What are the common goals for an Enterprise Project Management Office?

 

Every day, businesses are facing new challenges and new opportunities as well. And without having a proper plan for prioritizing your working category can waste your investment in, time, energy, and money respectively.

This is why the organizations are keen to invest their time in developing efficient strategic plans.

A well-defined strategy reflects the organization’s experience about its key competitors, market analytical studies, the future approach and the present strength.

Those organizations, who are already knowledged in project management, are somehow able to provide the necessary bridge between strategic plans and execution progresses.

Enterprise Project Management (EPM) & Its Goal 

Now come to the enterprise-level project management. The EPM supplies the critical link between the business’s strategic planning and execution. 

By offering the standard organizational methodology for proper planning, executional methods, resource management, prioritizing all project aspects that include in today’s organization workplace. 

EPM gives the organization life a new fusion that could have been lacking before. 

A decisive enterprise project management goes beyond the traditional project management level. It provides an expanded role that combines the strategic objectives with individual projects and responsibilities. 

Here I have mentioned the common goal of the Enterprise Project Management Methodology: 

Mentoring and Coaching 

EPM with its skill in project management offers to mentoring and coaching the project managers and the team members who are operating in the same project but at different levels. 

EPMO may lead the periodical practice and coordinate for industry-level certifications associated with project management. 

Enterprise-leveled Strategic Alignment

EPMO makes sure that the projects that are offered in various divisions of the organization are arranged to the near and long-term business goal. There by guaranteeing that the organization is employing money on the ‘right things’.

Value Management

Often the projects managed by department or business levels PMOs are part of a higher organizational drive.

At these traditional EPM levels, it’s tricky to estimate the business purpose of the projects. On the other cards, EPM has a picture of the more generous organizational leadership which are broken down into various projects.

So EPM is in a position to estimate the substantial and hypothetical benefits of these actions.

Enterprise Project management may use methods like ROI, Net Present Value, and Internal Rate of Return, etc to estimate the profits.

Demand Management

Enterprise Project Management is accountable for demand forecasting and organizing the project demand creating from several business problems developed across the organization.

It becomes a primary position where the request is captured and categorized into strategic, tactical, or executional demand.

In businesses operating only department normal project management and not owning the EPMO, there may be a struggle that project A proceeding in the department i having higher superiority than project B running in another department.

But EPM ensures that each project has their own priority at this central office and so there is no friction of delivering priority between departments on the projects.

Also. resource Management in EPM supports a picture of the resource available to act on this demand between all departments of the organization.

This inside view of resources at EPM helps in diplomatic resource planning resulting in cleaner utilization of resources and increase efficiency.

Standardization

Another important responsibility of EPMO is to standardize methods, processes, project management exercises, and tools that cover the whole enterprise.

This program secures all the team’s talking points with each other in a single line and carrying better energy as well.

Coordination between PMOs

There will be situations where a PMO is encountering a problem that can be fixed by reaching out to different PMOs.

EPM because of its unique viewpoint, is able to observe the movements in different PMOs.

Thus they are able to coordinate among different PMOs and enhance the interaction between various PMOs reporting to the EPMO.

As a result, it becomes an issue-solver with less risk.

Centralized Tracking, Auditing, and Reporting

EPM has the authority to track the project running elements. It periodically audits the process to check for compliance with standard exercises.

EPMO also has the authority to track the portfolios, programs, and projects. EPMO will periodically also audit these portfolios, programs, and projects to check for compliance with standard practices.

Having this cluster view, EPMO is in a stage to prepare reports and dashboards for the enterprise leadership in a better way that helps them to make critical decisions to steer the ship.

All these project components scroll down under the EPM. So, EMP has a view of all the projects, programs running across the organization.

Beyond this EPM have common goals for enterprise business.

Read the main article on Orangescrum Community Article.

How to be an Effective Scrum Master

Scrum Master and Agile scrum project management are two words that go together and almost make one feel as they are synonymous. Nevertheless, practicing agile without a scrum master is unheard of and would just delay in reaping the benefits of the methodology.

