In chatting with a customer the other day, the topic came up of why a standardized process and pmPoint project template couldn’t be used with all the projects in a certain business unit.  After all, shouldn’t project management best practices be common to all of them?

While certain fundamental best practices apply to most all projects, at BrightWork, we feel strongly that a one-size-fits-all approach to project management does not work from one company to the next – and even within a single company.

Even within a certain business unit with a well defined project management process, the amount of process should be considered in light of the various sizes and volume of projects the unit does.  In a recent conversation, for example, a customer kept returning to a theme of how best to quantify the time spent in weekly project meetings.

I was a little puzzled by this.  Was it worth the overhead to track a 1 hr per week task?  Talking a bit more,  it turns out that team leads were assigned to a couple of dozen small projects at a time, and were spending many hours a week in weekly meetings.   So, although having a weekly project meeting is a reasonable best practice, this process doesn’t scale when the same set of resources are doing lots of similar small projects.  So tracking meetings wasnt really the issue, whats needed is a way to consolidate these meetings.

Sometimes I prompt my customers to devise some breakpoints to define large, small and even medium projects, and scale their project management process to each level.  Some combination of total project duration and number of resources makes an easy breakpoint, or perhaps some budget amount.  For example, small IT projects that require 1 resource for up to 4 weeks should use a lightweight variant of the process, and use the pmPoint Project Tracker template.  On the other end of the scale, for projects with, say, 3 or more resources engaged for 4+ months, additional process is required (milestone reviews, risk management, formalized reporting).  Such projects could be mandated to use the Project Structured pmPoint template.

True, elaborating your process to scale requires a bit more effort, but it is a key way to get user acceptance.