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.

Analysts Detail Correlation Between Tech Solutions and Performance for Project-Based Businesses

In mid-2012, two independent research organizations published unique reports about the best practices of top-performing, project-based businesses. Each had their own focus on the subject matter regarding the emphasis of their research metrics or how differing project-based companies can be collectively considered successful despite a wide variety of nomenclature, product offerings, and organizational structures. Regardless...

Product Forecasting and the Planning Fallacy – Enrich Consulting

Experience shows that what happens is always the thing against which one has not made provision in advance. — John Maynard Keynes [1] An old cliché in forecasting is that when it comes to the single-valued forecast, the only thing you can say with certainty is that it’s wrong. More than just plain wrong numbers,...

Learning From Our Forecasting Foibles – Enrich Consulting

The prevalent tendency to underweight, or ignore, distributional information is perhaps the major source of error of intuitive prediction…The analyst should therefore make every effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to facilitate utilizing all the distributional information that is available to the expert. —Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky [1] Most people involved in...

Every budget is an IT budget. Now is the time for IT Alignment with the Business.

A recent article caught our attention where Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP of research at Gartner, stated that every budget is an IT budget and that technology is embedded in every product. So how can IT departments begin to think differently and act quickly in order to keep up with technology trends? Here are some of...

PPM in 2013: Consolidation, Change and Collaboration

First published on ProjectManagement.com on January 2nd, 2013. As  2012 starts to become a distant memory and companies begin implementing their 2013 plans, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) trends of 2012 and how those trends will continue, amplify or decrease into the new year.  From observations made over the...

Reflecting on Clinical Research Industry Headlines of 2012

Addressing CRO Challenges with Services Resource Planning December is often a time to reflect on achievements, ponder on lessons learned, and set goals for the New Year. It is as if Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has saturated the subconscious and I expect the Ghost of Christmas Future to appear this evening and tell me...

4 Dashboards Vital to Profitability for Tech Services Companies

In the first section of this two part series, 13 Key SRP Metrics Vital to Profitability for Tech Services Companies, I outline specific metrics necessary to measure performance across multiple business units for successful resource planning in Technology Services organizations. This blog will discuss the top dashboards required to provide visibility of those key metrics,...

Democratizing IT Work Requests with Project Scoring

First published on ProjectManagement.com on December 4th, 2012 We’ve all heard the adage, “By failing to plan, you are planning to fail,” but for IT departments trying to handle myriad work requests on a continual basis, a more apt adage would be “By failing to prioritize, you are planning to fail.” This article is designed to...

Optimizing Your Resources: Learn from the Military

Now more than ever, organizations are asked to do more with less. Pressures mount, competition is building, and there seems to never be enough resources to tackle what needs to be done. Then, when resources are finally allocated to strategic work, the work ends up getting delayed because the people are pulled off on emergencies,...

How Clinical Research Organizations Are Transforming in Today’s Environment—Part 2

The Solution for CROs The previous blog in this series discussed the increasing growth rates and related issues seen the Clinical Research Organization (CRO) space due to strategic partnerships, globalism, and market consolidation from mergers and acquisitions. This kind of growth inevitably presents challenges for CROs trying to generate data from fragmented, non-integrated systems. There...