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...
Organizations that take project governance for granted are headed for a fall. There is one area where governance seems to be failing in many organizations, and it's perhaps surprising--the PMO. That is incredibly dangerous, and here’s why...
Every project has an issues log. But what about the PMO? Does your PMO manage issues and maintain an issues log? Do you look for trends across the issues of different projects and take proactive steps to address them? Do you attempt to prevent issues through good communication? In this article, we look at a model for PMO-level issue management and suggest ways that it can improve the quality of projects that your PMO is responsible for.
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.
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...
As a PMO leader, are you driving change, or is it driving you? In all too many cases, PMOs are reactive--implementing a solution in response to a problem. In this article, we argue for a more proactive approach.
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.
Sometimes the corporate priorities change unexpectedly, and the projects that were approved at the start of the year are no longer appropriate for what the organization is trying to achieve. How can an organization cope?
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”?
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.
What does the future of PM have in store? Three trends have the potential of being very powerful for project management and the organizations that continue to pursue the discipline.
So much for 2011 being the year of recovery. Next year should be much like the last. Some recent developments may impact your success as a CIO. What trends are likely to impact your organization from an IT perspective? What strategies and actions will yield the best outcomes for CIOs and their companies?
Organizations are expected to deliver more and more with less and less, and that has in part led to the growth of organizational project management. But in this writer's experience, organizations have not been able to define what a successful OPM model looks like. How do you maximize the return on Organizational PM?
Organizations do a lot to implement what is viewed as project management. But do organizations have an organizational project management capability? To understand whether we do or not, we have to understand what this actually means, explore where organizations are today and evaluate how close we actually are to the attainment of this goal.
The elusive achievement of organizational alignment in corporate America is striking. What is needed is the development of an organizational structure and culture that dynamically self-adjusts and recalibrates to an ever-changing environment.
The key challenge to organizational PM is that companies tend to view projects in isolation by ignoring the obvious (and sometimes not-so-obvious) linkages. Here we present a list of essential factors to ensure the organization can begin to not just benefit from the discipline of project management, but be able to maximize the benefits that organizational PM can provide.
The portfolio manager is the strategic spearhead of your project organization, and there is a lot of mystery about an organization’s strategic planning process. The PPM function of your organization needs to be in the center of this process, and in this article we explore some of the functions that it needs to perform.
This executive communication strategy will go a long way to prevent middle management inertia when implementing project portfolio management. Here we look at the cascade that breaks down the management wall to PPM.
In the history of organizations trying to implement and get some value from project management, there has been a string of buzzwords that have captured the hearts, minds and budget approvals of senior executives. Why doesn't the hype of portfolio management seem to measure up in real life?
Why has Project Portfolio Management struggled to be adopted in organizations? While part of the problem lies with the vendor overselling the product, the bulk of the issue stems from our collective failure to educate ourselves on PPM--and understand how we should adopt it.
"One, two...the portfolio's coming for you! Three, four, better lock your door!" For a company to be successful, it needs to have a high-performance project portfolio. If it misses the mark, everyone is relegated to the B-movie horror of High Spending and Low (or No) Return for their Money.
ADVERTISEMENTS
"The rule is perfect: In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane."