Project Portfolio Management

The PMO is under constant pressure. From maintaining standards for project management practices to planning and delivering projects – the PMO needs to be in constant sync with strategy and business outcomes. This PMO blog category provides numerous recommendations from experts to encourage top down and bottom up planning, improve processes, promote stakeholder satisfaction, and ultimately eliminate silos to advance the PMO function. Get expert advice on the pros and cons of adopting a continuous planning model. Experts will also share real-world advice on choosing your next Project Portfolio Management tool and how to #BeThatPMO your business needs.

How Leaders of Successful Professional Services Are Ensuring Success

In today’s increasingly competitive market place, executive and delivery leadership within professional services firms are taking the time to step back and review their vision and refine their strategies. As the professional services market continues to show signs of growth, often these strategies relate to these business edicts: Create clear competitive advantage Seek continuous improvement...

Don’t Get Stuck “Beyond the Wall”—4 Dragons to Fire Up Your PMO

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you’ll appreciate the analogy of how PMOs can feel like they are constantly trying to protect their kingdoms when it comes to expanding the scope of portfolio management into the organization. Check out the 4 Dragons (trends) for portfolio management that will help you fire up and defend...

How to Optimize the Productivity and Profitability of Resources

For all project-based services organizations, having good visibility and control over resources is important if they are to operate effectively and maximize the revenue they can drive from their people. The recent Professional Services View of the Resource Management and Capacity Planning Benchmark Study highlights that this is an area where many of these organizations...

What if Everyone Were a Statistician? – Enrich Consulting

There’s a nice blog post by statistician Jeff Leek on how more and more non-statisticians are finding themselves in roles that involve data analysis and visualization. Data are becoming more and more available, and less and less expensive to collect, and the tools for analyzing that data, from Excel to SAS to Spotfire, are becoming...

Bringing Instant Insights (Not Just Charts) to Sales Planning Meetings – Enrich Consulting

The starting point for most conversations about a candidate drug’s sales potential is a chart of drug sales by segment and time—month/quarter/year, depending on the planning horizon. Digging deeper, you are ‘treated’ to a huge table, or perhaps a bunch of bar charts, tallying the number of afflicted people, those afflicted who have insurance, those...

The Remarkable Reason Complacency for Spreadsheets May Reach Critical Mass

How One Cell Discredited the Way the World Measures the Ratio of Debt-to-GDP and What That Should Mean for Using Spreadsheets for Finance At every FP&A conference I have ever attended, the subject of spreadsheets comes up and those with a great argument for keeping them receive, what I perceive to be, the loudest applause. Usually...

Warning: Talent Cliff Ahead—Part 1

The Looming Technology Workforce Shortage A Guest Contribution by Service Performance Insight This article is the first of a two-part series on the pending “talent cliff,” an important topic to professional services leaders. We discuss why this critical situation exists and provide some related insights from the newly published 2013 PS Maturity™ Benchmark for professional...