A new case study entitled "Is your Organization being Beastly to you?" has been added to the Team Management Site.
Steve Botham, describes how the Team Management Profile was used in a UK financial services organization as part of a change management initiative. The Author explores the challenge of change and how change affects people.
[ More on the Team Management Site ]
The sad truth about the Project Management Guidelines that we developed is that when they down-sized the company they absolutely decimated the Engineering & Construction Division (we went from 160 staff to 39). They cut most deeply where all of the real expertise and grey hair was resident. They let almost all of the Engineering and Construction expertise go, and the YYY initiative just stalled.
The deal was - with deregulation - they expected that the capital budget would go from $500 million to only $40 million. Of course, no sooner had they let everyone go, then they got the a major offshore project approved ($1.5 billion) another phase to an international project (another $1 billion) and were considering a major arterial pipeline ($1 billion) and an XXX project ($1 billion). Three months after they cut everyone loose, I got a call from a former colleague to say that my old boss was looking for my phone number because he was looking for a project manager for the XXX Project. Like me - almost all of my former colleagues were now busy working for someone else. . .
They hired so many new guys - (and most of the staff that was kept on were definitely not the visionary types that had embraced the Guidelines) - that they merely muddled their way through in a purely reactive mode as they had always done. Apparently, they are just as bad as before when it comes to project delivery due to the shortage of experienced personnel. It really is unfortunate that after all that time and effort they still don't get it.
We knew that we were good at delivering major projects and although I thought that we were terrible overall (we were horrible at delivering the smaller projects) it was not until I saw what the other Oil & Gas companies were doing that I realized that compared to the rest of the industry we were "World Class" (in the Oil & Gas business). Now with all of the senior guys gone, that ability to successfully deliver projects has suffered . . .
This software is a great tool when the PM process and cultural desire are there. Unfortunately, most companies still think that the software can cure their project management ills. You know - it's the "build it and they will come" syndrome . . . I have fought to get them to understand that it is "process, process, process" and that this software is only a tool. What good is a compass if you don't know where you are and where you need to go? It can keep you on a heading, but if you are heading in the wrong direction entirely, you only feel better for it because you have this talisman (tool) . . .
At every company that I have been at, the modus operandi seems to be "let's not admit that our projects can be done better, because that would be admitting that we haven't been doing our jobs . . ." They implement this software because they are told to (it is usually driven by Finance) and then they malign the software when they don't get the millions of dollars in savings that they (rightfully) should be getting.
Very few clients have even a handful of PMP's, although they are starting to understand the value in PMI® education and the application in the workplace. The best client I had in this regard was a major US Oil Company. They claim that they have saved over $5 million a year on their offshore platforms because of the process changes we made that were enabled by this software. They told me that they are saving a further $1 million a year on their drilling projects too for the same reasons. They are also a real proponent of PMI® and have an excellent project management process, and a formal Project Management Centre of Expertise that regularly publishes educational materials and provides training and mentoring . . .