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Blog post series
Do the right thing - Blog #6
Doing the right projects right is an amalgamation of planning, strategy, and execution. The alignment of strategy and execution helps organizations to find gaps in the planning process, and negotiate and manage change to ultimately achieve better business outcomes.
Great project management provides strategic alignment for an organization, creating a clear vision for how work is executed and problems get solved. However, organizations often undervalue the importance of project management.
The value of project management
The Project Management Institute reports that
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According to the 2018 Pulse of the Profession®,
“Executives often fail to recognize that effective project and program management is what delivers on strategy. More than one in three organizations report not having strong alignment of initiatives and projects that directly deliver against strategy. This indicates the need for C-Suite executives to better recognize the full potential of project management to execute strategy, and to ensure they are leveraging the right programs to directly deliver against strategy.”
So why are standardized project management tools and techniques either not valued or not working?
Do the right projects right
As a result of the strategic planning, your leadership team defined the strategic roadmap— the right projects. Now, it’s about execution — doing the right projects right. That's what matters now, because what’s at stake if a project fails? Time and money! And wasting time and money is never on the strategic roadmap.
“IT projects are notoriously difficult to manage. A survey published in HBR found that the average IT project overran its budget by 27%. Moreover, at least one in six IT projects turns into a ‘black swan’ with a cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of 70%.
In other words, while most IT projects will fall short of their budget targets, a few might overshoot the targets so much as to cause catastrophic organization-wide problems. KMart's massive $1.2B failed IT modernization project, for instance, was a big contributor to its bankruptcy."
Execution is a team effort but one of the most important elements of executing projects successfully is visibility. You need a tool that bridges the gaps between both core data systems and business organizations.
Project management challenges
A powerful Project Portfolio Management tool that richly integrates with and leverages your everyday line of business tools and provides full visibility into every stage of the process is essential — from executive level down to project contributor - to ensure business alignment and agility at all stages.
Siloed organizations are their own worst enemy. According to a Harvard Business Review article, “when asked to identify the single greatest challenge to executing their company’s strategy, 30% [of managers] cite failure to coordinate across units.”
A lack of communication or visibility across business units can really hinder project success. Real-time insight into project status and collaborative modes of communication enables teams to be more agile and responsive when there’s a change. More than that, the ability to look into a project and view its status helps managers and team members — across silos — communicate and keep the project moving.
It can be hugely challenging to maintain current projects, initiate new ones, and plan the road ahead, without impacting business momentum. Agile delivery approaches have introduced new ways to visualize work progress, providing teams and decision makers with new insights and real-time information about the status of the organization, encouraging transparency and collaboration and ultimately, alignment so that projects successfully underway are not disrupted.
As stated in the Harvard Business Review article, “No Gantt chart survives contact with reality.”
There's always change and the future is impossible to predict so teams, plans, and processes have to be agile enough to adapt to change. Having the high level 'big picture' visibility to see what's working and what's not is the first step. Next is having visibility into the granular aspects of a project.
The right project management toolkit
So which tools help you to do the right projects right?
Let's look at a typical Primavera customer from the energy / power / construction sector who is struggling to see the decision they need to make at the front of the process. Primavera means they can do the projects that get approved right, but which are the right projects to actually do?
Primavera customer example
An organization we work with previously had little to no visibility of their activity data held in SAP and Primavera P6, and no way to quickly visualize what was happening with their activities over time and/or connect them to their Projects or Drivers.
They were spending hours manually creating a PowerPoint slide to present their plan; Activity/Milestone roadmap, to leadership. They had to repeat this for their activities in their 120 day, 2 year and 5 year plans and for each Driver, which has several Projects made up of numerous Activities. Each Quarter they would recreate this slide and manually try to 'see' the shift in data quarter over quarter.
Software to visualize your business roadmaps
By leveraging SharpCloud, a business alignment platform, they no longer have to manually piece this information together - it's done automatically. They no longer have to create various roadmaps for Teams or Drivers because they can leverage filters within the platform to automatically create these roadmaps.
Additionally, they are able to use data-driven visualizations to see where they need to focus. Leadership is able to identify Projects or Drivers that will go beyond their original end-date, due to Activities being pushed out, and see where planning may be at risk because of out of order dependencies on Activities.
The increased visibility allows them to see the impact of their decisions. Rather than just push out an Activity, they can undertake scenario analysis by pushing out an Activity and seeing its true impact on other Activities and/or the Corporate Strategic Drivers and Projects.
Connect, visualize and align
Any organization looking to better understand how their business roadmap connects to the overall business direction and strategy are able to draw connections to otherwise siloed areas of their business to get a comprehensive view of what is happening in their organization.
That visibility alone is worth millions of dollars especially for larger Oil/Gas or Aerospace companies where projects can be worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. The impact is tremendous to have one of those projects pushed or for a Net Zero initiative to be pushed out several years when shareholders are expecting something to happen now.
Project management tools for agile
As an Oracle Partner Network member, SharpCloud can help Primavera customers and other project-led enterprise companies quickly visualize and leverage the relationships and connections between their project data and business goals. This increased visibility allows them to prioritize their focus and the see impact of their decisions and provides their leadership with a holistic view of the business.
Supporting both top-down and bottom-up decision-making discussions, through its ability to dynamically visualize cost and schedule information across multiple views so that users can see the relationships of their work to goals, SharpCloud provides a shared workspace that connects data and people and ensures a greater connection between strategy design and delivery.
Read more about the partnership benefits here.
Connect and align: projects, people, and data to your goals!
By seeing the big picture and working together in an agile manner your business teams and leadership will make better strategic decisions.
The right solution empowers organizations to translate corporate values into strategic, actionable plans, with the agility to respond to change...it empowers them to do the right projects right.