PMcrunch

You may be considering the possiblity of earning a business certification this year. 

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One of the most profound and ubiquitous management concepts over the past 30 years is “systems thinking”. Systems thinking is all around us. One example is that project management has in essence been “systematized” by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide!

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What do Six Sigma, ITIL, and Project Management have in common? These three disciplines all have associated business certifications, living largely in the ‘business’ versus technical realm, and all relate in some way to processes. But how can these disciplines relate to one another in such a way that greater value is created for the individual as well as the organization?

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Many professionals are either “knowledge seeking” or “problem solving” – but, to their detriment, not both. You can create a one-two punch for professional effectiveness by combining “knowledge seeking” and “problem solving”. Let me show you what I mean by looking at some details of some popular bodies of knowledge today.

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When we set-up a project team for a new project or if we take over an existing project, we have an opportunity and a responsiblity to create new norms and a new atmosphere in which project team members can flourish.

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Tough challenges demand detailed analysis and affective decision-making. However, almost always it takes time to turn around a bad situation. While we all know that it will take time for the worldwide economic turmoil to iron itself out, recent stock market surges demonstrate and the reaction of investors to those surges illustrate how mindsets can be changed almost overnight.

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Any project portfolio is likely to have a high degree of synergy among various projects. This is especially true of a portfolio of projects that make up a particular program. The challenge is how to best realize these synergies and to derive true value from them.

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In these challenging times, so many of our projects and programs are more challenging than usual. We are called upon to make tough decisions to solve difficult problems and to squeeze more out of every resource we have. How we face these challenges has more to do with our approach and attitude than anything else.

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On so many projects we assemble all the tasks and then assign them to the appropriate individuals. However, I have found that as an alternative we need to consider assigning some tasks to a small team of people. This may sound inefficient but I think it is essential, especially in certain environments and on certain types of tasks.

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FMEA is an important lean Six Sigma technique that has potential to be used in project management. While in Six Sigma it needs to be used at a very rigorous way, there certainly is some room for flexibility when used in project management. In either case, it is a good structured technique for analyzing problems and identifying solutions.

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