ViewPoint: The Pathway to Project Success
Unleash Your Team's Potential with ViewPoint Visual Project Management
Experience the transformative power of ViewPoint, a cutting-edge visual project execution model that transcends traditional approaches, propelling your projects toward unparalleled success. With ViewPoint, you’ll bridge the gap between planning and tangible results, enabling your team to achieve remarkable collaboration, streamlined workflows, and a laser-sharp focus on decision-making
bridge the gap between planning and tangible results
1
Unleash the Power of Collaboration
Say goodbye to fragmented communication and siloed information and hello to seamless collaboration. ViewPoint revolutionizes how your team interacts, fostering a harmonious environment where ideas flow effortlessly, and expertise is shared. By breaking down silos and connecting team members, ViewPoint unleashes the full potential of your workforce, ensuring that every voice is heard and every contribution is valued.
2
Streamline Workflows, Maximize Productivity
Embrace the simplicity of ViewPoint and witness the remarkable streamlining of your project workflows. ViewPoint empowers your team to operate at peak efficiency by eliminating unnecessary complexities and tedious processes. With streamlined workflows, you'll experience heightened productivity, reduced bottlenecks, and accelerated project timelines. Embrace efficiency like never before with ViewPoint.
3
Make Informed Decisions, Drive Results
In the fast-paced world of project management, timely decision-making is crucial. ViewPoint equips you with the tools to make better, more informed decisions that propel your projects forward. With its intuitive application of visual management methods and data analysis, ViewPoint provides unparalleled insights into your project delivery process. It enables you to see potential bottlenecks, allocate resources wisely, and confidently drive your entire project portfolio toward success.
Situation
Despite significant investments in project management processes and tools, achieving on-time delivery and staying within budget remains challenging for project portfolio managers. However, we recognize the concerns of executives responsible for project delivery. They acknowledged the crucial role that effective project execution plays in their business success and made substantial investments in their project management teams. These investments include:
Strategically aligning the Project Portfolio with business goals, ensuring a solid business focus on strategic projects.
Demonstrating commitment and engagement by actively participating in project reviews with the teams.
Establishing PMOs (Project Management Offices) and investing in building competent project management teams.
Providing comprehensive training for project managers and their teams, adhering to the rigorous standards outlined in the Project Management Institute's PMBOK® Guide and certifications.
Our project management research indicates that most project management teams believe they are implementing suitable project structures to deliver projects effectively. However, executives are still waiting to see the desired outcomes from these investments. They are still confronting significant challenges:
- Insufficient resources and talent to effectively manage the project portfolio.
- Motivating project and portfolio managers to take a long-term perspective on capital risk and capital efficiency.
- Accessing relevant market data for assessing portfolio risk.
- Incomplete alignment within the organization and with suppliers, role confusion between portfolio managers and project managers.
- Delays in obtaining engineering documents, approvals, and responses.
- Delays in acquiring engineered equipment.
Training Won't Save Your Projects
The actual results of many projects shed light on the underlying reasons. Among the five key performance indicators (KPIs) for project success, staff skills training has proven to be highly effective in improving three areas: quality, scope, and business benefits. However, there has been an unexpected decline in performance regarding costs and schedule.
How could this be the case? We attribute these outcomes to the principles outlined in the PMI PMBOK® (Project Management Body of Knowledge) Guide, the foundation for project management certification (PMP). The PMBOK® primarily emphasizes the importance of disciplined analysis, planning, scope management, quality control, risk management, communications, and monitoring and control processes. It is logical, therefore, that enhancing skills in these areas would improve scope, quality, and overall business benefits. Thus, we can confidently conclude that these methodologies yield positive outcomes in the specific areas we have focused on. However, the unintended consequence of this emphasis is a decline in performance in the critical project delivery areas of budget and schedule.
It is important to note that the PMBOK® does not emphasize project execution. The PMBOK® devotes less than ten pages of the guide’s 450+ pages to this topic. The definition of project execution is limited to “the process of performing the work defined in the project management plan.” It recommends managing effective project execution with “expert judgment” and using a “PM Information Management system”, respectively. In essence, the PMBOK® Guide leaves the responsibility of project execution entirely in the hands of each project manager, relying on their expertise and experience. It’s the main reason that delivering ‘competency’ is the chief solution implemented when managing complex project portfolios. However, ‘competency’ is only defined in 3 of the five success criteria. There is a considerable gap between what is taught and what is needed for project portfolio success.
While recognizing the value of the PMBOK® Guide in enhancing certain project management areas, we must also acknowledge the need for a more comprehensive approach that encompasses systematic project execution strategies. Agile methods have proven to be a game-changer in numerous environments, but unfortunately, they haven’t been the silver bullet for most projects.
Project Management Offices Harm Project Results
The enthusiasm among executives to establish Project Management Offices (PMOs), particularly for managing project portfolios, is undeniable. However, the shocking reality is that implementing a PMO often leads to declining results across all five key performance indicators (KPIs). Even the Project Management Institute (PMI) confirms that project success is not correlated exclusively to having a PMO. Instead, skills in communication, problem-solving, collaborative leadership, and strategic thinking are most important in helping project professionals fulfill organizational objectives.
