On new development projects, the production stage can be the point of no return. Before it’s too late, a rigorous gating process can help to ensure that development activities, teamwide input and critical stakeholder priorities are all aligned with the overall project vision.
This deliverable will help you write a plan to cover how products or services will be operated and maintained after your project is implemented.
As long as people are involved in the project process, project managers will have to deal with politics. As intuitively obvious as that statement might be, it must remain an enigma to many project managers because they seem to be very politically challenged. Many PMs fail to understand that projects are comprised of people who must find a way to work together toward a common goal.
This presentation has been designed to proactively reduce ineffective supervisory actions that have been identified as critical to employee satisfaction and workforce performance. It clarifies the role of the supervisor in implementing effective strategies to handle employee performance and behavior problems, both major and minor. If supervisory competency in these areas is inadequate, this presentation can be delivered in the Activation Phase of the project.
This sample of actual Premium and Corporate content is available for FREE download through April 17, 2009.
Every project has stakeholders. Your job is to get to know the ones who will be crucial to your project. This analysis worksheet will help you get a feel for what to expect from various key parties who have an interest in your project.
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.
Different stakeholder groups affected by your project will want different results. Each group's requirements will not only differ, but sometimes be in conflict. Use this template to identify conflicts/potential conflicts, gaps, contradictions or incompatibilities between stakeholder group requirements, so you can reconcile them.
Given IT has played a significant role in business since the 1960s, it seems almost inconceivable that CIOs are still alignment challenged. Perhaps the challenge isn’t so much getting aligned but staying aligned given the pace and nature of change companies must cope with and adapt to in today’s global economies.
The risk register records details of all the risks identified at the start and during the life of the project, their grading in terms of likelihood of occurring and seriousness of impact on the project, initial plans for mitigating each high level risk and subsequent results.
True stakeholder analysis involves five primary pillars of understanding. By establishing these five pillars of with all of your stakeholders, you can be certain that requirements, solutions and collaboration will be fruitful--and any dysfunction associated with your project is likely to be dissolved. Your focus will be on the solution and not ego, politics, influence or any other static garbage that prevents you and your teams from being successful.
Will Chief Information Officers live long and prosper or go the way of the dodo? A look at the history of executive-level evolution and the current state of IT strategy may provide the answer.
The fostering of any successful relationship requires us to see the world, issues, concerns and needs through the lens of the other person. Additionally, you need to factor the person’s influence, position and attitude toward you into your assessment of how to cultivate and manage the relationship. This holds true for SRM as well--and purposely taking these elements of the relationship into account when designing your communications plan will only add to your success.
Need help with project recovery? A whole new skill set and strategy is needed to recover an IT project from free fall. Here we provide practical recovery pointers on four project areas for failing IT projects, with a focus on software development for business applications.
Does your organization have the right processes in place to support the next great idea? Once an evaluation and selection framework is in place, aligning an “idea pipeline” with the project portfolio is crucial. Otherwise, your next star project might not even get a chance to soar doomed or less-promising initiatives drain resources.
In the concluding installment of our “5 Questions PMs Must Ask” series, we explore the fifth and final question: how do we know we are making progress? The answer requires measures of effectiveness and performance stated in tangible units that are meaningful to all stakeholders.
How have things changed in the world of CIO priorities, IT strategies, salaries, spending and such since September of 2010? Certainly the rise of the Cloud has had an impact on CIO thinking--as has the anemic and languishing global economy.
Why are project managers afraid to stop projects? So often after being assigned to a project, project managers try to run before they walk. This is especially common when the project is already in progress. You can quickly get caught up in the momentum of work and forget to question whether the work is justified. If this is truly the case, shouldn’t more projects be stopped? What if it means losing your job?
From Gartner PPM Summit
Gartner Research Vice President Robert Handler discusses the importance of aligning IT strategy with corporate priorities, and shows how portfolio management can minimize the role of politics in corporate decision-making.
It's important to engage your stakeholders early on in the project process and work with them to understand their perspective. In this article, we will examine some of the key things to consider when making certain that your project engages and captures the perspectives of your stakeholders to ensure that project results are sustainable over the long term.
This quality plan and policy defines the specific business and technology quality targets to be achieved to fully satisfy all stakeholder and client requirements.
While the promises of increased cloud activity are great, so too are the chances for stormy situations. While many organizations will rapidly seek cloud computing to help combat struggles with their economic circumstances, they will do so at their own peril. Be very afraid...the cloud craze is entering its teenage years.
ITIL appears ready for prime time. So why isn’t it being implemented with great success across the board in IT organizations? This two-part series will set forth some observations and insights on how you can successfully evolve ITIL standards into your organization.
Use this strategic plan to assess your enterprise's value streams and its readiness for change to center operations around those value streams. This retail example can be adapted to any business interested in doing a change assessment project.
You have a great idea for a proposal. Here's a way how to put it in writing to catch the attention of sponsors, potential stakeholders and your upper management.
