Your path to business agility
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.
A product manager and an analyst are discussing the revenue forecast for a product in development. Poring over the financials, the manager asks: “Have you considered how SUPR-3 will impact sales of our other SUPR products?” The analyst replies confidently: “Yes! Right here you can see we are estimating SUPR-3 to take a...
It’s that time of year again: We find more requests for proposals (RFPs) in our inbox during the late summer and early fall than any other time of year. RFPs vary dramatically in length, complexity, and level of ambition. In a spirit of cooperation, allow me to make some suggestions about those RFPs, and about...
When we engage with a client, our primary objective is to ensure that they are investing in the right projects: Those in closest alignment with their strategic goals. Without proper attention paid to project execution, however, you’ll never unlock the potential of your chosen projects. Last year we blogged about the distinctions between operational and...
The link between a company’s strategy and the long-range planning process, which culminates in their annual budget, has always been, to put it nicely, a very loose one. For those of us close to the planning process, this has been a well-known problem for a long time. Yet we continue to be surprised when we...
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....
