Digital Transformation

Program management is an unseen engine propelling industries forward, from tech marvels to healthcare breakthroughs. It influences the long-term success and sustainability of businesses. Effective team management is crucial for talent retention and high morale, while sound financial decisions are key to maintaining financial health. Within this dynamic environment, I started as the sole project manager.

My initial key deliverable involved monitoring all projects within the program, addressing blockers, and forecasting project needs. The challenge? The team structure varied, reflecting the unique nature of their work: Scrumban, lean, predictive, all with tailored ceremonies, but without dedicated PMs. Planning, grooming, and monitoring required constant communication, with me navigating from meeting to meeting, while also actively managing other internal projects and setting up project management toolkits.

The teams, though small, were very experienced. Their projects required expert knowledge, which no project manager alone could possess. After drilling through similar cases and ways of improvements, a question popped up. Why not let specialized projects be led directly by these capable specialists? With proper assistance, education, and tools, they could be fast, autonomous, and motivated. But how could we funnel everyone's progress into one place for program management to make informed decisions, and simultaneously create a project governance framework for future organizational endeavors?

I addressed this by introducing a Project Management Information System (PMIS) for detailed planning and real-time automatic updating of the program's information. Previously, these actions were segmented into an online task management tool, offline MS Project instances for program roadmaps, and offline digital documentation for reports. After evaluating five alternatives, I found that Jira software from Atlassian met most requirements.

The tool's introduction had three phases: an initial phase to establish a backbone for a few active projects and demonstrate capabilities, followed by an evaluation and acceptance from the team and management; a standardization phase to integrate all program projects with created automated roadmaps, user training, and security validations based on European standards and internal processes; and finally, the adoption phase, where the program would run exclusively on the PMIS, with distributed knowledge among teams to drive their projects independently. At this stage, other operational departments could also integrate their work into the system, kick-starting their introduction phase and evaluation.

This system included 15 different development projects and is the main tool for product changes, incorporating inputs from quality, production, supply chain, engineering, and product development. At the end, behind every achievement lies a team of people with resilience, potential and vision, a responsibility I feel gratified to have been entrusted with.