And this why Scrum Master is a crucial role in the agile project management scheme of things.

At a very high level, Scrum Masters are considered as:

Leaders – have the skills to motivate and lead the team practice agile successfully.

Experienced – have thorough knowledge of the agile principles and stay true to them throughout the course of the project. 

Coach/Mentor – have the role of coaching and guiding the teams through agile adoption.

Organizers – as the crucial responsibility of ensuring coordination, communication and collaboration within and between teams, product owner and business stakeholders lies on them.

Now this gives us a good glimpse of the various hats that a Scrum Master has to wear to enable his teams implement agile project management successfully.

Let us take a quick look at the Scrum Master role to then understand what they do, how and why. 

 

Read the full article at Orangescrum blog

 

Top 10 Kanban Featuring Project Management Software in 2021

Today’s digital technology has simplified several ways of our work; sometimes it also brings the complexities in the day-to-day workflow operations. And for managing these complexities efficiently, Kanban system was adopted in several workplaces.

Nowadays, Kanban is being used by every professional including freelancer to small-scale businesses and global enterprises as well.
The implementation of Kanban is based on the sources, in which you will have a clear understanding of how accurately to improve your work processes;

• Begin with the existing process
• Grant to track incremental adjustments
• Consider all the current processes, tasks, and responsibilities
• Support acts of management at all levels

What is Kanban

Kanban is the visual overview of a workflow. Here you can steadily maintain your progress to improve productivity.
Or you can say, this is “the” way to visualize the team’s work, recognize and reduce complexity and deliver operational improvements.

 Read the full article at Orangescrum blog

Enterprise Project Management Software and Orangescrum

 

The biggest challenge to getting the project done on time, on budget and wowing the client on a single thread, a project manager knows how difficult it is.

Even in the best firms, project management can be a largely unformed subject, held up by uncertain aspirations, bowing from the conversation that goes bottom-up and/or less than ideal guidance - and that’s if you’re lucky!

If you have stretched over the word “Enterprise Project Management (EPM)” before then you may wonder whether it is something that changes your company's work process.

The fact is that many different models of business can profit from doing this correctly.

So what is it all about and how can you make the most of this method?

What is Enterprise Project Management?

Let’s start with an example.

Some of the companies, which are growing or already formed as large-sized organizations, are having the risk of teams working independently from each other.

Sometimes they try to resolve the same issue in the same way or they took a completely different approach from each other.

And another risk is the team is not holding the company’s main objective or mission in their art of work.

Many times it seems the projects deal with the matters in a sensible way but without considering the firm’s approach or the way other projects are implying.

Considering all these risk factors, Enterprise Project Management methodology is the way where it brings all projects under one umbrella and makes them run all smoothly.

Once it is configured at our business workplace, it ensures no repeated work or effort is given and interacts with others without any hassle and overlap.

So, it gives a uniform approach with other advantages including lowered delivery risks and a reduced impact of skills deficiency.

We should also sail in mind the value of training project managers practicing this model.

The portfolio program is also regularly used in EPM now. This involves estimating the worth of each new potential project and determining which ones to hold in the portfolio of upcoming work.

How to build an effective approach?

Recently I had released one article regarding how we can build an effective enterprise project management approach.

Anyway, starting to implement an EPM culture in an enterprise leveled business may be a huge task. After all, it would take the place of traditional project management methodology.

Also, the implementing process could bring a few (maybe) risks of transitional errors. However, it should not have to be that serious painful process.

Considering the company’s strategy, objective and values would perhaps be the best starting point.

The best practice guidelines and the governance also need to be put in place together. Same way, it is important to get senior management approval for these changes.

They need to commit to it and take an active interest in the projects.

Who will be managing on your EPM? The perfect starting point is with your most qualified project team members.

They can help set up the method and will then perform an essential function in managing the projects and the portfolio.

Things to consider while adopting EMP

There are a few important issues that usually crop up when a company tries to adopt a piece of software across the whole organization.

