DPPM for IBM
IBM professionals work on some of the world’s most complex business and technology initiatives. Through this hidden page, IBM personnel can obtain completely free access to all of the DPPM books, flowcharts, templates, examples, training courses, and the DPPM certification. There is no trick, upsell, second tier, or other condition to this access. The IFPPM is a non-profit organization, with a mission to help the world manage better.
Whether you are managing a major client transformation, developing new technology, implementing AI, managing an internal initiative, or simply responsible for getting complex work done, the proven DPPM resources will help you manage that work more effectively and efficiently, and enhance your career. More information is provided below.
Please do not publicize this page outside of IBM.
“I’ve been PMP certified since 2016, and this is the essence of practicality.” – Darlene Boyd
How DPPM Helps IBM Personnel
1 – Project Manager Excellence
IBM project managers operate at the intersection of technology, business, clients, partners, and multidisciplinary delivery teams. Therefore, the DPPM methodology starts by building a solid foundation in the key skills required by the project manager, or any manager or leader of teams. The essentials of communications, team formation, team dynamics, negotiation, and leadership are covered, providing the project manager with a solid grounding in the most important skills required to manage complex assemblies of human beings.
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 clients, sponsors, partners, and senior management.
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 required. For IBM, stronger project manager leadership means more effective teams, better client relationships, and more successful project results.
2 – Control Complexity
IBM undertakes projects that can combine sophisticated technology, numerous stakeholders, multiple organizations, changing client requirements, legacy environments, security constraints, vendors, regulatory considerations, and distributed teams. Therefore, DPPM begins with the recognition that controlling this complexity is the first principle of successful project delivery.
The DPPM methodology collects the most deeply practical processes from the past 100 years of PM experience to help you manage your project in the simplest and most effective way possible. This balance is especially valuable in IBM environments where teams need sufficient organization to coordinate complex work without allowing administration to slow innovation or technical delivery.
DPPM helps project managers focus on the essentials: the objective, deliverables, dependencies, critical path, expenditure, risks, communication, and stakeholder expectations. For IBM, this means project managers spend more time leading teams, resolving cross-functional problems, supporting clients, and protecting delivery commitments, while technical specialists spend more of their time working on the actual solution.
3 – Plan Efficiently & Accurately
IBM teams often need to move rapidly from an opportunity or client requirement into execution while still establishing realistic expectations for scope, schedule, resources, and cost. DPPM provides a streamlined seven-step planning thread designed to achieve this balance between planning rigor and delivery speed.
One of the greatest values of the DPPM methodology is extremely efficient planning processes that almost always require 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 managers and clients need to make any adjustments before authorizing execution, and ensures that if it is approved the effort will have sufficient budget and schedule so it can proceed with realistic expectations by everyone involved.
The result is a stronger basis for authorization and execution: sponsors and clients can understand what is being committed to, delivery teams have a realistic plan, and project managers have an effective baseline for subsequent monitoring and control.
4 – Triple Constraint Balance
IBM projects operate in environments where requirements, technologies, priorities, and client needs can change rapidly. The DPPM methodology is built around a proven approach for managing those changes, keeping the triple constraint of scope, schedule, and budget always in balance.
When additional scope is surfaced, the corresponding effects on schedule and resources must be accounted for. Likewise, an accelerated delivery date may require reduced scope, increased resources, changed sequencing, or other adjustment. DPPM makes this relationship explicit throughout the project lifecycle, and provides constructive techniques for determining the impact, and communicating the changes to stakeholders.
This is particularly useful in client-facing IBM engagements, where accommodating a reasonable customer request can be important, but repeatedly absorbing additional work without adjusting other constraints can eventually undermine the entire project.
By making trade-offs visible and discussing them constructively, IBM project managers can help clients and sponsors make informed, proactive decisions. Maintaining the triple constraint balance protects everyone: client, executives, project manager, delivery team, and the project outcome itself.
5 – Integrated Risk Management
Many IBM projects operate in environments with significant technical, organizational, commercial, security, integration, and delivery uncertainty. To address this need, the DPPM methodology ensures that professional risk management is integrated 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, eliminating 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 satisfied stakeholders and ultimate project success, increase several times over.
6 – Standardize Agility
IBM makes extensive use of Agile approaches to move solutions from ideas through implementation. DPPM complements these approaches by separating the overall project management from the methodology used to develop individual products or components. This allows IBM to maintain predictable project governance for scope, schedule, budget, risk, dependencies, stakeholders, and commitments, while individual teams have complete freedom to use Agile or other development methods most appropriate to their work.
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.
For IBM, this provides a common project-management framework around diverse delivery approaches. Teams can remain technically agile while sponsors and clients retain the overall visibility and predictability required to manage commitments, resources, financial performance, dependencies, and business outcomes.
7 – Integrate Multi-Disciplinary Teams
IBM projects can bring a wide range of disciplines together, each with its own methods, terminology, priorities, and expertise. By providing clear and simple documentation and tools, such as the one page process flowcharts, books, online courses, and project example, the DPPM methodology enables entire cross-functional teams to quickly be brought onto the same project management page.
