How to ‘sell’ project management?

Written By: Mateusz Jasny on June 18, 2008 No Comment

One of the many problems which PMOs / P3Os are facing is how to convince middle and operational management to the idea of project management.

You can try many ways. To find out what the situation in the world look like I decided to ask that question at the linkedin forum, the responses were surprisingly consistent.

The least recommended solution is to “force” middle & operational management to just do the project management, I have to agree with that, but I think that there should also be some demand from the upper management. It is hard to imagine a Project Manager who willingly writes a project status report, if there is no one interested in reading and analyzing it.

So, how to “sell” project management? On the basis of the experience and answers from linkedin I’ve created a few points:

1. Show the benefits of project management – you may need a pilot project which will show the benefits. You can also create various case studies for key middle and lower-level managers; let them touch the management of projects. (If you can’t create a case study, try to recruit professionals – there are some games available on the market such as Challange of Egypt

2 Convince people that project management is not secret knowledge – These rules are dictated by common sense.

3 Competence / certificate of project management is a good point in CV.

4 Create a need for relevant reports in organization – be careful with being bureaucratic – try to make reporting automate and relevant to senior managers.

5 Watch out for bureaucratic, it can kill the best ideas.

6 Avoid saying – “you’re doing wrong now, with project management you will be doing right,” say – “you are doing well now, but with project management you can do it better” .

I urge you to read all the answers

These links can be interesting:

Tags: certification, p3o, pmo, Project Management, value of project management