NEEDED: Hyper-Efficient & Savvy Business PMs
For Companies to become leaders in their industries, they will will focus on “executing strategy” as well as a few other things to accomplish this goal. An article was posted this week at ProjectTimes by Catherine Daw [click here] that highlights & supports many of the trends other industry leaders are talking about as well.
A few Needs that 2010 brings include:
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Hyper-Efficiency
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Savvy Business PMs
1. Hyper-Efficiency is Needed
Catherine says that organizations will continue to look for quick and effective means to deliver on initiatives faster. They want to deliver more effectively and efficiently than ever before. And then describes the use of ‘chopping’ and ‘chunking’ larger programs and projects into bite size pieces (4-6 month key deliverables) as one way they will increasing efficiency while still delivering results against desired benefits and results. And then says that Agile Project Management, Lean Project Management and Lean Six Sigma will be methods that more and more companies will begin to adopt to do this.
If you look at some key concepts behind Lean and Agile, it is about working on smaller batch sizes of work and limiting the amount of work in process at one time. Why? Because studies have proven that the more you multitask, the more productivity is reduced. It won’t matter what type of project you are working on – the need to take large complex projects and break them up into more managable pieces will be a skill that PMs will need to leverage to help make this happen.
Organizations need PMs that can do this.
Another recent article describes this as well [click here].
2. Savvy Business PMs are Needed
Catherine also explains that it is going to take more than shedule managing project or program manager today. 2010 needs PMs who understands business whys, whats and hows of strategy. They will need to play multi-purpose roles inside and outside programs/projects they are managing. She expands on this by saying PMs will need a higher level of knowledge, skill and savvy appreciation of how business works as well as what the strategic direction of the organization is to ensure business results are realized. And they need to speak CXO language, garner executive respect, and tell the truth to the powers at be.
This is exactly what we’ve been talking about on our webinars lately. That PMs must be more visionary and see the bigger picture of the organization. They must lead their programs/projects/teams to meet customer and market needs – and not just manage the schedule. They have to make tough decisions that keep the company strategy in mind at all times.
PMs that can step back to see the bigger picture and learn to do the following will be in great demand.
They must…
- understand the business, market and technology needs,
- become the liaison between the customer/business and the development team,
- lead (not manage) the team from concept/initiation to launch/close
read more in another recent article…
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