Treating the Source of Poor Project Delivery

For decades, we’ve seen project management industry research highlight the challenges for PMO and project management teams. But what should or do those challenges tell us?

The PMO Outlook Report has been published the last 4 years by KeyedIn and has displayed the same top challenge year after year. The top challenge that continues to top the list at almost over half of organizations citing it as their top challenge – Resource Management.

However, we’d argue that resource management could be a result of inattentive blindness.

What is Inattentive Blindness?

Inattentive blindness is a psychological phenomenon that causes us to miss what’s right in front of our eyes. In a recent webinar, we talked about the example of resource management. The PMO Squad had a client come to us and say, “Can you fix our resource management problem?” The client cited things like, we don’t have enough people, our people are overworked, and our projects are always late.

Our team of experts knowing full well that resource management is often just a symptom of other related challenges within an organization suggested a full PMO assessment to address all areas of the business and not just focus on resource management.

With those findings our consultants noticed that their resource management challenge stemmed from other issues within the business. So, when offering a suggestion it was not just a simple ‘medicine’ to treat the symptom of the issue such as staggered scheduling, prioritization or other temporary fixes, but a completely new approach to how the organization goes about delivering projects. 

It was time to start doing things differently within the organization. But how?

Most project management processes are open loop and linear, but this isn’t how the world or organizations operate. With an open loop process, there is no feedback and doesn’t consider any changes that happen within the different phases of the processes that affect the later stages. But, as we all know – the business environment is constantly changing – both internally and externally. With open loop processes, that feedback doesn’t ever get incorporated, and you’re stuck doing the same things over and over again with the same results. 

It's time to break that cycle!

Organizational Project Delivery (OPD) is a closed loop process that incorporates feedback at every stage and puts it back into the processes of the organization. OPD is not about project management, it’s about the organization’s capability to deliver projects. It takes the inattentive blindness out of the equation and provides a healthy network of feedback to treat the source of what’s really happening. OPD is a simplified view of a complex set of systems that intersect with one another in an organization.

With OPD, organizations reduce poor project delivery because it becomes organizationally connected and that feedback is put back into the continuous improvement of project delivery for the organization.

This is about treating the source of poor project delivery and not just the symptoms. OPD allows organizations to get to that source and input feedback throughout the organization to deliver projects better – not just improve a symptom of poor project delivery temporarily.

Stop treating the symptoms of poor project delivery and get to the source through closed feedback loops with organizational project delivery.