Your organization might be struggling with project management. These program management best practices will help you catch up.
Soft skills and project management techniques can help you get your small business off to the right start and through the first few years. A successful business requires the ability to organize work, lead teams, budget and schedule properly, and communicate between them.
If all goes well, your company will grow to the point where managing projects is no longer enough. You will need to organize those projects into programs and manage them holistically if you want to grow your business in a sustainable manner.
A large-scale approach can also be a great way to secure your business’ future and your career. Gartner predicts that artificial intelligence and project management software will eliminate 80% of the project management tasks today.
You can help your organization shift its focus to program management now. These are three signs that your organization needs to shift its focus from project management to program management.
You need to be reminded of the differences between program and project management. Click here to see a list of the major differences.
Three signs that you should change to program management
1. Your projects don’t build on each other
The problem
It’s like a tree falling from the forest without anyone else hearing it. The lessons learned are not shared with other teams, the surplus resources aren’t strategically reallocated, or follow-up projects aren’t planned.
These are some of the best program management practices that can be helpful:
To get to a program management mindset, the first step should be to create a project management office (PMO). This will improve cross-team communication and align projects with larger organizational goals.
PM Solutions Research found that organizations that have a PMO experience a 43% increase in alignment of projects and overall objectives.
If you don’t have enough resources to create a dedicated PMO, you might consider creating a channel in your collaboration tool for project manager to share resources and coordinate projects. It can be thought of as a virtual PMO.
2. Project resources cannot be shared
The problem
Project A is in danger of missing the deadline and is short-staffed, while Project B is over-budget and over-staffed due to poor planning and lack communication.
These are some of the best program management practices that can be helpful:
While project managers are still necessary to manage each project, having a program management approach (overseeing all projects and resource management) can prevent situations like the one below. Your PMO could, for example, pull two coders from Project B and reassign them as Project A. This would help both projects get back on track.
Your PMO can identify driver projects that are crucial to your company’s success and receiver projects that are less important and are largely benefiting by the success of driver project. If Project A is a receiver, your PMO might decide to phase it out and reallocate its staff. Your PMO might choose to ignore the fact that Project A is over budget and strategically expand its scope if Project B are driver projects.
Portfolio management software can be a great tool for project management software. It allows your PMO to see the status of multiple projects at once.
Management of a portfolio in Atlassian Jira (Source).
3. Individual project managers don’t collaborate or support one another.
The problem
Although you have great project managers who manage their projects well, your organizational goals are not being met because the projects aren’t aligned or the teams aren’t sharable.