6 Keys to PMO Methodology Implementation

1. Establish a Defined Selection Process

Any successful project management office is careful when selecting projects to be undertaken. Acceptable projects must fall within certain criteria, such as financial viability and profitability, alignment with the organization’s strategy, adaptability in the event of future shifts in strategy or technology, the relative risk factor for success, scalability, and the legal and ethical implications (does the project comply with local, national, and/or international regulations?).

2. Identify the Project’s Objective(s)

From the outset, establish measurable objectives for the project in question. Define how those objectives will be measured. Identify key performance indicators which can monitor progress or reveal any bottlenecks or other obstacles hindering success.

3. Define the Function and Scope of the Project Management Office

A project management team can function in three fundamental manners. It can act in a supportive role as advisors or consultants, as a controlling agent by, for instance, establishing protocols and mandating compliance, or by assuming direct control and management of the projects. Those boundaries should be clarified from the outset to ensure full support from sponsors and stakeholders.

In addition, other questions should be addressed. To whom will the team report? Will train project managers throughout the organization? Will it interact in other ways with various departments or be siloed? While subject to change, the project management office’s scope should always be transparent and clearly defined.

4. Be Certain the Project Management Team Has the Full Support of Its Sponsor

5. Engage Stakeholders

6. Always Be Open to Improvement

Downtime, differing standards in various departments, poor communication and documentation, as well as other inefficiencies are the bane of any successful business. While standardization, scalability, and agility are all desired qualities, they cannot be achieved if a project team, or the organization as a whole, are not open to new techniques, tools, and methods.

No manager or team can organize or execute a project without both a passion for problem-solving and the experience of past successes. Consistency and inspiration must work hand in hand. To get your critical project on the track to green, consult Project Genetics today.

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is one of the most successful strategies for businesses of all sizes. CRM focuses on improving profit per customer by improving the quality of the relationship that your company has with each of its customers. When your customers feel that they have a more personalized relationship with your business, they’ll be more likely to come back and spend more. If CRM isn’t already embedded in your company’s DNA, consider how successful CRM implementation plans work.

What Are the Most Important Steps in CRM Implementation?

Understand Your Shortcomings

Why do you want to implement CRM in the first place? What problems will CRM solve? All too often, we see companies rush into CRM without first evaluating their circumstances. Before you embark on any CRM project, gather heaps of data. Interview as many customers as you can to find out how they feel about their relationship with your business. Speak to CSRs and sales to find out what makes it difficult for them to forge strong client relationships.

Take a closer look at your internal business processes. Can you adjust them to give clients more involvement? Are unnecessary tasks or excessive exchanges between employees keeping your customer service team from focusing on the customer? A good rule of thumb is any activity that doesn’t generate value for the customer is one you can live without. Once you know your flaws, you’ll be able to address them precisely through meaningful changes.

Set Goals for CRM

How will you know whether your company implemented CRM successfully or not? Without clear objectives, you won’t be able to accurately measure the impact of your implementation. Select KPIs that relate to CRM and pull as much historic data as you can to see where you stand now. Consider comparing to industry benchmarks or other organizations to spot where you’re lagging and where you excel. Set new KPI targets and observe how CRM affects them.

Numbers alone are only half of the equation. Add a timeframe to your goals to make sure your implementation doesn’t drag on or balloon in cost. Set short-term and long-term goals for each of the KPIs you chose. Some useful ones to consider are profit per customer, purchase frequency for returning customers, customer satisfaction, and the number of referrals per customer. Aim for a 1-year target goal and build from there with 3-year or 5-year goals.

Choose the Right Tools

How are you going to track all of those KPIs? How can you strengthen your internal processes to facilitate growth in those areas? CRM tools can help you measure progress towards your goals while also making it easier to interact with your customers in ways that boost your KPIs with minimal effort. However, your company may already have some tools in place. It’s important to make sure that new software is compatible with existing tools and practices.

The most successful customer relationship management implementations are guided by expert consultants who understand CRM and the tools that support it. Book an Intro Call with Project Genetics to learn how we can help your company implement CRM.

Workday is a powerful software package that helps companies manage multiple financial and human capital systems. It has numerous benefits for companies of all sizes and can generate reduced costs, improved performance, greater efficiency, and positive team morale. Managing a successful transition starts with being aware of what the process will look like, so here we take a look at some of the key factors involved in Workday implementation.

What Is Workday Implementation?

Existing Practices and Processes

Regardless of what industry it operates in, each company develops its own set of internal processes to maximize efficiency. This is especially true for human resources departments and payroll or financial operations, areas where Workday applies most directly. A big part of implementing Workday is having a firm grasp on optimal operations before starting the transition, so you can configure the software accordingly.

