Maarten van Weeghel joined consulting firm IMPROVEN as a partner in early 2020

Maarten van Weeghel joined consulting firm IMPROVEN as a partner in early 2020. Maarten is responsible for the Projects & Change practice, which helps organisations professionalise Project & Project Portfolio Management and set up PMOs.

“Wonderful right!” Jan Bosman managing partner of IMPROVEN is proud of Maarten joining the partnership. “Joining is not only a great step for Maarten, for our organisation it is also a great compliment. IMPROVEN stands for the right balance between the challenge to perform on the one hand and trust, personal attention and development on the other. Maarten is an example to other professionals for this”.

Over the past 20 years, Maarten and his team have worked on developing, shaping and marketing a completely unique project management methodology with the now established name “Pragmatic Project Management”. This hybrid approach has been gaining an increasingly loyal following, especially in recent years.

In recent years in particular, his consulting practice has been growing due to the shift from waterfall to more agile approaches, with Maarten and his team taking a divergent stance: “There was nothing wrong with Prince2 as an approach to realising change in an organisation, but it is often used for the wrong changes and set up wrong. Scrumming is certainly not the holy grail either! A full agile transition often really goes too far.” “I am a great advocate of a ‘blended project portfolio’, in which an organisation chooses separately for each challenge which approach is the right one: waterfall, agile or a hybrid form - anything is possible. Of course, this demands more from an organisation - and especially from project managers and project owners. Knowledge, experience and flexibility are even more important than before. Colouring outside the lines is becoming the norm.”

In his new role as partner, Maarten and his team remain active in this complex playing field: “The nice thing about these assignments is that we bring about changes at all levels of the organisation. Project managers learn new ways to shape and direct their project. The project owners have to take responsibility for creating value through the projects and the management team has to start steering on mission, vision & strategy, combined with optimal deployment of scarce resources.”.

IMPROVEN helps clients improve performance by optimising processes, information provision and projects, among other things. Today, IMPROVEN has a team of over 100 consultants. The agency's consultants distinguish themselves through a pragmatic and customised approach, with the main premise of achieving demonstrable results; “No thick reports but working solutions and implementation power”, is therefore the agency's credo.