You are a professionally certified project manager working for a consulting comp

Question

You are a professionally certified project manager working for a consulting company. Your manager has just let you know that you will be assigned to work with a new client as soon as a contract is signed. The client wants help with selecting a project management methodology in order to increase the maturity level of project management practices in his organization. For confidentiality reasons your manager cannot tell you anything else about the client or his business but still expects you to propose some solutions to the client in a meeting that is scheduled for three days from now. What would you do? By Day 3 After considering the scenario, post your response to the following questions: Describe your approach for developing proposed solutions for the client to help them select a methodology. Why did you choose that approach? What are some of the characteristics of the methodologies that you will look at as you evaluate solutions? Why do you think those characteristics are important? How will you help the client understand the similarities and differences between methodologies?

Explanation / Answer

Aim: To increase the maturity level of project management practices in the organization

There can be two inferences from this statement:

Question 1

If the first sentence stands true, then the client will need some form of improvement methodology to adopt such as PDSA cycle. This is to improve the level of practice in adopting and applying the existing project management methodology. Various interventions can be tested and implemented to achieve this aim.

If the second sentence stands true, then the client will need to assess certain aspects of business before adopting any particular project management methodology. This would mean the nature of projects, cost, size, resource requirement, target outcome and organizational values and goals.

The high level approach would be:

Question 2

This is the most logical approach considering that there are various project management methodologies that exist today and they have their own strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes adopting one or the other may not be the solution and may require customizing the solutions to best fit the organizational needs.

Question 3 and 4

Some of the characteristics of the methodologies in order to pick the best solution would be:

Ease of implementation: the project management methodology should be easy to understand and implement and more importantly spread. The tools, techniques and methodologies should be readily available with proper training materials and content knowledge. It should not be too technical such that it requires special training or education to implement. It should be easily spreadable across the organization and customizable.

Success rate / effectiveness: The proposed project management methodology should be evidence based. There should be enough evidence to support its benefits and success. This will also help secure buy-in from the stakeholders. It should be effective in terms of outcomes. The methodology should also be flexible so as to be able to make minor changes as per the organization’s needs.

Organizational readiness: organizational readiness in terms of its own policies and procedures, goals and priorities, leadership engagement, values and culture and resource availability are important aspects that can pose challenge in the successful implementation and adoption of the project management methodology. Hence it is important to evaluate the organizational readiness and ensure alignment and compatibility of the project management methodology with these factors.

Resource: The project management methodology proposed should not be resource intensive. The cost for implementing and adopting it should be minimal. The resources required to implement should also be less as much as possible since the organization will be testing it first and would not want to incur cost on something that may not be successful.

Industry benchmarks / trends: Another criteria would be to look at other organizations in the industry that have adopted the same project management methodology and have been successful in terms of the outcomes. This will give confidence to the client and other stakeholders involved

Projects: The nature of the project, size and complexity, and the expected outcomes also are important deciding factors in adopting the right project management methodology.

These characteristics are important to consider as they are key risk factors can lead to failure in implementation and spread of the methodology. The effects can be seen on organizational performance and outcomes. It will also impact the employee morale and disengage the key stakeholders.

Question 5

The best way to explain the similarities and differences between different project management methodologies would be to share evidence, examples and results of each one. We can also share the results from organizations who have adopted these approaches. Comparison can also be done in terms of tools used for each of them. An important way to show the similarities and the differences is through the stages and steps involved in each one of them with proper project management methodology flow.

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