Have you ever wondered how enhancements get from ideas to functionality?

Project Management is something that happens at every company, club, or group, even if you don’t realize it. When you plan something in your own life, you consider things like why you want to do it, who ought to be involved, and what’s in it for you. The Project Management Office [PMO] brings all these questions and answers together into one place for our company.

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If you’ve ever wondered how exactly something goes from a simple idea or requirement to being functional in a system, all that funnels through our department; we reach out through the various business units and collaborate for success. Items are constantly prioritized against each other to figure out what would give us the most value in the shortest amount of time. We align our work with strategic and operational initiatives intended to sustain Idaho Farm Bureau as the company of choice.

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Project Management delivers initial value by practicing two principles: understanding the problem before finding the solution and understanding the problem’s impact to the customer and/or user. This requires high levels of collaboration, communication, and empathy. It demands taking a step back from personal perspectives to really understand the impacted users’ desired outcome.

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The mindset of Customer Centricity strongly comes into play because we need to think of our customers before all else when making these tough calls. And of course, we can’t do that alone. Feedback from those of you who interface with our customers and systems daily is invaluable because our group doesn’t get that exposure. We are making strides to include the business units in different and new ways to ensure they’re there to make decisions when appropriate.

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Has a change ever been made in a system or to the company that you didn’t know anything about?

Part of Project Management is a new idea for our company – Change Management. We’ve been performing some of these activities in silos, but we’d never had a concerted effort. We now have a Change Manager at our company charged with ensuring the people are ready for the change. Sure, Project Management makes sure the change is ready for the people, but what about the other way around? We know already that changes aren’t slowing down anytime soon for technology or for business needs. We have varied and complex changes coming at us from every direction. What we need to ensure is awareness and understanding so people have the time and information to accept and adopt change.

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In Change Management, we think about things like who the change will affect, how they will receive the change, how we can share information as early as possible, and what we can do to train and prepare people for what’s to come. Dana in a past article talked about the ADKAR model, which is what we’ve chosen to use for our company. Change Management doesn’t apply only to software projects—it applies to anywhere in the company where someone’s job, processes, practices, or expectations are changed. Big or small, there’s a level of Change Management needed to be reliably successful—and satisfied.

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We as an Executive Team are committed to increased opportunities for and success of communication, transparency, and inclusion. More than ever before, there are chances for everyone to make their voices heard, and Project Management and Change Management foster that. Please reach out to me if you have questions or suggestions.

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Emily Roseborough, Director of PMO

 

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