Project Management
TisTT is a provider of project managers and programme directors. They can be supplied for temporary assignments or permanent placement, individually or as entire teams.
Fundamentally, our approach is resource-based: we believ that most business challenges can be solved effectively with the application of the right management talent, experience and action. If we can be of assistance in resourcing any management role, please Contact Us...
Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.
Our service is ideal for any situation where experienced effective managers are needed fast, perhaps to:
- Supplement and strengthen a team
- Provide a specific set of skills or experience on a temporary basis
- Execute or accelerate a project
- Replace a key manager who has abruptly departed
- Build up a new business, division or team.
Project Management as Operational Competency
Success in supporting project management as an operational function requires two things:
- an understanding that project management is a tool, and
- implementing organization-wide discipline related to the management and practice of the tool. The tool exists for the benefit of providing value to the organization. Used correctly, the tool can provide improved product time-to-market resulting in quicker revenue realization, better project cost and schedule performance leading to greater portfolio predictability and reliability, and more project value delivered for equal or lower cost.
What it takes to do so is for organizations to implement the same discipline and precision in planning, executing, quality control, measurement, and evaluation that they do as a matter of course in other areas as noted above. This is nothing more than good management. If it were done more effectively than it is now, organizations would not look to cut project managers first when financial times get tough and they need to cut costs as happened during the economic downturn of 2001-2003. This was a disturbing and too common practice that senior managers at numerous organizations exhibited during this period because project management is not viewed as operationally important, but as an expendable ‘nice-to-have’.
The key to turning project management into a core operational competency involves benchmarking. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, there is existing hard research that identifies the benefits of project management. Based on the collection of various project management costs, a project management maturity assessment, and project portfolio metrics for cost and schedule performance, the benchmarking is able to target specific practices within the project phases and knowledge areas that would lead an organization to higher maturity and improved performance focused on business results. The data has become so robust over the years that it is now possible to draw projections for PM ROISM based on an organization’s current assessed level and a realistic projected target level to be achieved by addressing the identified areas for improvement.
