Chapter News

“Looking for a way to stay ahead of the pack in today’s competitive and chaotic global economy, companies are turning to project management to consistently deliver business results”
This statement may sound very recent, however, it is taken from a whitepaper that PMI already published in 2010! (The Value of Project Management)

So, nothing new you may think, but less is true. The dynamics in the project management landscape have changed a lot in a decade!

Nowadays project managers need to have an excellent understanding of how, in a fast-changing business environment, their projects can still enable value realization by the time they are completed. At the same time, the business can rely less on project managers to do so and need to collaborate much more actively for ensuring project teams are made aware of crucial business changes so they still can deliver successfully. For doing so, the typical project management techniques used in plan-driven project environments maintain having value, for enabling implementation and integration in environments that require a minimum level of stability and predictability, while the increasing pace of business change needs to be respected as well, leading to a growing need for application of Agile techniques for ensuring value delivery in fast-changing environments. The classical “Run” organization (Operations, focused on stability & predictability, with their yearly budgeting cycles) and the “Change” organization (Projects, focused on enabling change, dealing with uncertainty, and with nowadays less stability than can be forecasted a year ahead) need a high level of integration, and therefore Business and Projects need to work together as a tandem.

So next to being a partner for the professional project managers, it’s no more than logical that our Chapter also extends its focus to Business Partners, for supporting them in growing their proficiency level in Organizational Project management and enabling this ‘tandem dynamic’ between Business and Projects. Our Chapter’s “Big-10” community is already a great example of that. This extension of stakeholders also leads to a new vision of our Chapter’s way of working together with Business partners, as formalized now in a revised Partnership agreement. There, we no longer speak of “sponsors”, which expressed a primary focus on the monetary value these stakeholders contributed to the Chapter, but Partnership, where the Chapter and Partners actively work together to deliver value for the Chapter members, the Partner organizations and the Chapter organization. The mutual value realization will be continuously evaluated during the program(s) which the Partner supports and can change and grow as the program evolves. Of course, the monetary aspect will not be forgotten, as the Chapter simply needs funding for enabling running these Chapter programs, but it’s not the primary aspect anymore. A nice example of this revised approach, you can read in the following article, an interview with the PMI NL Mentorship program team and Threon, our Gold Partner and exclusive sponsor and active partner for enabling this program’s realization.

We started this item but also close it with a statement from the same PMI Whitepaper of 2010: “With the right resources, a clear timeframe for delivery and senior leadership support, a strong and disciplined project management practices will drive an organization forward. It’s how you stay competitive in the marketplace.” Because to our opinion, this hasn’t changed and it underlines even again, the value which PM has for Business!

So continue reading to learn more about what the future in PM for business hold.