Focus Areas Addressed by Dynamic Solutions - Project Management Perspectives

Dynamic Solutions

Dynamic Solutions - Improving the Way Companies & Their People Accomplish Business Goals

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Susan Junda
Dynamic Solutions
Albuquerque, NM
(505) 888-4786

We can focus on project management from three perspectives:

Senior Management
The Project Manager/Team Leader
The Team Member

At the Senior Management level:

Project Management helps foster the best utilization of an organization’s people, time and money in the most efficient and effective manner.

What organization in this crazy and exciting day and age does not need this?!?

Have you ever wondered how well your organization really practices project management? Just think about the answers to these questions:

Is there a defined methodology to managing projects?
Are the projects really coming in on time, within budget and meeting customer requirements?
How do we create more successful projects and project teams?
How does our organization structure affect our ability to manage our projects?
How serious are we as a staff about using Project Management? Is Project Management addressed at the Strategic Planning level, along with Customer Satisfaction, Total Quality Management and/or Six Sigma?

Some of the key areas we cover with Senior Management, in addition to the above, are:

Deliver a 20+ question Project Management Assessment to Senior Staff in which they rate how the organization is performing.
Show them some basic project management concepts and tools that are standards in organizations that do projects well.
Facilitate discussions on what management can do to foster more project successes and what they might be doing to hinder project teams from creating more successes.
Discuss the pros and cons of using Project Management software packages.
Discuss how high performing teams are formed and developed.
Guide them in creating an organization in which all non-operational work is managed via projects. This can include setting up a Project Office, a Project Management Department, gaining buy-in from all Department managers, creating a Project Management Operating Policy and Guideline Manual, or developing standard project management methodology by which all projects are managed.

At the Project Manager/Team Leader level:

Once again, not everyone is born knowing how to effectively lead a team!! In fact, in this technical day and age, many times it’s the technical expert who gets promoted to the role of project manager – even though the skill set of what makes a great technical expert vastly differs from what makes a great project manager!!

Some of the key areas we cover with project managers (and sometimes team members) are:

It is critical that project managers insure the team is working on the right project and the right time with the right people right out of the start box!! We teach them the importance of identifying their stakeholders on a project and learning how to develop questions with which to interview them. They learn to distinguish between “needs versus wants” and get to core expectations and deliverables before beginning the planning and execution of a project.
They will learn how to develop a Project Implementation Plan (including the Project Charter and the Detailed Plan) within a team environment. In today’s world, it is impossible for one person to see or know all that is coming down the road. All members are needed so issues can be dealt with up front as much as possible – this minimizes the “hiccups” that can happen during execution.
In doing the planning together, the participants will not only learn the basic tools of project planning (Work Breakdown Structure, logic network, resource matrix, estimating, PERT, critical path, Gantt), but will learn how to link them together to create the Detailed Project Plan. They will walk away with a project planning methodology that they can use over and over, regardless of what type of team they are or what type of project they are planning.
Critical in a Project Manager’s skill set is the ability to delegate and communicate. Project Managers who come “up through the ranks” often have difficulty in letting go of the work, especially in the areas that required their technical expertise. In addition, the importance of learning how to communicate well, (in writing, verbally and in the facilitation of a team) cannot be overstressed!!
Often during execution, the project plan that a team is marching to becomes invalid (because something happened that they didn’t expect, or a decision was made outside their control that affects their project). To counter this, they will learn how to create alternatives on how to proceed and a way to present these alternatives to management in a way that gets a decision made quickly.

At the Team Member level:

Not everyone is born knowing how to be an effective team member! The thrust of our focus in this area lies in identifying and developing team members' competencies in a team environment. Management often makes a big misassumption when moving into project-based teamwork -- that you can throw a group of individuals together and they automatically form a high-performing team. Not so!! Taking the time to develop individual team members' skills and awareness will pay off in the long run.

Some key areas we cover are:

Transitioning from functional tasks and responsibilities to project team goals
How to work effectively in a team environment
Understand team dynamics and why "teams" are used in the first place
Acquiring effective communication, conflict resolution and negotiation skills
Understanding the basic project management tools
Learning about your responsibility as a team member

Remember, a project team is only as good as its weakest link!!