What is enterprise project management?
Enterprise project management in its general meaning is a system of managing projects in large companies with over 1000 employees on a company-wide scale. In the current ever-changing environment, enterprise project management main goal is to make organizations flexible and able to adapt to transformations.
It’s very common that large enterprise companies run multiple projects simultaneously. These projects may at the first glance seem not connected but in the end, they are all related. They all exist for the benefit of the same company, and they are all working towards the same goal. That’s why large enterprises need to have a system that allows managing different projects and connect all parts (departments) of a company.
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), there are several initiatives that a large company should perform in order to have a sustainable project management system:
- Use a project management software that can support various projects and can operate on a company-wide level
- Create a dedicated department that will work to support a company-wide project management system and principles
- Support “stages of growth” models to improve project-management capabilities
Why enterprise project management is different from general project management?
The key point is that a general project management approach is to have one project. This project has its goals and the tasks that you need to do to reach those goals. Enterprise project management has to deal with multiple goals of multiple departments/teams. All these goals in the end help to achieve broader organizational goals. General project management focuses on goals achievement, and project success is defined by them. When you deal with projects within one large enterprise, there may be times when the goals of one particular project won’t be met. But the overall success is not defined by that.
Project management system established within large companies should be flexible and follow agile principles. Ideally, it should allow changing goals and objectives on the go as the environment evolves every second. When a company grows it tends to become slower. That’s why it’s very important for it to have a project management system allowing fast changes and flexibility.
Implementation of enterprise project management
Successful implementation of enterprise project management starts with a thorough review of all existing projects, tools that a company uses and its organizational culture. Sometimes, you should perform serious transformations in a company even before adopting any special project management tool. Organizational culture should be ready to embrace the possibility of changes and the agile approach.
Only when you have done all the internal preparations, a company should think of a project management app that can support all the projects and be flexible enough to suit every team in a large company.