How to Determine the Value of Value?

valueThe question is project management, that has been asked frequently and quite readily is how the things both tangible and intangible can be determined, the cost and effectiveness. What is its value exactly? Value is a concept that varies from organization to organization and encompasses the total sum of all profits, gains and losses.

When the value which can be seen and determined is easy but what about the intangible ones. The clear ones can get you return, and you can easily get where the return is? The intangible elements the project can generate.

Businesses primarily consists of things are tangible, but things which are intangible can have great impact on businesses changing the way they operate, how employees are managed, how products are designed and sold. Intangibles can be classified as benefits or assets (resources). The benefits classified as intangible consists of subjective approaches and views about a company that can’t be expressed in terms of money.

The challenge is finding and tracing these valued intangibles. Keeping in mind, most of the value will be created in the minds of the investors or stakeholders.

Project management is considered as a central process in businesses used to oversee and control specific activities. The results of project management from that of the project as a whole cannot be differentiated and if they can, this might be a difficult thing to do. It definitely takes time and money to manage a project. The benefits include, both in terms of tangible and intangible.

One of the very basic tangible benefits that adds value to the business or project is budget management.

It is a major benefit that includes budgetary savings. Project managers are responsible for controlling budgets, making decisions how the resources need to be allocated, in order to get the best return.

Second major tangible benefit is meeting deadlines, which majorly includes managing your time. The completion of project requires two main things, completing it in budget and in time, meeting the deadline is very crucial to success of the project which ultimately adds value to the business and in return stakeholders get a sense of reliability over the project management team.

The intangible benefits can be managing risk and team work.

Discussing the prior, risk management is important as well as a difficult task to do. The reason being its difficult quantifying as compared to cost savings. The only thing project managers can do is evaluate the factors that can cause harm to the project and plan a strategy to avoid it to the best of their knowledge.

It might contains some tangible benefits too like placing a financial metrics for placing a tangible value on risk. The intangible benefit is taking the risk when it’s best to take it, the appropriate move to make. The sign of a skilled project manager is he can lead the team to its objectives but remain flexible to react to changing risk factors.

Another intangible benefit is team work, one of the key factors that affects project management is its allocation of human resources. The right person for the right job and their ability to work in coordination to achieve a common goal.

What are some common ways to align portfolio management with strategy?

portfolioIn most organizations, the successful implementation of initiatives that are strategic in nature is very crucial. But a number of them neglects the importance of aligning portfolio management with strategy. According to a recent survey only 10 percent pay heed to aligning portfolio management with strategy.

Leadership, direction and guidance. Monitoring and reporting of key performance. ALIGNMNET TO STRATEGY and empowering teams to make day to day decisions is very crucial.

The most talked about and critical factors to align portfolio management with strategy are as follows.

3 C’s:

The important three c’s mainly culture, change management and communication. These three c’s are very crucial to company’s success. The triple threat of portfolio management is having these components work in harmony with the company’s strategy.

Culture can be understood as the habits which are embodied by an organization. It may also refer to personality. Culture can be described as something that may refer to something unseen that can be felt when walking around in an organization. According a survey, it has been cited that approx. 95% of the employs never pay attention to what’s the strategy, they just focus on the tasks individually, not the strategy or planning or the overall growth.

Although culture may be difficult to describe, it can be understood as instead of just letting our cultures evolve randomly we should focus on making and building cultures inside our organizations. And that can happen by socializing that culture through communication and change movement.

Governance:

When you want to practice good portfolio management with remarkably aligned strategy these core governance functions should always be kept in mind.

  1. Oversight
  2. Control
  3. Decision making
  4. Integrating
  5. Value
  6. Risk management
  7. PPPM maturity.
  8. Organizational structure.

 

 

Agility:

A broader umbrella for organizations culture and processes that are quick and adaptable.Quick here suggests how nimble they are in terms of speed of reacting. Whereas adaptable refers to being flexible or versatile. To take best advantages of internal of external changes one should it’s crucial to make a versatile and flexible organizations. The cause of strategical change is portfolio management.

How you align portfolio management with strategy?

This question is a challenge for project managers now a days. While building an organization to enable strategic initiative an organization should be defined by verticals of end to end processes.

Portfolio management is all aboutmaking decisions and then carrying out appropriate actions for its cause. Portfolio managers need to develop their business skills, most importantly the understanding the mechanisms and processes associated with governance and strategy planning.

