Project Management Maturity with Virtual and Non-PM Teams?

   Ahead of Friday’s Project Management Maturity Forum, guest speaker Brad Clark shares answers on a few advance questions from our participants.  Brad is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Advantinum Group, an Ohio-based management consulting firm, and is Maturity Measurement Team Lead for OPM3^® Second Edition.

Q:  ”How do you achieve project management maturity when project teams are virtual, using many people who don’t have a project management background?”

  A: I had to deal with this particular problem supporting 7 business segments in Consumer Operations at Bank of America, where my entire project delivery team and project team members were virtual.  I knew going in that I couldn’t turn every project team member into quasi project managers, but I had to enhance their knowledge of the basics of estimation, understanding schedule dates, time tracking and project status and use my project managers has leaders and mentors, which I had in my favor since all of them had came from within the business and been Six Sigma trained.  My larger hurdle was that my project managers had little or no true project management experience.  I decided to leverage PMI’s Project Manager Competency Development Framework (PMCDF^®) and OPM3^®  as my baselining instruments to provide the metrics and measures to build a Manage by Fact (MBF) Program of Green Belt and Black Belt projects for those areas that needed improvement.  With virtual teams those metrics and measures are the most important.

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