Project Management
Overview
A project is a temporary endeavour with a beginning and an end which creates a unique product, service or result. Project Management is a profession which follows a systematic process. The Project Management Institute breaks project management into knowledge areas and process groups. Knowledge areas are Integration, Scope, Time, Cost, Quality, Human Resources, Communications, Risk and Procurement. Process groups follow the process of project management: Initiating Process Group, Planning Process Group, Executing Process Group, Monitoring and Controlling Process Group, and Closing Process Group.
Effective project management is used to overcome projects completed late, over-budget, without the required functionality and not providing any value. Having good project management skills does not mean you have no problems. It does not mean that risks go away. It does not mean that there are no surprises. The value of effective project management is that you have standard processes in place to proactively deal with all contingencies.
Project management processes and techniques are used to coordinate resources to achieve predictable results. Since projects involve people, there is always complexity and uncertainty that cannot be absolutely controlled. Project management is both science and art. It is science in that it relies on proven and repeatable processes and techniques to achieve project success. It is an art because it also involves managing and relating to people and requires the project manager to apply intuitive skills in situations that are totally unique for each project.
Learn more about Project Management services provided by MKR Consulting
Change Management
Overview
Change management is the process, tools and techniques to manage the people-side of change to achieve the required business outcome. It involves understanding how an individual goes through change and the organizational tools available to support that transition such as communication, sponsorship, coaching, and training.
Change management is similar to project management, but if focuses on the 'people side' of change instead of the technical side of the change. Like project management, change management follows a structured process. And like project management, change management has a set of tools to support the transition.
When the organization introduces a change (a project, an initiative, new policies and procedures, etc.), the ultimate outcome is that individuals have to do their jobs differently. The organizational change is only successful if individuals make changes to how they do their jobs. Change management is the tool available to drive the individual changes required for projects to be successful.
All organizations continually strive to improve. Those improvements represent objectives that the organization wishes to reach. These objectives have three components (technical, human and leadership) that must be handled expertly to reach the objective. Project management is the discipline used to manage the technical component of an objective, governance is used to manage the leadership component of an objective and change management is used to manage the human component.
Change management is a system used to anticipate, activate and accelerate people's engagement in the environment an implemented objective will create.
Learn more about Change Management services provided by MKR Consulting
Business Analysis
Overview
Business processes are the activities that transform a set of inputs into a set of outputs (goods or services) for another person or process using people and tools. Improving business processes is paramount for businesses to stay competitive in today's marketplace. Over the last 10 to 15 years companies have been forced to improve their business processes because of demands for better products and services. If consumers do not receive what they want from one supplier, they have many others to choose from; hence the competitive issue for businesses.
For companies who wish to improve business processes with a gradual, incremental improvement they can follow a Business Process Improvement (BPI) model. This model attempts to understand and measure the current process, and make performance improvements accordingly. BPI begins with documenting what you do today, establish some way to measure the process based on what your customers want, do the process, measure the results, and then identify improvement opportunities based on the data you collected. You then implement process improvements, and measure the performance of the new process. This loop repeats over and over again, with continuous process improvement.
For companies who cannot afford a slow change process and wish to implement rapid change and dramatic improvement they can follow a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) model. BPR relies on a different school of thought than continuous process improvement. In the extreme, reengineering assumes the current process is irrelevant - it doesn't work, it's broke, forget it. Start over. Such a clean slate perspective enables the designers of business processes to disassociate themselves from today's process, and focus on a new process. It is like projecting yourself into the future and asking yourself: what should the process look like? What do my customers want it to look like? What do other employees want it to look like? How do best-in-class companies do it? What might we be able to do with new technology?
BPR begins with defining the scope and objectives of your reengineering project, then going through a learning process (with your customers, your employees, your competitors and non-competitors, and with new technology). Given this knowledge base, you can create a vision for the future and design new business processes. Given the definition of the "to be" state, you can then create a plan of action based on the gap between your current processes, technologies and structures, and where you want to go. It is then a matter of implementing your solution through effective Project Management and supporting the new processes with effective Change Management.
Learn more about Business Analysis services provided by MKR Consulting