To thrive in today’s age of disruption, professionals need to dedicate their time and effort to constantly upgrade their knowledge and skillset. According to the World Economic Forum, no professional can do without collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication.
Having recognized the importance of these four values and driven by the constant need to get out of our comfort zone and grow professionally, we decided to organize a series of workshops that will help our managers make smarter and faster decisions through critical thinking that will take our organization into the future.
On top of this, in collaboration with our career development team, and based on our competency framework evaluation, we have recognised a few areas of improvement: stakeholder management, risk management and software development lifecycle management. This also inspired us to bring all the managers together, ignite their curiosity, open discussions, and reveal ways how to be more efficient in these three areas. Through a mixture of exercises and theory, we demonstrated why and how to improve problem-solving abilities and get on the same page with teams and clients.
Workshop #1: HTEC PM/SM Handbook
30 project manager and Scrum masters participated in this first workshop that took place in Ruma, Borkovac, and it was segmented into two time slots. During the first session, we used our collective brain power and experience to do the anatomy of the draft version of the Handbook, make the necessary edits, upgrades and offer suggestions for its improvement. During the second session, we discussed good practices of risk management, which was immediately followed with practical work, where our managers had a chance to gain some hands-on experience and interact in micro groups. After the workshop, they were presented with the results.
We asked Marko Pavlovic, Head of Project Management Office at HTEC Group, to share more about the first workshop in the series as well as to give us a bigger picture of the values these kinds of workshops will bring to our growth and individual development of our project managers:
“At this very moment, there are 46 project managers and scrum masters distributed across various offices and departments in HTEC Group, but, due to the Covid-related circumstances, they have not had a chance to get together, meet in person, share thoughts and insights and interact. This seemed like a fantastic opportunity to compile a workshop, invite them all, to explore the skills of the future and talk about opportunities for their further development and improvement.
And the best part: we took this opportunity to present a new guide, HTEC PM/SM Handbook (still in the making) which includes all the processes and procedures of project management and scrum management we specifically tailored to meet HTEC’s needs and requirements in project management.”
What is the HTEC PM/SM Handbook all about?
The goal of the HTEC PM Handbook is to establish working principles and best practices to effectively manage projects, enrich our knowledge and experience, and bring value to the company and project teams. It should be seen as a veritable oasis of information and resources that contributes in a variety of ways:
- Establishment of common foundation for all HTEC PM/SM with principles, methods, and project management processes
- Encouragement of knowledge transfer among respective organizations between projects in order to improve project implementation
- Improvements in project quality, project documentation management, a project documenting system, and communication
Marko explains that “the focus of the Handbook is a close look from the point of view of the project manager. It should bring the new PMs as close as possible to the situations, protocols, and processes that can take place within a project and give them more insight into what their roles and responsibilities might be. The aim of the Handbook is to help managers understand software development lifecycle better, manage their teams more efficiently, recognize and understand future possibilities that will impact their way of working, and lead with change.”
Moving forward
And this is not the end!
We are planning to organize two more online workshops in November and December. In collaboration with our Business Development representatives, we will organize the second workshop in November, which will focus on sales opportunities from a project manager’s perspective. In December, we will be moving forward with another workshop where we will demonstrate software development lifecycle management.
Stay tuned!
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