

    • Micro reports: Short examples of lessons learned, best practice and innovations from the construction programme.
    • Case studies: Peer reviewed papers on lessons learned, best practice and innovations from across the Programme.
    • Research summaries: Summary reports of research projects undertaken by academia and industry on the London 2012 construction.  These organisations will also publish full research papers as they are finalised throughout 2012.   Over 600 interviews were undertaken by researchers on the ODA and its supply chain as part of the learning legacy research.
    • Champion products: Examples of tools and templates used successfully on the programme.

    The reports have been classified into 10 themes:

  • Programme and project management;
  • Design and engineering innovation
  • Equality, inclusion, employment and skills;
  • Health and safety;
  • Masterplanning and town planning;
  • Procurement and supply chain management;
  • Sustainability;
  • Systems and technology;
  • Transport;
  • Archaeology.

This is a highly recommended rich source of information.

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