It is no secret: Everyone Needs MinProj!

Project Customers Wish Their Teams Had MinProj

A better question is, who does not need MinProj?

Target: Who Needs MinProj?

OK, Given the types of projects that MinProj supports, who in your organization does MinProj help, and how does it help them?

Project Managers
Many of today's "Project Managers" are relatively new to the discipline. In fact, in the MinProj target audience, Project Management (PM) is often something many do in your spare time, along with your other responsibilities. Our experience is that a truly competent Project Manager can leverage the effectiveness of everyone you touch by an order of magnitude (that is 10x improvement). Is that not the most important work for you to perform? In an era when everyone is trying to "do more with less", competent PM is the best way to do so.

MinProj helps you by introducing you to the knowledge, skills, insights, processes, behaviors, and competences that it takes to be as effective as possible in your project. Not only that, but it helps you, through careful Role definition, to remove "the weakest links" from your Project Team—not by getting rid of them, but by helping them to do their job more effectively.

Resource Managers
Do you have too many projects, and not enough staff? And, is everyone competing for your highest-skilled team members? While MinProj is not a Portfolio Management tool, it does give you the power to more effectively manage each of the projects in your portfolio. Of course, you will still need to prioritize your projects in alignment with your Enterprise Strategies, and allocate the right number of people to the right projects.

MinProj helps you by providing a consistent repeatable process that helps clarify which skills you need to apply during each Phase of the project; it helps you grow the skills of your team members and project managers, so each time they touch another project they are even more effective. And it helps you avoid your most common error: Starving a project of the needed resources in the mistaken belief that you are improving efficiency; when in fact you are crippling it.

Executives
Such irony: In today's compliance-oriented environment, top Executives have piercing visibility into the status of everything in your domain... Except where your projects are concerned. And there, especially in projects with "soft", or intellectual results, versus "hard" or physical results, we fly totally blind, or nearly so. A common reaction: Impose deadlines, so we have some semblance of control. Everyone knows this drives up Cost and Time, and drives Quality and Return on Investment down. But what is an effective Executive to do?

Get some help with MinProj, that's what. Establish a more effective Project-Oriented Enterprise: How about getting more reliable estimates and schedules for a start? How about fewer surprises? What about the ability to establish a vision and lead to results, rather than reacting to crises? That is the potential of MinProj for Executives.

Executives who are Project Sponsors get special added benefits. Who wants to be the Sponsor of less-successful projects? And yet, many of us are, despite our best efforts. MinProj helps you focus on the areas that will help you the most.

The Project Management Office
Some organizations establish Project Management Offices (PMO) to "get control of those out-of-control projects". And the PMO struggles because it is always understaffed for the volume of projects you are trying to support. Some fall back to the 70's model of "project cops", rather than coaches. And then they are surprised to find themselves feared and reviled by the very teams they are supposed to be helping.

MinProj helps the PMO by helping you to institutionalize a proactive, effectiveness mentality, rather than a reactive false-sense-of-efficiency mentality. And it continues with consistent milestones so your PMO can more honestly "roll-up" the status of all projects for Customers, Resource Managers and Executives. And, if you can prevent problems rather than fight them, you can accomplish much more and truly serve the mission for which you were created.

Customers or Clients
Customers often face projects that are unresponsive to your needs, and that add burden rather than improve your status quo. You see results that are late, and that miss your most-needed Requirements; Project Teams that deliver defective results that are unusable, hard to learn to use, and even harder to live with. Sound like your situation? Not with MinProj.

One of the ways MinProj helps resolve those common problems listed above is by involving you in many of the most important early-project activities that assure your satisfaction. And, MinProj helps assure your satisfaction by making you responsible for some of the late project activities that prevent those failure patterns in your projects. The result: the business benefit you intended when you justified the project. Satisfied Customers, not project victims.

Project Team Members
Saving the best for last: most Project Team Members feel it is a career boost to work on projects. Well-managed ones, at least. Why feel your efforts are eroded by less-effective management of the project, when instead you can be gratified by the results you create?

Of course, there is a secret. Every delegated work package or activity in a project is a project of its own, one that needs the planning and tracking that the overall project requires. So every Team Member has a stake in competent Project Management, and MinProj guides you on that path.