Workday comes with default settings for each application, and these may not be ideal for your company. It’s important to evaluate current practices to determine what’s working and what isn’t, so you’ll have a clear idea about how to configure Workday before you begin implementation.

Data Migration

A major step in the implementation process is moving data from your company’s existing systems into Workday. A common example of this is migrating human resources data, specifically employee information pertaining to group health insurance plans. This includes things like hiring and coverage dates that determine eligibility for benefits, meaning a mistake can lead to delays in implementation.

It’s important to have a rigorous plan in place to manage data migration and ensure correct entry, avoid data duplication, and identify data points that might not be recognized in Workday. This will help avoid costly delays and get you up and running as quickly as possible.

Focus on Testing Phase

The implementation process usually occurs in multiple phases, from planning and configuration to testing and deployment. Each of these is important and has its challenges, and the testing phase can often be the longest and most complex. This may include the development of testing scripts as well as analyzing automation tools, so it’s important to have a team in place with the required technical expertise.

This means that once again preparation is key for effective implementation, as the testing team needs comprehensive information about various use-case scenarios from the end user’s perspective. Whether you outsource this testing task or not, it’s a good idea to involve business analysts, human resources managers, and key financial personnel in this process.

Find the Right Partner

Given the complexities involved and the level of expertise required, it’s no surprise that many companies turn to independent partners that are experienced in implementing Workday. Having helped other companies do the same, they offer tremendous value by guiding best practice to deliver a smooth and effective transition. Consider this option as you evaluate internal competencies and the potential deployment of company resources.

If you’re considering implementing Workday to improve your business operations, this is a general idea of what the process entails. Contact Project Genetics to learn more about what Workday can do for you, and how they can help implement it.

With today’s marketplace evolving faster than ever, companies must constantly adapt to remain competitive. This means searching for weaknesses and opportunities to improve, including all facets of operations and personnel performance. Process optimization is the ongoing commitment to seeking the best tools, practices, and methodologies to maximize company success, and here we take a closer look at what it can do for your company.

Why Is Process Optimization Important?

Improves Efficiency

This is one of the key benefits of prioritizing optimization, as without this it’s easy for companies to become complacent. It can be as simple as continuing to do something the same way without exploring more efficient options, simply because that’s the way it has always been done. An example of this is data input and management, which some companies continue to do manually when there are automated tools that can do it much faster and more accurately.

Optimizing your company’s operational processes reduces waste, both in time and resources. This not only helps conserve company profits but improves team morale as employees avoid the frustration associated with menial or inefficient tasks. By constantly looking for ways to optimize operations, whether it’s with new software, automation tools, or simply addressing inefficiencies, companies allow their employees to focus on efforts that matter most.  

Better Team Performance Monitoring

For a company to remain competitive, it must be able to measure how well its team is performing. It’s important to identify what is or isn’t working and why so weaknesses can be addressed before they spiral out of control and create financial losses. For very simple tasks this is quick and easy to assess, but the reality is that for most jobs this requires nuanced analysis and a detailed, optimized process.

A commitment to optimization means establishing clear expectations and allowing departments to track and share information, so they can monitor performance and demonstrate accountability. This will help expose human error, inefficiencies in operations, or even fraud. Addressing these issues will keep your company on track and give employees a clearer sense of expectations and accountability.

Legal Compliance and Regulations

Every industry has its own unique rules and regulations, and in some cases, there are massive changes that can upend operations from year to year. Adjusting to amendments in things like financial or safety regulations can cost companies a great deal of time and money in the short term as they struggle to comply, but are forced to do so under the threat of fines and penalties. This is another area where optimization can help.

As an example, a company can easily adapt to changes in financial regulations when its payroll and accounting departments are already optimized for efficiency. Each team member understands how his or her role is affected, making it faster and easier to tweak operations as needed. The same goes for safety protocols, as it’s easier to adapt when there’s already an understanding of who is responsible for workplace safety and equipment inspection.

These are just a few reasons why optimizing processes is so important for businesses in all industries. Contact Project Genetics to learn more about how optimization can help your business reach its full potential.

A failing project can spell disaster for the reputation of your company. Project recovery is one of the most useful skills executives need to be able to implement, but creating a schedule to recover projects can be more difficult than it seems. This is why it’s important to leverage knowledge about your industry to create actionable steps to get your project back on track.

How Do You Create a Project Recovery Schedule?

