Benefits of Auditing Full Video
Hello, I’m Richard Broo, Founder of TrueNorth PMP Consulting. We are a consultancy dedicated to helping companies reduce costs, waste, and time out of their project management process to improve their operational efficiency and profitability. I like to talk with you about the benefits of periodically auditing your project management process.
I believe you’ll easily understand why this will benefit your business, especially in our current economic environment that makes it harder to profitably develop and deliver new products to market.
Reason number one, reduce costs, time and waste out of a project or project management process. By auditing your project management process, you can identify the non-value-added tasks that increased costs or add waste and time to your projects.
Once you identify and fix these non-value-added tasks. You streamline your ability to develop and deliver new products to market quicker and at less cost.
An effective tool to identify non-value-added tasks is a value stream map. A value stream map helps identify actual time spent on a task and actual time waiting to get on a task.
Time spent on a task should be creating value time spent waiting to get on a task. That’s creating waste by identifying actual time wasted, waiting to get on a task you pinpoint where cost has been increased time wasted, and most importantly value lost value stream mapping is easy to do and not to be done by annually on your project management process, to make sure it’s running efficiently and effectively and creating value for your company and its customers.
If you want to learn more about value stream mapping, there are many examples on the internet reason.
Number two, identify recurring weaknesses and project execution monitoring and controlling other recurrent patterns in your projects and how they conclude meaning are they over budget or late in delivery and audit can pinpoint the root cause of these issues and provide insight on how to eliminate them.
Issues such as being over budget or late in delivery, usually are symptoms of poor performance and project execution or monitoring and controlling. As you execute and monitor and control your projects. Do you regularly compare actual costs, expended versus budget or costs and actual time expended versus budget of time?
What is your process to monitor and control your projects? Now I’m not talking about achieving the project scope. That’s what you’re trying to achieve, but the processes you use to achieve the project scope are the project management processes and procedures. You use escalating project costs and extending project time by auditing past projects that have not been completed on budget and on time and identifying the patterns of failure and these projects, as it relates to execution monitoring controlling, you will find the root cause of these failures, which leads to corrective actions to prevent them from occurring on future projects.
Reason three failing to achieve total customer satisfaction by total customer satisfaction. I mean, being able to deliver to your customers a product or service that completely satisfies their expectations for features, benefits, and performance. If you are experiencing this issue on more than one project, you ought to audit how you capture customer expectations for the products and services you offer.
And what is your process to understand them, maybe the process you are using to capture the features and benefits your customers expect from your products and services is not robust enough and does not dig deep into understanding. Why they want certain features and benefits and how they rank them in importance to the business analyze projects that have not been able to achieve total customer satisfaction review, what was delivered versus what your customer expected to be delivered, to identify root causes of why this disconnect occurred.
This exercise will help you understand how to improve your project management process related to identifying qualifying, quantifying, and verifying what your customers really want from your products and services, as well as prevent the occurrence of future customer dissatisfaction. Remember a satisfied customer is a happy customer and a happy customer creates advocacy for your company, its people and its products.
Reason number four, learn how to better qualify what value your company is creating for your customer and itself. One could say our project is a project designed to create a unique product or service for a customer that customer, which is the purchase.
But is this really the purpose of a project, a project or service is only the tangible aspect of a project that that project is designed to deliver. But what is the value behind that product or service to put it another way? What fire does a product or service create for the customer in terms of reduced operational costs, improve productivity, increased sales and market share, etcetera.
There is a dollar and operational value associated with what a project delivers to your customer. Do you ask your customer what value will be created for them to the project you are conducting on their behalf and successful? You should ask this question once, you know, the type and dollar amount of value.
The project will create for your customer. It will help you understand what you can charge for your company’s expertise to create this value for them. And once the project is successfully concluded and the value is validated, you have created competitive differentiation for your company, its people and products on top of creating a totally satisfied customer.
Reason number five, it drives continuous improvement and excellence and operational efficiency to be a world-class company or to aspire to become a world-class company. Continuous improvements need to be part of your DNA by auditing how you initiate plan, execute, monitor, control, and close projects. No matter if they’re externally or internally focused, you continuously improve your capabilities to become more effective and efficient in your operations.
Additionally, markets and customer needs change very rapidly. And your company’s ability to quickly adapt to these changes is directly dependent on the effectiveness and efficiency of your project management process. Auditing is a tool you can use to create the DNA required to execute an effective and efficient project management process capable of helping your company to become world-class within your market space.
Reason number six, confirm you are using the right project management process for your projects. There are basically two project management disciplines throughout a project. One is what I will call the traditional method, which is a project that is run sequentially, using a formal project management plan.
The project scope is clearly defined and the process steps to achieve it are linear and logical. Some folks call this the waterfall method of project management. The other discipline to enter the project is called agile project management. It’s used when the overall project scope is understood, but the path to get there will require more knowledge and data work.
Must be executed in increments, which are called sprints or iterations over a fixed period of time to generate this knowledge and data. The objective of each sprint or iteration is to create more knowledge and data that will achieve ultimate success to get to that project scope. Agile project management is more interactive and iterative compared to traditional project management.
It requires a lot more interaction and communication with the client to achieve project success. In fact, project success is directly related to how involved the good client is in the project. So, what does this tidbit of information have to do with using the right project management process? It means that if you are not using the right project management process to run your projects, you will waste more money and time to complete them.
And they’ll also be unnecessary capital and human waste. Is the scope of a project crystal clear with the logical path to achieve it, or is it not fully developed and any further knowledge and data to find the path to success. Once you understand this information, you can best decide what project management process discipline will provide you the best methodology to successfully execute and complete the project.
Choosing the right project management process methodology will maximize the money, resources and time you invest in a project. I want to thank you for listening today. I am Richard Broo. My company is called True North PMP consulting.
