Project management
Too many projects experience delays, additional costs and quality issues. The consequences of this are dissatisfied customers and users, frustrated employees and managers, increased costs and thus poorer financial results.
Our approach and way of working
Our approach ensures better predictability and goal achievement in project portfolios and individual projects through a three-step process:
- Rigging
- Establish a management platform - ensure that a good management foundation is in place
- Manage through project assurance meetings
We often see one or more of these reasons why projects do not go as desired:
- Project goals are unclear or not anchored in the project team
- Unclear interfaces and weak interaction between project and line organization, customer, partners or suppliers and between subprojects/work packages in the project.
- The project responds too late or weakly to deviations, threats and opportunities
- The fear of failure is greater than the joy of winning - it creates a defensive mindset where we have a one-sided focus on what can go wrong at the expense of the room for opportunity.
- A culture of fear where people are afraid of the consequences when problems are flagged.
- Lack of learning so that the same mistakes are made again
- Reporting and follow-up processes that look back and are concerned with explaining what has happened.
What are we doing?
Our approach to project assurance ensures better predictability and goal achievement in project portfolios and individual projects through a three-step process:
1. Rigging
The goal of this phase is to clarify formats, participants, frequency, and a process tailored to your context and the nature of the project(s). We start from the overall goals and challenge picture to ensure we address what is critical to success.
2. Establish a management platform – ensure that a good management foundation is in place
It's about establishing and clarifying a good foundation to manage from. Here we work together with the project manager, the project management team (in large projects) and project owners to clarify the goals for the project, we define the important few milestones with clear ownership and dependencies between them and, last but not least, we establish some clear rules of engagement for how the project will work together to ensure success.
3. Manage through project assurance meetings
The purpose of the project assurance meeting is to agree on what is needed to ensure that milestones and goals are reached so that the project(s) is a success.
In the meetings, the energy going forward is spent on what is the best we can do now, rather than explaining why deviations have occurred. Each individual comes prepared and highlights deviations, threats and opportunities along with proposals for measures and decisions and the need for help. The earlier problems and opportunities are reported, the better. This gives the project the opportunity to implement measures early and in a controlled manner.
In the meeting, each individual receives feedback on their assessments and the participants' collective experience is activated to agree on good measures and make necessary decisions.
At the portfolio level, participants include project owners, project managers and relevant line managers. The focus is on ensuring that individual projects and the portfolio as a whole deliver as agreed, dependencies between projects, and identifying systemic bottlenecks across projects.
At the project level, the detagers are the project management team and the focus is on ensuring that the subprojects and the project as a whole are progressing and reaching milestones and goals, as well as dependencies between the subprojects.
Would you like to know more about how we work?
We are a company with skilled professionals with extensive experience in our field.
Predictability in projects
Project assurance builds the organization's and projects' ability to ensure predictability along the way and the end result of the projects:
- Opportunities and threats are identified early so that they can be handled in a controlled and planned manner - “early warning of bad news is second best to good news”
- Increased ownership and commitment to project goals and milestones
- Increased learning across projects/sub-projects so that:
- don't make the same mistake again
- new project managers get up to speed faster by getting input and advice from colleagues with more experience
- Better interaction and dynamics in project management and between project and line
- Better handling of dependencies and resource conflicts between projects and subprojects
- Identifies bottlenecks in the organization and processes so that improvements that have real impact can be implemented
We have successfully helped clients with very different types of projects within infrastructure, construction, energy, product development, research, technology, IT projects and larger organizational development projects.
We help you achieve better predictability and results in your projects.
When we work with our clients to improve predictability and goal achievement in projects, key themes are leadership, collaboration, learning and control. Portfolio and project management have many common denominators. Common to both is the introduction of a management process we call Project Assurance. We do this at three different levels:
Portfolio management
Ensure progress and results in the projects and develop learning across the projects in the portfolio
Project management
Ensure progress and results in a project, as well as develop collaboration and learning in the project management team
Coaching of project managers
Support and sparring to project managers to develop the leadership role of a project manager and how she/he can work with her team and internal and external stakeholders to ensure progress and success
Get contacted
Fill out the form and you will hear from us soon.
