Project Management

Certification as a
Communication and Process
Toolset
A case study for the CAPM® Certification Course

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Contents
Introduction 2
Challenges 2
Solution 3
Approach 4
Final Outcome 6
Critical Success Factor 7
Lessons Learned 7

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Introduction

XZY Management Consulting firm has been in business for over 30 years,
providing project management services to companies around the world. It has a
billion-dollar project portfolio with hundreds of projects. It needs to decrease
time-to-market in response to competitive pressures and expanding product
line. It sets aggressive goals to reduce average project duration by approximately
50% and improve internal customer satisfaction by 25% over a three-year period.

The organizational focus had been to leverage best practices and industry
standards for projects, ensuring that the services provided to clients were
valuable and useful. However, as the organization has grown and evolved,
project managers have all adopted a very personal style to managing projects.

Some project managers follow the Project Management Institute’s Project

Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK), while others rely more on their
personal extensive experience and have created many unique approaches to
working with clients and various initiatives within their chosen industry. Project
Managers leverage various approaches to managing their projects, report
performance metrics based on the needs of their clients, and manage
performance based on hours, dollars, or indexes depending on their personal
preference, for example:

Individual projects have multiple approaches to managing scope with some

project managers leveraging change requests; others respond to requests
on a one-off basis.

In some cases, project efforts leverage formalized risk management while

others use a less formal approach to identifying and overcoming obstacles.

Lessons learned are collected and maintained by individual project

managers and not as an organization with PMs having their own personal
set.

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Recent customer surveys, client retention rates, and overall project performance
have been dropping, leaving the firm with the need to do something to improve
professionalism and success factors across all initiatives.

Challenges

Most project managers have been with the firm for 10 or more years, with only a
small fraction joining recently. Based on varied client needs, the industries that
projects were completed for range from computer infrastructure to business
process improvement and transformational change. Therefore, project managers
were grouped into functional knowledge areas and often did not work with
counterparts in other industries.

With the varied background of team members and the diversity of industries, the
organization adopted an internal “language” for dealing with project deliverables
and reports. This internal reference was not documented and was based more
on interaction and on-the-job learning. New project managers faced tremendous
challenges in understanding the terminology and acronyms used by the tenured
staff members.

In addition, clients would often pick their “favorite” project managers to work
with insisting that other PMs did things differently or incorrectly and didn’t
understand the uniqueness of their projects.

Finally, the Executive Leadership team was focused on billable time and profits,
leaving little time or dollars to be spent on personal growth, career education, or
certifications for team members. Instead of investing in training, the organization
suffered a very high level of turnover for project managers who “did not get it”
or were unable to adapt to the rigid undocumented processes employed. A
varied set of expertise and skills are a norm at the firm.
John was appointed the new Sr. Program Manager and was assigned a high-
profile complex software development program consisting of three projects that
were all running behind schedule, over budget, and with rising concerns from the

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stakeholder community. John’s task was to turn the program around before the
client canceled the entire contract.

To better understand the issues, John analyzed each project by looking at

schedules, budget, work performance, and quality reports and interviewing the
project managers. The result:

Project A
The project had been plagued with constant changes from the stakeholder
community impacting the scope of the effort, schedules, cost, and quality.
Stakeholders continued to find new features and individually insisted that they
needed to be added for the project to be successful. The project manager was
frustrated with the stakeholder requests and was consistently being chastised for
missing deliverables and deadlines.

Project B
Unexpected issues were an ongoing concern for the effort. While the project
was based on new technology, the team was comprised of cutting-edge technical
staff. The team was able to overcome each obstacle that slowed the project.
Unfortunately, the plans and schedule had gone out the window. Quality was
struggling to keep up with the changes, and the stakeholder community was
frustrated and confused as to how the project would meet the requirements and
when to plan for the actual project completion.

Project C
Throughout the project lifecycle, stakeholders had popped in and out of team
meetings. At times, they contributed vital information on regulations, customer
needs, and usability features, while at others, they were completely detached
from the effort and silent to requests for material review or project status
meetings. In addition, the team was consistently restating information in each
meeting. Everything from requirements to proposed solutions, business cases,
and risks seemed to be new information and warranted rehashing the topics in
great depth and detail. Overall, the project was able to move through the
execution successfully but was held up at every phase gate and decision point.
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Solution
Recognizing the disparity in knowledge, standards, and processes and frustrated
with inconsistencies on the projects in his program, John realized that each
project was being managed differently with partial project management
processes being implemented. While the Project Managers had proven track
records of success, they were frustrated with their client and none were
confident of success for their efforts.

