Learning Objectives

• Explain typical symptoms and root causes of project failure in a real organization that has low project management maturity.
• Understand the consultative skills needed to diagnose and fix project management problems in such an organization.
• Understand the design of a project and portfolio management system that is an appropriate next step for an organization at this level of maturity.
• Apply the steps, issues and lessons learned in implementing this system over the course of a year. Summarize the current results and how well the original problem has been solved.

FabCo competes in a brutally competitive global market. This session describes how FabCo used a consultative process to identify and remedy project management shortcomings within a division that had low project management maturity.

The problem: FabCo is a worldwide leader in the global marketplace for semiconductor fabrication. Although FabCo's U.S. operations invest heavily in projects to stay competitive, many of these projects failed. They missed schedule and budget, did not deliver what was originally intended and caused major last minute surprises to the senior management team.

The solution: Management and technologists at FabCo-U.S. realized that improving project success was vital for the U.S. operations to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape. FabCo-U.S. designed and implemented custom project and portfolio management techniques to solve this problem.

We'll examine how FabCo-U.S. analyzed the situation, then adapted project management “best practices” to make them appropriate for an organization with low project management maturity and a non-project culture. We will also discuss learnings from the implementation process and current results on how much project success has improved.

* Name is fictional, but everything else is real.