A project failure is seldom caused by unknown or mysterious factors. In fact, failure is often predictable based on symptoms and warning signs. And it can be prevented by following a disciplined approach to recovery. Here, an experienced project recovery specialist shares his methodology for fixing a failing initiative.
When did we stop needing just a phone? Just as our dependence on technology has increased, so has the speed of mobile technology change. Because of this energy, enterprises are scrambling to keep up with a variety of resources necessary to support mobile technology.
Do you make trade-offs with maintainability and adaptability in order to meet release dates? Fortunately, this hidden-cost fate is avoidable--but only for organizations that make a commitment. This article introduces you to technical debt and its common symptoms. You'll learn the basic steps to set up a repayment plan, the common causes of technical debt and effective strategies for paying it down.
Project managers usually tend to focus on the methodology for executing the technical part of the project. However, a good understanding of a practical SOA landscape and its associated challenges can help a technical PM make the SOA adoption on technology projects run even smoother.
Discussion on quality management has not evolved much since the mid-1990s. Within executive circles, the discussions are not about the importance of quality, but rather on what quality is, how it is achieved and how it can be measured. The issues surrounding quality seem focused on definition and approach rather than on need. What is quality? What does senior management expect from the quality process, and how do these expectations apply to IT? Read on...
Recently we surveyed members of two OPM3 groups and asked them what they thought the generic reasons for using OPM3 may be, and how OPM3 should be used. We also asked them how various stakeholders within an organization may view these questions. Their answers provide interesting food for thought.
When we talk about producing a “quality” product, what do we actually mean? Is it easy to use … fast enough … flexible? Does it consistently work the way we want and produce the results we expect? Here are some factors to consider when addressing the meaning of quality on your projects.
What's going on with your project? Use this document to report to your PMO, project steering committee or to project stakeholders everything about your project -- recent activities, financial status, risk review, issues, milestones, deliverables and planned activities within future time periods.
This template allows the project manager to fully understand the communication needs of stakeholders on the project. Stakeholders expectations and requirements can be documented ensuring there is a clear understanding of the why, when, how and what of the project’s communications.
This document will help you assess and address the workforce needs of your business unit or organization now and for years into the future.
What’s in your backlog: features or results? Creating a Results Backlog that clearly defines success--with measurable business objectives--will ensure your team stays focused on solving the right problem, not just the problem right.
Every project should have a quality policy in place. Here's a good place to start.
Before that brilliant idea can become a proposal for a kick-butt project, it has to go down on paper first. Here's how to do it.
Your project workforce can be better motivated and more effective if it is aligned with the overall business goals of your organization. Use this template as part of your employee motivation and retention strategy and see how quickly performance improves.
Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Kraft Bell discusses how to take a strategy-aligned approach to enterprise change and overcome some of the constraints faced by organizations in these turbulent times.
These worksheets help the PM identify, understand and quantify the expectations of each project stakeholder across an array of topics. It also lays out a structured approach for dealing with each expectation.
Avoid the shame of inadequate delegation of employee responsibilities. This tool aligns worker action with project needs and corporate strategies. It's also good for upgrading existing documentation and preventing eczema.
This planner is designed to assist leaders of project portfolio management to ensure that the proper training of middle managers and project managers is identified and completed by all required.
Your chances of success in any major change initiative are directly linked to the capabilities, commitment and experiences of the stakeholders involved. Do you have any idea who these influencers and decision-makers are — really? Here’s an assessment checklist covering a range of important attributes to help you find out.
Too many projects, and not enough money or resources to do them all! We need to make prioritized decisions to determine which projects to fund. Chances are that you are in a software leadership role and can’t make the final determination alone; but your expertise will certainly be called upon to help make that determination. This article presents tips that can assist you in making those “fateful” project decisions.
If you don’t see how your project fits into an overall strategic vision, you’re operating with blinders on, and without information critical to success. Here’s some guidance on what you need to know about the relationship between your project and your organization’s business plan, and how it can improve project performance.
How can you ensure projects deliver measurable business impact? United Stationers has been able to help their organization make specific real-time business decisions through enhanced project portfolio management capabilities, metrics and reporting.
Product development requires a unified, collaborative team effort. A social project management framework, combined with the right social tools, helps to connect team activities to the product development process and stakeholders. The benefits include increased visibility, more accurate estimates, responsive, real-time analysis and streamlined workflows.
Organizations keep evolving and changing their direction--tough times make this even more of a necessity. Because of this, a company’s dynamic business operation can result in the creation of important action items for employees, creating new career opportunities in the process.
At the release level, we approach the meaning of “done” more strategically by aligning User Stories with Epics and Vision Statements — all of which should be shared across the Scrum Team and all stakeholders so that they can see the building and not just the bricks. Here are some examples of what that looks like.
Picking the right IT governance framework can be confusing. Here we take a look at many of the emerging flavors in the increasingly clustered mix.
