With the year coming to a closing, organizations are wrapping up remaining projects and start setting priorities and objectives for 2012.
One of the main challenges continues to be in defining goals and objectives for the upcoming 12 months and utilizing limited resources in the IT organization in most efficient and effective way.
Some of the common questions CIOs may find themselves asking during this stage of planning are:
- What is the demand on my organization and how can I effectively manage it?
- Which projects are the most crucial and deliver the most value?
- Do I need to revisit and reevaluate my current investments in applications, resources, and infrastructure?
- And finally, the most important one, how can I keep my customers happy?
What are some of the priorities for CIOs out there? Take John Halamaka, CIO at CareGroup Heallthcare System, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School. He outlined his three priorities for 2012 in a recent article in CIO Magazine.
John’s focus in the upcoming year will be around issues such as:
- Identifying key business customers and ensuring that their priorities are reflected in the current IT operating plan as well as strategic plan
- Standardizing communications to receive updates on a top-priority projects
- Defining the process of managing IT projects across the enterprise which includes IT intake process, IT Project lifecycle, and project management tools
In order to effectively manage these priorities, CIO should evaluate whether their IT organization has the right project and resource management tools in place that allow IT management to evenly allocate resources throughout the organization, managing incoming demand, obtain instantaneous status reports, adjust existing portfolios in case business objectives change due to the internal changes (such as budget or management shifts, etc).
After all, CIOs are the pioneers of innovation and change within any organizations; they are empowering their team to achieve greater efficiency by giving them the right tools to succeed. And nowadays when the selection of these toolsets is quite broad, IT directors can find a solution that will fit their business needs without hurting the main IT wallet or taking years of implementation to go live.
If your team is planning to evaluate PPM toolsets in the upcoming year, you may find reports from Gartner analysts to be quite valuable in your research.
