Do the costs and benefits of your project balance out to a worthwhile return on investment (ROI)? Management will use that as important criteria for authorizing your project. Use this spreadsheet to calculate the ROI of your project.
Doing more with less people, less tools and less funding has become the norm--and 2012 doesn’t look to be much different. How can you continue to service a growing backlog of project requests in the face of static or shrinking budgets and a dwindling pool of project professionals? Believe it or not, there are things that can be done and ways to keep progress moving forward. Here are 10 tips you might find useful.
Why do stakeholders' eyes roll when you try to explain why earned value is a good thing--and how it works? Ever wonder why claiming partial credit for projects in progress is met with skepticism and ire? Maybe it’s time to rethink the concept of EV as a way to measure project performance and progress.
This sample business case provides a proposal for the development of a Web service that directly supports the successful launch of an affiliate program.
ROI analysis can be an enormously valuable tool for directing project investments, but it requires an open mind, reasonable assumptions and accurate numbers. Even then, the numbers that tell the whole story usually don’t appear on silver platters and rarely lend themselves to cookie-cutter templates. Here are five pragmatic rules for constructing useful, believable ROI analyses.
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.
Finding sponsors to back your project is an art. Make a compelling case for the project to gain sponsor support when you are pitching your business case to executive management. Here is an example of a brief, direct project concept designed to lure sponsors into your camp.
Use actual accounting data on the performance of your last project to compare how accurate your estimates were versus the real thing. The Actual ROI tool is a quick way to show you how your project performed against the plan and identify areas for improving your estimating skills.
Justifying the financial benefits of web-based training may seem like a losing proposition. Here is a spreadsheet to help identify and quantify the many factors involved.
Sell your business case with a respectable return on investment. Here's how to calculate ROI. We've also thrown in an example so you can see how it all works.
Sometimes things go horribly wrong once. Other times, they go horribly wrong on a routine basis. Ever wonder why that is? If failure is a recurring theme in your projects, you'd be wise to download this deliverable.
The Risk Management Grid is a technique to identify potential risk events that could impact one of more of the project’s Seven Win Conditions. Importantly, it also serves to decide how those events will be prevented or mitigated.
From Gartner PPM Summit
Gartner Vice President and Fellow Audrey Apfel hosts this session of Gartner for IT Leaders. In it she will discuss the challenges of executing successful projects in the midst of changing expectations, elusive business value and the uncertain ROI from PMO functions.
Are you considered a sunk cost? Is it challenging to speak clearly about your value as a business analyst? Here are some suggestions for bringing ROI into the conversation with four concrete ways that BAs reduce project costs.
Many companies struggle with justifying the need to maintain a project management office after it is established. But the onus is on the PMO itself. Here are five key performance indicators that PMOs should use to measure effectiveness and ensure alignment with the needs of the organization.
What is the business value of agile project management for creating new products and services? What are the costs and benefits--or what is the ROI of agile project management? Has anyone ever measured the benefits? If so, what are the results? Furthermore, is there a measurable difference between agile and traditional project management? Some studies shed light on these crucial questions.
A recent Aberdeen survey identified the top pressures in managing IT projects as well as “best-in-class” practices for picking the right projects and managing portfolios and resources.
Green is beautiful, and it is certainly the color of IT looking into the future. There is a challenge, however, to coordinating the environmental shade of green with the financial one. Here are some thoughts and ideas for greening up your IT initiatives while holding on to the green stuff that pays the bills.
This Powerpoint presentation includes the questions to ask and things to think about before you build, buy, outsource or subscribe to any application package.
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.
Although the metrics used to communicate risk mitigation and ROI are different, the reality is that--despite it being a lightweight framework--Scrum puts a much greater emphasis on these two areas than waterfall.
The recent release of the Realtime Publisher’s eBook - The Executive Guide to Improving Your Business through IT Portfolio Management - has brought the IT Portfolio Management model to the forefront in suggesting ways to transform IT into becoming a driving force for corporate growth. This webinar further explores the eBook.
Agile methods are all about delivering value. We work on the high-value items first and prioritize the backlog based on business value. Everything is value driven, aiming to maximize value delivered. Risks, on the other hand, are like anti-value--they have potential for value-robbing down time, rework and even project failures. Here we look at how to use Risk-Adjusted Backlogs and Risk Burndowns to illustrate and prioritize risk within agile projects.
How green are you? For many, implementing Green IT solutions is an imperative that transcends ROI or enterprise alignment. For others, it's a good thing to go green if it is cost effective and in tune with other stakeholder expectations and needs.
