Step 3: Project Management Best Practices

Deploying Project Management Best Practices
Having established where the organisation currently is on the capability maturity model and planned how to get to the next level in steps 1 and 2 we can now start to roll out the best practices. I am going to assume that you are starting from level 1 (if not you will already have some of the earlier items in place).

Before starting any of this I believe it is absolutely essential to involve all the organization’s project managers in the process (after all they are all key stakeholders). So these are the steps involved:

Define, document and agree a standard project life cycle (if you don’t already have one), then define, document and agree project management processes to support the project life cycle. To speed up the development, these can be based on existing standards (such as PRINCE or PM-BOK) or on a good project management handbook (such as Effective Project Management in easy steps). This takes you from level 1 to level 2.

Next establish a project office to maintain, support and develop the processes. This takes you from level 2 to level 3.

Then define project reporting standards and metrics and task the project office with supporting and enforcing these, together with collecting and processing the data and reporting it to management. This takes you from level 3 to level 4.

You could stop here but why not take the next step and task the project office with optimising the processes and standards. This takes you from level 4 to level 5 and completes the deployment of project management best practices.

Next week I'll set out the process for deploying program management best practices.