Process > Benchmarks

New benchmark study on project management offices shows consistent, two-year trend in delivering quantifiable value, with upwards of $400,000 in savings per project.

All the project measures in the world are useless if the end result is not of high quality. But how do you quantify quality? What metrics measure how good something is? Agile practices respond by making quality part of the process rather than something you measure along the way.

How can an organization tell whether its management of risk is good enough? This framework describes four levels of capability based on four attributes: culture, process, experience and application.

Why is change control so important? With everything a project manager is responsible for, why so much concern over it? What does it really mean, and how do we perform it?

The second State of Requirements Management Survey, sponsored by Ravenflow and Jama Software, is open through December 10, 2010.

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.

It appears that although the global economic recovery has been sluggish, IT departments are bouncing back even more slowly. Why the lag? It has something to do with high expectations and low confidence. As usual, it's up to the mighty CIO to bridge that widening gap.

Cross-project integration, executive buy-in and clearly communicated benefits continue to challenge PMOs. Adding traditional business measurement benchmarks such as mission alignment, domain authority and organizational readiness are needed to help project leaders deliver and report success quicker.

A new study finds that Agile project teams are 37 percent faster to market, 16 percent more productive, and able to maintain quality even as schedules are dramatically compressed.

Research effort will measure which best practices are predictors of success in professional services organizations.

What you do during your first 30 days as CIO will most likely determine your future success. The strategy you deploy is critical and will vary greatly with the circumstances you are inheriting. Here's the third and final part of our examination of possible success strategies, which involves assessing IT service levels.

Like most projects, the value of ITIL needs to be quantified and communicated clearly to the rest of your organization. The combination of information on benchmarked cost saves--paired with baselined metric data or value drivers--will present them with the information needed to tell a convincing story and sell the business case.

The Agile2011 Conference drew more than 1,600 attendees to Salt Lake City, where dozens of companies showcased new technology solutions and training offerings. Here is a recap from the busy exhibition floor.

A new benchmark study on the value of project management offices reveals increased maturity can drive major savings per project. Additional findings suggest significant increase in executive influence.

A project to implement the ITIL framework throughout North Carolina’s IT agency has done a lot right: cross-functional process teams, common-language training, peer benchmarks, an awareness campaign for workforce buy-in and, yes, sustained executive support. No wonder the effort recently earned ITIL Project of the Year honors.

At the end of the day, the real measure of a PMO’s effectiveness is the degree to which it improves the speed, cost and consistency of project success. Here's how to evaluate that effectiveness.

The annual review is not going to go away, but good or bad performance needs to be recognized in real time, immediately and consistently.

Using product quality to deliver business value in agile development is vital. This article provides a how-to for progressive change agents interested in delivering products that generate measurable business value for their customers and stakeholders. You’ll learn how product qualities differ from functions, how to identify the right ones, measure them and use improvements to drive business results.

What are hyper-productive teams doing differently to achieve such extraordinary results? This article introduces you to the key practices used by Scrum teams around the world to achieve hyper-productive results--practices your team can apply right now.

To appreciate the impact of crisis project management, it’s important to understand how the discipline started. Here we take a look at an infamous case that helped shape a strategy.

In high school, you may have learned that pi is equal to roughly three and change. Now that you're a PM professional, you know that PI is worth a whole lot more than that. Despite the popularity of Process Improvement these days, there hasn't been much discussion of the schedules, costs and real value of bringing your software development to the highest levelsuntil now.

Globalization is driving professional service organizations of all sizes to adapt their processes and consider integrated resource planning solutions that can improve financial visibility and operational efficiency while maintaining a hands-on project management touch.

If you're trying to justify a training project, here are some statistics that might get management to listen to you. There's no arguing with solid financial evidence.

Now that you understand the definition of--and the interdependencies between--latency, throughput and resource utilization, it's time to ask how you measure such nonfunctional requirements. And why should you even bother? This article will focus on two testing strategies: load/stress testing and scalability testing.

This column continues a multi-part series that addresses the practical steps and considerations in setting up a PMO in today's organizations. While admittedly theoretical in some regards, the first few columns have endeavoured to lay the groundwork for a more involved discussion of developing PMOs. Here, we take a look at benchmarking.