Some of the key features are

Exploring the factors that influence strategy, mainly the culture of organization, capability of the organization and what does stakeholders expect from the firm.

Secondly, the strategic management or planning of the organization. Their choices at corporate level, decisions and how the actions are carried out to formulate those decisions into successful happenings

In the end, the process of portfolio execution is presented.

Enterprise Function Support

valueIf you are new to project management, you surely need to know and understand this phenomena,the first thing is understanding enterprise function model. The enterprise functional model is generic one that can be applied to numerous organizations, in any industry. It can be of two ways, product driven and service driven. It represents the highest level functions in an enterprise.

Now a days with the changing needs, everyone is in need of enterprise function support, it is more demanded as hybrid project delivery approaches. The quantitative analysis as show that the hybrid project delivery is becoming rather common these days.

In order to add more value to one’s business the things like aligning business activities is coming into considerations by project management leads. The activities which are made top of the list are project delivery activities.

The considerations may include activities like speed at which project iterations are produced using agile method, complexities of business and technology, and the increasing expectations of customers. Though these considerations are not limited to the ones discussed in the article, there can be many others as well.

All of these enhances the importance of enterprise functions and their support such as portfolio management, release management and resource management etc. these and other enterprise delivery disciplines have been identified by a framework known as scale agile framework. This has been identified as the key to success in agile project delivery methods.

Coming back to enterprise function model and its key features, the material used in enterprise function model gives details about

  • Overview of functions used.
  • Functional responsibilities
  • Terminology

This model is generic and can be implemented to a wide range of industries and enterprises.

The approach used can be product driven or service driven.

A function can be understood as a group of knowledge related (subject area activities).

These activities need to have a purpose.

The framework used for enterprise function model has an impression of creating a sense of getting a long lost thing back specially when considering the innovations, but that’s not the case.

Rather this framework has helped in identifying the critical need to have these functions in place and engaging all types of deliveries in an enterprise.

Whether there are project managers or agile leads, both can increase the percentage of their project’s success by getting closely related and integrated with enterprise functions. Lacking of this will create troubles for enterprise and organizations will have a hard time in processes like schedule, resource, dependency, testing and implementation. Without having any robust enterprise function model in place, the enterprise may lead to lesser number of successful projects ultimately reducing the business value and profit share of organizations, which is indeed closely related to how organizations design their work infrastructure.

Talking about function and their model, it varies with the scope of the industry, whereas the thing that has been seen is all enterprises do have research and development function.

Consistency while following the right model and delivery is very important for businesses.

When the Benefits of Your Recent Project Fades Away

benifitsThis is a thing which is not being paid due attention, for instance, let’s understand it with an example the project you were working on is complete you are busy taking your time out, enjoy success, celebrating with your stakeholders and other teammates. You are not following your recently completed project but somebody else surely is.

You even engage in some new assignment. But then the unexpected happen. Ad what it is?

The project you completed is not delivering results. At some point like the first six months or so of your project, you might even overhear what your project has been creating, a mess for others or let’s just say , not adding the right kind of value or expected value to the business of your customer or the organization you are working for. But once you find out the results are not as expected, next thing on your mind is how you need to carry out the amendments but firstly you get to know, what went wrong?

You start looking for clues and let us see, what can be the answers,

Your findings reveal that the related processes which are supporting your product are not aligned thus in return producing the loss. Which results in erosion of benefits or you can say with this the benefits of the product fade away.

Some of the factors are discussed below, which can be of great help for project managers, these factors will help you fill the loopholes when you work on your next project, so here you go.

  • Overtime
  • Regulatory fines
  • Overlooked tax deductions union disputes.

Discussing these in detail is important.

But first, understand is what your next step would be, focus on the assignment you are currently working on and ignore what’s been lacking behind or work on the solution involving your stakeholders, other project managers, and team in the process. The answer may differ according to the situation you are in, but one thing you need know, updating the project with lessons learned is important. And crucial to your success as a project manager, whether you are in the leadership role or not.

Regulatory fine:

The project processes do not provide the project report on time, regulatory reports to be precise. There is a lack of compliance, data requested by federal or local authorities is missing. This results in creating a lot of mess.

Overtime:

Lack of clarity about changes brought by your project and the changed processes caused the operational areas to work as usual. Producing the undesired results and the operational areas worked as usual, and the work had to be done again.

