The dramatic rise in global competition has increased pressures on firms to be more innovative, to reduce costs and to increase productivity. They are responding in a range of ways such as outsourcing, value-adding, partnering with other firms and, critically, developing and adopting new technologies. New models of doing business are emerging as a result. All these factors are putting considerable pressure on traditional approaches to staff training and development. Firms are looking for faster, better or more skills acquisition for a given investment of time or money.
Case Study 1
Government agency with over 5,000 employees involved in hundreds of projects
One division was about to undertake a program aimed at improving several of its business processes. The program comprised of several sub-projects, each one with a potential of impacting large numbers of employees. Senior management wanted to have each project managed by one of their functional managers in order to give them a professional development opportunity, but also wanted to ensure the success of these critical organizational projects.
They determined that sending these managers on traditional training alone would not be sufficient to mitigate the risks if these projects were not managed properly. Also, they understood the benefits of not re-inventing the wheel by seeking some best practices processes for managing these projects.
Key goals were to find an external partner that could:
- Provide an experienced and PMP® certified project manager who could take on the role of ‘program manager’ and who brings expertise in training and development as well as executing.
- Bring to the table an established project management methodology equipped with customizable processes, guiding steps and templates.
- Take on a ‘mentoring’ role for the project managers while at the same time remaining hands-on in terms of problem solving, executive reporting, and change management.
Bay3000 matched our client needs with one of our senior consultants who brought past expertise in the public sector. The consultant, who was also an experienced instructor, felt that it would be essential to give the team (project managers, sponsor, and the core team members) a common level of understanding of a framework of project management. She conducted a short awareness training session, which proved to be extremely valuable and a proactive way to ensure common understanding as well as to set expectations.
With the Bay3000 methodology as a guide, the consultant worked with the project managers and the sponsor through the planning processes for each of the sub-projects. Once project plans were fully developed and appropriate resources allocated, the consultant was able to mentor the project managers as they executed the project plan. Mentorship included problem solving, facilitating sessions, progress tracking and reporting, task assignments and control, as well as obtaining approvals as necessary. For the executive sponsor, the consultant provided program-level status and performance reports, issue management, program bulletins, and resource management.
The organization successfully delivered all four sub-projects on time and on budget and obtained approval to proceed with additional projects for the following year. The functional managers, who had no experience in managing projects, now were capable of managing projects independently. Finally, the organization now had a set of consistent templates and processes that they can reuse in future projects.
Case Study 2
Organization with over 20,000 employees. We were working with a newly established Project Management Office responsible for providing services across the various departments.
There is a directive in place to establish common learning priorities for staff across the organization. One of the areas that were deemed essential competencies that they need to enhance in order to accomplish their aggressive business plan is in Project Management. The challenge facing this client was that they were establishing a new PMO and wanted all their newly hired project managers to have a common level of advanced understanding in project management. They had decided to hire novice to intermediate project managers and to provide for them a development path to get them to a more advanced level.
Senior management felt that they needed a customized program designed and delivered by experienced instructors. By having an in-house program, they would be able to save costs in the long-term as well as use this training as a team-building opportunity. This also was to serve as a pilot for an on-going training program for staff.
With the input and collaboration of this organization’s management, we designed a customized curriculum for a ‘Masters of Project Management’ certificate program. This four-week program was scheduled to coincide with the start of these newly hired project managers. The curriculum was developed by Bay3000 and approved by our client. We then moved forward to create the customized training materials. Although the program was fully customized, we were able to draw significant content from our course materials and thus were able to develop the program quicker and at a lower cost.
The curriculum included the framework of project management (initiation, planning, executing controlling, closing), as well as extensive training and hands-on workshops in communications skills, change management skills, facilitation skills, and team building skills. The course included marked exams at each module, as well as a final examination.
We provided two senior instructors for delivering the course. They were able to lend a wealth of personal expertise in managing projects. They were also able to assess the students strengths, weaknesses, areas for further improvement and feedback this individualized knowledge back to their functional manager.
We graduated all fifteen students, who were ecstatic about the training they had just received. They felt the content and the instructors were top notch and that this will position them extremely well to be successful in their new roles. They are already working on projects and demonstrating excellent competencies due to this training. Due to the success of this initial offering, this client is planning to offer this program regularly for project managers across the organization.
Case Study 3
Our client was rapidly growing embedded solutions provider. Their solutions range from designing small micro-controller based systems and large real-time, multi-tasking software systems to developing board support packages and device drivers.
The business challenge facing this client was that many implementation projects were late and over budget. A key driver for improving their project management was that they had aggressive growth plans and the number of projects as well as the complexity of them would be increasing significantly. In addition, the functional managers and the senior executives were not obtaining the performance reporting that they needed during each engagement for resource and revenue planning.
At the same time as they were reevaluating their corporate strategic plans, they determined that they needed to assess their ability to deliver to the client, and to enhance the profitability of the project engagements. Key goals were to find an external partner that could:
Assess the current competencies of the project managers and propose a training and development plan appropriate to the organization’s needs. Deliver a customized training program for the project managers based upon the competencies assessment conducted and based on the unique needs for their types of projects.
Upon understanding some of the drivers for change, we proposed an on-site competencies assessment. By interviewing each project manager and functional manager and obtaining their perspective on the projects, the environment, their own skills, the tools they use – we were able to get a clear picture of where they were today and what the perceived issues were. However, we felt this was not enough to truly create a client success plan, so we proposed a facilitated workshop with Senior Management in order to understand the business strategies and to examine where senior management would like their project managers to be and what how would describe successful client engagements.
As a result of these assessments, we were able to outline a gap analysis and recommend a plan to help this organization to close the gap. As a starting point, we proposed an on-site customized training program in order to get everyone to a common level of understand of project management techniques. Since the assessment highlighted gaps in terms of soft skills, we ensured that the training program addressed communication and team building skills as well as the technical project management processes.
The training program was delivered and this team of project managers (who previously did not really want to manage projects) felt that they now have some specific tools and techniques to guide them and were excited about applying these at their next opportunity. Since the functional managers also were part of the training, they are now working on improving their processes and templates to incorporate the learning into their day-to-day processes — with our continued input and support. They now include ‘project management’ as capabilities that they use to sell their own services to their clients.