"Know what value you are bringing to the organization: PMO Governance case studies across multiple industries and varying missions": October Governance Forum Summary

By Alex Blench, PMP

The PMI Atlanta Governance Forum hosted Dan Petell, Senior Director at Equifax. Dan delivered an interactive seminar designed to teach attendees how to identify and build value in projects. Over his 37 years in the industry, Dan has experienced project management at all levels and walked members through 4 unique PMO case studies.

Overview: Identifying and building value is one of the most important goals of project management. Dan emphasized the importance of gauging value by creating a measurable benefit delivered to stakeholders, and whether or not that value was within scope. Dan outlined a few key ingredients to improve the delivered value of projects this during his seminar this month:

•  Define Value
   o Confirm expectations of the deliverable.
   o Measure value based upon recipient’s level of satisfaction with the results.
   o Define work that will contribute the most benefit to the customer.

•  Encourage Cross-Functional Interaction
   o Meetings should be brokered by VP/Executive level leadership.
   o Build trust and understanding that your priorities are not the only priorities.
   o Stimulate cooperation and resource/knowledge sharing.
   o Enables departments to leverage resources/staff together as a team.

•  Create a “Project Management Operations Book”
   o Keep everyone on the same page.
   o Aligns day-to-day operations with the overall goal.
   o Encourages communication and sharing of ideas.

•  “Sunset” your project and retire old systems.
   o If you are introducing a new system, build a business case to retire the old system.
   o Make sure senior leadership is involved every step of the way and there is a clear path to the objective.
   o Do not discount the project Closure process group of project management.

Forum Highlights: Dan emphasized the importance of demonstrating value to Senior Leadership and the customer. Senior Leadership is an important tool, necessary to leverage resources and bring teams together to deliver value. Remember, just because everyone is working does not mean that they are always producing value when measured against the objective of the project.

Special thanks to our presenter Dan Petell for an engaging discussion and sharing lessons learned from over his extensive experience in governance.

We appreciate our participants as well, and were able to offer free PMI-branded goodies to those who were in attendance. 

We would also like to thank our sponsors at Global Payments for making this event possible.

If you would like to learn more about Governance and the value it brings to projects, please join us at a future forum. The calendar can be found on the PMI Atlanta web site at http://www.pmiatlanta.org 

ABOUT PMI

PMI Atlanta serves project managers in Metro Atlanta, and we're an active resource to corporations, community and government agencies throughout north Georgia. With over 4,000 members, PMI Atlanta is the second largest chapter in the US and fifth largest in the world. Our professional expertise span across industries; we’re the professionals building healthcare information technology systems, the engineers developing smarter public transportation, and the planners growing our communities more efficiently.