Program And Portfolio Management Information Systems Assignment
Added on 2021-05-31
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PROGRAM AND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS 1Program And Portfolio Management Information SystemsNameDate
PROGRAM AND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2Introduction and summary of outcomesProject managers are becoming increasingly under pressure to deliver more with much less; they are required to better handle the expectations of stakeholders, ensure customer requirements are met, foster innovation, all with decreased resources that require them to deliver projects in muchshorter durations. These are consequences of an increasingly competitive business environment, where product life cycles are reduced to a matter of months, rather than the old business environment where a manufacturing company, for example, would expect to have a production life cycle lasting a few years to a decade. The increasing demands o project managers also requires them to work in collaboration and cooperation with other stakeholders, a situation that has led to highly qualified project managers with the right skills increasingly failing to deliver successful projects. But the problem is not a lack of tools and techniques, it is a matter of perception; managersand organizations still view projects in snapshots as different parts, rather than as a system made up of parts that affect each other and affect and are affected by the external environment. Adopting a systems thinking approach based on systems engineering methodologies will greatly aid project managers to deliver more successful projects, given that project management methodologies such asSix Sigma, Lean, BABOK, and PMBOK have their origins in systems and systems engineering. This paper summarizes the main learning outcomes with evidence for week two and week three course learning units Itemised learning outcomesa LO1Summary: Explain the relevance of systems thinking to the project, program and portfolio managerProject management itself as a field has its roots I systems engineering, as shown by the various project management methodologies such as lean, PMBOK, and Six Sigma; in undertaking systems analysis, one requirement is the setting of credible and clear objectives and formulating viable alternatives. Systems thinking then becomes relevant to program, project, and portfolio managers because it is a goal seeking and places great emphasis on feedback control and communications. Systems thinking entails breaking down a project into its basic elements and then seeing them as parts that make up a whole; parts and elements that affect each others, and have inputs, processes and tools, and outputs, that can also be inputs for other elements and other systems; systems affect various different elements in the external environment and are also affected by the external environment. For project managers, looking at projects through the lens of systems thinking is akin to using the BIM (building information modeling) approach to construction, where all elements in a building project are interlinked for their entire life cycle, from design, to
PROGRAM AND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS 3engineering, materials, construction, and facilities management, such that a change in one aspect; such as materials or supplier affects all other systems (Sankaran, Haslett & Sheffield, 2010). It then becomes a useful tool for project managers and even organizations to view projects as interlinked parts, so that the effects of a decision made on one element and how it will affect other elements is well understood before the decision is implemented. For instance, in the BP deep water project, a proposal was made to install a better system to plug oil wells in the event of a leak; but because the organization had an overriding policy of cutting costs, this plug was not put in place, because managers only sought to cut costs; a systems thinking would have made them understand that while the plug would cost some more money, it could prevent a disaster that cost several hundreds of millions of dollars more (Association for Project management, 2017). As such, systems thinking becomes a useful tool to the project, program, and portfolio manager because it enables a holistic view of the entire project as a system for better understanding how the sum of its different parts affect each other; this not only aid s in better decision making, but will ensure decisions are made on time before things get out of hand. Evidence: The BP Deep-water Horizon oil spill disaster in the gulf of Mexico (Moore, 2010)b LO2Summary: Identify different systems thinking tools and techniques to aid project managers solve project problems.Systems thinking requires the use of various tools that project managers can use to better manage projects and have a high level, holistic view of the entire project. One of the best tools to use in systems thinking is the causal loop diagrams (CLD). Systems thinking is like a language for representing interdependent and complex issues that project managers face in every project; CLD’s are the sentences used to describe the complexities of issues in projects that identify the main variables within the system and indicating the causal between these variables through links, which are like verbs in a sentence. Linking several loops together a concise story concerning a specific issue pr problem can be created. The CLD is made up of four main variables that include variables, the links between the variables, the signs on the links (these show the interconnection between variables), and the loop sign (this shows the behavior type that the system will produce). Presenting project problems through the perspective of the CLD, the structural forces that result in puzzling behavior can be better understood (Lannon, 2018). Another tool that the project manager can use in systems thinking is the stock and flow diagrams; these are the foundations of systems modeling. Stocks refer to entities that can be
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