Organizational Solutions

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.