Effectively Managing Multiple Projects

St. Michael’s follows the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge® (PMBOK) for managing our contracts. Using this as the baseline, we are then able to apply key success factors toward program and project success in the following areas:

  • Create Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) to show complex activities in a single viewpoint of measurable, traceable, and functional tasks
  • Manage risk in four continuous steps: Identify, Analyze, Mitigate, and Monitor
  • Employ Cost/Benefit Analysis to review financial requests, assess new and existing program tradeoffs, and explore alternative funding methods
  • Conduct Feasibility Determination by objectively examining several different factors prior to beginning a project or task
  • Create realistic schedules with identified critical paths and optimization
  • Determine reasonableness of schedules based on project constraints (scope, resources, budget, etc.)
  • Analyze changes in schedule and impacts for all affected organizations
  • Document milestones and track major events, completed phases, and deliverables, including those with external dependencies
  • Identify and mitigate risks capable of impacting schedule delays
  • Develop Communications Management Plans for agency-wide communications
  • Create governance structure based on roles, responsibilities, expectations, and interdependencies
  • Produce marketing materials that convey a consistent message
  • Develop content for meetings, draft participant surveys, and create communications products focused on your organization’s key topic areas
  • Provide comprehensive documentation and presentation writing, editing, and production capabilities for executive briefings
  • Prepare metrics analysis reports that record quality and quantity levels of productivity
  • Track schedule progress at program, project, or task level, milestones, phases or stages, actual costs verses planned costs, and/or deliverable quality aspects including defects
  • Determine how delivery is being performed against the program management plan and/or need for corrective actions
  • Update metrics for status for change requests, corrective actions, preventative actions, and defect repairs along with their estimates to completion

Program Management Key Success Story

St. Michael’s plays a critical role in an agency’s highly successful strategic communication campaign. We develop and design a “Top Down Approach” to gain acceptance and overcome resistance to change. We compose the agency’s monthly, agency-wide audit readiness newsletter, to inform and enable over 26,000 civilian and military personnel located in 48 US States and 28 countries to support the audit readiness initiative. We draft all Director and Deputy Director level communiqués relating to audit readiness to provide a single “voice”; and develop themes and messages that inform and communicate audit readiness messages that promote awareness of status and upcoming milestones, describe audit readiness progress, and recognize key contributors. The result has been unqualified success, based on a variety of metrics that include:

  • 90% of Enterprise staff know what Audit Readiness is
  • 79% of staff recognize practices and procedures that contribute to audit readiness
  • 78% of staff understand how they personally contribute to the goal of being audit ready
  • 65% believe audit readiness will have a positive impact on their ability to achieve the agency’s mission