Why projects fail and how project management standards drive long-term success
Many projects fail due to common issues such as poor alignment, lack of executive support, and unclear project requirements or expectations. This is where project management standards can come to the aid of Project Managers.
What is project management standardization?
Project management standardization means creating an organizational or at least a team-wise standard project management framework for managing your projects.
In some cases, it could be challenging to bring your project teams on board with having a standard way of project management. Different teams could be set in their own ways of managing projects, and a system may not always be welcome at first.
This is why it is essential to convey the benefits of standardization in a transparent manner. To begin with, standardizing your project management processes helps break silos and brings different units of your organization together.
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7 key benefits of standardizing project management processes
Standardizing project management processes offers numerous benefits. Organizations can improve cost efficiency, streamline workflows, and strengthen project outcomes by applying best practices.
As a result, projects are more likely to be completed in a timely manner, while customer satisfaction and overall success increase over time.
1. Improved project efficiency
Managing projects in a standard way means defining the project scope and responsibilities of the team members with clarity. Everyone on the team knows what they are supposed to do and by when.
This increases accountability, which in turn supports continuous performance improvements for the team members assigned to a project.
2. Higher consistency
Standardizing your project processes ensures that all your portfolios are managed in the same manner. Whether it is the way of recording data, sharing project reports, or budgeting, the teams can do it in a consistent manner with the help of project standardization.
There is less to no scope for any surprises along the way. A strong management culture that incentivizes higher consistency helps project managers to do their job with ease, while allowing better control to senior executives on the entire portfolio of projects.
3. Better communication and Stakeholder Satisfaction
Standardized project management methodologies can help improve communication between project teams and stakeholders.
With consistent ways of doing a project task and sharing project information, there is more transparency, which can lead to better decision-making and timely problem-solving.
4. Easier onboarding training
With standardized processes and practices, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time there is a new hire or a new member joins your team.
Standardized project portfolio management processes make it easier to train new team members and onboard them more quickly. Cross-department knowledge transfer and resource sharing also become easier with standardized procedures.
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5. Better risk management
When you have a consistent, standard way of managing projects, it is easier to identify, assess, and mitigate risks.
You can see when your projects or a part of your projects is falling off track. It is easier to catch mistakes and take the necessary corrective measures.
A standard way of project reporting leads to transparency of information, which is key to identifying risks and issues at the right time.
6. Better resource planning and allotment
Project managers can often find it difficult to juggle multiple project phase transitions and deadlines. Organizational standardization advantages enable project managers to switch between projects as their time, effort, and resources are accounted for in an organized manner.
It also allows stakeholders to manage and control multiple projects simultaneously. From project planning to project delivery, everyone, including project sponsors and project team members, know what and when deliverables are due. This minimizes the scope of any timeline clashes and ensures that the projects stay on track to success as well.
7. Greater scalability
Standardized project management practices make it easier to scale up or down operations as needed.
As described above, the standardization of PPM processes allows for better resource planning. Better-planned resources allow more flexibility, so you can move them as per the demand and stage of the project.
Once your PPM processes and practices are standardized, you can easily replicate them to any new project area at the required scale.
Standardized Project Management for Consistent Success
In summary, project management success goes hand in hand with project management standards. Adopting project management culture through consistent standardization is vital for organizations seeking to improve project execution and outcomes.
You cannot align your project stakeholders and teams with your strategic project management goals without having a clear, consistent way of doing project management.
