Your Project Business Needs a “Center of Excellence”. We help.

On this page:  Why a CoE for Project Business? - The challenge - The process - Our support - Deutsch

Why should you establish a Center of Excellence for Project Business?

Portfolios with customer projects hold untapped potentials for more and and better business. A Center of Excellence for Project Business helps realize these potentials.

You are in Project Business when your organization works as a contractor for a paying client.

One thing is clear: For you, the project is a profit center.

Project Business can be satisfactory and profitable in one moment. However, in the next moment, you see your margins melting away, outlays for the customer challenging your credit line, and a frustrated customer making the project painful.

Project Business is different from—for example—book, hotel, or transportation business, or any other business in which companies compete for profitability and market share. Project Business is high-risk business for all parties involved. 

Other forms of business have education, standards, certifications, literature, research, and what else is necessary to define a profession. These also exist for internal project management but not for cross-corporate Project Business.

Here, players must help themselves. 

The CoE for Project Business future-proofs the organization by:
  • Ensuring the profitability of the customer projects.
  • Monitoring and protecting the liquidity of the contractor organization.
  • Delighting customers - you want them to come back and bring friends with them.

  • Assuring management attention to customer projects.

  • Enhancing predictability and order in customer projects.

  • Addressing project, commercial, and legal risks.

  • Improving the existent project business for customers.
  • Helping the organization win new business.

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A Distinct Challenge: Managing Customer Projects

Education, literature, and associations still have a sharp focus on the management of internal projects. They assume that companies usually run projects for their own purposes with internal staff, perhaps with occasional outsourcing here and there as an "extended workbench".

In fact, cross-corporate project business is not the exception today, it is the norm. By ignoring the challenges of project business, they fall short when it comes to the specific questions, such as:

The lack of focused education brings a problem for contractor organizations: Their project managers, PMO staff, and other practitioners need help as beginners, but also later as seasoned experts to take on their daily challenges, but associations, literature, training providers, academia, etc. talk about other things. 

Your Center of Excellence (CoE) for Project Business gives these practitioners the help they need. In addition, it brings certainty to the organization that its staff addresses the high risks of project business most professionally and protects the organization's future. 

The Center of Excellence may be an additional task a PMO may pick up. Or it may be a separate unit coordinating with your PMO. If you do not have a PMO for customer projects, the CoE may pick up this role too.  

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The Overall Process

The process to create the CoE for Project Business follows individual needs and wishes of the customer.

In a sequential approach, it begins after the positive management decision with a number of analyses on business and training needs and at the end supports the running business with programs and workshops.

Alternatively, an "agile" approach can be chosen using an iterative-incremental "quick-win" strategy. Here, excellence is achieved gradually in small, quick increments.

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How We Support Your CoE for Project Business

Depending on the business and training needs, many activities can be performed to develop excellence in Project Business. Here is a selection of the activities that we support:

Bringing Your CoE to Life

We support decision making, organizing, recruiting for the CoE. 

In addition, we help develop a definition of Excellence as a compass for the CoE's work and a yardstick against which its achievements will be measured.

Development and Deployment of Process Assets

Well developed process assets, such as tools, methodologies, glossaries, and customized software unify approaches, language, and reporting for successful customer projects. They help by

  • Ensuring common understanding
  • Easing reporting
  • Keeping a focus on value-adding activities
  • Improving the manageability of the portfolio of customer projects

Project Business Training

A curriculum can be developed addressing relevant topics, such as:
  • The Basics of Project Business Management
  • Benefit Engineering - Project Managers as Sales People of additional services
  • Risk Management for Project Business
  • Legal Caveats of International Project Business
Another goal is the development of business acumen among the project managers.

Project Management Certification

Certifications do not automatically make better project managers, but the preparation process comes with personal development.

While most certifications are not specialized for Project Business, they open doors for winning new business.

We offer among others:

  • CAPM - entry-level certification
  • PMP - advanced-level certification
  • PMI-ACP - Agile certification
  • Scrum master certification

Project Business Coaching

We have experience in:
  • Coaching on the job - helping your people learn while they do their work.
  • Structured coaching - an interactive multi-session coaching program guides project managers towards their excellence goals.

Continuous Improvement

The Center of Excellence takes post-implementation measures to uphold the and further develop its achievements, such as:
  • Mentoring
  • Focus groups
  • Lessons learned workshops
The goal is that the CoE does this in a self-directed fashion without external help.

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Services

Project Management Training
Project Business Management Training
Congress Speaking
Coaching - Workplace & Structured
Project Management Audits
Project Business Healing Days
Connective Leadership Assessments

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Address

Trollblumenstr. 39g

80995 Munich

Bavaria, Germany

 

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