When everyone on the effort understands the importance of the triple constraint, then uncontrolled addition of scope is much less likely. When everyone knows what the 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 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
IBM project managers encounter a wide variety of situations, from small internal initiatives to complex technology transformations and major client engagements. The DPPM materials enable everyone on your team to stock their toolbox with the most highly effective best practices from a century of project management experience to apply according to the situation.
These best practices describe the most effective way to establish objectives, gain executive support, gather requirements, build work breakdown structures, identify dependencies, estimate accurately, set milestones, quantify risk, choose contracting approaches, delegate appropriately, manage scope growth, communicate problems, monitor progress, compress schedules, manage quality, verify results, obtain product acceptance, conduct useful lessons learned, and many more.
The value for IBM is process breadth combined with practicality. A project manager does not need to invent a response each time a problem appears or apply an unnecessarily elaborate methodology to every situation. DPPM provides a suite of tools and processes that have been proven over time.
Combined with IBM’s extensive technical and industry expertise, this practical management toolbox can help IBMers address delivery problems earlier, make better decisions, and manage projects more successfully across different technologies and client environments.
9 – Scale For Small Projects
Not every IBM initiative requires the same level of project-management process. A small internal improvement, limited proof of concept, short consulting engagement, or narrowly defined technical implementation does not need the same scale of process as a large transformation program.
DPPM provides a structured method for scaling project management effort according to the size and complexity of the work, to help determine how much planning, documentation, risk analysis, monitoring, and governance are appropriate. A simplified one-page project flow provides the essential processes for smaller efforts while allowing unnecessary detail to be omitted.
This approach is particularly compatible with IBM environments where teams may need to experiment, create prototypes, develop MVPs, or execute relatively small client initiatives quickly.
The small project flowchart, backed up by the rest of the DPPM 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 where IBM management or clients require objective evidence of delivery progress, DPPM describes how to implement the sophisticated Earned Value Management (EVM) technique in a maximally practical fashion.
The DPPM methodology simplifies the complexity of the 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.
For major IBM efforts, these measures will enable you to provide highly reliable cost and schedule projections, determine likely risk budget sufficiency, focus monthly project reviews, and greatly enhance client, sponsor, and stakeholder confidence in the governance, reporting, and competence of the project manager and team.
11 – Customize A Realistic Example
The comprehensive Magical Devices Version 3 (MDV3) project provides IBM project managers, leads, and teams with a realistic example so they can see how best practice practical project management 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
IBM requires project managers who don’t just understand project management conceptually, they can actually implement it in the most efficient fashion. You can demonstrate to management, clients, and stakeholders that you have those skills by earning your DPPM certification, demonstrating that you don’t just understand project management, you know how to implement it in the simplest, most effective, most 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 in real life, 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.
For IBMers seeking broader responsibilities, the underlying capabilities can also be valuable beyond formal project manager roles. Consultants, architects, technical leaders, product professionals, team leads, and managers all benefit from understanding how complex multidisciplinary work can be planned, coordinated, controlled, and successfully delivered in the most efficient way possible.
IBM and related IBM product and service names are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. The Institute For Practical Project Management is an independent organization and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by IBM.
Testimonials
Christopher Irons
Over the course of a 20 year career I have purchased many training materials, video courses, study guides, etc, and this was hands down the best material I have ever used.
Dan Bischoff, PMP
I am interviewing for a PM position in two days. This course boosted my confidence and gave me valuable insight into key PMBOK areas I haven’t considered since I received my PMI certification in 2012. And I’m able to improve my resume since I now understand how PM functions I’ve been performing for years are much more valuable than I thought.
Mark Thorogood, PMP
I have been a PMP since 2006 and learned so much from this course, truly outstanding.
Susan Steigler, PMP
This is by far the best project management course I have ever taken.
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Marcelo Palenzuela
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Allan Madhuram
The only course you will need. Walks you through all the phases of project management. With examples, anecdotes, and most importantly – templates. Highly recommend.
Raj Bidika
I took this course after earning my PMP certification, and am stunned by the practical insights it provides. Thank you! I definitely recommend for both newbies and experienced Project Managers.
Mark April
This was the best project management course that I have taken. I recommend to anyone interested in project management. Really above and beyond what I expected.
Alexander Feravich
Really straightforward and clear. Wish I had taken this before I sat for my PMP test.
Alain Yeno
Great course, perfectly delivered. The PMBOK Guide applied to reality. I plan to repeat this course over and over again.
Saad Faruqui
Not only does this course teach you practical project management, it also teaches you life skills you will keep for a lifetime. Exceptional. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.
Rufus Okomhanru
Crisp and direct, no blabbing. Wise to go with this first before consulting any other material.
Vladimir Mitev
The course was amazing. A lot of real life examples. In my 17 years of PM experience I have never taken a more concise, informative, and easy to understand PM walk-through.
David Morrison
I’ve been managing projects for several years, and picked up key points which will improve my work in the future, and would have made previous projects significantly better if I’d known them sooner. Highly recommended.
Nicholas Ikpi
This turned out to be the best money I ever spent. My only regret is I didn’t take this course sooner.
Francisco Zapata
One of the greatest courses I have ever had. Short videos you can digest at your own pace. A warm environment, seems that you are talking with him.