Creating a schedule for a project begins with identifying an issue, assessing the project, and making recommendations for how to reset the course of the project. The goal of recovering your project is to complete your project on time and with the results you want. The steps to recover your project include:

Recovery Intervention

Recognizing that your project is in trouble is the first step in recovery. When a project starts, it’s a good idea to identify parameters that will identify the circumstances that indicate the project is going off the rails. Once these parameters are defined, it will be much easier to make accurate assessments of the project progress and identify when an intervention is necessary to recover the project.

Recovery Assessment

Part of your recovery assessment will include assessing various factors related to the project. For example, your assessment should cover the scope of the project, the expected schedule to complete the project, the staff that is involved in the project, the quality of the management practices, the project cost, and project risk.

Your recovery assessment will be used to determine which aspect of the project is causing poor performance. During the assessment, you will look at each of the project variables to determine where management and performance are failing so you can make recommendations for how to correct the issues.

Recovery Recommendation

Recovery recommendations are generally developed in response to any problems that are assessed and identified. Usually, recommendations for recovery can include establishing baselines for performance in management and addressing the root causes contributing to the poor performance.

These recommendations should also include directives on what needs correction, why the corrections are necessary, and an estimate of how long these corrections will take to integrate.

Recovery Planning

Recovery planning includes defining the roadmap for how to implement the recovery recommendation steps. Recovery planning should be clearly defined so the plan is easy to follow and execute.

Some aspects of recovery planning you may want to include the management of staff, risk management, communications used during recovery, and contacting vendors who may be affected by the recovery efforts.

Recovery Execution

Recovery execution is the step that implements the recovery plan by applying success criteria, project networks, team organization, cost and benefit analysis, risk containment strategies, and other requirements that are necessary to recover the project.

Recovery Closure

Recovery closure is the last step of recovering a failing project and will include a review of the problems that caused the original failure of the project so that future projects can avoid these mistakes. Other aspects of recovery closure can include how to improve project management in the future and how to return to normal operations after the project has been recovered.

Quickly recovering a failing project will benefit the reputation of your company and keep your performance rate high. Some of the steps involved in recovering a project should include recovery intervention, recovery assessment, recovery recommendation, recovery planning, recovery execution, and recovery closure. For more information on how to create a schedule for project recovery, contact Project Genetics today.

Mergers and acquisitions can tank productivity levels. However, if you are well prepared, your team’s workflow doesn’t have to suffer. Use these tips to maintain project efficiency and help your team transition as smoothly as possible.

4 Keys for Increasing Project Efficiency After Mergers and Acquisitions

1. Create a Game Plan

You wouldn’t jump into a complicated project without an established outline, nor should you walk into a merger without a plan in place. It’s essential to have clearly stated roles and guidelines that account for factors such as client services, communication, finances, office real estate, and human resources. Having a roadmap that everyone can follow will lessen the chances of any employee being caught unaware of a new protocol or project.

Additionally, employees can be more efficient when they clearly understand what their role is, both in the company and on individual projects. Indecision and uncertainty regarding roles and assignments on projects also discourage individuals from feeling a sense of ownership over their efforts in a project, leading to reduced performance.

2. Be Willing to Slow Down

The old expression, “go slow to go fast,” holds true when combining workplaces. Mergers can be overwhelming for employees adjusting to the changes taking place. Therefore, when implementing change in the workplace, leadership needs to allow employees time to transition into the new methods.

Although the changes may be exciting, and you’ll be eager to build your new beginning, don’t rush. Establishing a foundation for core systems and company expectations will serve you in the long run. When you have a team of confident employees who have a firm grasp of the processes and procedures of your company will ultimately allow you to achieve a higher rate of efficiency on projects.

3. Culture Is Key

As a leader, it’s easy to become focused on deadlines and projects during a merger to the point where you don’t have the mental bandwidth to create the company culture. While it may not feel important to you at the moment, being intentional about creating a space where employees can express their feelings, both positive and negative, will increase employee satisfaction.

Employees that feel satisfied and tuned in to the company culture are more productive and more likely to remain loyal to their company. Of course, there will always be interpersonal speed bumps during any change in the workplace, but providing employees with the safety to ask their questions and discuss the future will smooth the road to success.

4. Hire Leadership Support

No matter how excellent the leader is, executing an acquisition or merger is a challenging job. The amount of legwork required to successfully bring a company up to speed while maintaining high productivity levels on projects is massive. Therefore, bringing in an outside professional to help throughout the integration process is a wise move. This individual brings additional experience and provides a non-emotional look at projects and workplace issues.

Help your company maintain and improve project momentum by hiring a management consultant. Contact Project Genetics Management Consulting today to see how our experienced leaders can help your company reach its full potential.

A number of factors go into successful project delivery. If you need to improve project efficiency to get better results in a more efficient timeframe, here are some questions you can ask to ensure you’re working as efficiently as possible.

6 Questions You Can Always Ask to Increase Your Project Efficiency

1. What is the Goal That We Are Trying to Accomplish?

An easy-to-understand vision for where the project is going will help everyone involved in the project at any level have a firmer idea of where they’re going with their work. Be sure that you have a clear vision and communicate that vision to the entire team working on a project right from day one. That will get everybody on the same page so that the whole team is working towards a common goal.

2. What Deadline or Benchmarks Are We Trying to Meet?

Timeframes matter in just about every project that you could possible undertake. Having a clear end-date for a project in mind and benchmarks to meet along the way will help you keep a project on course. Set a timeframe that will get the project done in a reasonable length of time, but not an unrealistic one that will put undue pressure on your team.

3. Will This Project Involve Collaborating with Other Teams?

Projects are almost always a group effort. Understanding the scopes of the different people involved on a project will allow work to be assigned to the team members who have the expertise to get the job done right. Consider before launching a project if you’ll need to bring other teams in to complete the project so you don’t have to make any last-minute collaboration plans.

4. Are There Any Unknown Variables to Account For?

While you can’t always prepare for the unexpected, taking a moment to consider possible scenarios that could arise during a project can help you be ready for any situation. Projects also have unintended consequences that come in addition to the goals that you set out to achieve initially. Taking a moment to consider what those ramifications might be can help you avoid unintended consequences of your project.

5. Who Will Be Taking a Leadership Role on This Project?

Clear and decisive leadership is one of the most important factors in the success of a project. Be sure that you and everyone involved in the project know from the beginning who will be taking a leading role in seeing the project completed. That will give everyone a clear idea of who they should go to if they need to ask questions or seek other guidance regarding the project.

6. Are There Better Project Delivery Tools We Could Use?

Having the right tools at your disposal can be the make-or-break factor in the success or failure of a project. There are a variety of project implementation solutions that you can get on your side to give your team the right tools to work with. You’ll be able to put everyone on the right job from day one and give them a clear view of the expectations placed on them.

Get the tools that you need to take your project to the next level. Contact Project Genetics today!

There are plenty of factors that can put a project behind schedule, leading to frustration and costly expenses. Here are some factors that can lead to delays in a project that good project delivery tools can help to alleviate.

6 Factors Destined to Put Your Project Behind Schedule

1. A Lack of a Clear Goal or Vision

Even the best worker needs direction to put their skills and efforts to the best use possible. When it comes to getting a project done in a timely fashion, you need a clear goal to work towards from the very beginning of a project. Without this initial step taken, there’s a good chance that work will end up running later than planned.

2. Ineffective Leadership and Guidance

While the people handling the day-to-day work on a project are important, skilled leadership and management is also essential to the project’s success. While any leader likely has a dozen different projects to worry about at any given time, it’s essential that they’re able to delegate well enough and manage their time so that every project has the proper guidance it needs.

3. Late Additions to the Scope of the Project

Having clearly-defined boundaries for a project from the onset is crucial to delivering results from that project on time. Trying to increase the scope of a project may seem like a way of handling related issues along with the initial goal in one fell swoop, but this can lead to the project running overschedule. You’re better off keeping the scope of the project clearly-defined and leaving the other issues for future projects.

4. Poor Quality Work Leading to Redoing Steps

They say that it’s better to do things carefully and correctly than to do them quickly and have to do them twice, and that wisdom holds true in project management. Having inexperienced or inattentive workers contributing to steps in a project can lead to those steps being redone when problems arise later down the line. Good training and assigning effective team members to projects can avoid these provides.

5. Incorrect Initial Assessment of the Project

One factor that may lead to a project running overdue is that proper expectations were never set in the first place. Sometimes, management can set deadlines for a project without taking practical considerations from the teams working on the project into account. Good project scheduling takes everybody’s perspective into an account so that the correct expectations are laid down from day one.

6. Not Having the Right Project Delivery Tools

As with any other job, delivering on a project becomes much easier when you have the most cutting-edge tools on your side. Strategic project management software, change management capabilities, and other tools at your disposal will help ensure the timely delivery of a project. Make sure your business is properly equipped before you undertake a project to avoid unexpected delays.

Get the best tools for your project when you get the assistance that our proven project implementation solutions provide. Contact Project Genetics today for more information!

Sometimes, even the best plans go awry and you end up with a project over budget. Here are some ways that you can get an overbudget project back under control, and information on where to get the best project delivery tools to help you conquer any project.

