ABSTRACT
This chapter describes two “flagship” projects from my own experience as a project manager, which have contributed significantly to the development of the Lean Project Management concept from the bottom up, so to speak. The first was an SAP implementation in a corporate structure with about 50 legal entities. This project was significantly characterised by the requirement for cross-organisational harmonisation of the HR processes of independent authorities in many different locations, the replacement of a legacy system, the corporate cultural challenges faced by those involved and, last but not least, technical complexity.
The second project involved the first-time establishment of a central control centre for emergency call processing and dispatching of emergency forces in a federal state that could be used throughout the state. The challenges here were not least of a technical nature, but the existing state political and media attention should also be mentioned. Risk management required particular attention, as there were a number of important influencing factors, many of which were outside of the project’s own sphere of influence, e.g. the provision of a country-wide Digital Mobile Radio network for Emergency Services. In this project, a “third party approach” came into play, in which (as is usually the case only in construction projects) a project “operator” (aka controller) acted as project manager for the PM processes and the PM system – alongside the client’s project manager, comparable to a product owner.
In both projects, methods from agile approaches were successfully applied according to the situation, with the basic orientation in each case being plan-driven. In the end, hybrid approaches emerged that followed the strict benefits orientation familiar from lean thinking. The chapter presents a variety of these methods.
