Project Management Process Improvement (Artech House Effective Project Management Series) : 9781580537179

Regardless of the extent of your efforts to design and deploy an exemplary project
management process, the realities always seem to fall far short of your expectations.
Project managers and their teams do not use the processes you worked
so hard to get accepted and approved. Some use the processes sporadically. Others
modify them to suit their own purposes. Others ignore them all together and
opt to use their own processes, which they believe to be superior to the ones
offered by their organization. Risk underlies many of these decisions. Project
managers would prefer to use the tried and true rather than expose the project to
added risk through the use of unfamiliar processes. Only after prompting from
you do they give the new processes a try. Their reluctance is obvious and you do
not seem to have won any converts to the new way. The question remains: How
do you win converts to the processes and support you are offering?

If you are experiencing these behaviors, I do not want you to think that
they are due to any failure on your part. Much to the contrary, to have a project
management process in place is a considerable accomplishment. You should be
proud of having reached this goal. However, I want you to take the position that
it is just an intermediate goal. The long-term goal is to have a fully developed
and integrated portfolio of project management processes. Your initial offering
is just that—initial. You are now dealing with a cultural change. As teams begin
to use these processes, you will learn about the process shortcomings. These you
will fix, and the cycle of learning and fixing will continue. This improvement
cycle is a major focus of this book.

This book will take you through the steps you will need in order to mature
your project management processes to whatever level your management expects.
In addition to the process goals, you will want to achieve a certain level of adoption,
and we will consider the steps to achieve that goal as well.