Benefits of the DPPM Methodology
The DPPM methodology will help you manage your teams, senior management, projects, and career as effectively as possible. IFPPM members from Booz Allen, Capgemini, Cognizant, DXC, EY, Honeywell, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, and other professional organizations trust the DPPM methodology to help them optimize the success of their projects. It can help you too. More information on the twelve main benefits of the DPPM approach can be found below.
“I am stunned by the practical insights this provides. I definitely recommend for all new and experienced project managers.” – Raj Bidika, PMP
1 – Project Manager Excellence
The DPPM book and online course start with a concentrated overview of the key skills required by the project manager, or any manager or leader of teams. The practical essentials of communications, team formation, team dynamics, negotiation, and leadership are covered, to ensure the project manager has a solid foundation in the most important skills required to manage their teams to success.
Then throughout the material, the DPPM methodology integrates management essentials with the technical best practices, ensuring the project manager knows how to most effectively direct, delegate, and motivate their teams, problem solve, and relate in the most productive fashion with the stakeholders, sponsor, and other senior management layers such as PMOs.
The need for the project manager to be the single-point truth teller is emphasized throughout, and several best practice methods for constructive communication are provided to help you negotiate with stakeholders when problems occur. Project managers are leaders of teams. The better leaders they are, the more the team will follow them, the better the outcome will be, and the more enjoyable the project will be for everyone involved.
2 – Control Complexity
The DPPM methodology is founded on the fundamental recognition that complexity is the number one common challenge in all project work. Therefore, the solution is to apply the most deeply practical processes collected from the past 100 years of PM experience, so you can manage your project in the simplest and most effective way possible.
This gives you the optimum balance of process excellence with minimum process overhead, so you can spend most of your time leading, managing, and solving the problems your team cannot, and your teams can spend most of their time on the actual work.
By controlling the complexity and preventing it from getting out of control, you will be able to maximize budget and schedule performance, increase customer satisfaction with a quality end result, and enhance the arc of your career as you gain a reputation for managing projects efficiently to the most successful outcomes (possible in the circumstances ;-).
3 – Plan Efficiently & Accurately
Most of project success is determined in the planning stage, before the execution even starts. As the great project manager Dwight Eisenhower so wisely said: “Plans are useless, but planning is essential”.
One of the greatest values of the DPPM methodology is the collection of extremely efficient planning processes into a seven-step streamlined thread that almost always requires 5% or less of the overall project effort, while providing you with a scope, schedule, and budget planning baseline accurate to within +/- 10%.
This planning efficiency, the sweet-spot between effort and value, provides the level of information the sponsor needs to make any adjustments before authorizing execution, and ensures that if it is approved the project will have sufficient budget and schedule so it can proceed with realistic expectations by everyone involved.
The $44M MDV3 project example provides a complete project plan illustrating the results of this streamlined process.
4 – Triple Constraint Balance
All of the DPPM methodology is built around the triple constraint, the inter-relationship between scope, schedule, and budget, the proven project management “triangular steering wheel”.
At its very simplest, the most important function of the project manager is to understand that a change in any one of these three constraints requires a change in one or both of the others. And then to stand strong, protect the project, and ensure the required changes are made to the others so the triple constraint stays balanced at all times. Everything in the DPPM methodology rotates around this fundamental imperative, and explains how to achieve it, including constructive methods of communicating with stakeholders.
The benefits of rigorous triple constraint management are considerable, ensuring that plans are always sufficiently resourced, the business case is realistic, changes to scope, schedule, or budget are always appropriately balanced, and accurate decisions can be made about prioritization of the constraints whenever required throughout the monitoring and control.
5 – Integrated Risk Management
The DPPM methodology ensures that professional risk management is integrated with the project management throughout the effort.
Risks are identified and mitigated to the maximum extent possible during planning before execution even starts. The risk register is quantified with professional estimating practices, so the budget and schedule reserves are realistic and defendable. The schedule reserve is allocated according to critical chain best practices to protect the key customer date, and can be used for anything that goes wrong anywhere on the project. The risk budget status provides clear metrics for monthly project reviews, making status reporting and decision points for baseline changes easy.
Integrated risk management makes monitoring and control a gentle adjustment process, instead of emergency last minute corrections. Project management then becomes an enjoyable game of trying to see if you can actually give some of the risk budget back. The morale of the project team, and the chances of ultimate project success and satisfied stakeholders, then increase several times over.
6 – Standardize Agility
The DPPM methodology resolves the relationship between project management and project development, by situating project development properly within the product creation phases of the project management execution stage.
This means that project management best practices maintain the predictable framework senior management requires for the overall project, while the product development team can choose waterfall, incremental, iterative, spiral, lean, agile, scrum, Kanban, or other methodologies as most appropriate for the specific development required.
And then, for all projects, including process oriented and non-technology projects, the DPPM methodology emphasizes the fundamental value of agility be integrated into the design and development, so the product, service, or result is created in multiple iterations, with user reviews and input in progress, to ensure the final result meets the customer needs. Best practice triaging processes are also provided to balance the essentials of finding required scope changes without falling into uncontrolled scope creep.
