Summary: This week on CIO Playbook with Jeffrey Hurley I am interviewing Tom Atkins the President of Tramore Group. We discuss the importance of project management to an organization's ability to accomplish its strategic objectives. Tom Atkins is President of Tramore Group and is an adviser to public and private sector organizations on strategy, operations and improving the effectiveness of enterprise-wide project management. He is immediate past chair of the board of the Rouge Valley Health System. His professional designations include Certified Management Consultant, Project Management Professional and Certified Director. He has been awarded both a Level 1 and Level 2 Credential by the Health Care Trustee Institute of the Ontario Hospital Association and has completed the Director Training and Certification Program at the University of California at Los Angeles and holds the ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors. He is a member of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants, the Project Management Institute, The Institute of Corporate Directors and the Toronto Board of Trade. A summary of the interview is below, to get the complete interview listen to the audio version. What is your business? We run a project management consulting company. We help large corporations develop their capability to deliver their large initiatives effectively. Including providing people who can do the work and develop processes to find better ways to deliver products. We also recently purchased a software company that provides project management solutions on demand. The product is HTML based and is used throughout the world. How did you get into what you do Life takes us in a lot of directions. I was a single father for a large technology company that kept me travelling across three continents. I wanted to be home with my son and the only way to do that was to start my business. I was able to change my lifestyle by getting my workload Toronto based. What do you like best about what you do? I like helping very very smart people achieve their objectives. I get the good fortune to work with men and women that run some of the largest corporations in the country. Talk to them about their biggest initiatives and help them find solutions to their significant problems. It is incredibly satisfying to watch these organizations absorb the ideas at the senior team level. What are your business goals? Let’s start with where we measure success. I have always felt as a leader in business that I am a general manager first. And that the most important thing I can do is ensure others see value in the products and services we provide. To date, with the exception of the public sector, we have not been subjected to a competitive bid process. When a big five bank directs business to us it is because we have a fair price, excellent value, and high quality outputs and that is really satisfying. What is the difference you bring that enables you to better the internal project management practice? I don’t think any of the components would surprise you. These elements include the quality of the people we deploy that allows us to put a round peg in a round hole. You get relevant experience at the right set of skills and the right chemistry mix for the environment. We also have the compensation room, which addresses a gap in the industry; an unwillingness to address the skill set in the executive ranks. We also have a support envelope around the people we deploy to ensure they get the support they need in the field. This breaks down to people, support, appropriate compensation, and managing the dialog with our clients. What is a characteristic of a successful project manager? That is easy, it is mandate focused. We work with our project managers to focus on what the mandate is. By being a role model to the team and staying out of things that are not their area of responsibility. I define mandate different from scope.