The first sticking point could be with how easy it is to learn. Remember that there is likely to be a broad range of skill levels across the business.

Not everyone will be equally comfortable getting to grips with new tools. Another potential issue comes in the shape of people using the same tools in different ways.

It can cause mixing and doubts between the rests of the team.

Someone who is used to working a specific way may try to bring on the same strain even when it no longer meets the company’s policy anymore.

Thankfully, these concerns can be defeated if you use the right kind of software. For example, Orangescrum is an online task management tool that suits the needs of businesses that are moving over to EPM.

This software is open-source and is smoothly integrated with any enterprise-level workplace. It is very easy for people across the business to get started with it.

An instinctive interface that is similar to the Google suite of tools makes it more easier to pick up quickly.

Read the main article on Orangescrum Community Article.

Strategies for Successful Project Execution

Research says that project execution is one of the most crucial parts of the project life cycle, and it needs to be planned and monitored by a professional in order to succeed. Hence, strong governance, monitoring and execution principles are a must for any project manager.

The project execution is the longest phase in the project life cycle and it is also the most demanding and complex part. But it will be simple once you have a better understanding of the strategies for successful execution.

What is project execution?

In the first phase of project execution, the project manager’s roles and responsibilities are to create project plans and objectives.

Project managers offer a robust project breakdown with tasks, assignees, deadlines, milestones to be achieved and the overall delivery schedule. And teams get to work on the plan outlined.

At the end, teams have deliverables ready to show to project stakeholders. 

Read the full article at Orangescrum blog

Top 11 Time Tracking Software for Your Workplace

Based on research it’s discovered that “69% of people say that they don’t track where they filled every minute or hour”.  And as a project manager, you can relate to this undoubtedly.

From the productivity aspect definitely, this is not what you expect.

So, the focus must be now to track who is doing what in how much time!

While discussing with our existing customers and new users, I spent a lot of time collecting feedback on time tracking, what they need and what kind of difficulty they are facing in their daily lives.

Most of them are not getting a clear picture of their projects and task process; some are not able to meet their project deadlines.

And the ones who manage their projects with an excel sheet and other tools which don’t carry the same feature say team members are also not interested to fill the timesheet at Friday end.

Read the full article at Orangescrum blog

How to Optimize your Kanban Implementation

Kanban project management method has been implemented widely in the last decade. And majorly without the full understanding of what Kanban method actually prescribes.

Most users are just driven by the quick fix that it is highly visual task management and makes it easy to understand where tasks stand and how to close them fast.

Teams put a few status columns to represent their task flow and begin with “agile task management”.

Well, this is exactly what Kanban is not!

Kanban is all about the flow – the way your work or processes flow today.

As a first step you need to take a holistic view of how your work flows today, is it in align with the end goal i.e. meeting customer expectations.

Kanban is developed with a service oriented approach enabling teams to meet customer expectations timely and consistently.

Read the full article at Orangescrum blog

How to Enable Transparent Time Tracking for your Employees

As a project manager, are you still chasing your team for project time tracking?

Every employer knows that time tracking is very important for productivity. But it always depends on the employees to make it transparent.

What isn’t tracked can’t be measured or improved!

As per the report of statistica, an untracked working environment could cost $7 million in a day in the USA.

And why do they not want to time-track? They say..

• it will be time-consuming
• gathered information are not useful
• they think management is spying
• their poor performance will be highlighted
• their work cannot be sufficiently measured
• and many more excuses

Painful isn’t it?

Still, we can motivate the employees to track time and can enable its benefits for personal and professional growth.

Let’s start with;

What is time tracking?

Simply put, time tracking is a mechanism that project managers and employers use to track the work of their team members for multiple purposes. Like billing, payroll, operations, etc.

Organizations deploy time management software to simplify the overall process. These software help employees to be more organized and efficient and increase overall productivity.

Time tracking software have proven to help save both time and money

 

Read the full article at Orangescrum blog