"Implementing Best Practice Project Management at EMC"

Event Report

About 25 intrepid members managed to navigate their way to a backwater Annex of the Royal Holloway College, Egham, to hear a talk on "Implementing Best Practice Project Management at EMC".

EMC have established their organisation through product supply and came to a view 3 years ago that a significant shift was required to provide overarching Professional Services to support and add value to the client base. Contact to Contract were then engaged to develop the strategy and implement the Project Management disciplines throughout the global organisation. This talk highlighted the approach and the experiences gained during the implementation.

The success of the relationship between EMC and Contact to Contract was evident in their joint presentation in that EMC had a strong champion in sponsoring the work. In response Contact to Contract recognised that significant benefits could be achieved by following the simple and basic Project Management principles rather than forcing a major revolution. Since a key objective was to change behaviours in the organisation rather than just implement new processes and procedures, it was decided to provide a stable framework with everybody using the same method before initiating continuous improvement programmes. The success of this approach was demonstrated by its simplicity of being 'based but not slaved' to best practice, rigorous but 'lite', consistent, having definite project completion points, and having mandatory 'Gateway' project review control points.

A simple memory game provided the opportunity to involve the attendees and demonstrate that people are more effective working together and practically, the 'Gateway' review process is more beneficial when used to share knowledge and experience and work together for a common aim.

The programme of work to implement Project management disciplines is still ongoing but the next stages are already following along behind. Building degrees of sophistication into the framework and seeking continuous improvement is expected to ensure that EMC will successfully incorporate the ethos of a Professional Services culture.

The slides from this presentation are now available.

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