Project Management Metrics Focus

In the past two years of the recession, the power systems design industry has been in the very challenging position of fine-tuning solutions to address the ever-pressing issue of energy supply and its environmental impact while still meeting demand. As organizations began cutting overhead costs - and in some cases even the heat - the demand for energy globally was scaled back to more manageable levels. Rolling blackouts to meet demand in many countries eased and gave power systems a chance to regroup and think about the way forward. As the global economy recovers, however, many of the challenges that power systems faced before the recession are returning. While many organizations took the opportunities afforded by the recession to invest in their project management capabilities, others will be faced with running to catch up in 2010 and beyond. At the end of last year, a panel of international experts, including myself, looked at the key project management trends that would drive industry in the coming year. The dominant theme? Metrics, metrics and more metrics

Program and project managers, under pressure from senior management to demonstrate project portfolio performance and its impact on the "bottom line," will put more resources to work implementing project portfolio management (PPM) solutions. This will enable fact-based decision-making senior management needs to make smart business choices. One area in which PPM solutions will prove vital will be smart grid project implementations. Whether in China, the United States, Europe or elsewhere, as wholesale and retail power suppliers move from testing to deploying smart grid systems, having a view of all the projects contributing to the upgrades as well as tools to track results will prove essential for defining success. Just as importantly, PPM will help senior management decide the path to cost effective, long-term expansion and management by providing data and information on cost and schedule performance.

In 2009 our experts predicted a greater role for requirements management and development (RMD), also known as business analysis. Reliance on RMD to determine metrics to track project performance will increase in 2010, helping to quantify organizational performance improvement for management. Whether we are talking about meeting the future power demands of an entire country, a car, or a smart phone, projects need well-defined requirements from the outset to know how best to demonstrate success to stakeholders.

To improve overall organizational performance, project and program governance will be embraced on all levels of the enterprise in 2010. Governance is a way to determine who is responsible for which decision and at which point along the chain of command. Aligning organizational resources and goals with the actual portfolio of programs and projects will contribute greatly to performance improvement. Governance can help facilitate decision-making in cases, for instance, such as whether a new energy system should be further developed or put it aside in pursuit of a different, more promising technology.

The positive influence of program management offices (PMOs) has increased greatly over the past ten years; yet, it appears that many have "plateaued" and they are looking for additional ways to demonstrate value. PMOs will use their intimate understanding of the organization, and how projects get done, to establish business analysis centers of excellence either within the PMO or alongside them. Whether it's a new power chip, wind farm or power generation facility, aligning a strong PMO with an integrated BA Center of Excellence will help ensure the project starts with the right requirements and metrics in place to effectively track progress and declare success.

As in every industry, power systems designers will continue to do more with less. Cost-saving efforts will contribute, for instance, to the prevalent outsourcing trend of silicon platform manufacturing that we have seen over the past few years. Thought-leading organizations will use PM principles to guide their contracting and outsourcing processes, leveraging project managers' skills and knowledge in schedule, risk, requirements and quality management to eliminate uncertainty and hold the contractor's "feet to the fire."

Over the past two years, we have seen what can happen across a wide range of industries when risk is managed badly. In 2010 there will be an even greater focus on PM risk assessment with an emphasis at the program as well as the portfolio level. In 2010 forward-thinking organizations will seek a clear distinction between systemic and non-systemic risks; the determination and management of risk factors that might hinder success; and dependencies between program and portfolio components. A risk can be as straight-forward as the potential for increased regulation of carbon emissions to a new advance in technology leapfrogging a solution and making it obsolete before enough units are sold to achieve break even or meet profit expectations. The broad range of uncertainties will put project managers under greater pressure to comprehensively identify risks and develop effective mitigations.

War zones, global pandemics and natural disasters will continue to present new challenges for systems designers worldwide as they seek rapid technological advancement in unstable areas. For example, Iraq's substandard electrical power generation continues to plague the country despite efforts to provide greater energy stability in a war-ravaged environment. PPM principles can help ensure that the right projects are selected and achieve the desired outcomes. PPM will serve both in assessing damage and in helping to effectively measure and communicate progress.

In our fast-paced world agility is a desirable attribute. Systems design requires quick thinking and an ability to adapt to the immediate situation. With the increased use of Agile PM approaches, including the various implementations of Agile methods (e.g., Scrum), senior management will demand quality metrics that clearly demonstrate the value of Agile over other PM approaches for specific projects, as well as Agile's impact on the achievement of organizational objectives. For the power systems design industry this will enable faster reaction times helping to speed solutions to market - hopefully ahead of the competition.

In 2009, many organizations implemented first-time learning initiatives that focused on PM maturity as a way to move ahead of the competition. These forward-looking organizations required that programs be based on insightful pre-assessments that drove the design of learning programs, along with ways to assess progress and demonstrate performance improvement. 2010 will see a pronounced increase in organizations using assessments to pinpoint their PM learning needs, track progress and identify the ROI that senior management is looking for in this critical investment. In order to secure the skills necessary to cope with these emerging trends, companies must track learning results and hold individual participants to standards that require they apply on the job what they have learned in the classroom.

To improve PM learning retention rates, and keep employees on-the-job as they learn, organizations will seek to leverage recent technological advances that help adults learn outside of the traditional classroom. Whether it is a webinar, self-paced online course, podcast or virtual classroom experience, companies will take advantage of a range of learning modalities. While the last two years haven't been easy, power system designers have had a brief respite from intensive global growth. This has afforded the industry an opportunity to focus on long-term issues like sustainability, environmental impact and how to meet the return of exponential growth in demand - for large as well as nano-sized systems. For PM professionals in power systems design, 2008 and 2009 offered a rare opportunity to demonstrate their value and the value of a systematic PM approach. It is the reason wise senior managers continue to invest in increasing their organization's PM skills and capacity. In doing so, they will ensure the success of projects essential to producing great power system design products, improving customer satisfaction and driving revenue and profit growth into the new decade. www.esi-intl.com