Project Management Skill Development Case Study

The Challenge To better satisfy internal customer requests to take a greater role in planning and managing projects, a major state agency’s management team decided they needed to change their culture to ensure good project management. They requested that Watermark assist them to improve their project management processes on initiating, planning, prioritizing, and completing projects.

The Solution Watermark worked closely with the directors and training manager of the agency, and created a custom project management curriculum based on our standard offerings. We “partnered” with the client to train more than 2/3 of their staff, provided baseline templates for agency-wide use, consulted with directors to create a project prioritization process, provided an on-site, on-call mentor available to any staff that sought the help. The mentoring created a great deal of consistency in how project management was applied across the organization.

The Benefits In the client’s words, “…we have an emerging project management process in place. We have a management team that understands and supports this process and many employees who are true believers and practitioners. We are currently looking into the creation of a PMO to continue and build on our efforts. We are not completely there, but we are a lot further down the road than we were two years ago. There have been many participants in this process, but we all recognize the work and commitment of …Watermark as key to our success.”