PMI Team Member
Most organizations are good at establishing and executing processes during the project selection and approval phase. But where many companies fall down is that they never revisit those decisions unless a fundamental change occurs.
For most IT investments, business cases are either missing or unbelievable. In the first of a series of articles, John Finneran explains what has gone wrong and outlines how to fix the business case.
Being able to accurately describe what impact a project will have on a company’s bottom line is absolutely critical in securing financial buy-in and project approval. If you don't have an MBA, fear not...here's some help in demystifing the writing of a project business case.
Like the source of the Nile, the start of portfolio management can be hard to locate. There is not yet a generally accepted initiation point for portfolio management, so let’s try and figure out where PPM might start in a perfect world.
You think you can justify that? Some organizations conduct an objective and formal analysis of their project opportunities, appropriately evaluate and prioritize them against objective criteria and make reasoned choices based upon independent assessment. There just aren’t many of them. Here, we’ll explore what does happen, and why. We’ll evaluate some alternatives and considerations in approaching project justification and talk about some of the changes that can lead to organizations making better decisions.
There is no silver bullet that will allow us to remove all uncertainty, but we can apply some business intelligence practices to the concept of annual planning to at least increase our confidence levels and reduce the risks around the decisions that we make.
A successful requirements definition phase takes a lot more than a good BA and enough time. There are time bombs hidden out there, but you can find them if you listen for the ticking. Here are three problems that can blast the success of your requirements gathering, how to spot them and how to react constructively.
Major project failure can happen to anyone. What’s important is to make sure that the organization can recover from such a situation, and that requires both advance planning (it’s too late to start planning the recovery when the disaster has already happened) and strong execution. Is your PMO prepared?
Projects are becoming more strategic, why isn’t project leadership? The argument for the CPO is becoming stronger and stronger, so let's consider the case for an executive responsible for project execution.
PMs don’t always have the right view of what makes a project successful. Our discipline has evolved and now requires us to have a much more complete view of how our projects impact organizations. Just how do you define "failure"?
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.
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"I never thought much of the courage of a lion-tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people." - George Bernard Shaw |
