On the last few months I have been into a very special challenge. I have been given the task to train experts around their own work.
This is strange, as soon as they are the experts, and even if I know the subject in depth, they know it better, because they are the ones who really perform the work.
Around 5 years ago this company came to us with the task to understand what were the best practices around their global operations, in this case, project management. Their objective was to standardize their processes globally based on them.
They had an enormous quantity of projects being planned and implemented, but each region had a different standard to be followed, and the documents provided, even though fulfilling the requirements to go through their tollgate process, were not standardized. Basically, each project was presented in a different way.
This allowed huge quality variation among the information delivered, therefore, it was getting harder to streamline the decision making around which project of the portfolio was more fit to the company strategy.
At that point, I was invited to support an initiative that would gather all those project documents which were successful, and presented good quality throughout all company’s regions.
With good communication and stakeholder engagement plans, we were able to understand what they had in common, and create a list of what should be the minimal information to be supplied, and how was the better way to present it according to the company’s values, culture and expectations.
After getting this done, we were able to define templates and guidance documents to create a standard to be followed globally.
As it’s been done for more than five years now, even if the main objective remained, the scope of work for each phase of this initiative changed. Here is a summary of what was done so far:
- Formed a team able to gather the information needed
- Select best practices and understand what added value or not
- Create templates based on used and successful documents
- Validate and deploy template and guidance documents, providing examples
- Determine and structure a centralized repository of knowledge, methodology, information and documents
- Engage teams on using the new framework
This incredible transformation process has been implemented using several good practices around business analysis, project management, requirements elicitation, stakeholders engagement, change and knowledge management. There are many other side initiatives and next steps to this new environment that were created.
Now, the challenge is to keep the teams engaged and adherent to the new procedures implemented. Even if they are the experts and they know it better. I am happy to being able to explain the reasons they are using the tools provided, how they would be better used and how they relate to the current company’s policies.