Last year, I called a friend, the head of Operations at a major US Department of Defense command. I had heard that they had a new CIO and asked my friend if he could introduce me to him. He said that in fact, he was going on a trip with him the following week and would ask. When he got back, he called me and said that the new CIO did not want to meet with me but, he said, “I can tell you that what he is concerned about is “project management quality.”” I said: “Project management quality? I’ve never thought about that.”
So I started to think about it.
On my walk a couple of days later, I remembered an article I had read years ago. It was about how a sales manager should spend his/her time. As I recall, the article said: “Let’s say you have 8 sales people reporting to you. 2 are really good, 2 are really bad, and 4 are ok.” And then I thought, if you think MS Project is the tool you are using for project management, and you have 8 project managers reporting to you: 2 of whom are really good, 2 are really bad and 4 are ok, you are going to be concerned with “project management quality.”
But with APM+, because templates are used to generate project plans, whether the person in the project manager role is really good, bad or average, it won’t matter. The plan will be the same.
And the benefits of using templates to generate project plans are many. You get consistency and repeatability throughout the organization. And when capturing performance metrics, because the plans are the same, it’s easy to compare the performance of different teams. You are comparing apples with apples. If the plans were different every time, it’s much harder and you won’t do it.
Check out APM+.
