Working Together to Achieve the Value of Project Management: The City

of Calgary Experience

Jim Duggan, PMP Michael ONeil

Leader, Project Management Practices Senior Advisor, Advisory Services
The City of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada KPMG LLP, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. - Henry Ford

Calgary, a city of 1.1 million people, located in Alberta, Canada, has had the experience of being
one of the fasted growing municipalities in North America for the last few years. With this
growth has come major investments in public infrastructure in the form of rapid transit,
roadways, buildings, interchanges, parks, recreation facilities and water services. The City of
Calgary takes very seriously the responsibility of being good stewards of public funds invested
in operations and projects. In 2011 project audits highlighted some areas for improvement and
this presented an opportunity to take a close look at internal practices and ensure projects are
well managed from start to finish across all major infrastructure construction areas at The City.

A program was initiated to create a Corporate Project Management Framework that would lay
the foundation for organization-wide project management practices. While still underway, the
program has made significant progress. This session will tell the story of the journey as it has
unfolded so far.

The session will open with an overview of the program to develop and implement a Corporate
Project Management Framework at The City of Calgary.

The session will include discussion on the challenges faced in this ambitious program and how
these challenges were addressed. Among the challenges was the need to establish a
collaborative environment where different areas of the organization could come and work
together to share knowledge and experiences to develop the new Framework. Of course it was
not enough to simply develop the Framework. There needed to be effort put into implementing
it which presented significant challenges.

Overall, the session will focus on general principles that highlight the importance of strong and
visible sponsorship, stakeholder engagement and an implementation approach based on sound
organizational change management strategies and how these were applied in a large and
complex organization environment.

In general the scope of this initiative at The City of Calgary applies to over 300 annual capital
projects and includes over 800 direct stakeholders made up of project managers, sponsors and
support staff.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. - Henry Ford