Improved people, project management can accelerate tech delivery

Faced with numerous challenges including changing working environments and a global shortage of scarce skills, project management offices (PMOs) at technology companies are having to take innovative measures to attract and retain talent, build company culture and better manage employees while ensuring successful project delivery to clients within budget and schedule.

Remote working has been around for quite some time, though adoption thereof has accelerated post-pandemic. It can have its benefits; for example, employees can work from home in an effort to avoid the traffic and be more productive and it can be a boon for those who have decided to ditch city life and semigrate to the country’s quieter towns.

Or, crucially, it can help organisations meet their skills requirements – there is currently a global shortage of experienced D365 practitioners and remote working can help attract talent regardless of where they are based. This is all the more so in a deteriorating global economy where organisations are looking for value.

It makes sense that remote working is set to become more prevalent across many organisations, especially those involved in technology, and project managers will have to learn how to get the best out of these dispersed teams. In addition to simply getting remote workers familiar with company culture, managers will have to overcome barriers including language and even time zones.

Then there are cultural sensitivities and traditions that might not be as apparent. Have employees from Spain? Best not to bother them during lunch, which happens to be the primary meal of the day.

Within these technology organisations, the PMO has to ensure a sense of community is created within teams so that team members are comfortable sharing their ideas – and this can be quite challenging when working with a large, dispersed team. Project managers will have to look at how best to draw out the value from each team member, perhaps even going as far as setting up one-on-one sessions.

This is crucial to getting valuable feedback from all team members, including the ones who do not speak up as much during online calls. Having acknowledgements for exceptional performance from quieter team members also helps ensure they are seen as an important part of the team.

Managers need to make the time and put effort into getting to know their team members, building relationships with them and better understanding their personalities in order to get the best out of them. This individual attention is important: in an office-based environment, it is easy to observe from body language that someone is at unease or at a low point, but this is not the case with video calls as many people tend to present their best face or even a poker face.

One-on-one engagements can help uncover issues in an employee's life that have a detrimental knock-on effect on their professional performance as well, and need to be addressed.

Now that you have the skilled resources in place, as well as ways to get the best out of them, how do you go about delivering projects successfully and consistently, with all the necessary scheduling, reporting and governance in place? The key is to be able to adapt depending on the type of project and to be flexible in the methodology being used.

While agile seems to be becoming more prevalent, it is not a new concept and has been around for a while when looking at it in terms of development, delivery and project management. This approach is ideal for smaller projects, with few consultants working on it, as it can be turned around in a relatively short time.

However, for larger projects, more organisations are realising that agile projects cannot be run in isolation and a different approach is needed. To get this right, PMOs are increasingly exploring the use of the hybrid or waterfall-agile (Wagile) approach. For example, in an enterprise resource system (ERP) implementation, agile can be used to build and sprint and show the progress made to the client, but it has to be built within a waterfall approach so that the schedule, cost and scope are all carefully managed.

This is unlike a fully agile approach, where there is no hard stop and you can just keep adding more sprints to the backlog. For larger projects, taking the hybrid approach ensures the project is tightly managed from the perspective of governance, documentation, scope creep and more.

PMOs driving delivery are having to contend with changes in employee environments as well as when it comes to ways in which projects can be successfully delivered. They are facing a challenging balancing act between keeping employees engaged and motivated and ensuring that projects are delivered within budget and within strict timelines. It is also an evolving challenge – the changes are set to accelerate as Generation Z enters the workplace. What will be crucial to the success of organisations going forward will be business adaptability, process adaptability and people adaptability.