Can you transform project management into a competitive advantage?

This blog is based on a conversation Bryan Quick and I had during the January Episode of our podcast, “Are You Done Yet?” where we discussed the meaning of “Transforming work and project management into a competitive advantage.”  It was a fun conversation, and we hope you enjoy.  We’re always interested in feedback, so don’t be shy – contact us!  

Our goal is to transform project and work management into a competitive advantage.  Some would ask, what do you mean by “competitive advantage”? Project management is a necessary evil, right?  You must do it to get stuff done, but nobody wants to do it, nobody wants to build and maintain project plans except for the project managers.  All the workers say “It’s not my job.”  The developers or engineers, people getting stuff done, they’re like, “That’s too much, too much work.”  They hate it.

So reimagining project management for someone that is staffed to a project might mean that they don’t have to tell the project manager what their status is all the time and can just do their job.  Maybe re-imagining project management for a project manager would mean they don’t have to spend as much time asking people for things and chasing data. It’s a perpetual issue, finding things and aggregating data.  Using spreadsheets and emails and SharePoint lists and databases and everything else just to pull information in and put it places just to get something meaningful out and finally get to the point where we can decide – it’s a lot.

We’ve had many conversations with many, many customers over the years about how much time people are spending putting together statuses, whether on a PowerPoint deck or spreadsheet, or other tools just to show how the project is going on a weekly basis.  This artifact is typically just posted somewhere, and someone may or may not even look at it. So, transforming project management to people doing this would mean they don’t have to do that anymore since the system does it for them.

The most fundamental pillar to this concept is allowing everyone to participate in whatever role that stakeholder needs to participate in a way that is as easy as possible.  Traditionally, it’s been very hard for all people to participate.  Think about classic project and work management systems and PPM systems where you have a core set of folks like your project managers who have access to all the data.  But then you have your constituents, like executives and your team members that are doing the actual work.  You also have other people that are kind of on the periphery.  Getting all those people the right kind of licensing and getting better information in a way that it can be easily manipulated has always been a huge challenge.   

But there’s good news.  Modern cloud technologies are enabling these concepts to materialize in ways never possible before. Centralizing data on a common platform with the ability to extend and connect into virtually all work management systems creates the foundation for people and applications to collaborate more real time, thereby reducing the effort while getting more done.

We know that “transforming project and work management into a competitive advantage” is a heavy statement. This is about focusing on your best work, and your project management, what’s going on for your most important initiatives that your organization is working on. This is about moving beyond just keeping track of what’s happening to your project management, and improving your ability to execute on these projects dramatically better, faster, with less overall effort and with more predictable results.  This creates competitive advantage in your field, whether that be in healthcare or in financial services or whatever industry vertical you’re operating in.