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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.
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...
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,...
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...
Having worked in the Professional Services industry for nearly 25 years, I have helped numerous PSOs and IT organizations utilize software solutions to manage their businesses. My extensive experience as both a management consultant and software design has given me a unique perspective into Services Resource Planning. As the need for it becomes increasingly prevalent,...
There is a significant transformation underway in the clinical research organization (CRO) space. The CRO market revenue amounts to approximately $30 billion, which is primarily generated from its core business of conducting clinical trials required for drug market admission by regulatory authorities like the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines...
Here is an uncomfortable reality in all but the smallest firms during their R&D portfolio management processes: Between the staff running each R&D initiative and the executives making project and portfolio decisions, there’s usually a division. Maybe it’s the gap between headquarters and lab, upstairs/downstairs, east coast/west coast, London/Singapore, or even a generation gap. At...
As we start the fourth quarter, having just come back from the annual Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) national conference, it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the trends of the last year. Read on for seven financial planning and analysis trends from 2012. Trend #1: The Rise of FP&A Within the finance...
In the words of one of baseball’s brightest stars Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else”. Score a win for your IT project and realize more revenue by implementing these key project management tips. Deliver projects on time, and within budget. Just put on your manager’s...
Dan Smith and I have written a white paper on strategic R&D portfolio management that summarizes many of the lessons and insights we’ve gleaned during twelve years of client engagements. The white paper is organized into eight ‘rules’: Avoid incomplete strategies Build an actionable strategy Don’t buy in to bubble plots Move beyond prioritization Present...
It’s no secret that projects in the earlier stages of the development lifecycle are evaluated and managed very differently than projects in the later stages. One major pharmaceutical company believed these differences to be so great, however, that they split their development organization in two. Over time, the structural gulf became a cultural gulf, leading...
