Governance development

Posted on February 22, 2015March 2, 2015 by PAshton

What is it? Project governance sets out the accountabilities and responsibilities associated with the development of an organisation’s project investments.

What it is not? Governance is not the management of projects by senior managers, nor is it an approval process, but an active process of forward-oriented decision-making.

What’s different afterwards? With effective governance structures in place the right people make decisions at the right level making it more likely that they will make the right decisions.

Monitor and control

Posted on December 25, 2014March 23, 2015 by PAshton

What is it? It is collection of attitudes – a mindset – combined with a toolset of methods and techniques that can be used to establish the status of an initiative, form a prognosis about likely outcomes, and determine management actions in response to this information. The approach is particularly valuable when organisational project practices (or the team itself) don’t have well-established performance metrics.

What it is not? Monitoring and control is not a passive observation process, nor is it a ‘policing’ function with onerous demands on the project manager to ‘produce more data’. Rather than simply focused on collecting detailed historical performance, it focuses on steering projects towards future success.

What’s different afterwards? A strong evidence-based model for predicting future outcomes and adjusting management and process behaviours.

Health checks

Posted on December 25, 2014March 2, 2015 by PAshton

What is it? Health checks are critical when there is uncertainty about a project outcome (i.e. Will it complete within its constraints? or Will the objective be met? or Are the risks and issues under proper control?).

What it is not? They are not themselves project recovery plans: health checks do not in themselves make a project safe. However, they establish the conditions to be met to make the project safe.

What’s different afterwards? A clear route map with associated management actions and a set of metrics to take control of a project and re-align it to planned outputs, outcomes and objective.

PMO

Posted on February 25, 2014March 13, 2015 by PAshton

What is it? A PMO is a structure and a function that allows an organisation to channel political and financial capacity into its programme and project management community in a manner similar to how it deals with its operational units.

What it is not? PMOs are not project administration groups, personal assistants taking minutes and booking meeting rooms.

What’s different afterwards? Depending on the needs and interest of the different stakeholder groups in the organisation the PMO offers control of the projects, guidance in the conduct of projects, and decision-support in the selection and management of the project portfolio.

Assurance

Posted on February 25, 2010March 2, 2015 by PAshton

What is it? Assurance is the deployment of a set of policies, processes, systems and tools aimed at safeguarding organisations’ investments. It includes both predetermined assurance regimes (stage gates and check points etc.) and ad hoc interventions such as health-checks and surgeries.

What it is not? Assurance is not a retrospective inspection of the causes of failure or an audit of processes and tools applied. After the event it is too late to assess or alter the initiative’s achievement of success; hence assurance has no retrospective aspects.

What’s different afterwards? Senior management and the sponsor community have a high degree of confidence that the portfolio of investments in change are at a supportable level of cost and risk for the reward they represent. The less viable initiatives are placed under closer scrutiny or closed before ‘sunk costs’ have become unendurable. Corporate husbandry of resource (both financial and human) has improved.