Union disputes:

The implementation of the new processes and project caused a change in union worker’s duties, which were caused due to not thinking about the minor aspects at hand, in the current contract, the new contract if done, would be on a larger scale with contemplating, each and every aspect.

Benefits Gain Profit Earning Income Hands Volunteer Concept

Hi friends, have problem listing open end activities in primavera P6?

import-projectIf you want to list up open end activities in primavera v6 and you can’t find any option in p6. A simple way is exporting activity relation detail to excel and separate predecessor with only SS successor. But that is a too lengthy process because at times you don’t know what formulas to apply in excel for fast working.  In excel one predecessor can have more than one successor. So you have to select predecessors with fully SS relation successors only.  Download are free to use schedule viewer. We have a project health check section which provides various checks including ‘ACTIVITIES WITHOUT SUCCESSORS’

There is a checkbox under this section where you can include or exclude activities with SS successors only. You can then export the activities to excel.  Hope this would be of great help for you on your project. You can still contact our experts if you face any ambiguity on provided email addresses globally or contact the vendor who provided you with the software.

Here are some problems that you might face and we are giving a solution to it in advance so that our blogs could be of great help for you. If you use the above-mentioned schedule viewer, and if it proves to be good there might a problem arise that it shows activities without predecessors or successors. It might not show open end activities. Only showing milestone activities with no successors and predecessors, this might create a lot of confusion or ambiguity. The problem can be, your, not tagging the checkbox. Consider, start to logic as missing.

Done. The other problem can be how to export that list to excel. When you try to export the whole project is exporting. Well, that is a big issue but you need not worry. When all the project activities are exporting including those without successors but you just want to export the list , not the Gantt then what you need to do is after clicking export and the options box comes up , you ought to select ‘expand to level  1’ and uncheck or deselect the ‘ draw Gantt  option’.

Another problem that can arise is , what can be the formula or any other method for extracting  SS relation activities in excel. The solution is using the formula countif(). You could sum up the total number of successors for each activity ID and the subtract the number of SS successors.

Another problem can be with the registration code being invalid there can be multiple reasons for it but one that has been commonly witnessed is moving or copying the existing file if you have copied or moved the file, the new file would need it’s own registration key. For the key that has been generated to you , you must use it for the existing file and not for any of new, moved or copied a file.

Standardization and How it Effects a Project Manager’s Business?

project-managementThis article is written for the better understanding of how the standardizing of project management adds value to once business, in any industry, the growth is driven by standardizing project management across the organization.

Some key capabilities for standardization:

An enterprise must invest in standardizing, codifying and documentation of project management practices. It doesn’t mean one way of managing projects but a portfolio of consistent projects the enterprise.

Different business units and verticals may follow different methods or templates for following project management. Many variations are carried out in order to meet the needs of customers and specific markets.

For instance just think if standardizing is not done, it can reduce management’s ability to track and control price change requests and manage scope stuff, which may result in lower margins and increased project risks. Formalizing projects help scale your business. Fostering standardization of processed such as change management, scheduling, costing and project reporting is also very important.

Another major step in standardizing is consolidating and integrating project data. Project teams can also improve productivity and effectiveness.

Benefits of standardization are vast and far reaching, those organization that combined standardized project management processes with the right kind of technology get a significantly good result and successful projects. The outcomes include improved project team productivity, fewer project losses, the higher instance of projects that get completed on time, and are under their financial reachability.

Standardizing project management across an enterprise often encounters resistance. Because teams usually working as how they might be feeling but often you have to encounter adjustments one way or another. There is a positive side of creating consistent project management experience.

Standardization can have the following positive impact on a project manager’s life.

If you are a project manager, you can experience that your life may go from slow and steady to chaotic in a matter of seconds. , it is witnessed it would be helpful both for the leader and the teammates to work efficiently if you share a common way of working such as a framework or interface etc.

Considering an example, if the schedule of your project is built on the same tool as your teammate, it would be easier for you to grab what’s next on the to do list.

When hiring a new project manager, standardized project management, which is already implemented in the enterprise may help the new hiring in the understanding of how the work is done in that organization. Thus, drastically reducing the learning curve.

