The Swiss Project Management Journal
Projects Beyond Boundaries
WAGILE
P rofessionalise your project portfolio management . By Andreas Eberhardt
Big organisations want to become agile. It is a com-
mon belief in traditional industries that start-ups are
more flexible, leaner and nowadays even able to
maintain this competitive advantage. The most
common explanation for this situation is: start-ups
L
et’s have a look back on the telecom
industry (Telco) in the early 2000s,
before the Apples and Googles had this
brilliant idea to integrate content on
mobile devices; before mobile network
service provider became ordinary mobile
network operator. The telecommuni-
cation industry was highly competitive.
There have been multiple product
launches and price changes per day. The
industry was a leader in technology and
innovation, both in infrastructure and
business models. It was characterized by
constant re-organisations and change.
Nobody talked about agile methodolo-
gies, even though the speed of innovation
and delivery was extremely fast. Without
regarding the failure of the industry
strategy, the impact and the expectation
towards project management was
immense.
are more agile (references: [1] [2] [3] [4]). Is “agility”
really the solution for traditional industries like ban-
king, insurance or automotive to survive what is
called the digital revolution, or in other words the
increase of competition and time to market?
The challenges in Telco organisations that
time are similar to the challenges tradi-
tional industries are facing today. Senior
Executives have to align the entire com-
pany organisation to a constantly chan-
ging market situation, without creating
administrative overhead and while
securing competitive advantages of
selective efficient organisational units
within the corporation.
The key success factors as the head of
project management in a Telco company
was the ability to formally establish a
cross functional end to end accountability
Make informed
decisions, fast!
in my delivery organisation, to split
decision research and decision making in
order to allow Senior Executives to
actively take risk and to empower delivery
teams to increase the delivery perfor-
mance in a well-defined process frame-
work. My main issues were not in the area
of project methodologies, but in the
management of external factors to the
project, like the lack of trust, the non-
availability of decision makers or missing
transparency of delivery performance
and decision making. Existing methodo-
logies did not provide a solution, in
contrary, they increased the creation of
organisational silos which then augmen-
ted the internal competition of valuable
resources. I had a need for a different
concept framework.
Set realistic
management
Increase the
Workflow
WAGILE
KEY SUCCESS
Monitor the
project delivery
Project Management Institute
SWITZERLAND Chapter
Control the
Go to Market!
24
2017 Edition