Your path to business agility
On a recent Webcast, a finance professional asked me about the use of spreadsheets in the planning process. Because this is such a common theme, (over 70% of respondents said they use spreadsheets for their planning process) I decided to add my observations to the conversation. Telling a finance person that they should not use...
In my last blog post, SRP and PSA — There IS a Difference, I discussed the major differences between Services Resource Planning (SRP) and Professional Services Automation (PSA). In short, SRP addresses the capacity and demand issues that drive resource decisions and revenue forecasting, whereas PSA focuses more on the mechanics that drive the quote...
Another striking—and often underappreciated—aspect of [Steve] Jobs’ success was his ability to say no. At a company like Apple, thousands of ideas bubble up each year for new products and services that it could launch. The hardest thing for its leader is to decide which ones merit attention. Mr Jobs had an uncanny knack of...
And, we’re back with the exciting conclusion to our 3 part resource management blog series. We’ve already taken a look at laying a foundation and capturing our current workload. In this post, we will explore how we achieve optimization and alignment of our portfolio of projects to squeeze the most efficiency out of our people....
Introduction by Planview AgilePlace COO Jon Terry As many of you know, we’ve been working for a while to develop a new version of Planview AgilePlace that, among other things, will allow our customers to manage their enterprise projects and portfolio with a hierarchy of multiple levels of kanban boards. Some of you might have seen...
Is it appropriate for product-based organizations to make improvised decisions when they don’t have visibility or access to proper data or metrics? Do product leaders have the resources for priority projects to drive innovation and growth? Is it possible that underperforming projects continue to consume precious resources? According to the industry’s third Product Portfolio Management...
“We can’t talk about the portfolio until you explain why Varmenase revenue is 5% less than last year’s forecast!” In almost every large organization a huge percentage of the effort in the “portfolio” process is spent “tying out” the new project valuations with the old ones. Teams ardently create reports to explain why the net present...
In my presentation at the Gartner 2012 PPM Summit, I discussed “Delivering What Matters: Focusing the PMO on the Big Picture.” I presented a number of themes, all of which, to my delight, aligned quite nicely with the collective keynotes and presentations at the conference. There’s no doubt that the role of the PMO is changing,...
A review of Itanium server sales forecasts made over seven years reveals the same bias year after year after year. When the economist Kenneth Arrow was working as an air force weather forecaster during the Second World War, he and his colleagues found that their long-range weather predictions were no better than random. They informed...
Every firm we speak with talks about strategy, and yet for all the attention lavished upon the idea, few companies are able to craft a strategy that provides a clear path forward for the R&D organization. Why is it so hard? There are a wide range of statements that are interesting, useful, difficult to conceive,...
