What's in this eBook?
- Introduction: The Well-Run PMO
- Three Common Challenges that Hobble Your Project Planning
- Three Essential Processes to Amplify Project Planning Success
- Planning Perfection: Powerful Practices from Real Companies
Introduction: The Well-Run PMO
A well-run project management office (PMO) brings exponential value to the company. Research that explored the top 25% of project management offices, found that an effective PMO can have a significant business impact, including:
- 43% improvement in strategic alignment
- $175K cost savings per project
- 25% decrease in failed projects
These kinds of results are achieved through a coordinated, controlled, and complete, top-down effort that starts with an efficient project intake process, followed by comprehensive portfolio management, where the most valuable mix of projects is compared and prioritized. Next, it is crucial to create a structured, consistent project planning discipline among your teams that aligns all of your resources into effective activities that not only meet deadlines and budgets but will advance business strategy.
According to a recent article from the Project Management Institute, “In today’s dynamic and fast-paced project management environments, project planning rarely gets the attention it deserves from project managers. The emergence of modern project management methodologies and approaches such as agile and extreme programming has reduced the time allocated for project planning to a bare minimum. Most project managers fail to realize that a solid project plan can save time and money and reduces the risk of project failure.”
That’s why, with this eBook, we have gathered specific and actionable project planning best practices in one place to ensure a impactful and benefit-laden portfolio.
Three Common Challenges that Hobble Your Project Planning
There are three issues that our clients report when discussing project planning snafus:
- Managers repeat the same mistakes and reinvent the wheel with each project because they do not possess the dynamic templates to ensure consistency.
- Entire portfolios swing wildly off-budget, with no accurate baselines to measure success, because managers lack the ability to forecast against resources, roles, benefits, and budgets.
- Project managers lack governance because they have not defined the stage gates for project management lifecycle excellence, or even reached a level of repeatable competence. As a PMI Institute paper on the subject asserts:
“The challenge that many project managers have struggled with is how to define, validate, and quantify the return on investment in establishing project governance, as well as determining how to make the project governance framework repeatable but dynamic to the project specific requirements. This is a quagmire that the project management community frequently faces: How do you make project and program governance dynamic and also repeatable?”
Don’t worry. If these issues sound like yours, use our step-by-step guide to create better, more effective project planning processes and leverage the technology that empowers them.
