Debbie’s comment regarding improved employee morale being an ancillary benefit of project management brings to mind a discussion I had with a client CIO last year who had been wondering about measuring the benefits of the project management and portfolio
management methodologies he had introduced into his organization. Naturally he was thinking about “hard numbers” such as projects completed on time and in budget.

This CIO had not yet thought about measuring the human benefits he was achieving: the sense of satisfaction the staff would receive from knowing they were working on projects that were important to the company, the sense of accomplishment associated with achievement of commitments they had made, the feeling of belonging to a team with a common objective. As someone who had been doing project-based work for the past 30 years, I knew that working with a good PM, reasonably applying PMBOK® Guide-aligned
processes, was a much more positive experience than working with a “shoot from the hip” PM.

When I shared my experiences with this CIO and we discussed measuring these indirect benefits, he realized that yes, perhaps there was something there to be surveyed and considered. And, no surprise, the results of his HR survey were aligned with Jeannette’s comments (in her post Agility Happens!) regarding employee satisfaction improvements.

Project management, when practiced right (just enough project management process, as indicated by the risk profile of the project) definitely has a positive impact on employee morale and turnover rates.

[NB to my Faithful Readers: Wednesday's post that was truncated has been corrected! If you missed the last couple paragraphs, they are up there now. Technical difficulties ... !]

In yesterday’s post, I alluded to headlines in the business and technical press that made me feel there’s a dawn simmering somewhere on the other side of this doom and gloom economy. Here’s a sampling:

IT Remains a Bright Spot in Gloomy Jobs Numbers according to Ed Cone of CIO Insight.

Not that IT is the last word in project management - there are plenty of non-IT applications of the discipline that also provide opportunities to streamline, cut costs, and avoid rework - but the Ten Upsides to the Down Economy discussed in Eric Lundquist’s eWeek blog display quite a few opportunities for project management (and project managers).

Small and Midsize Businesses Continue Hiring says this eWeek column, noting that despite the economy, small business owners feel optimistic overall. Since, historically, these are the businesses that create the most jobs, and where innovations are born, this is good news. The brontosaurs of the business world are operations-heavy, while smaller, newer businesses race from project to project.

Other articles view U.S. economic challenges from an outside perspective. For example, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, interviewed on the Knowledge@Wharton site, remains bullish because he takes history into account, and because of his “outsider” perspective (as a Turkish-American educated in Britain):

[M]any Americans, under siege in the 1970s and 1980s from rising gas prices and economic competition from Japan, thought the economy was falling apart back then as well. “But the system did not collapse,” he noted. “America came out of that crisis so much stronger because … this country and this nation did what it always does best — reinvent itself and innovate.”

More about some of the more innovative projects and products in the news in our next post. Stay tuned.