Less Well-Known Benefits of Integration Management

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Integration management ensures project planning elements are connected properly, regardless of the methodologies being deployed. Here are some other benefits of integration management you might not have thought about:

Ensures accurate status reporting. A well-integrated project plan ensures that status changes are properly reflected throughout the project, no matter where those changes originate. For example, if you mitigate the risk of cost overruns by reducing the use of contracted skilled resources, tasks might take longer, impacting the project schedule. Other skill-related risks could become more likely. Also, product quality may decline. Impacts to the project often extend beyond one element. Sound integration management ensures you have a complete picture of the status of your project. 

Reduces stakeholder conflict. Project managers need to ensure stakeholders understand their obligations to the project. As new ideas or questions arise during the project, stakeholder obligations can change. Performing integration management ensures changes in obligations are identified early. That prevents conflicts later in the project when the pressure is on and project impacts are more significant.

Here’s an example. After your initial requirements are drafted, your contracts team notices that a vendor’s costs will increase considerably because of new demands from your project. To address this, your organization decides to perform the work in-house. This impacts project stakeholders through workload, cost, and schedule. Although it may be the best solution, sound integration management ensures that stakeholders understand the new project projections and workload impacts. That way, they can negotiate with project sponsors to seek other solutions or agree and respond to the new workload. 

Helps you manage in a virtual world. One of the greatest virtual team risks is increased errors in communication or process. In one example, Team A uses metric measurements and a geographically separate Team B used imperial measures, generating costly errors. Although integration doesn’t guarantee error-free processes, integration management activities do reduce risk. Integrated plans and integrated processes help your virtual teams work in lock-step.

Helps you produce accurate project plans. Ensuring that all project planning elements are properly integrated is a great way to ensure a sound project plan. Have you added a risk mitigation strategy in your risk plan but forgot to add budget for it? Have you added tasks to fulfill your quality plan but neglected to add them to your project schedule? Focus on integration management and you are unlikely to see omissions in your plans. Project planning deliverables will be complete, which helps deliver a successful project! 

Do you have examples of integration management providing project benefits? Share them in the comments section.

For more about integration management, check out Oliver Yarborough’s Project Management Foundations: Integration course.

Coming up:

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects at their LinkedIn Office Hours session, Managing Dependencies in Hybrid Projects, on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Also, even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

Less Well-Known Benefits of Scope Management

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Scope management is all about ensuring your project produces what is required — and only what is required — to satisfy project objectives. It also delivers additional benefits you don’t often hear about:

Helps manage risk. Talk to an experienced project manager and you’ll likely hear a hard-earned lesson: the bigger your project, the riskier it becomes. For initiatives that require a lot of organizational change and project deliverables, you can break down scope into phases to make things more manageable. This breakdown into smaller chunks reduces risk and makes it easier for the organization to absorb the changes because they are applied in progressive steps. In many respects, the most effective way to manage project risk is to work closely with your stakeholders to manage scope.

Expands understanding of business requirements. Scope management is best performed through conversation. And conversation not only helps the project team understand business needs, but also helps the business recognize what is straightforward and what is difficult for the project team to produce.

In addition, good scope management means prioritizing requirements. This helps the project team understand what’s vital to the business and can enhance the business’s perspective on its own requirements! So, the business and the project team are better positioned to produce what’s most important, reducing scope and risk.

Builds confidence in the project. Detailed conversations about scope, including well-crafted questions to gain detailed understanding of business needs, can help build stakeholder confidence in the project team’s ability to meet its objectives. Good questions that inspire analysis and understanding of business needs can build trust that the project team knows what needs to be done. And starting off a project with trust from business stakeholders is a big plus.

Helps adapt to available resources. Skill shortages are everywhere and have been amplified by the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Scope management helps everyone be realistic about what can and cannot be done. Discussions about available skills help craft a realistic project schedule. Scope and resource management drive productive discussions about prioritizing work, particularly for scarce resources. The earlier these conversations and prioritizations are made and understood, the easier it will be to build a sound schedule and proceed through the project lifecycle.

Have you obtained other benefits from scope management? If so, share them with us in the comment section.

For more about scope management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Quality Management

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In addition to producing products without errors or functional issues, quality management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of quality management:

Defines a fundamental requirement. The information needed to complete a quality plan ensures that you understand a fundamental requirement’s grade. Grade, which represents the degree of optional features available in a product, is a significant element of quality and of the product(s) you produce. The required grade can significantly alter your project approach. For example, an entry level car is one that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It includes basic features that helps you get from point A to point B. That is a low-grade vehicle. However, when that entry level car is designed well and lasts a long time, it is a high-quality, low-grade vehicle. In contrast, a top-end luxury car with extra features that breaks down frequently is a low-quality, high-grade vehicle.

The required grade identifies whether the car has a requirement for those multi-way adjustable heated seats! Deliver successful projects by focusing on producing both the desired grade and quality.

Drives fact-based discussions about cost, time, intent and outcomes your project will produce. The degree of quality you build into a product depends on three things; money, time, and skill (and skill costs money.) This interdependence gives the project manager a way to justify requests for additional funding and/or time for higher quality items (which typically require more development, construction, and testing time). In addition, more expensive resources or parts may be required. 

Helps define sound completion criteria. Successful projects share a common characteristic: well-defined completion criteria. The required quality of your deliverables (including grade), components needed, and relevant performance characteristics are vital elements of sound and quantifiable completion criteria.

Protects your reputation. Producing a product for the marketplace without understanding the quality that help it sell would be foolhardy. Producing a deliverable without quality criteria is similar. You’ll waste money and time without proper descriptions of required quality and well-defined quality verification processes. Quality plans protect your business from waste and can highlight the importance of good project management by ensuring that you produce deliverables fit for their purpose. 

Have you achieved other benefits from focusing on quality in your projects? If so, tell us about them in the comments.

For more about quality management , check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Quality course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Communication Management

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Communication management is all about making sure project stakeholders understand the purpose, status, and value the project brings to the business. And it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

  • Greater understanding of stakeholders. Sound communication strategies go both ways and provide excellent opportunities for the project team to understand stakeholder needs and perspectives. This helps create better deliverables today and can help increase the value future projects bring to the business.  In addition, stakeholders who feel understood by the project team are more confident about the current project – as well as in project management as a discipline.
  • Increased project sales prowess. Half the battle for project managers can be selling the value of a project. Executing well-crafted communication plans generates ideas, recognizes business concerns, and identifies valuable business objectives to help define viable projects. 
  • Provides a periodic “project perception management” tool. A foundational piece of a communication plan is the project status report. A status report can shape and manage stakeholder perceptions. Less-experienced project managers view this report as a way to share progress compared to a published plan, which, of course, it is. However, more experienced project managers include other information such as short success stories, opportunities that have arisen, and other news that can improve or reinforce a positive perception of the project and its value to the business. 
  • Identifies vocabulary that gives you the greatest influence. The words stakeholders use to describe business problems and opportunities helps your outgoing project communication to be more meaningful. For example, the information technology lead for your project may draft reports using the phrase “data redundancy and operational integrity.” But if a stakeholder describes their concern with the phrase “data backup and restoration,” it is more effective to use the stakeholder’s terminology in your reports. That way, your communication will be understood and produce the desired reaction.

How have you pushed the benefits of communication within your projects? Share your tips with us in the comments!

For more about communication, check out Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes’s course, Communication Foundations.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.