Four questions with Jeffrey Bane, vice president of Xerox Global Services Center of Excellence.
If you think project managers can’t make it to the top, take a look at Jeffrey D. Bane, PhD., PMP. He was completing a doctorate in industrial engineering when he began his career as a project manager with Xerox 10 years ago. Since then he has risen through the Xerox ranks — receiving eight promotions — and today serves as the vice president of the Xerox Global Services Center of Excellence, Stow, Ohio, USA.
In this PMI.org exclusive, Mr. Bane discusses everything from managing a skilled project team to what keeps him up at night.
How do you use your project management skills in the executive-level position you hold today?
I use the tools and processes in my management style, as I’m fundamentally a portfolio manager. At any given time, I could have 10 or 20 large implementations happening on my watch. And if I don’t continue to look at the portfolio of risks, the portfolio of resource constraints and really understand a comprehensive critical path in all those projects, I couldn’t possibly do my job.
How much stock do you place on professional credentials?
I’m a big advocate of properly earned credentials — that are backed up with experience — being worth their weight in gold. … I expect my project managers — and I have about 70 under my management today — to be [Project Management Professional] PMP®-certified and Lean Six-Sigma Green Belt certified.
I’m demonstrating that the professionalism of my project managers is critically important. It says to my customers, “We have a methodology and we are investing in quality project management [practitioners] that are there and understand what it takes to deliver a project on time, on budget and of quality.”
How do you deal with talent management?
We are always looking for that senior project manager, and I’ve found that those folks have to be developed internally. So we’ve put [project managers] on complex projects under the guidance and apprenticeship of a senior project manager, and we hope to grow two or three of them per year.
I have successfully found people outside of Xerox to come in and fill important roles, and I’m actually looking for folks that can progress to that senior project manager type of level. So that’s really where I focus on getting that very senior thought leadership complexity kind of person who can handle big, big portfolios of projects.
What are your biggest challenges?
Right now, what is keeping me up at night more than some schedule slipping or some budget being missed by some degree is worrying that we get exposed to some huge risk and liability. It started before the [U.S.] economy began to turn down, but I see customers putting more and more liability on major corporations that they’re outsourcing to.
In the past, where I would have picked a project manager who had more financial or process skills, I now look for people who can understand complex risk, how to share and mitigate that, and how to manage a project plan from a risk mindset.
“I’m a big advocate of properly earned credentials — that are backed up with experience — being worth their weight in gold.” — Jeffrey D. Bane, Ph.D., PMP, vice president of Xerox Global Services Center of Excellence
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Learn more about how organizations across the globe are employing project management on PMI.org:
- ● Measuring Performance: Collaboration Management and Control Solutions, a Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based consulting firm is helping organizations gauge their project performance-capabilities with the help of PMI's Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®).
- ● Success Story: Pinellas County, Florida, USA used methodologies recommended in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) to increase support for project management from top management, increase productivity, and update best practices, checkpoints and processes.
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Project Management at Xerox
Within the Xerox Global Services Center of Excellence, project management practices often serve as a customer interface from the time large deals are made, through project implementation.
“These are typically very large, Fortune 200 companies with multiple locations that are procuring large enterprise sort of deals from Xerox,” says Jeffrey D. Bane, Ph.D., PMP, Xerox Global Services Center of Excellence. “This is really how we enable customer success and living with the promise that they bought from Xerox.”
Project management in the sense Mr. Bane describes differs somewhat from the historical context of the profession within Xerox. Previous applications of project management methodologies followed an engineering mindset when managers were called upon to build new products.