John identified the need for a common framework across all managers. As a
certified Program Management Professional (PgMP) from the Project
Management Institute (PMI), the program manager decided to implement
project management standards and certifications for his project managers.

Each project manager was provided with a copy of the Project Management
Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) and signed up for a training course on the materials.
Since they all had many years of project management experience and were
successful in past efforts, John was not concerned about their ability to
understand or grasp the concepts. Therefore, each manager was challenged with
learning, attending the course, and passing a certification exam for Certified
Associate in Project Management (CAPM).

Approach
After completing their required training and in preparation for their exam,
project managers were tasked with identifying areas of inconsistency between
their projects and the standards. A gap analysis on each project identified issues
with terminology, standards, common practices, and industry standards where
their individual management choices had either missed knowledge areas or had
incompletely addressed the knowledge area as it related to the project.

Project A

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The Project Manager for Project A quickly recognized that the changes to
requirements and scope could be addressed with improved Scope Management
processes. Since the project was already underway, the Project Manager
recognized that they had to fast track the implementation and move into a more
effective execution process.

The Project Manager initially developed a scope statement based on the

requirements that had been previously identified and the requests received from
stakeholders. She brought her team together and brainstormed the scope,
ensuring that the boundaries for scope were clearly identified, including the
current work and requested requirements. From this scope statement, she
leveraged the project schedule previously developed and created a work
breakdown structure.

Initially, the WBS consisted solely of the work encompassed in the schedule, but
in the next review, the team took the scope statement, identified the gaps in
tasks previously identified, and created a more extensive and complete WBS that
encapsulated all the work necessary to achieve the project.

The project schedule was updated with the newly identified tasks, and each work
package was adjusted on the timeline to improve efficiency and ensure that
predecessor tasks were complete prior to undertaking the subsequent efforts.

Next, the Project Manager created a Change Management process that required
a formalized Change Request and identified the steps necessary to evaluate
change, determine project impact, and follow an approval process with a Change
Control Board of stakeholders. The Change Requests included impact analysis
and changes to scope/schedule/cost prior to review and approval by the Change
Control Board.

While the project did not meet its initial schedules, budget, or scope through the
implementation of Scope Management, it soon operated with constrained
Change Requests and began to meet every deliverable schedule.

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Project B

As the Project Manager for Project B went through the training and read the
materials, he took immediate notice of the formalized Risk Management
knowledge area. Throughout the training course he recognized the value of Risk
Management exercises for his efforts and could see how, while counterintuitive
to his need to push the project through to completion, stepping back with the
team to do brainstorming exercises could absolutely assist in recognizing issues
before they were encountered.

As soon as he returned from his training course, he called his team together to
start brainstorming on everything that could go wrong and strategies to
overcome any potential risk. Going through this process, the team was able to
identify a huge number of hurdles. Some would have completely derailed the
effort.

The initial Risk Identification process was tremendously useful. The project
benefited from regular, ongoing identification, qualification, and planning
sessions. The sessions enabled them to recognize potential future issues and
devise approaches to resolve them.

The project benefited from the Risk Management process throughout the
lifecycle, but more importantly, they were able to identify enterprise and
program level risks which were raised to the Program Manager who leveraged
these issues to avoid pitfalls on other efforts.

Project C

When the Project Manager for Project C heard about the new methodology, he
ridiculed the thought that some book would provide the solution to his issues.
His issues weren’t process related, they were personality and power struggle
issues with stakeholders who just involved themselves when convenient and
torpedoed the project. No methodology would solve that.

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However, after doing some of the course case studies, reading the materials, and
working through exercises, he suddenly realized that his issue was related to
Stakeholder Engagement and Management as well as Communication.

First, the stakeholder engagement was not being managed effectively. When
stakeholders dropped out of the project participation, they were left alone and
not encouraged to rejoin or participate. As a matter of fact, many seemed to feel
that they were not necessary during particular project stages and, with busy
schedules, reprioritized their time.

Project Manager C began actively managing participation by documenting

attendance, noticing who was and wasn’t participating, reaching out to various
stakeholders to actively solicit their interaction, and most importantly contacting
stakeholders prior to meetings and decision points to ensure they were aware of
the importance of their attendance/participation. Project Manager C also was
involved in identifying the topics and issues for discussions and acknowledging
stakeholders when they did participate.

