Effective project management gets things done, on time and on budget. It also helps organisations deliver projects and products across teams with consistency and efficiency.

Project management involves planning, executing, monitoring and reporting. It’s about making sure that things happen at the right time, in the right way. It’s about communicating roles and responsibilities, expectations and goals, and progress.

Project management in a digital world has extended into product management because it requires an audience, or user-centric approach to planning and implementation and a mastery of the latest approaches and tools.

Agile approaches to product management include cycles of testing, optimisation and learning. Products are developed by multi-skilled self-managed teams. This means that the number of steps for decision-making is reduced and organisations can become more responsive and efficient.

Things to think about

  • Do you have an established project or product management approach across the organisation?
  • Are there clear processes, systems and tools for digital projects?
  • Do you work in multi-skilled cross-organisational teams to plan, deliver and optimise products which meet an audience need?
  • Do you have a pathway for taking learning from previous projects/products, and incorporating them into new projects/products?

Project management: five levels of maturity

1. Inconsistent

Project management is done differently for different projects.

2. Basic

Some common project management principles are used.

3. Progressing

Projects are managed through a structured but often lengthy process. This does not suit every area of activity in an organisation.

4. Developing

Agile project management principles and practice are used, mostly on digital projects and products. There is a launch, test and improve approach.

5. Impactful

Agile principles are consistently used in all projects to empower multi-skilled teams, improve efficiency and increase impact.

Resources

Projectmanagement.com has lots of project management resources and useful discussions about strategy.

Average score

Overall, for this competency, organisations average out at level 2.5.

Scores by year

These graphs show the average scores for this competency over the last few years, expressed as a percentage.

  • 2020 56% 56%
  • 2019 52% 52%
  • 2018 56% 56%