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Picaso Consulting / News /
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Project Management Boss: Techies Surging Ahead With Deployment Will Lead to Disaster
If the engineers and other technical staff who lack project management skills are allowed to lead deployments then it is a big mistake says one of the Australia's most skilled IT executives.
Former StorageTek boss, Phil Belcher, who recently took over as CEO at project services firm PMPartners Group said that opportunities should be given to technical staff to learn about techniques that can be used for these projects and could be shown how this knowledge is applicable to their own experiences.
Some people and businesses are seriously working on the problem, as 4000 people were trained by PMPartners over last year.
The skills transferred to these professionals are universal keeping in sync with the universal standards, still the IT sector needs to incorporate leading project due to rapidly varying environment.
According to Belcher most of the times project management and projects managers are held responsible for the failed project, its so because the company fails to address the organisational problems during technology implementation.
The root of problem can be partly attributed to the lack of project governance in Australian organisations. Results of the surveys carried out between October 2007 and January 2008 points towards the fact that 62 percent of the organisations don’t have any sort of governance mechanisms in place thus allowing each project manger to operate independently.
According to Belcher it is hard to maintain control over individual managers in absence of project management office (PMO), which is currently found in only 30 percent of Australian organisations.
Do these PMOs always have an active role?
As per the surveys even if these PMOs exist , only 60 percent of them support organisation – wide portfolio management framework , and 80 percent of them possess little authority to make project related decisions.
“I was a little surprised” says Belcher about the small proportion of organisations with PMOs, whereas he was at comfort to learn that 81 percent of those that had delivered tangible business benefits.
Phil Belcher recommends formal training to existing subject matter experts, and then utilising it along with consulting services (offered by PMPartners ) to develop a PMO and developing a suitable implementation methodology.
According to Phil Belcher relatively a small number of people can accomplish a lot using the resources organisations already have.
Whereas “organisations showcase differing levels of maturity in project management” and an optional approach which can be used is to outsource the project management function, and Belcher tops it with suggestion that people involved should be brought into the organisation as if they were employees.
PMPartners Group came into being by the merger of project management training and consulting firm PMPartners with IT project delivery organisation ITPM.
At first instant a feeling of strangeness may envelop you on inspecting that the enlarged firm chose someone who occupied director – level positions at data communications, networking and data storage businesses as its CEO.
Whereas “it really isn’t” reacts Belcher.
Earlier Belcher occupied executive positions like managing director of Datacraft Australia and managing director at StorageTek in Australia and New Zealand. He said that large part of which they all did was delivery.
Belcher says that it’s a good thing to have leading edge technology but more important is what you do with it.
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