Some substantive updates to the definition of Scrum artifacts may seem like minor clarifications to terms and definitions, but they have quite profound implications. In this article, we discuss these changes and how they affect the ScrumMaster (or project manager) tasked with delivering a “done” increment.
Global professional resourcing and project-based solutions leader turns to Compuware’s Changpoint to manage growth and complexity with streamlined resource planning, project management, and time and materials tracking.
There is lots of great information available on how to use agile methods for custom software development projects, but less so for package implementations. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf solutions make up a large percentage of the IT projects undertaken by companies each year, and many organizations are missing out on benefits that an agile package approach can bring.
How do you pick the right projects? Find out what stocks and projects have in common--and how you can use that to help choose the right portfolio combination for your company.
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.
Agile methods incorporate many mechanisms for dealing with late-breaking changes that also lend themselves to proactively responding to risks. Here we explore how these methods make effective risk management easier to implement.
Formulating a business case and proposing your project to senior management for buy-in can be tricky. Don't dive right in and start writing. Begin with a solid checklist of guidelines to ensure a business case that's more than buzzword hype.
This webinar provides an overview of key principles and practices for effective Agile project estimating and planning that have helped many Construx customers greatly increase the accuracy of their project forecasts, enabling them to make better go/no-go decisions, increase the predictability of their projects, and deliver their projects successfully... on time, within budget constraints, and with the desired functionality.
The typical response to tough economic times is for IT leaders to make across-the-board cuts. While the cost savings are immediate, they are drastic, one-time fixes that introduce risk and don't position the organization for future survival.
Beyond reducing project costs, business analysts must also focus on increasing project benefits. In doing so, you position your work as fundamental to successful outcomes. Here are four ways you can elevate your role and responsibilities to deliver more value to the organization.
Like it or not, getting funding for a project goes beyond presenting the numbers and hoping that they speak for themselves. Getting approval for projects requires a superior business case complete with persuasive arguments as to why the project in question deserves funding and support amongst all the other competing requests for resources.
The attached tool has been developed to assist you in generating some solid payback data to be used to evaluate the return potential of your proposed method. Not only will it help the gods of finance see the light, but will also help you to understand whether your project is a winner or loser before you ever put your signature on the purchase requisition.
Use this task sheet to help you identify, research, collect and analyze all required client information and data pertinent to the project.
Does your PMO Produce Multiple Obstacles for your project or Promote Many Opportunities for success? PMOs often get a bad reputation on agile teams, but it need not be that way--they can also add tremendous support and be a great help.
Agile methods deliver many benefits in terms of their flexibility to cope with changing requirements and priorities. However, this adaptability and reluctance to be tied down on scope can create contract problems when trying to form supplier agreements or outsource work. Part 1 of our two-part series covers the challenges of agile contracting and offers some of the packaged solutions created so far.
Confused by ROI? This primer will help you understand what it's all about. And if you're behind the eight-ball, responsible for putting together an ROI for a project gone bad, this article could save you.
The state of the CIO is stagnant, according to the latest industry surveys. We've taken a look at what they say and boiled them down to the essential message for CIOs: align or die.
How can you make your IT dollars even greener? Here are some tips on moving your IT department into the green without bringing your business into the red.
New survey by CIO Insight finds improving alignment with business objectives is the No. 1 priority for IT executives.
All IT projects are really business projects in that they are — or should be — about delivering business value, according to former CIO Bob Lewis, author of A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology. But that doesn’t let CIOs or PPM executives off the hook.
Code inspections are an implicit, often unspoken best practice among agile project management teams. This silence has caused some people to question the quality control of the agile PM paradigm. Surprisingly, agile teams have not forgotten to mind the Ps and Qs of quality engineering--and not only continue to perform code inspections, but perform them more often. This results in even greater quality than traditional project management teams.
Knowing when to interfere can be difficult. Fortunately, there is a useful concept to help project managers make the right decision on when to step back and when to step in.
Unsound, undisciplined processes can produce unrealistic ROI estimates for projects. These five principles can improve your ROI analysis.
From functionality to return on investment, here are some key criteria to focus on when considering a project portfolio management solution.
As PPM solutions evolve from “nice to have” to essential, there is a need to integrate them with other business operations, according to H-P’s senior product marketing manager. But are vendors glossing over the cultural and procedural changes required for organizations to reap the full benefits of these tools?
How do you make the case for PPM and justify the expense? What are some common pitfalls in implementing or extending PPM across the enterprise? How much should an organization expect to “bend” to accommodate a new PPM solution? PowerSteering’s CEO shares his perspective on these and other issues.
