Your path to business agility
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...
Game-Changing Services Resource Planning In my previous blog, Blindsided: Why Service-Driven Organizations are Unprepared for Swings in Demand, I discussed some of the pain project-based service organizations are currently facing. To summarize, virtually every organization experiences the following challenges: Unreliable forecasting means incoming demand is always a surprise Poor visibility of resource utilization; to find the...
Finance and R&D can get along You’ve just finished briefing the executive committee on the methods for project valuation that you have worked so hard to establish in your R&D group. The team has finally acknowledged that risk needs to be managed in all its potential forms. You’ve reached consensus on the following set of...
Innovation is inherently risky. By definition, you’re doing something that you haven’t done before so there are no guarantees it will work. The mindset in many organizations is to “minimize” risk as if it were a disease, but it isn’t that simple. The best companies face risk head-on and manage it both systematically and transparently....
Part one of this series notes that 1) there are appropriate uses for spreadsheets in the planning process, 2) there is a key point at which spreadsheets fall short (alignment), and 3) an appropriate planning tool is one that makes the most of the strengths of spreadsheets in the data gathering process. In this blog,...
No one will argue that the economy is creating many business challenges for project based businesses. Thinner margins, slowing revenue growth, fewer projects, lower bill rates, changing customer and employee expectations, and new technology trends including the consumerization of IT are daily topics for many executives. In these rough waters, how does the successful executive...
A Look at the Findings from the 3rd Product Portfolio Management Benchmark Study: Companies are Waking Up to Ways to Streamline Product Development This year, 320 product development executives and managers across the globe shared their priorities, risks, and pain points around product portfolio management (PPM). Because this is the third study on PPM, we were...
The iPad has been a revolutionary device, bringing tablet computers from relative obscurity into the mainstream. What makes the iPad so compelling “its easily portable size and weight, fast booting, and diverse selection of applications” also makes it a great tool for project managers. Most of us are rarely chained to a desk, and fast,...
