Project Management Culture

Moving your organization to embrace a “project management culture” takes time and patience. A great first step an organization can take is to ensure that their project leaders are trained and fluent in the discipline of Project Management. Also, and most importantly, senior management must understand and embrace the value of project management, and commit to support the process of implementing project management throughout all levels of the organization.

To help change the organizational culture to one that embraces and values project management, it should fund and support the development of a project office, which can help facilitate rolling out this “project management culture”.

Some first steps that should be taken:

• Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of existing project managers and project support personnel
• Develop a basic project management training plan for the entire organization to familiarize all with the project management verbiage and practices
• Identify and provide specialized advanced training for all project leaders and functional managers
• Develop a project management office (PMO) to provide enterprise coaching, and to develop and manage your organization’s project management methodology
• In addition to the methodology, the PMO should develop and maintain standard project management templates for the organization to use
• Ensure that existing projects are audited and meet your organization’s minimum project management standards
• Setup a program where your PMO provides coaching to less experienced project managers and oversight of all enterprise projects
• Ensure all projects have Lessons Learned captured

There are many more things that can be added to the list above, but the intent of this posting was to get people thinking about ways to change the Project Management Culture where they work.