Embracing Project Management to Cross Functional Boundaries by Anticlue

Planning, launching and executing projects is how business problems are resolve and new opportunities are seized. Managing Projects fails outside of the operational work keeping the lights running of the business. Perhaps your project work is centralizing registration, reducing ER wait time, implementing electronic based practices of care, or developing a new service. Projects are how organizational advancement gets done. Managing projects should be familiar grounds, organizations should not struggle with the concept.

Historically, projects were managed by the operational managers. As organizational departments grew more specialized, we went from being independent jacks of all trades to highly interdependent teams. Today team work is the foundation of any success. But departmental teams have differing priorities based upon their customers, there arises a need for an team to drive and achieve the organization's opportunities across all of the different departments. Welcome to the basis of project management becoming a familiar business concept.

Unfortunately, it started out as the IT department does projects in this manner, Quality Management completes projects in this manner, Labs use this technique, and Informatics has another technique. The techniques and standards follow individual process, which overlap a bit, but are inconsistent. The outcomes then also become inconsistent. If the goal is to reduce adverse drug events, implementing a barcode on the employee's badge doesn't achieve the overall goal, but works for HR as a success. The project was driven within HR, however the nursing manager on the floor still needs the other pieces of the pie.

To get consistent outcomes on an organizational level the concept of a matrixed was introduced, separating the management and achievement of the project away from the operational support. Now it becomes important to improve how projects are executed and managed at an organizational level.

Getting organizations to implement new business practices in faster, cheaper, and better way with quality is different than just getting the project done with a consulting project manager. There are key structural elements which need to be put in place so doing the right projects at the right time with the right resources to achieve the right results becomes second nature. In order to accomplish all this project management must be embraced as the way to cross functional boundaries, not as another level of organizational bureaucracy.

Hence arises the balance an organizational PMO walks having enough process and good people to improve project success over time across the organization while not being perceived by the rest of the organization as a bureaucratic department. This change adoption like all others must be made within the organization's culture and lead by example through the leaders of the organization.

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