Case Studies

Step-by-Step: Increasing Project Management Capability

An executive team in a large pharmaceutical company knew that it was time to re-evaluate its management model, but wasn’t sure where to start.  Their business clearly depended on projects but it seemed to be impossible for the projects to stay on track and milestone performance was less than 40%. The Executive Team could not agree on a common method for evaluating and overseeing the projects.

The first step was for AfR to facilitate a 4-hour customized Executive Briefing on how to manage by projects. From this concise, focused meeting, the executive team was able to formulate an operational definition for how projects contributed to their business success, what the key pillars of enabling project success were, and agree to recognize the importance of projects to their business success.  While acknowledging the need to continue building functional excellence, they also decided to create a better cross-functional governance process to prioritize and oversee projects, and have sponsors assigned to all key projects.

Cross-functional teams were charged with ensuring that critical planning elements were consistently applied and AfR was asked to help with the initial assessment to understand their starting point, and device specific improvement plans. The project teams also received just-in-time action learning and coaching from AfR consultants as they assessed their current plans and put improvement plans in place. 

The work was framed using the PM Capability Framework as a guide to define specific organizational/operational actions and supporting learning activities to systematically move the organization to a higher level of overall project management capability.  As the sponsors were defined, AfR also provided customized training, which addressed the specific needs of the newly appointed sponsors, by using their “real-life” project scenarios as practice ground.  A year later, project performance had improved significantly in all fronts. 

Two years later, with a continued multi-layered focus to move the organization to Level 3 PM Capability, the organization is now well positioned for market success as it continues to grow. The milestone performance, which gave the executive team sleepless nights two years ago, has been 98% in the past 12 months.

The Missing Link: Providing Project Leadership Skills to Project Managers

A medical device company was challenged because their project managers struggled with leading teams and gaining cross-functional commitment for projects. The technical expertise of the project managers was fantastic: most had at least masters’ degrees in Engineering or related field, and several were PMPs. Yet, the project teams often had difficulties coming together during planning and committing to a joint approach and schedule. During execution, commitments were often not met because people were being pulled in too many other directions. The project managers didn’t know how to hold people accountable because, very often, the team members’ functional managers were part of the problem.

After an initial assessment of the situation, our consultants helped the organization clarify cross-functional expectations and management level by bringing the senior functional managers together to agree on the project roles, authority and rules of engagement. We followed this with a focused Project Leadership workshop for the project managers, who were well-versed in project management topics but had very little training on team leadership, communications, influencing and holding people accountable (managing performance in a matrix).

By introducing the Emotional Intelligence Framework and related leadership styles, the project managers also had an opportunity to discover their own strengths as leaders, and define additional development goals for increasing their leadership effectiveness. The project managers were given pragmatic tools for kicking off their cross-functional teams, setting up the right team and stakeholder management processes, and assessing their team’s effectiveness.

This process increased the project managers’ confidence as leaders, while also ensuring that the right management commitment to the project management role existed. This enabled a greater partnership with the functional managers and the project managers, and provided an increased level of commitment and ownership for deliverables at the team level.