Management Consulting
Solve Challenges and Problems in Project Management Reliably
Companies must work more sustainably, digitally, and efficiently. The initiatives taken to achieve this create a variety of projects that can quickly end in frustration without good project management. Using modern project management methods and standards, companies guide projects to success and get the best out of their capacity.
What Makes Project Management Challenging These Days?
Megatrends such as sustainability and digitalization force businesses to manage even more tasks of vastly different natures simultaneously with each other. These projects are also characterized by high time and cost pressure as delays can cause budgets to spiral out of control in no time. Structured and professionally applied project management that balances the targets of costs, quality, and delivery dates becomes more and more important in this context.
In practice, project management proves to be complex. There are four challenges in particular that managers face:
- Capacity: Experienced project managers are a rare resource at most organizations. Project management is done by experts who do not have the relevant skill set and are often unable to manage the projects sufficiently.
- Volume: Strategically relevant initiatives affecting multiple organizational areas are often performed simultaneously. Accordingly, there are high requirements for multiproject management.
- Transparency: The status and interdependencies of the projects must be identified, and this requires effort. The hierarchy levels involved use different metrics to track the same projects.
- Structure: There is a lack of standards around that project managers can orient themselves by. The quality of the projects varies very strongly as a result. Areas of action where standardization would be sensible are usually not identified. Due to the lack of risk and opportunity management, countermeasures are usually taken spontaneously.
On top of that, there are typical problem areas such as communication between the project team and stakeholders, short-term adjustments of the project scope, excessively optimistic delivery dates, and a lack of targets and specifications. Companies must also address these areas if they want to ensure their project goals.
What characterizes good project management?
Essential for project success are reliable, transparent structures and qualified project personnel. In the long term, it is about establishing a landscape of standardized processes and methods. This starts with the project plan (including targets and responsibilities) and involves the communication as well as the processes and tools. Companies must achieve project targets through systematic, cross-divisional management with as little waste as possible.
The following are characteristics of successful project teams:
- overarching, coordinated work packages with targets, roles, and responsibilities
- cross-hierarchical transparency about progress, dependencies, risks and opportunities
- effectively coordinated interfaces within the team and beyond
- Risk and opportunity management that allows for early detection and proactive resolution of issues like delays or errors, as well as the identification and realization of opportunities.
Under these conditions, there is a focus on goals, clarity, and organization. Important information, such as details about scheduling or project progress, is available to all team members. Responsibilities are clearly defined, resources are used efficiently, and communication is marked by openness. This lets potential improvements, like ones for business process management (BPM), become visible just as quickly as possible risks do.
We Help You to Manage Your Project
Ingenics Consulting has completed more than 10,000 projects for German and international companies in classic industries in recent decades. This experience has been integrated into a project management framework that we can quickly and flexibly tailor to the needs of your organization in practice:
- Planning phase: structuring of the task, coordination of targets and structures, planning of the project, risk analysis, establishment of committees and communication.
- Start: preparation of the project handbook, kick-off with all parties involved (project lead, team members, stakeholders, etc.).
- Implementation: continuous monitoring and accounting of project progress, definition of suitable measures for target achievement, monitoring of milestones, communication, and reporting.
- Project completion: presentation, review, lessons learned, relief for the project team.
With this methodological approach, we ensure that you meet your schedule, quality, and cost targets. It is an approach that has proved successful in the planning and implementation of new projects as well as in crisis management during ongoing projects. For both scenarios, we provide you with experts who have industry experience and can lead the projects or support your experts.
On top of that, we show you how you develop standards for your project management that can be used to generate success. The things that are critical for this include the implementation of individual project processes, the adaptation and new development of practice-relevant project methods and new organizational units for approving and managing your core projects. To enhance transparency in your projects, we work with you to develop customized digital project management cockpits.
Overview of Services and Tools
Systematic project management analysis (SPMA): An SPMA shows the maturity of your project management. A look at the project management’s quality reveals potential improvements (processes, methods, qualification initiatives, etc.).
Implementation of a project management office (PMO): The PMO defines standards for project implementation and provides them in a project management handbook. They create a central hub for coordinating your projects and developing your leadership.
Furthermore, the PMO takes responsibility for program management and multiproject management.
Establishment of a project office (PO): The PO is responsible for preparing (including approving) and organizing the project launch and ongoing project management. Our project managers ensure that the concepts, methods, and tools fit your requirements and train your team to apply new methods.
Schedule coordination: Working with you, we define roles and responsibilities, coordinate the interaction at your interfaces, and provide templates for the planning and realization phase. Diligent digital reporting with clearly structured documentation not only increases transparency and on-time delivery, but also prevents scheduling or venue conflicts.
Change management: Every project affects the employees’ day-to-day work. Rituals such as change stories help to convince everyone involved to lessen any resistance and give changes strong roots within the organization.
Agile methods: We show you how you can roll out and use agile frameworks such as scrum, design thinking, last planner systems and kanban in your organization. They let you react to changes in the project more flexibly and promote self-guidance as well as motivation among your employees.
Critical chain project management (CCPM): CCPM seeks to use resources in projects as efficiently as possible and makes use of transparent information as well as open communication. It influences the company’s culture and improves your entire project portfolio in the long term.
Project quality management (PQM): PQM checks compliance with the defined standards, reveals best-practice approaches, and gives the project leads tangible support in the successful implementation of their projects. It also delivers input for the continuous enhancement of the standards at your company, ensuring high satisfaction among the management team and the workforce.