Project Over Budget? How to Rein in a Project

Identifying the Cause

Understanding what has caused a project to run over budget is the first step in bringing the project back under control from a financial standpoint. Recognizing breakdowns in the communication and coordination between team members involved on a project is one good place to start looking.

Problems that a project may run into also often have their roots in the planning stage. Developing better planning methods that lay out a clear and concise vision for the project from day one can stop problems cropping up later down the line.

Find Ways to Reduce Cost

While you should always be careful not to damage the quality of a project by cutting corners, bringing a project back into its budget often requires finding ways to cut down on expenses without damaging the quality of the project. Finding ways to reduce costs in materials, supplies, or services can all help chip away at the expenses incurred.

An example of a way you might cut down on costs of a project without detracting from the finished product would be to reevaluate your training methods. Formal training sessions may be able to be replaced by less expensive online training sessions that still communicate the same information instead.

Fine-Tune the Project’s Scope

One common reason for a project to exceed its initial budget is that the scope of the project grew to surpass what was initially planned. Such a project ends up demanding more hours of work and other resources to succeed than were accounted for when the budget was being drawn up.

You may consider drawing back a project’s scope in order to have it better fit the financial resources that you have available. Work with the client you’re carrying out the project on behalf of to determine what parts of the scope can be dropped as a way to bring the project back on budget.

Reassign Your Human Resources

Sometimes, having the right people in the right roles can make all the difference in bringing a project that has overran its budget back under control. Taking a moment to assess how you’re spending your most useful resource, your employees, is an essential step of project management.

While getting newer or inexperienced workers hands-on experience on a project is vital, doing so on a project that is already overbudget may not be the best opportunity. Consider reassigning these workers to other tasks and have more experienced, productive workers put on the project to get it moving on schedule.

Use More Efficient Project Delivery Tools

The right tools on your side can improve the efficiency that you get a project done with, reducing expenses to help you stick to your budget. Strategic project management tools keep everyone on the same page so you get the most out of your workforce.

To get the most cutting-edge tools on your side, trust our team of project management experts and the world-class tools we deliver. Visit Project Genetics today for more information!

Remote work is quickly becoming the norm. While it comes with a number of advantages, it can also hinder your approach to managing workflows. All is not lost, however. You simply need to find new ways to connect with your team members. Here, we’ve listed a few tips that are both effective and easy to follow.

Managing Workflow in the Era of Remote Work

Remote work naturally gives your team a high degree of flexibility, but that doesn’t mean they should complete tasks as they please. A regimented approach must be given to work requests and assignments to ensure your team meets deadlines.

Daily schedules that combine flexibility with accountability can help work move in a smooth, linear pattern. This type of scheduling gives employees what they want – nearly 80% of team members surveyed believe pliable scheduling allows them to be more productive but also ensures projects stay on task.

Stay Organized

Organizing and managing schedules in one place, such as Kronos practice offerings, can further simplify your management role. Kronos provides second and third-level support in timekeeping and scheduling, allowing you to compare work completed with hours worked.

Consider Your Collaboration Methods

The freedom provided by remote work often leaves employees feeling isolated and demotivated. You can counter these ill effects with steps that help all team members feel part of the pack.

Start with a business and process analysis that helps you understand your own internal processes. You can then identify areas that need to be improved for efficiency and efficacy. Also, consider your collaboration methods to ensure they create a team environment. Remember that all employees should feel both seen and heard, even if they’re not housed under one roof.

Implement Best Practices

It’s easy to stay connected when in-house teams share the same office space. But tracking work completed when each employee resides in a different location can be tough. You might even say that assigning tasks to remote workers comes with a degree of uncertainty. You don’t know if the deadline will be met or the quality of work delivered will be on-point.

Implementing a best practice framework can help you manage projects from start to finish, regardless of where your employees may be. In fact, the right framework can help you:

• Design strategic company-wide objectives
• Manage the works delivery lifecycle
• Execute reusable processes for consistency

Build Employee Skills

Wherever they’re based, employees need ongoing training. Partnering with the right consulting firm can help you create a skilled workforce in which each member supports the other. An experienced consultant can be especially helpful when you’re undergoing a digital transformation, as often happens with remote work situations.

Likewise, employees need healthy competition. This urges them to work harder and positively prove their mettle, but contests should be structured so team members never feel inferior. You can start by creating a deadline to complete a project. Offer rewards when individual goals are met within a specific time frame. Winners might then receive cash prizes, company swag, or gift cards.

Managers often find it challenging to keep remote workers engaged, motivated, and productive. But these tasks become much easier when you choose the proper consulting and technical solutions. We provide full end-to-end support services, from Kronos offerings and process analyses to SMaRT best practices and enterprise training. Learn more by contacting Project Genetics today.