Like increased training, we observe a perplexing inverse relationship between increased PMO maturity and the ability to deliver projects on time and within budget. We believe the root of this issue lies in the content of the PMBOK®. While the body of knowledge places significant emphasis on specification and control, there is a notable lack of focus on executing projects successfully. Consequently, it’s no surprise that we see improvements in these areas. Additionally, PMOs often lack the most experienced and skilled project managers, as they find themselves responsible for running the very projects they oversee.
Naturally, the concept of a PMO, entrusted with establishing standards and assuming accountability for all projects, appears reasonable. Organizations need scalability, and some form of standardization is essential. The issue is not with the standards; they are not inherently flawed. Instead, they are incomplete.
To truly maximize the potential of PMOs, we must redefine their purpose and expand their scope. We can bridge the gaps in project delivery performance by incorporating a holistic approach emphasizing delivery excellence. It’s time to reimagine the role of PMOs, equipping them with the comprehensive tools and resources they need to drive success at every stage of project execution.
ViewPoint is a groundbreaking visual project execution model that revolutionizes the project delivery system, effectively bridging the gap between planning and tangible results. Using the ViewPoint method, project teams experience significant enhancements in several key areas:
- Fostering seamless collaboration among team members, promoting synergy and effective communication.
- Streamlining workflows through simplification, eliminating unnecessary complexities that hinder progress.
- Empowering management with intensified focus, allowing managers to think and act strategically rather than chasing the problems of the moment.
ViewPoint Helps You See
Typically, to improve project performance, activities are built around the sequence of how projects are accomplished:
- Get an idea.
- Form a team.
- Make a plan.
- Execute the project.
The ViewPoint visual project management method proposes a counter-intuitive approach, focusing first on project execution processes. ViewPoint makes all projects in the portfolio visible, allowing for strategic management of the bottlenecks that block project progress. Drawing upon Lean management concepts, visual management, and the Theory of Constraints (ToC), ViewPoint seamlessly integrates these principles into a scalable process, facilitating rapid output increases within a matter of weeks.
Unlike traditional approaches that divert the team’s focus toward planning activities, ViewPoint centers on completing the work and prioritizing project execution activities to increase the project completion rate. This shift allows team members to engage more deeply with the tasks at hand rather than being consumed by time-consuming meetings solely focused on status reporting.
By fostering a higher level of engagement and fewer meetings, the ViewPoint process unleashes the team’s resource capacity, resulting in accelerated project activity. As the group becomes proficient in the fundamental elements of execution, they systematically progress towards more advanced behaviors and processes, such as project planning and automation.
For team members, ViewPoint liberates them from firefighting and expediting mode, establishing daily and weekly routines that identify high-priority tasks and promptly resolve obstacles hindering progress. In the process, detrimental behaviors like multitasking are exposed and eradicated, replaced by focusing on prioritizing work and managing expectations.
For managers, ViewPoint provides actionable process metrics that empower them to comprehend the project delivery system’s inner workings and make informed interventions. It goes beyond merely introducing new metrics; ViewPoint seamlessly integrates these metrics into how people manage, shaping monthly or quarterly reporting and becoming the first thing they check when they start their workday.
Delivery Excellence
Simplified Project Planning
With ViewPoint, project resources experience enhanced focus and productivity as they engage more consistently with project tasks, eliminating the inefficiencies caused by multitasking and frequent priority switching. The methodology provides crystal-clear priorities to the project team, fostering a shared understanding of the work to be accomplished. Consequently, projects are completed faster and in less time.
The ViewPoint method emphasizes the importance of clearly defining the project completion process and developing practical project plans that align with the organization’s capacity to manage them effectively, which means that we prepare project plans at a level of detail that makes them useful for managers to incorporate them into the day-to-day life of the project during delivery.
This approach to project planning creates a common footing for delivering work across the organization, enabling tasks, priorities, and resources specified in all project plans to be compared and analyzed. This normalization of project plans empowers managers to forecast process requirements and behaviors across all projects reliably. As a result, project execution costs are reduced, and the organization can achieve dependable delivery performance.
The plans are simplified and straightforward, incorporating and acknowledging the reality of the environment they must live in. This approach to project planning provides a common basis for planning for the organization so the tasks and resources specified in all project plans can be compared against one another. This normalizing of project plans then enables managers to forecast process requirements and behaviors across all projects reliably. ViewPoint’s integration of project execution and effective planning ensures that project teams work efficiently, adhering to clear priorities. At the same time, managers benefit from standardized planning processes that promote cost-effectiveness and reliable performance.
Who Has Implemented ViewPoint
Howard Slobodin
General Counsel, Trinity River Authority
“It is by far the best thing I’ve encountered in my seven years here in terms of being able to track, not only individual parts within a project, but also those at the macro scale.”
Chandrasekar Subramaniam
Senior Project Director, Worley Parsons
“You understand where the problems are andn what needs to be done. I think that’s the big advantage.”
Clint Wood
President, Trajectory CRE
“The value opportunity.. is in the tens of millions of dollars per year.”
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