In the 21st Century the majority of Project Managers work in SMEs.
The project professional membership bodies ably meet both the needs of individual project professionals, and of large organisations who themselves employ large numbers of project professionals.
The needs of SMEs their PMs and their Sponsors are often forgotten. We think that’s just wrong and PM Advisor aims to go some way to filling that gap. Take a look at the thoughts of our founder, John Williams on the ProjExc blog.
PM for SMEs
Projectification
With the “projectification of society“, there are many more project managers than specialist project professionals. There are increasing expectations on these PMs (transformational business leaders) to behave as sub-enterprise CEOs or “mini-MDs”. It is essential to support these entrepreneurs to deliver demonstrable value, as they seek greater agility and efficiency.
Product Management
Is product management a specialism within project management, or is project management a component part of product management. We have known countless debates and can see the arguments on both sides.
One thing that is certain, is that there are unquestionable strong links between both disciplines.
Whilst not all projects are creating new products, products are always created as part of a project, regardless of the methods or techniques used.
PM Methodologies
Your chosen project management methodology is Step 1 to success. Get the process or methodology for project management right and you’ll be well on your way.
Step 2, you will need to find the right tools to help you follow the methodology.
Finally in step 3, you’ll need to make sure that you (or your PMs) have the skills and experiences necessary to follow the process and use the tools for maximum effect.
PM Competence
Competence is the combination of skills and experience. You might need to get some project management knowledge, recruit or onboard some project managers, or train yourself or your colleagues in how to do project management or project sponsorship better. And while it's important to have the competence, it is also critically important to have the discipline to use it.
PMO Services
When you have more than one or two PMs, a PMO of some form becomes increasingly important. They support the PMs as well as driving consistency and discipline which is central to the success of an organisation. In the current economic climate, there’s no time to waste in establishing a fully-functional PMOffice, whether in-house, outsourced or even virtual.
Project Sponsors
Poor sponsorship is the major contributing factor to project failure. Sponsors often don’t fully appreciate their pivotal role, or as a result make or delegate the time for the task. There is a wealth of resources for project managers, but oddly very little for project sponsors, and we aim to put that right here.
Business Continuity
Business Continuity Management (BCM) or Organisational Resilience is an incredibly critical, but often overlooked, activity for businesses large and small. It is so important to identify potential threats, provide a framework for building resilience, and to create a capability for an effective response that safeguards stakeholder interests, reputation, brand, and value creating activities.
Often Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are confused as the same thing. Disaster Recovery (the recovery of critical business data and/or IT systems) is only, an albeit important, component of a more holistic approach to protecting the continuance of a business.
Property Developers
We’re often asked for advice in construction and particularly self-build projects, presumably stimulated by Channel4’s Grand Designs and host Kevin McCloud.
While generic project management techniques apply to any type of project in any environment, for someone about to embark on building their dream home (or office in the garden) there are some specific techniques that are really important to the novice developer.