Establishing a program for Delivery Excellence

Establishing a program for Delivery Excellence

A large IT services organization, part of a global conglomerate in hospitality, packaged foods, cosmetics and tobacco products, wanted to establish a program for overall improvement in their project delivery and a sustained initiative for delivery excellence. The program that they were looking for needed to cover multiple levels in the delivery organization starting from entry level project managers all the way up to the senior leadership. This initiative was considered a key aspect of organizational development to establish a complete eco-system for delivery managers and project managers to deliver to the best of their abilities and potential.

Background

While there are established knowledge areas and competencies for project management (such as PMBOK from PMI), there is no comparable body of knowledge for delivery management. In fact, there is often lack of consensus across organizations on what constitutes delivery management knowledge areas and competencies. While delivery managers need to possess PM competencies, they need more than those to fulfil all the expectations of their role in areas such as making & managing delivery commitments, providing oversight for projects, managing expectations of stakeholders and developing competencies of project managers.

PM Power Approach and Solution

PM Power’s approach comprised the following steps:

• Engage with the organization’s delivery leadership and understand all the dimensions of the role of delivery managers, setting goals for them and typical challenges that they face
• Conduct a brainstorming session to elicit requirements for the design of a program tailored for the company and the initial group of delivery managers
• Design and deliver a three-day workshop to the first group of about 20 delivery managers as the first step in the program
• Incorporate improvements based on feedback from the first batch of participants and roll out for subsequent batches
• Help establish a delivery manager community (DM community) to identify delivery improvement opportunities in the organization and take the lead in implementing them

In short, PM Power helped implement a customized learning environment for delivery managers covering instructor-led sessions as well as group learning. PM Power continues to interact with the organization’s DM community in identifying past project experiences for packaging them into case studies. PM Power consultants facilitate the analysis of these case studies in DM community sessions.