Regardless of what you are creating, integration of agility is the most effective way to eliminate explosions of schedule and last minute failures, and guarantee the customer is happy with the outcome.
7 – Integrate Multi-Disciplinary Teams
By providing clear and simple documentation and tools, including the one page flowcharts, books, online courses, and project example, entire cross-functional teams can quickly be brought onto the same project management page, including core teams, consultants, architects, analysts, software developers, engineers, data specialists, security professionals, business experts, support departments, procurement staff, vendors, and customer personnel.
When everyone on the project understands the importance of the triple constraint, then uncontrolled addition of scope is much less likely. When everyone knows what the project critical path is, and why it is important, focus on the most important work is much more dedicated. When everyone understands why the schedule risk buffer is allocated according to critical chain principles and must be preserved to deal with late breaking problems, schedule performance by the entire team is much more consistent. And so on.
Once everyone involved in your project understands the proven project management best practices, using the same terminology and vocabulary, they begin to function as one well-oiled, high performing team.
8 – Stock Your Toolbox
The DPPM materials enable everyone on your team to stock their toolbox with the most highly effective best practices from the past century of project management experience.
Including how to constructively communicate and resolve disagreement; establish a culture of mutual accountability; get and keep senior management support; get agreement on the objective before you start; size the effort to spend in planning; conduct thorough requirements gathering; prepare work breakdown structures at the appropriate level; prepare accurate precedence diagrams and identify all project dependencies; perform accurate estimation; define appropriate schedule milestones; choose the best contract structures; quantify risks accurately; effectively delegate and motivate; manage and offset scope growth; optimally manage expectations; monitor and control efficiently; compress schedule when required; manage the quality essentials; constructively communicate when there are problems; hold three party acceptance events; conduct scenario based verification; deliver with customer confidence; close your team with a human touch; hold optimally effective lessons learned meetings; and many, many others.
9 – Scale For Small Projects
Use standard sizing metrics generated during initiation to determine how to scale the planning and project management process for smaller and less demanding projects.
Use the tailored one-page flowchart for small projects to ensure you have applied the appropriate project management best practices to shorter projects with smaller teams, while ensuring the practical best practices and documentation required are streamlined down to the level required for the scale of each specific effort. Use standard rules of thumb for small projects to establish a risk budget quickly and easily.
The small project flowchart, backed up by the rest of the DPPM books, courses, and other material, enable you to focus on just the top-level most important processes appropriate for the size of your project, while at the same time ensuring nothing important is missed, to manage and deliver smaller efforts with limited budget and schedule as efficiently as possible.
10 – Implement EVM For Larger Projects
For larger and more critical projects, and whenever contractual requirements mandate it, the DPPM methodology describes how to implement the sophisticated Earned Value Management (EVM) technique in a maximally practical fashion.
The DPPM methodology simplifies the complexity of the standard EVM definitions to clearly separate estimated value, planned value, and earned value into three natural categories. Similarly, it extends the standard EVM approach to estimating future budget expenditure with an objective approach to estimate likely schedule requirements based on progress so far. Guidance is also provided so you can assign cost accounts at the right level of granularity to support the EVM methodology without overwhelming the administration function.
When the project is big enough or important enough, EVM will enable you to provide objective status throughout monitoring and control to produce highly reliable cost and schedule projections, determine likely risk budget sufficiency, focus monthly project reviews, and greatly enhance sponsor, customer, and stakeholder confidence in the project governance, reporting, and the competence of the project manager and team.
11 – Customize A Realistic Example
The comprehensive Magical Devices Version 3 (MDV3) project provides project managers, leads, and entire teams with a realistic example so they can see how the DPPM methodology translates to actual documentation for a complex, multi-domain, $44M project.
The MDV3 example provides complete, realistic examples of all the key project documents, including a project charter, project plan, stakeholder register, requirements baseline, work breakdown structure, precedence diagram, Gantt schedule, risk register, and more. The example enables everyone on your team to understand how to achieve the best balance between thorough documentation and practical focus that makes the DPPM methodology so effective for maximizing the chances of project success with the least process overhead, so everyone can spend most of their time on the actual work.
Both MS Office and OpenDocument soft-copies of all the documentation are provided so you can easily customize the examples as required for your current projects.
12 – Enhance Your Career
Enhance your career by earning your DPPM certification to demonstrate to management and employers that you have a foundational understanding of implementation level, hands-on, applied project management in real life.
Read the DPPM book, take the online course at your own pace, review the MDV3 example, and then write the exam to obtain your DPPM certification and demonstrate to management and employers that you don’t just understand project management, you know how to implement it in the simplest, most effective, most deeply practical way possible.
When you add the DPPM certification to your resume, you give your sponsors and stakeholders the confidence their project is in safe, competent hands. The DPPM certification communicates to everyone that you have a thorough understanding of applied project management skills, and the necessary foundation to manage even the largest and most complex efforts in a maximally effective fashion, providing an invaluable accelerator for your career.