Implementing Project Management Procedures and Developing Skills

Is it your role to oversee and monitor project portfolios at a high level. Senior PMO and portfolio management staff need to know what is going on across the portfolio, where attention needs to be focused, how the plan vs. actual performance is and how money is being spent.

The progress and success of strategic project initiatives are based on accurate data flows from project managers into the PMO on a month by month basis.

Inaccurate data is the basis for wrong decision making affecting your project organisation in a myriad of negative ways including costly rework and ultimate project failure.

As the decisions that are made by executives regarding the progress of strategic project initiatives are based on the data flows from project managers into the PMO, this information is generally not challenged, accepted as correct and approved, therefore senior executives on many occasions are approving wrong data across the entire project portfolio month by month.

As projects are generally fraught with risk and uncertainty there are numerous common pitfalls that may arise throughout the project lifecycle. Some of these include: stakeholder variations and direction change, the project is late or over budget, resources are unavailable, shortcuts are taken and the product or service quality is compromised, the project status changes amongst a myriad of other events that may occur.

If project managers aren’t operating at a high level of project management competency and there is a lack of support and mentorship available to them across the lifecycle there is a high probability that the integrity of the data that they are presenting as progress will be compromised.

So what can be done to control and manage this issue. Ongoing Training, Support and Mentorship at the organsiational level.

Introduction to Project and Program Data Integrity