Project Management ConsultingOriel, in partnership with Boston University’s Corporate Education Center, offers consulting services that have been designed to help you implement effective project management practices at your organization.  Our consultants can help your organization:

  • Develop project management roles and competencies
  • Assess staff against project manager competencies
  • Create strategic training and mentoring plans
  • Establish a project management support portal
  • Develop an organization-specific executive overview


Oriel can provide any or all of these services, or we can focus on only those components required to assist you in completing or beginning the process of developing a project management practice.  Each step is described in further detail below.
 
Additionally, Oriel can develop templates and a project management methodology to support the project management practices that already exist within your organization.

Develop Project Management Roles and Competencies
In the first stage of the process of establishing a project management practice within your organization, Oriel consultants work with you so that you come to understand the levels of project management roles that exist, whether formally or informally.  These may include:

  • Project Team Member
  • Project Team Lead
  • Project Leader
  • Project Manager
  • Program Manager
       or
  • Level 1 Project Manager
  • Level 2 Project Manager
  • Level 3 Project Manager


 
As part of defining project management roles, competencies for each function must also be established.  Oriel uses the following methods to determine the appropriate roles and competencies for each function:

  • Interviews with the staff members who are performing those functions
  • Questionnaires
  • Conversations with managers/supervisors
  • Statistics from your organization’s human resources department  and other department heads
  • Data from the project management office
  • Other sources that you determine to be important to your organization


Once this information has been collected and examined, you can use it to develop career paths for project managers to help them grow and thrive within your organization.  Oriel consultants are happy to work with you to establish these career paths.

Assess Staff Against Project Manager Competencies
Once the project management roles have been established and competencies mapped to each role, the next step is to assess all appropriate individuals against those competencies.  You can accomplish this via online assessments.  In circumstances where only a small number of people are to be evaluated, assessments can also be performed by interviewing the individuals being evaluated, their supervisors/managers, and project team members.

  • Subjective Online Assessment:  This self-paced online tool appraises project management skills in all three competency components: technical, personal, and business/leadership. The subjective assessment is most effectively used when the project manager’s supervisor plays an active role by evaluating the project manager based on his/her knowledge.
  • Objective Online Assessment:  The self-paced, online objective skills assessment tool can appraise both technical and business/leadership skills in terms of project management.

Both of these assessment tools can be tailored to include competencies that are specific to your organization.  You may also elect to use your organization’s own assessment tools to assess the skill sets of your personnel.
 
Create Strategic Training and Mentoring Plans
Once the assessments have been put together, Oriel consultants will work with you to create strategic training and mentoring plans to:

  • Improve the skills of staff members based on the results of their assessments
  • Help personnel acquire additional, critical (“soft”) skills to help them in their personal and career development
  • Increase the skills of junior members of the project team by having them partner with more senior members for skill transfer
  • Create an ongoing annual training program for your organization


Training materials might include an Oriel curriculum, an in-house curriculum created specifically for your organization, or a curriculum from another provider that your organization already utilizes.


Establish a Project Management Support Portal
Now that you’ve established project management practices within your organization, Oriel can develop and host a portal site to provide you with:

  • Collaboration/information-sharing forums
  • Access to tools/template
  • Best practices knowledge base
  • Listing of all project resources within your organization
  • Current and past project information
  • Project status tracking
  • Project schedule and budget maintenance


Develop an Organization-Specific Executive Overview
An initiative like the one described above can be rolled out only with the full support of top management.  To help with this, Oriel can develop and present executive overviews to assist your organization’s top management in communicating the following:

  • Benefits of establishing a formal project management practice within the organization Project plan – from gathering information through rollout
  • Value added to the organization
  • Measuring the value: business impact/ROI

 
Whatever the size of your organization or whatever field you’re working in, Oriel consultants can give you the project management training, consulting, and expertise necessary to optimize your organization’s efforts and increase your position in the market.  Turn to Oriel for all of your consulting needs.