Your path to business agility
For most people involved with project management, a Program/Project Management Office (PMO) is an ideal entity to deploy at any company. There’s much to like about a centralized group that does everything from creating and deploying standardized project management practices and tools, to managing dependencies among various projects while tracking their performance. At their best,...
Once again, our friends at Kalypso have issued a challenge for all of you product development companies out there… actually, two challenges this time. 1. Move past the myths that keep you from using social models and tools to support innovation and 2. If you have moved past these myths, nominate yourselves for a SPIKE...
It’s that time of year again: We find more requests for proposals (RFPs) in our inbox during the late summer and early fall than any other time of year. RFPs vary dramatically in length, complexity, and level of ambition. In a spirit of cooperation, allow me to make some suggestions about those RFPs, and about...
In previous blogs, APM: How Much Are Your Applications Really Costing You? and APM: Why Organizations Don’t Understand the TCO of Their Applications, I focused on how organizations can start to determine the technical and business value of their application portfolios. In this post, I would like to focus on aligning applications portfolios with the business...
When we engage with a client, our primary objective is to ensure that they are investing in the right projects: Those in closest alignment with their strategic goals. Without proper attention paid to project execution, however, you’ll never unlock the potential of your chosen projects. Last year we blogged about the distinctions between operational and...
The link between a company’s strategy and the long-range planning process, which culminates in their annual budget, has always been, to put it nicely, a very loose one. For those of us close to the planning process, this has been a well-known problem for a long time. Yet we continue to be surprised when we...
Coffee Talk: It’s Your Link to the Latest Innovation and Product Portfolio Management News and Trends! We are excited to introduce this new video blog series, Coffee Talk, featuring the Product Portfolio Mavens. Likened to The View for Product Portfolio Management (PPM), the Mavens offer wise insights along with a fun perspective on critical topics for...
As we have said before, every forecast you’ll ever build is wrong. The truth may be out there, but due to a lack of perfect information about the future, you won’t be able to reveal it before your project review meeting. There is a paradox here: The more you insist on the truth, the more...
With cloud-based project portfolio management software, project management offices can gain visibility into both strategic initiatives and sustaining operations, resulting in clear visibility into operations, effective prioritization, and better decision-making across the entire portfolio. A Project Management Office (PMO) doesn’t always achieve its full potential. Project managers often find themselves short on resources, time and...
What is an R&D-driven company with $10-50 billion of cash in the bank to do? In the last twelve months, Merck, Pfizer, HP, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb have announced stock buybacks totaling over $25 billion, and layoffs of over 30,000 employees. So apparently, for many firms, the best use of their cash hoard is a...
