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Project Management and Systems Engineering Models

Project Management Fundamentals

Industry – Science and Technology Sector
Capability: Project Management and Systems Engineering

The Situation
Our client, a Fortune 500 company that provides science, engineering and technology solutions to an array of industries, sought to improve performance of its vast project portfolio.

Our client required a brutally objective reality assessment of both its operating paradigm, and how well its project management training program was supporting its desired performance outcomes. In addition, our client required support in building a plan to convince stakeholders of the decisions necessary for a successful outcome.

The Strategy Bridge Solution
A Strategy Bridge team conducted a comprehensive assessment of program/project management practices across the client’s entire corporate enterprise. This assessment included interviews with nearly fifty executive leaders and project managers for insight to root causes of program/project manager performance in the context of existing client-sponsored training/development programs sponsored, as well as an examination of the client’s internal project/program documentation.

Our team learned during the interviews that a significant number of the client’s project failures resulted from a lack of attention to project management and systems engineering fundamentals—specifically: failure to understand and manage project risks from the onset, failure to plan for a realistic project start-up phase, and/or failure to manage project requirements throughout the lifecycle. Consequently, we applied a holistic, systems perspective in describing our observations and recommendations for the evolution of the client’s project management competency development program. We then developed and provided both Project Manager (PM) and Systems Engineer (SE) Competency Models that were tailored to our client’s organization structure designed to improve their overall projects performance.

The Outcome
Our client was pleased with depth and objectivity of our assessment and subsequently adopted and implemented Strategy Bridge’s recommended PM and SE Competency Models.