| | July 20168CIOReviewProject Management­An EvolutionBy Omer Awan, Senior Regional CIO, EMHSProject management like many other disciplines has evolved over time to not only stay relevant but to continue to deliver the value that users have come to expect from it. Traditional waterfall methodology takes on a sequential approach, is still practiced and well suited for certain areas. However, more projects are leveraging some form of Agile (an incremental and iterative approach) and can comprise of Scrum, Lean, Kanban, a hybrid, and so on. The purpose of this article is not to advocate for any specific form of Agile but to highlight a few concepts and areas that I have found very useful over the years in different roles as a project manager, sponsor, and user.Waste ReductionThis is at the heart of Lean and what this simply means is to provide high quality product or service to users with fewer resources by leveraging processes that produces zero waste. There are several different forms of waste and it can include wait, non-productive or redundant meetings, defects, over-processing, over-production, and so on. The idea is that anything that does not add value and is not a regulatory, legal, or compliance mandated activity, is probably waste.When you buy a car, you start becoming more aware of cars with similar make and model. The number of that type of car hasn't increased, but your awareness of it has. Similarly, this concept requires that the project team put on the Lean glasses and review the project meetings, attendees, activities, and milestones to identify and eliminate waste. This does not require becoming an expert in Lean but only to recognize and remove activities and processes that add no value.HandoffsThe true power of project management comes to light when there are several different teams involved that need to work together to develop a Omer Awan
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