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Why You're Confusing Frameworks with Methodologies
byIt's surprising how many project managers don't know the difference between a framework and a methodology. It's time to clear the air and clarify the differences.
It's surprising how many project managers don't know the difference between a framework and a methodology. It's time to clear the air and clarify the differences.
Adoption of a Program Management Office is not a decision that should be made quickly or taken lightly. Careful preparation, clear alignment with organization objectives and stakeholder feedback are critical to a PMO’s success.
Many PMOs do not fully understand their role within the larger enterprise. What can PMOs do to improve lackluster performance and increase the return on investment? Let’s look at a few of the emerging trends for PMOs to help answer that question...
Determining the nature and scope of a project is essential to refining how the resulting effort will accomplish business needs. A crucial component of this is having the knowledge of the business environment and the demands it must meet.
“Governance” is one of those words that consultants and managers like to throw around to make it sound like they know what they're talking about. It is also one of the most widely misused words--if not concepts--currently employed in organizations. Why this is, what it means (and doesn’t) and what it should represent are what this article explores.
Major project failure can happen to anyone. What’s important is to make sure that the organization can recover from such a situation, and that requires both advance planning (it’s too late to start planning the recovery when the disaster has already happened) and strong execution. Is your PMO prepared?
One of the primary roles of the PMO is to provide a framework for ensuring proper governance over projects. Here we look at some of the obstacles and challenges facing the PMO governance function--and some tips for overcoming them.
All project failures are related to miscommunication of requirements. And it's the requirements that define the purpose, function and value--the business requirements--that are the biggest culprit as they are especially hard to define.
The PMO must have an easy time of annual planning, right? It's a service function that provides resources based on the overall project portfolio, and the organization determines which projects to approve. Based on those decisions, the PMO knows how it needs to adjust its resource model. But life’s not quite that simple...
Many organizations make the business case exercise more painful than it already is. They create cumbersome procedures and templates that circumvent its principle purpose and provide no useful information. What can you do?
What information technologies promise to be hot in the coming year? The focus is on the maturing of environments in terms of standards, policy and site certification efforts--with big data, Cloud Computing and BYOD at the forefront.
You won’t get the right benefits unless you start with the right scope. As project managers are increasingly asked to become involved in the business side of project execution, many elements they previously didn't have to worry about are now becoming relevant.
The value of PPM and the priorities people place within it have seen drastic changes to go along with the dynamism of the world over the last five years. Optimal realization of portfolio ROI is now a must just to simply stay alive, whereas before it was often just treated as a nice idea that a company could do to improve its business success.
The purpose of the project proposal template is the first step to gain approval of a project moving forward. Similar to a project charter, it provides the initiator of the project with an avenue to document the purpose of the project, the objectives, and the basic information need to see the project approved through to the planning stage.
The purpose of this document is to quantitatively justify the project. For smaller projects, the business case may be no more than 1-2 pages in length. For larger, more complex projects, the business case may be much larger and contain far more detail.
You just spent the past month building a fantastic business case. You spoke to the right people, got the right numbers and have put it all together in a nice, tidy package. Now, the only hurdle is to get management's approval. This file requires the WebEx Player. It is 4.8Mb.
Our inaugural Project HEADWAY webinar addresses Creating the Project Business Case, one of the most important steps to a solid foundation for a successful project. This file requires the WebEx Player. It is 4.6Mb.
We’ve all heard the adage, “By failing to plan, you are planning to fail.” But for IT departments trying to handle myriad work requests on a continual basis, a more apt adage would be, “By failing to prioritize, you are planning to fail.” This article is designed to give you a high-level view of how IT teams can prioritize projects, why it’s important and how it benefits the entire company.
Successful ITSM requires a true partnership between departments. Nowadays there is much more of a balance between IT and the business groups that it supports--there is recognition that the two departments need one another more than ever before. However, in many organizations there is still a little bit of a divide--and to really leverage one another there needs to be a true partnership.
Is the role of the project manager evolving, or is it just revolving? Large organizations dealing with challenging economic conditions for the past decade or trying to keep up with the rapid change invoked by technology progression have had to re-think the way support infrastructure sustains the business. Turning to various flavors of shared services models, the role of the project manager has had to take on several different faces within the organization.
Running an IT department isn’t about the technology, it’s about the business. To be a strategic contributor, IT needs to take a much more proactive view to managing the technology portfolio--driving business-focused projects with bottom-line benefits.
Some managers view PPM as nothing more than high-level project management--a service function rather than a strategic support function. But PPM is more than just project management with bigger numbers.
To try to reduce the potential for abuse in the project justification stage, organizations should consider a number of different steps. Justification isn't about selling, and business cases are not sales presentations...ever!
If portfolio management is about ensuring strategic alignment and strategic management is about defining organizational direction, where does one stop and the other start? Specifically, what should we expect a good strategic management process to define? And what does portfolio management expect and require as input in order to ensure that the results of portfolio selection are, in fact, “strategically aligned”?
What is portfolio management supposed to deliver? The answer for many organizations is that it is a consolidated function that aims to provide a high-level management function of the initiatives that are underway or upcoming. But from one expert's perspective, PPM is not about managing projects or even programs. In fact, PPM is not about delivering projects...no really, it isn’t!
In practice, BPM more often centers on implementing process handling and business rules into the underlying IT applications. All too often, BPM efforts are little more than another package evaluation and selection process to find a “bolt-on” BPM tool. But there is a better way, a simpler way to traditional BPM, one that condenses the vision, definition, modeling, analysis and improvement discovery phases into a single process.
How do you decide which PPM tool is right for you, and then make it work? In this article, we identify a few of the things to consider when selecting a tool.
It’s one of the oldest debates in project management, and now there are a whole new set of arguments. What type of project manager should an organization have?
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Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. - Stuart Smalley |