PMI highlights some of the top reasons for project failure in this read here. The list includes ‘poor alignment’, ‘lack of executive support’, and ‘unclear expectations’, to name a few. This is where project management standardization can come to the aid of Project Managers.

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Project management standardization means creating an organizational or at least a team-wise standard for managing your projects. In some cases, it could be challenging to bring your project teams on board with having a standard way of project management. Different teams could be set in their own ways of managing projects and a system may not always be welcome at first. This is why it is essential that you convey the advantages of project management standardization to your teams in a transparent manner. To begin with, standardizing your project management processes helps break silos and brings different units of your organization together.

Here are 7 benefits of project management standardization:

1. Improved efficiency

Managing projects in a standard way means defining the roles and responsibilities of the team members with clarity. Everyone on the team knows what they are supposed to do and by when. This increases accountability, and in return, this improves the overall efficiency of your human resources assigned to a project.

2. Higher consistency

Standardizing your project management processes ensures that all your projects across portfolios are managed in the same manner. Whether it is the way of recording data, sharing project reports, budgeting, or any other project-related process, the teams can do it in a consistent manner with the help of standardization. There is less to no scope for any surprises along the way. Higher consistency helps project managers to do their job with ease while allowing better control to senior executives on the entire portfolio of projects.

3. Better communication

Standardized project management practices can help to improve communication between team members and stakeholders. With consistent ways of doing a project task and sharing project information, there is more transparency, which can lead to better decision-making and timely problem-solving.

4. Easier onboarding training

With standardized processes and practices, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time there is a new hire or a new member joins your team. Standardized project portfolio management processes make it easier to train new team members and onboard them more quickly. Cross-department knowledge and resource sharing also become easier with standardized procedures.

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5. Better risk management

When you have a consistent, standard way of managing projects, it is easier to identify, assess, and mitigate risks. You can see when your projects or a part of your projects is falling off track. It is easier to catch mistakes and take the necessary corrective measures. A standard way of project reporting leads to transparency of information, which is key to identifying risks and issues at the right time.

6. Better resource planning and allotment

Project managers can often find it difficult to juggle between different projects and deadlines. Organizational standard project portfolio management processes enable project managers to switch between projects as their time, effort, and resources are accounted for in an organized manner. It also allows stakeholders to manage and control multiple projects simultaneously. From project sponsors to project team members, everyone knows what and when is to be delivered. This minimizes the scope of any timeline clashes and ensures that the projects stay on track to success as well.

7. Greater scalability

Standardized project management practices make it easier to scale up or down operations as needed. As described above, the standardization of PPM processes allows for better resource planning. Better-planned resources allow more flexibility so you can move them as per the demand and stage of the project. Once your PPM processes and practices are standardized, you can easily replicate them to any new project area at the required scale.

In summary, project management success goes hand in hand with standardization. You cannot align your project stakeholders and teams with your strategic project management goals without having a clear, consistent way of doing project management.