Skip to main content
14.06.2018 | News

Rethinking project management from best practices to next practices

Embrace value delivery landscape and elevate the project professionalism
Velimir Tasic, Ph.D., Consultant, next level consulting

 

Best Practices are about today, and in most cases the applied solution is to imitate the best competitor. As the economic spotlight has relocated and the world is in a constant state of flux, progressive organizations recognize that only innovation keeps them ahead. Doing better relates to best practices, however, over the last decade, doing things differently has become a norm. The rate of change is as fast as we continually exchange ideas, and thus, we have to embrace new paradigm and utilize next practices.

 

    next practice is about tomorrow’s success, and the most lucrative organizations constantly aim to create value by doing different to the rest and not only to their competitors. Disruptive times are moving the boundaries and writing new norms. Definition of competitors has also changed, and industry edges have  blurred. Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Udacity, GitHub, Tesla are often commented as some of the main disruptors. However, a number of business leaders question disruptions impacting all kinds of companies across virtually every industry, although, that is the disruptive times we face. The business landscape is transforming and presenting both numerous opportunities and challenges. New paradigm demands intelligent leaders, and lifelong learning is economic imperative. In this light, next level consulting is proud of its success in building business excellence for almost two decades.

 

 After a delightful introduction by the conference organizers, Dr. Velimir Tasic kicked off the workshop with sharing about project management best practices and latest developments in the value delivery landscape with focus on introducing the next practices approach.

We all know that a lot of business leaders are still interested in best practices, however, Dr. Tasic suggested that if you want to be a gamechanger in disruptive times, you should focus on next practices. Although, the next practices approach has been around for some time, business leaders still find it challenging to understand and take full advantage of it. In this view, participation in the world-class conferences and investment in professional development are important and open countless opportunities for intelligent leaders to thrive in disruptive times.

 

    Nowadays, businesses are undergoing one of the major transformations. In the same time almost all business innovation is executed through projects and programs. That is good news for project leaders and business consultancy organizations, who have an essential role to play in helping firms to clarify and manage profound changes across the global economy.

 

    Dr. Tasic continued the workshop with the importance of strategy, portfolio, programs, projects, and teams alignment, as well as skills diversity, sustainability management, and projects set-up Framework. In brief, he explained the value delivery spectrum of approaches—predictive, iterative, incremental, agile, hybrid, and whatever could come next to change how we work. Afterwards, he shared the Brightline Initiative and 10 guiding principles “crafted to help leaders shrink the costly and wasteful gap between strategy design and delivery”. He strengthened the workshop with a few case studies and emphasising a number of advantages in combining the above approaches within the same program or project and among the different project phases. Furthermore, he talked about sustainability management and opportunities to build innovation focus project culture through emphasising project set-up framework. The workshop was further enhanced by group work and participants short presentations.

Dr. Tasic summarized the workshop with several tipps, and some of them were the following:

  • Embrace value delivery landscape and benefit from applying agile as well as other value delivery approaches
  • Elevate the project professionalism and move towards higher projectification

In addition to the rethinking project management workshop, on the second day of the conference, Dr. Tasic conducted a project leadership presentation. Driven by the idea that high engagement contributes to greater learning experience. He started the presentation with an exercise helping participants to better focus and master the main takeaways. In the presentation, he talked about: importance of competencies diversification, how to prepare for tomorrowland, knowing and doing difference as well as gravity of being, the significance of so called “wondering time” and mindless tasks guided by the idea of helping our brains to wander and engage in creative problem-solving, how to benefit from sustainability management practices and how to utilize professional networks and digital media to improve competitive business skills.

If you are interested in learning more about these topics Dr. Velimir Tasic is more than happy to answer your questions. Also, if you valued this article, thank you in advance for sharing it via projectmanagement.com, LinkedIn, or any other plattform.

A few comments about the conference:

Belgrade is one of the leading technology innovation centres in southeastern Europe. The PMI Serbia community is among the biggest and most active in the Western Balkans. The conference was a great success, and over 160 business leaders as well as experts from Austria, Greece, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania and Serbia have joined it.

 

 

next level holding GmbH.

Floridsdorfer Hauptstrasse 1, 1210 Vienna

Tel: +43/1/478 06 60-0

Fax: +43/1/478 06 60-60