Simplifying And Improving Project Management Methodologies

The Client's Challenge

Siemens Australia had a project management methodology that it used worldwide to build everything from Power Stations to telephone installations to systems, and had projects that ranged from multi-million construction projects to minor systems upgrades.

Their standard project management methodology had problems and was not suitable for smaller projects. Selling and delivering projects was a major service line for Siemens that had to be competitive, successful and profitable.

Scope

The end-to-end project management and delivery processes for all project types.

Approach

This review was part of a major Business Simplification (reengineering) project across all of Siemens Australia’s operations (9 process streams across 8 companies).

Initially, the intent was to run two reengineering streams, for large and small projects, separately. It was quickly found that they were variations on the same process and the review teams were combined.

Every dimension and step had to justify its existence in terms of the value it delivered. Some steps were eliminated while new steps were added to prevent commonly experienced problems.

Once the full-scale project management methodology had been agreed, then the relevance of each step to small projects was analyzed. This resulted in each step’s retention in full, in part or its removal from the required small project management process. Importantly, this cut-down (“lite”) design was defined and agreed by a team of experienced project managers who had experience managing both large and small projects.

The Results

• The overall outcome was an agreed pair of project management methodologies — full and 'lite' — adopted across all eight Siemens Australia companies — a situation that had never been achieved before anywhere in the Siemens world.

• The overall number of project management steps was reduced by 41% after the new steps were added to eliminate common downstream problems.

The Payoff

Specific benefits identified by the client were:

• Improved control over projects

• Reduced project elapsed time

• Improved management of variances

• Improved satisfaction of stakeholder expectations

• Improved project management capabilities across the group

• Increased utilisation of people on projects

• Single timesheet system

• Improved consistency of cost rate calculations across projects.