The cooperative continuous improvement is a very important thing and I have always been in the favor of improving. And the best way of doing this working along the other project managers, peers or pioneers both. This will help you in carrying out your tasks in more effective and standardized way. Thus making standardizing your tasks easier. Having someone to share your ideas and looking up to someone for some good experience is indeed a good strategy

How Outsourcing Adds Value to Your Business?

outsourcingBefore pursuing to the understanding of adding value to your business, first, we need to understand what is outsourcing.  According to our very own Wikipedia, this term refers to a practice used by different companies in which they transfer a portion of their work to different external companies, this is a cost effective way but the condition is, it should be used properly. The external sources or service providers ought to be Specialists in their related fields.

Leaders choose out-sourcing to enhance business value propositions to stake-holders.

The question arises how and why the need arises, some of the processes are temporary and the company does not intend to hire a professional for doing that task.

However, before that, it is necessary that you should think and study about all the advantages and disadvantages of giving the resources and time of your business to a third party vendor, which is indeed very critical for your business.

As every other strategy related to business, there are many pros and cons to outsourcing as well. If not done right, it can bring down your business and create a lot of unrest.

Famous outsourcing business streams may include,

Pros of outsourcing

  • Swiftness and expertise
  • Concentrating on core process
  • Risk sharing
  • Reduced operational costs
  • Reduced recruitment costs

Cons of outsourcing:

The disadvantages include:

  • Risk of exposure of confidential data
  • Hidden costs
  • Lack of customer focus

How it adds value to your business:

When outsourcing, making a strategy which is effective in lowering the cost is very important.

Project managers can help make one.  Considering this three part structure,

  1. Assess the current state
  2. Consider the “to be” state
  3. Consider the governance require to sustain the future state

Project managers can avoid some common pitfalls in their outsourcing projects:

  1. Add a legal team, consisting of procurement and legal outsourcing experts which will help you in making the agreements.
  2. If you have any senior leaders around you, invite them to your project, in this way you can steer the initiative this will also help align it to the business mission.
  3. Gather some leadership support from your seniors; they might help you abstain from committing some serious blunders.

The things that count should be on finger tips of a project manager while handling a process with outsourcing aspects. Leaders can capitalize business value by keeping the right things in mind and if the outsourcing is done with a defined end.

Just to get an idea, consider that Assessments can be made on few things, such as

  1. Associate labor costs
  2. Labor expertise
  3. Value and non value support services
  4. Baseline of operational measures and service levels.

Project managers can help in many ways make an outsourcing strategies that trigger capitalization.

Why Project Managers are Seen as Less Likeable for Businesses?

project-managersThe answer to the above asked question can be very simple, but first you need to understand the mindset of stakeholders who wants to get maximum results with minimum expenditures. Many people today see the project manager officials as providers of low value with high administrative cost. They also perceive that they are doing little to improve project delivery, which is indeed not true.

We will discuss the facts here.

The general state of the project management is not improving; the recent increase in project manager officials hasn’t changed the facts as well. According to estimation, organizations worldwide waste around US$122 million every year, this survey was done by PULSE, and was done according the expenditure of US$ 1 billion being invested for every project. The previous records show that it is the increase of 12 percent according to the gone years.

The question arises here, why there is a huge gap between the presence of project manager officials and the project success rate, as the success rate is declining, according to the stated facts?

Indeed the question is somewhere among the project managers.

Here are some of the reasons summed up for the failure of project managers and what the people in lead role of project management can do about it?

The first thing to ponder upon is repeated processes or redundancy over efficiency during project development lifecycle.

This can be explained by an example, let’s just take an example, in an organization there are multiple PMOs, functional PMOs, such as IT, business, finance PMOs etc. these multiple layers of PMOs will cost the portfolio manager an exaggerative cost, expenditure will be huge, excessive time, energy, utility etc in order to fulfill the requirements and requests of multiple functional project manager officials.

The thing that needs to be understood, there is more power and value in centralizing and standardizing portfolio information. The executives should have a clear insight into each and every part of the ongoing process to have a clear understanding of what and how the decision should be made.

Before appointing PMOS the things that should be taken into consideration is whether there are areas that have the same type of oversight and control.

Another major step is taking into account the difference between talent and template, how it is done is the next biggy.

The part where PMOS lack is they rely on templates rather than originating skillful teams. Teams that is skillful in all aspects.

In order to contribute to the project’s success, the portfolio management processes need to be repeatable. They should sustain for quite a good span of time. And need to be successful in demonstrating measurable impact; these all will clearly add value to a business by generating a successful project and making you and your team a success. The project manager leads lack when they try to enforce the process instead of having the right and skillful people at the place to help the success in project development and execution.

