PMI Pulse Report & Executive Roundtable

While I was at PMI Global Congress in Rome, I was invited to join the executive roundtable to discuss last Pulse Report.

This year’s Pulse of the Profession® that organizations are making progress as they are experiencing more success with implementing strategic initiatives. For the first time in the last five years of this research, it is seen that more projects are meeting original goals and business intent and being completed within budget.

At the same time, the definition of success is evolving. The traditional measures of scope, time, and cost are no longer sufficient in today’s competitive environment. The ability of projects to deliver what they set out to do—the expected benefits—is just as important. These findings suggest that organizations are becoming more mature with their project management practices and are investing in the following factors that distinguish more successful project performance:

• Talent: Developing the technical, leadership, and business management skills of project professionals continues to receive significant attention. 32% of survey respondents consider both technical and leadership skills a high priority.
• Benefits: There’s growing attention to benefits realization management, which is the collective process of identifying benefits at the outset of a project and ensuring, through purposeful actions during implementation, that the benefits are realized and sustained once the project ends. 31% of organizations report high benefits realization maturity.
• PMOs and Strategic EPMOs: Organizations can bridge the chasm between high-level strategic vision and implementation with a project management office (PMO). Among organizations in our survey that have a PMO, half report having an enterprise project management office (EPMO). And those that align their EPMO to strategy (i.e., have a strategic EPMO), report 38 percent more projects meet original goals and business intent and 33 percent fewer projects are deemed failures
• Executive Sponsorship: Actively engaged executive sponsors continue to be the top driver of projects - with 62% - meet their original goals and business intent.
• Agile: Organizations increasingly embrace agile as a technique for managing projects. 41% of organizations report using agile approaches for their projects sometimes or more frequently.

Related to feedbacks of the roundtable participants:

• Hybrid approaches, a mix of Agile & Waterfall techniques, are popular. Project managers need to be agile. It would be interesting for PMI to track the evolution of Agile approach.
• Agile methodologies are simple to apply in solution based organizations.
• Agile has proven to improve results and increase customer satisfaction with Agile PM’s using Scrum Master techniques.
• Some PMO’s have transformed into hybrid Agile PMOs and Agile CoEs. It is important to tailor each Project Management phase/context.
• PMI is currently working on a Project Management Agile Practice Guide.
• https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse