Career development through business transformation

Business transformation is gaining momentum. As firms emerge from recession they are committing to radical change that meets the needs of a price sensitive market place which demands even higher levels of added value than was the case before 2008.

If you are in a project management role, business transformation is very relevant to your career development. Projects and programmes do not spontaneously occur in organisations. They are commissioned in response to the need for change. Not all projects will be part of a wider transformation agenda as some change will always be relatively small scale and contained within an individual department. However, with the increase in enterprise wide technology solutions (SAP, PeopleSoft etc) departments and functions do not operate independently of one another, so any change has a domino effect, impacting on the next process and team in the chain i.e. it is large-scale transformational change even if that were not the intention.

Business transformation aligns the organisations improvements in people (staffing levels, roles and responsibilities, training and development remuneration and reward), process and technology to the business strategy.

For me, business transformation brings together excellence in a number of critical management disciplines:
- Strategic and commercial understanding - appreciation of the customer, technology and regulatory environment and ability to conceive of changes that exploit opportunities in these offered as these environments evolve
- Change management - ability to plan and implement the required changes (www.maventraining.co.uk/change-management-explained/
- Project management - ability to deliver new capability upon which the changes are based (www.maventraining.co.uk/project-management-explained/
- Stakeholder engagement - ability to communicate the reasons and benefits for the changes in a compelling and exciting way, answering the question 'what's in it for me?'

This range of skills is reflected in the job specifications that recruitment agencies are posting under the heading of 'business transformation':
Strategic and commercial understanding
"Develop and implement strategies and solutions to meet organisational business goals and objectives."
"You will be the owner of the strategy space, defining the roadmap and blueprint of the strategic vision."
Change management
"The main purpose of this role is to act as the point of reference and centre of expertise in managing and implementing process improvement changes across the organisation."
Project management
"You will drive delivery via the application of strong project management processes, ensuring that requirements are analysed for their benefits, risks and costs and that project plans to deliver these requirements are clear and have the agreement of all their stakeholders."
Stakeholder engagement
"You will shape all communications and engage change champions across multiple business units to transition and embed the change to the new operating model."

If you want to find out more about this topic and you are in London on May 26th, come along to my free briefing where I will be looking at how to get started in change management http://www.maventraining.co.uk/course-detail/_/free-briefing-how-effective-is-our-change-management/72/

Today all the excitement in the office is about launching our new free briefing – “How effective is our approach to change management?” http://www.maventraining.co.uk/course-detail/_/free-briefing-how-effective-is-our-change-management/72/

It has been designed for people who want to find out:
-How to baseline your organisations readiness for change
-How to create a change management framework and apply it across your organisation
-What actions you can take now to improve how change is implemented in your organisation

For an informative session on effectively managing change, come and see us at 1.30pm on the 26th May at the Maven Centre, 8th Floor, Aldermary House, 10-15 Queen Street, London EC4N 1TX.

Michael Porter (famous management guru – Porters 5 forces) has written an article in this months Harvard Business Review setting out how he believes companies should operate using long term value and not immediate profits as their goal.

Part of his argument is to stress the importance of the social value of an organisation i.e. what it offers its customers, the environment and the world around it. To me, social value is about the bigger picture, and how we are offering something more back to our customers i.e. added value.

As a company training company, our value is our specialist knowledge and all the tips, techniques and practical advice we offer to our learners. To me, social value is about how we make as much of this available to our economy as possible because ultimately, making things better is what drives everyone at Maven. We want to ensure that our clients improve their ability to manage projects, implement changes, control risks and deliver benefits.

That’s why we put so much effort into developing pre-course materials that allow you to prepare ahead of your course, so that when you are with us you are getting as much as you possibly can from the service you have paid for. We want to interact, to discuss your issues, and help you see them in the context of the best practice that’s available.

We believe that project management touches every area of our lives, and that if we improve the ability of everyone to deliver projects successfully then we are improving our environment. Ultimately, it’s this drive to pass on our knowledge (learned by making countless mistakes) that is the core of our value to you.

That’s why we make so much of our knowledge available to you – go and look at www.mavenprojectmanagement.co.uk to see the free stuff that we regularly post for you to use. I hope it helps and keep the link close to hand as we are adding to it all the time. Or if you want to hear it first hand, come to my regular free briefing held every fortnight in London - http://www.maventraining.co.uk/courses/free-briefings.cfm

The future of project management...

Rather portentous title but I was at a lunch on Friday where part of my role was to explain where next for our industry. The imminent launch of the best practice guide for Management of Portfolios (MoP™) from OGC is leading us to question what happens next.

I think we are coming to the end of the development of best practice which dominated the last decade and a half, starting in 1996/1997 with the launch of PRINCE2, leading to the creation of guidance on risk management (MoR®) and Programme management (MSP®) and now finally MoP™.

I think that how best practice is applied and evidence of the improvements it creates has been a focus for several years and effective application of best management practice will continue to dominate the thoughts of those responsible for the operational management of our organisations. I am being specific about operational managers because I think there is still a distinction between these leaders and chief executives who operate strategic leadership, often in an unstructured way, but implicitly relying on the underlying management infrastructure, which is where best practice comes in.

I think organisational governance is growing in recognition and importance - probably becoming a senior management discipline for this decade.

Organisational governance has many definitions but I think it has two components - a structural/procedural piece and an interpersonal component which is the leadership ability of senior management to sell the benefits of applying the governance structure to everyone in the organisation, whatever their grade or length of service.

We need to explain how organisational governance is a key contributor to organisational excellence and how the best practice established at project (including technical and interpersonal skills), Programme (encompassing change and benefits management disciplines) and portfolio management (evidence based judgement and decision making) are interlinked.

I think this gives those of us involved in delivering projects and change initiatives plenty of scope for getting involved in shaping how our employers operate, and will ensure project management becomes embedded as a mainstream management discipline.

As always, let me know what you think, but if you want to want to know more, please go to http://www.maventraining.co.uk/white-papers.cfm or come and here me speak at one of my free briefings http://www.maventraining.co.uk/courses/free-briefings.cfm

Assurance.... next on the agenda?

Has sponsorship or assurance grown in importance in your organisation? I ask because we're seeing a significant demand for sponsorship training from senior managers as their perception of the importance of project management grows. Up until a few months ago, training for members of the project board was organized by those managing the projects who felt that they were not getting the support they needed. Concerns by project managers included senior managers failing to keep up to date with the progress of the projects they are responsible for or not prepared to take the tough decisions during the life of the project as issues and risks demand attention.

Now we are seeing demand from managers who recognise that they must give their projects serious attention. The financial environment means that all organisations are keen to control expenditure. Projects are a source of discretionary spend and it seems senior managers have decided to find out how to get control and start governing this work.

In predicting trends in PPM the next logical step would be an increased interest in project assurance. After all, effective sponsorship means knowing if the project team are doing the right things in the right way, but few organisations have the funding for internal assurance services so, as the pressure increases to ensure project delivery is timely and appropriate, focusing on assurance would seem likely.

BTW, thanks to all who attended the briefing on Friday 12th - it was a great session! If you missed it, check out our new schedule and join us.