Understanding Agile

A major thing when managing a project is understanding agile, which is very important for adding value to the business.

Agile + project management or project management + agile; as project delivery methods have evolved over the time. It has changed a lot of things; the special focus is now on leadership, different approaches have emerged. Such as hybrid approach, in which traditional waterfall approach and iterative agile approaches are used together. The reason is today the project managers need to contend with budgets, financial forecasts, release schedules, as well as business case benefits. Another big reason is aligning implementation of products with other projects across the organization.

agileSo one way or another, project managers today need to have a sound knowledge of what is agile and how it effects the product development phase. A frequent question that comes up is whether the industry needs a project manager who knows agile, or some agile leads who can handle traditional project management practices.  In today’s world we need both.

Agile development is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies.

It should be kept in mind that a project manager will oversee an agile delivery process. So it is very important that a project manager start their journey with competency, this journey may include beginning with training in agile methods. As the journey continues shadowing an agile lead to see how the iterative process works is also very crucial.

As you advance in the process, you come to the understanding of terms such as agile metrics, alignment of agile both to testing and to release process. As well as the people factor, that is also very important.

Agile leads needs to understand project management as this may lead to more successful projects and adds value to business.

What’s your take on that? Do you think organizations today need agile leads who know project management?

As the journey continues, a project manager will soon see what sort of projects can be best delivered.

Regardless of the delivery approach, a linkage to enterprise approach is required. Experience with iterative methods used to quickly deliver and shape solutions. They have a strong business analysis background. That is majorly shown when defining user stories on the team member’s part. In the near past these abilities or skills were sufficient but as the time changes many of the things that were once part of the waterfall model, needs their agile counterparts. The things like schedule, budget, product quality, and business case realization are of great importance and are necessary tools in agile process. These include the complexities of the contemporary delivery.

These all things compels the people in agile lead role to acquire skills in traditional project management as well as agile methods in factors like estimation, forecasting, resource management, technical requirements, as well as testing and the development tool implementation practices. Developing these skills the people in agile lead roles to give better quality and successful projects that will enhance the business value.

What Does Enterprise Function Support Means and Why it is Needed?

erpSome common enterprise functions of any enterprise involve the efficient management. The management of organizational resources, such as finances and other such entities. Other resources such as employers, suppliers, customers, and partners are also included. And assets such as equipment, material, parts, supplies and properties. While it can be safe to say that technology intensive systems,  such enterprise resource planning commonly known as ERP, have come to represent the most cost- efficient way, these are the functions that chief executives and business leaders turn to in the hour of need, widely known as ‘back office support functions’.

In what circumstances they are needed is a question, commonly asked, when the top priorities for an enterprise are cost containment, cost avoidance and efficiency improvement. These are the functions widely worked on.

Other enterprise functions may include,

Business value alignment, business process optimization, shared services and outsourcing advisory, information system for enterprise function etc.

The most important of these are information system for enterprise function; enterprise resource planning can be understood by these,

The first and most crucial one is business process re engineering and requirement definition.

Others may include steps like, project management of ERP implementation.

Enterprise architecture and technology integration consulting, organizational change management, transition to steady state operations.

Now the question arises why these enterprise functions are needed and how they have a big impact on project management, as discussed above the things like project management of ERP implementation is very important.

As the approach of hybrid product delivery is enhanced, the consideration of adding value to one’s business is widely implemented through alignment of resources. Most important of the considerations include, speed at which the iterations are produced by agile process, the other things include business and technology complexities, as well as the increasing expectations of customers.

The reason for their need is such enterprise functions are considered as the key to success by today’s agile heads. The enterprise functions as mentioned above, such as resource management and portfolio management etc. there are other traditional enterprise delivery disciplines that are considered as key to success. Other frameworks such as scaled agile framework commonly known as ‘SAFe’ are also considered key to success in today’s project management practices by the people leading the agile processes. The agile heads today are people who have sound and impressive knowledge of both new and traditional knowledge of processes needed for project management.

Talking about “safe” as the new big thing, it is indeed the nest generation thing for project managers and it has enhanced the prospects of managing processes. And why is that so?

The answer to this is it had identified the critical need to have all the enterprise functions in place. The enterprise functions are all engaged for all kinds of deliveries that are need of the existing hour.

Enterprise functions can be of great help for both project managers as well as people in agile leads by helping them in developing successful projects.

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