What Are Your PPM Crimes?

Wayne leads product marketing for Oracle | Primavera and previously served as VP of Marketing for cloud PPM leader Instantis before it was acquired by Oracle.

  PMO   Portfolio Management   ProjectsAtWork  

PMOs might take a page from New York City’s war on crime, which produced a sustained drop in reported crime. By focusing on solutions instead of symptoms, then targeting the most serious strategic or execution-related pain points, a PMO is more likely to make a transformative impact.

There’s a new book out called The City That Became Safe by Franklin Zemring that attempts to analyze and explain the astonishing 80 percent drop in the New York City crime rate over the 19-year period starting in 1991 that has dramatically improved the quality of life in NYC. One of the key themes and lessons is that many of the assumptions about the nature of criminal behavior, and how best to combat it, have been debunked by the NYC experience. The author questions how much of the success can be attributed to the traditional explanations — for example, that untended disorder and minor offenses like panhandling and graffiti, which negatively impact the every-day quality of life for New Yorkers, gave rise to serious crime and urban decay, and that an aggressive police and a zero-tolerance law enforcement regime drove crime rates down.

The author suggests that while there were many factors that played a role, the most important strategy was not the bottom-up focus on minor offenses that would lead to more serious offenses, but direct strategies to identify, prioritize and …

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