We recently spoke to a project manager who formed part of a multi-national team charged with regaining market share for their client. It was a complex project with international stakeholders introducing language and culture barriers and the project was on a timeline of eighteen months.

Project Challenges

The company was not a convert of formal project management methods and was, at the time, using a lite version of PRINCE2. The translation of strategy into an executable plan whereby stakeholders’ visions of success as a single and agreed common understanding, was particularly difficult.

What worked well?

The successful outcome of the project was based largely on the company’s strong corporate governance working to achieve the strategic objective which was to re-capture its market share. The PRINCE2 Board structure proved to work well with decision makers working quickly and decisively.

Highly effective skilled specialists collaborated regularly by sitting together, resulting in fewer meetings than normal and a cohesive, integrated team.

Dealing within a marketing environment, the team had to adopt flexible project management processes, translating PM terminology into business terms, with ‘risks and issues’ translated into ‘considerations and opportunities’ and the project plan becoming the ‘cycle plan’.

Lessons Learnt

In retrospect the project management team learned that, in spite of the size of the organisation in question, which is governed by bureaucracy, the project team achieved a quick turn-around time from decisions to implementation. The lesson learnt from this is to prevent delays with decision making by global stakeholders, the project plan included a schedule indicating the decision makers’ levels of responsibility in the chain of command which proved to be an invaluable time saving measure.

While the organisation values and uses the formal PRINCE2 approach, here it was crucial that this approach was adapted by the project manager to meet the demands of this specific project in order to achieve the objectives and desired results.

What do you think?
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