Jones International University
February 8, 2012
Survey of Project Management Trends
As an IT and Business Process Consultant, my clients hire me to help them implement different types of projects according to their needs. Some of these projects may be developing and implementing new systems, which are long-term projects, costly and critical for the organization. As a project manager, I am responsible for delivery of the assigned project on schedule; we accomplish this using different project management and software development methodologies. Searching about new project management trends to improve my work, I looked at an article to consider de-escalation management to prevent failure. The article by Donald Flynn, Gary Pann, Mark Keil, and Magnus Mähring (October 2009) introduces a practical and good de-escalation management maturity (DMM) model by combining different approaches that have been suggested for managing de-escalation in IT projects.
The authors provide a de-escalation management maturity (DMM) model which captures the progressive levels needed to manage de-escalation. De-escalation1 is the art of not escalating a situation and bringing about the possibility of resolution through communication, and when bad things started to happened in large projects, is necessary to find a way to change the failure of the project. They explained with 5 different levels that an organization can manage de-escalation effectively if the people are ready depending in the maturity of their project management process. Those levels are:
Level 1 of the DMM Model requires people who have the discipline to change a project plan.
Level 2 requires people who have the discipline to detect deviations from project plan and prevent escalation.
Level 3 requires people who have the discipline to execute project plan and are skilled in the art of change management,
References: Bailey, D, Brenan, G. (2008). De-escalation Woorbook. Retrieved February 9, 2012, from http:// related:its-services.org.uk/silo/files/de-escalation-workbook.doc Flynn, D, Pan, G, Keil, M and Mähring M. (2009). De-escalating IT Projects: The DMM Model. Communications of the ACM, vol. 52, no 10. doi: 10.1145/1562764.1562797