One of the most underused but incredibly effective recruiting tools is one called "benchmark recruiting." Learn more about it here.

Sustainable project management is growing. Indeed, there is a clear economic imperative for companies to adopt greener practices, from telecommuting to managing projects almost exclusively paperless. And project managers can play a vital role in demonstrating how even seemingly small actions can make a positive impact difference — on the environment and the bottom line.

Recent alliances, acquisitions and implementations in the world of project and portfolio management.

Portfolio Management is about managing the flow of projects through their transitions into and out of the basket of projects being pursued by the organization--and thus integral to the activities found in the PMO. In order to keep PPM processes easy to understand and implement, they will be presented in terms of pre-, active and post-portfolio activities--which we explore here.

We often see change as something that detracts us from the work we need to be doing to deliver requirements. But the truth is that if we don’t adapt the deliverables to changing situations, it's like we never gathered requirements in the first place--and we end up with a solution that doesn’t deliver.

Companies are desperate for project managers with security backgrounds, which can help them meet homeland-security requirements, protect against data theft, viruses and cyber-terrorism and comply with government regulations.

Is a mechanism really needed to provide structure for making key project decisions? Yes. Being in a leadership role, you’ll be pressured by people wanting decisions made for the best interests of the company, the employee or the customer--and they typically conflict. Let’s look at the three categories of influences.

It's the most wonderful time of the year for you data-hungry CIOs. Welcome to our annual summary of the most recent and relevant IT surveys to keep you aware of all the trends that affect your job and your success. How does your experience match up with what others are saying?

A hospital’s yearlong initiative to improve care coordination for underserved patients is benefiting from a dose of project management that brings structure, organization and accountability. Simple, strategic Post-it notes and iterative approaches are part of the prescription. It’s all new medicine for the doctors leading the effort.

Does your PPM solution help you understand the cost of IT operations or just your projects and portfolios? Technology Business Management is an emerging category of software solutions designed to help CIOs and IT executives manage and communicate the cost, quality and value of IT Services.

As project and portfolio management processes spread throughout organizations, the greatest roadblock to executive visibility isn’t the software or methodologies employed. It’s individual contributors. Traditional top-down approaches just don’t work. Here are keys to increasing team member participation. Increased visibility and value will follow.

Even when everything seems to be going well, things may not be as rosy as you think. All the facts might point to success, but perceptions can often trump that reality. Here's some practical advice on aligning how things are and how they appear.

Almost 70 percent of companies surveyed set themselves up for both project failure and significantly higher IT cost due to poor requirements practices, survey finds.

How to calculate IT spending as a percentage of overall revenue. Get smart about IT spending benchmarks.

Fortunately times have changed, both in perception and in reality. Organizations can now legitimately use the ability to supply eco-friendly solutions as a major selling point with their customers.

Agile project management and software development techniques like Scrum and Extreme Programming continue to gain popularity, but not all projects are suited to a purely agile approach. By helping to define value, eliminate waste and prevent defects, the principles of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma can also be used to improve the effectiveness of traditional project management processes.

Project leaders must shepherd initiatives in which change is a very real piece of the final deliverable. New technology, infrastructure and processes bring about updated policies, procedures and other adjustments, which often elicit resistance and fear. Here are some techniques and communication tools for managing the dynamics of change.

What was named the 2007 Project of the Year by the Project Management Institute at its Congress in Atlanta? Read on for a valuable success story.

The success of an outsourcing project, perhaps more so than in any other kind of project, is heavily dependent on the contract encouraging the right kind of cooperative and service execution behaviors.

The size of your company doesn't really matter; how your PM system measures up against the competition does. Thank Interthink Consulting, Inc., for finally putting together a study to help you know exactly where you stand.

IT guys are known for making big promises and sometimes serving up solutions that are less than gourmet-caliber. Maybe it's time for IT to take a taste of what it's dishing out, to improve service and reputation.

New report finds high-performing organizations integrate strategy execution and project management best practices more than other organizations.