Executive's Guide to Project Management: Organizational Processes and Practices for Supporting Complex Projects

Organizational Challenges and Mitigation Strategies

The two major challenges regarding APPM are:

• Too frequent change of status of complex projects can result in thrashing where too many stops and starts introduce waste into the project and increase project risk.
• The lack of an effective human resource management system (HRMS) which can lead to ineffective project assignments, wasted human resources, and resulting in a compromised portfolio.

Questions to Ask the Project Manager

Gaining management approval of the POS is a significant event in the life of a project. The approving managers in the SMT should question the project manager, and the answers they get scrutinized very carefully. While the POS does not have a lot of detailed analysis supporting it, it is still valuable to test the thinking of the proposer and the validity of the proposed project. It is not unusual to have the project manager return to the drawing board several times for more analysis and thought as a prerequisite to management approval. As senior managers review the POS you can anticipate the following review questions:

• How important is the problem or opportunity to the enterprise?
• How does the project relate to our CSFs?
• How does the project align with the strategic plan?
• Does the goal statement relate directly to the problem or opportunity?
• Are the objectives clear representations of the goal statement?
• Is there sufficient business value as measured by the success criteria to warrant further expenditures ...