No organisation can stay in a fixed state and remain a leader in its field: change is essential as new ideas and outside factors evolve. Change requires a structured vehicle to be delivered and the Enterprise Project Management Organisation is that vehicle. – David Dunning
Facts
- 90% of all organizations are unable to execute on their strategy due to lack of project management.
- Research on troubled projects showed that over 40% of projects performed by the surveyed organizations were troubled.
- An estimated 68% of corporate IT projects are neither on time nor on budget, and they don’t deliver the originally stated business goals.
It is clear that corporations are challenged with managing project portfolios and aligning them with organisational objectives[1]. Many organisations today are often quite good at managing individual projects or reasonable numbers of projects. But challenges arise when project numbers increase, become more complex, and must compete in an environment with constrained resources.
Project Management Offices (PMOs) have arisen within many commercial and government organisations to serve as project and portfolio process owners, financial stewards, and centres of expertise. Specifically, the following challenges are often commonly recognised:
- Increasing numbers of potential projects and programmes in which to invest
- Difficulty aligning projects and portfolios with organisational objectives
- Difficulty achieving consensus among competing stakeholders regarding project priorities
- Inadequate measurement methodologies to determine project benefits, costs and risks
- An overemphasis on project execution management, without due diligence on project portfolio selection and alignment
- More complex and challenging project constraints, to include budgets, personnel, risk, time, and compliance
What Business Wants
- Business Leaders constantly seek how to ensure visibility, accountability and transparency across the organization’s project portfolio.
- They seek innovative ways to cope with tight budgets while still achieving organization’s performance goals.
Reality
- Lack of enterprise-wide multi-project planning and control skills and tools.
- Projects are worked on individually, but overall company priorities aren’t necessarily supported.
- Projects are not actively and realistically tracked and managed throughout execution.
- Change, kill, or recover decisions are not made early enough.
The question is not whether your projects run into problems but “How can your organizational structure minimize project problems and help troubled projects recoup effectively?” Therefore establishing a well-aligned and effective Enterprise Project Management Office for your organization is no longer a necessity but a must, to ensure attainment of corporate goals using standardisedproject management practices throughout the organization.
Benefits
- Improve alignment of projects with the organisation’s strategic objectives.
- Decrease in the rate of project failures.
- Eliminate ‘low value’ projects that are not aligned with strategy.
- Drive process compliance and enable repeatable project success.
- Increase cost saving per project and minimize financial, governance and other corporate risk.
- Maximize human resources through resource and capacity planning.
The iCentra Team
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[1] Significant subsequent annual surveys of executives by the Project Management Institute (PMI) continue to substantiate the Kellogg study. PMI’s research crosses geographies and industries with little variance in the overarching findings: organisations consistently fail to achieve their business objectives. PMI’s annual Pulse of the Profession surveys and quarterly In-Depth Surveys provide significant additional insights into causes, correlations, and contributing factors to both success and failure and remain a rich source of best practise information.