EnterPlicity Project Management Software & Resources

In our last post we discussed the relationship between the project management skills of an organization to a successful project management software implementation. Read it here. We discussed how project management software is a tool to help improve project management discipline to accomplish key strategic goals. But the software works alongside of good processes to do that.

Let's talk about what an organization can do if they lack good project management skills? How can they bridge the gap? This is not at all an uncommon scenario. I am going to list out several ideas in this post. Send me your ideas and what has worked well for you at blog@teaminteractions.com or by posting a comment.

First, let's talk about training. Training is probably the first thing that people think about. Sending key personnel to a training course can be helpful if it is done strategically. Just sending someone to a class and expecting your project management woes to be solved is like buying some software and also expecting they will be magically solved. Think longer term. Who is the best person? What type of course do they need? If the desire is for project management to permeate the organization, who can learn this stuff and also pass it on to others in the organization.

Make sure you attend the right training. A popular form of training out there is PMP Certification Training. This is project management training designed to help the student pass their Project Management Professional (PMP) certification test. That may work well if you are serious about this and want someone well versed in project management that is certified. But be sure this person also has the experience to go along with it.

Alternatively, many universities have excellent extended learning courses in project management. These tend to be several months in length and provide a good foundation of project management taught by project management professionals with a flair for real-world scenarios.

You can also check out the many companies that offer online project management training courses and resources. Just Google "project management training" and you will find a wealth of them.

Second, you can hire someone with project management experience. This may not be possible, obviously, but an ideal scenario is to hire a person that can give you instant experience and also be able to convey that experience, skills, and knowledge throughout the organization.

Third is self-study. Start an in-house self-study program. There are many excellent books and self-study resources to help you become better versed in project management. These days you can also find resources online, such as The Project Management Podcast, with the latest knowledge and trends.

Fourth, "hang out" with project management professionals. Learn what they do, how they think, best practices, etc. A good opportunity to do this is with your local PMI (Project Management Institute) chapter. These chapters hold regular meetings and provide a good opportunity to discover what is happening with project management, learn what others are doing, and be exposed to more resources. You can find information on local chapters at www.pmi.org.

Fifth, bring someone in temporarily. There are many consultants, professionals, and others who are geared towards coming into an organization to help them with project management skills and knowledge. This could be conducting some training classes for your organization, or consulting over a longer period of time and helping you setup a training program / good processes.

Take these ideas, and any others, and think about them strategically. Where do you want your organization to be a year from now? 2 years from now? This isn't a one time thing. This should be a continual improvement in the project management discipline of your organization. When you have this type of commitment, your project management software implementation is much more strategic with a greater liklihood of achieving real strategic advantage for your organization.

Those are some simple, straightforward ideas for you to think about. Send me your stories and ideas and then we'll move to other strategies to make your project management software implementation strategically successful.

Is there a relationship with project management skills and the success of project management software?

We discussed some of the strategies that are employed by organizations trying to implement project management software (see earlier post Implementing Project Management Software: Common Strategies). But what does work? What is the right way to implement project management software in a way that meets expectations and provides strategic value to the organization?

No one can come up with a scientific, one-size-fits-all process for implementing project management software. There are too many variables. What is appropriate and works for a large organization may not be appropriate and may even backfire for a small organization. However, we can learn from experience and evaluate some common traits of successful implementations.

The first is the concept shared by some readers that project management skills and knowledge as an organization is important to a successful implementation.

Why might this be and what can an organization do about it? Well…the obvious answer as to why this might be is that implementing project management software is a project like any other project and it needs project management discipline to be successful. But I think there is more to it than that. The goal of project management software should be, at least in part, to improve the project management processes of an organization. In other words, to help it get better at managing their projects so that…fill in your own blank here - products get to market quicker, or more work is done with the same number of people, or customers are happier by eliminating things falling through crack.

The software should complement the project management processes. If there are no project management processes or the skill set to do good project management, the software is not going to solve that. Instead it is simply something that sounds great, but turns out to be only half the puzzle. How can you implement a tool to help you with project management if you do not understand project management? The tendency will be to “whither in the wind”.

Now a point could be made that project management software could instigate good project management processes. For some that may be heresy, but I’ve seen it happen for the simple reason that sometimes you can get people to buy into implementing software instead of reinventing business processes (who wants to do that?). And in some cases it starts a discussion about how to use it properly, which starts a discussion about the right processes an organization should be following (or what they currently are). But even when this is the case, the software is supporting the processes, not a substitute for them. So processes must be put in place by someone (or multiple “someones”) who have at least a basic understanding of project management.

So what can an organization do if they are lacking in project management skill or knowledge? We’ll cover that next…

What are your thoughts on this topic? Send them to blog@teaminteractions.com or post a comment.