Principle of project management

1.                     Business Value: The goal of all project work is to deliver business value.

2.                     Judgment: Empower project staff to make decisions about methodology application and trade-offs between scope, schedule, and budget when necessary.

3.                     Enterprise Perspective: Consider the impact of project decisions on enterprise value, not just project or PMO objectives.

4.                     Shared Accountability: Create commitment to a shared vision of project outcomes.

5.                     Stakeholder Partnership: Establish personal connections with stakeholders based on leadership, trust, and credibility.

6.                     Proactivity: Take a proactive approach to identifying and resolving project challenges.

7.                     Risk Management: Enable informed tradeoffs between project and portfolio risks and potential rewards.

8.                     Time Management: Encourage PMs to value time—both stakeholders’ and their own—when making project execution decisions and managing meetings.

9.                     Cost Efficiency: Calibrate resource use and project management costs with project needs and expected returns.

10.                  Reuse: When possible, utilize existing processes and tools before creating or buying new ones.

But the most successful project management organizations don’t just dust off these principles every year when they’re creating their annual plan. They embed them into the day-to-day rhythm of project management work so that the principles become the guide for interactions between project management staff and stakeholders, and the lens through which PMOs and project managers make decisions about resource allocation and skills development. To really make them come alive, they post them on the wall in every team meeting room, include them at the top of the agenda for all project meetings, and hand them to every new PM on their first day at work.