Secondly, the project manager recognized that the information and the
mechanisms for communication were not effective. Long, detailed reports were
not being read or sent out on a monthly basis. In addition, the frequency of
various communications was not in line with the stakeholder needs. He
developed a Communication Plan that identified which information would be
provided, when, and through what mechanisms. Then he offered this
information to stakeholders and allowed them to choose their level of
interaction.

At times, stakeholders selected a lower level of participation than that the

project manager felt was appropriate based on their interests and influence. In
those cases, he sat down with the stakeholders to validate their choices, inform
them of the value they brought to the effort, and at times tailored the
communications to meet their specific needs.

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 At the end of this transition, long reports were set aside in preference of bullet
point documents that quickly provided status, issues, risks, and decision points.
Email was a preferred method of communication and meetings were limited to
crucial status and decision-making discussions. Stakeholders were encouraged
to participate, monitored, and personally followed up with.

Very quickly, changes were limited and decisions were made up-front on project
efforts. There were fewer drive-by/drop-ins, and stakeholders increased their
overall satisfaction with their knowledge and level of involvement and decreased
changes.

John, the Program Manager of the effort, mentored and advised project
managers. However, the program itself reaped immediate benefits with program
and enterprise level risks being raised sooner, greater overall participation,
increased communication, and better scope management. Suddenly, the
negative numbers for cost, schedule, and quality were turning around and
projects were achieving their objectives in a timely, efficient, and effective
manner. Customer satisfaction surveys indicated greater confidence in project
efforts, and complaints reduced dramatically.
Final Outcome
The executives at XYZ quickly noticed how John’s program was outperforming
the others in the portfolio and how his projects had turned around performance
and increased customer satisfaction. John was brought to the Executive
Leadership Team to explain his success.

John explained that while his managers were very skilled and experienced in
project management, simple things were becoming systemic issues. In addition,
the project managers struggled to communicate with one another both because
of their internal struggles but also because of a lack of consistent terminology.
The introduction of a framework of consistent best practice, taken across all
industries, facilitated increased overall performance and provided success factors
for individual efforts.

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 John explained that Project Management Institute had developed standards from
project managers around the world and across industries. The Body of
Knowledge had been developed based on consistent and repeated success
factors from project managers and was a relatively open standard that constantly
evolved based on personal experience of project managers around the world.

He pointed out that requiring a passing certification test ensured that his
managers truly invested themselves in the learning process instead of just
attending the course. This ensured that managers had read all the material,
attended courses, and discussed their findings with John as their mentor.
Pointing out that project managers had complete flexibility over their project, he
identified how they had found critical areas of concern, developed tailored
processes to address, and customized their approach. At the same time, John
showed how managers maintained their own autonomy and made choices for
how they would address issues based on their own experience and expertise.

The Executive team, impressed with the rapid improvements, quickly mandated
the approach be undertaken across all organizational projects and programs.
While an investment in time and energy, they quickly reaped the benefits turning
around their critical failures and achieving the first truly successful project
deliveries in a number of years. Customer satisfaction numbers skyrocketed and
XYZ returned to its position as the market leader.

Lessons Learned

Process improvement does not have to be an external function nor is there any
requirement that it be extensive. In this case study, managers were presented
with a framework for project success but were not required to implement a
blanket policy. Instead, they were presented with the opportunity to learn, and
while going through that process, self-identify issues within their current efforts.
This self-identification process can be extremely powerful as the individual is not
pressured from outside influences, instead they can identify their own concept of
critical issues and look for ways of mitigating the impact.

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 While efforts can be all-consuming in the challenges faced, often continuing to
make the same mistakes simply produces the same results and with no
improvements. Taking a step back from the effort to see the challenges from a
different perspective can be incredibly valuable.

Similar to many organizations today, XYZ had not found a need to invest in
training in the past. However, competition, market shifts, technical changes,
cultural transitions all had a tremendous impact on the business model. To turn
the company back around, they needed to adapt a new approach that would
change the overall way they did business without negatively impacting their key
success factors.

At times, the investment in people, especially when focused, can have such
tremendous results that it seems surprising it was not undertaken sooner.
However, there are so many different technologies, management approaches,
leadership styles, and knowledge areas that simply training your people, as an
open-ended approach, may not have the desired impact. Instead, John could
clearly identify a critical area of knowledge and focus his team on investing their
efforts in expanding that knowledge area.

Based on the Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®
Guide) ― Sixth Edition
CAPM, PMI, and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

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