The success of a company depends on providing the highest level of service to its clients.  Yet when times are tough, reduced budgets and smaller staffs make it harder to deliver.  Outsourcing key projects can help you to provide a higher level of customer service while lowering costs at the same time.  It is an important step on the road to business virtualization, which reduces IT costs, improves availability and optimizes service.

The project management practice environment consists of Portfolio, Project and Program management. To date, significant progress has been evident in organizations’ awareness and adoption of portfolio and project management, but advances in program management have lagged behind. In an earlier article, we explored how Program Management is a key solution to closing the gap between strategy formulation and strategy execution; we defined programs and program management and outlined six steps to getting started on implementing a program management environment in an organization. A critical factor in ensuring program success is entrusting the management of programs to individuals with key skills and experience. In this article we explore in detail the attributes and requirements of the successful program manager, and outline how to develop program management competency within an organization.

Both traditional and agile project delivery embody similar principles and practices that aim to deliver measurable results. Traditional project delivery can be described as a “waterfall” approach, which presumes that the requirements, expectations, duration, activities and outcomes of projects can be predicted accurately and planned in a sequence before any actual development activity takes place.

Back in my younger days, I could run a sub-seven minute mile. When I heard about somebody running a five minute mile, I thought “now that’s really fast”.  Today, the world record for the mile run is 3:43:13, set in 1999 by Hicham El Guerrouj from Morocco.

In the eighties, IT projects felt like they moved at the pace of an eight minute mile.  We took the time to write detailed requirements, detailed design documents, thorough project plans, test plans, you name it.  If someone had a new idea or a new process on how to “do it right”, it was implemented.  I recall hour-long meetings on ways to improve processes on projects and conversations around what wasn’t being documented that needed to be documented in case somebody asked the question “where’s that documented?”  We even took the time to write detailed communication plans, which is something that I haven’t seen in a while. 

For folks looking for a project management approach that successfully navigates them through the project life cycle while focusing on the project manager’s role in delivering a successful project, let me recommend PRINCE2. PRINCE2 (Projects in  Controlled Environments) is a structured, non-proprietary project management method. It is a generic, widely accepted approach to managing projects which can be applied to any project regardless of project size or type.