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.

Your Cheat-Sheet for Getting Executive Buy-In On Technological Investments

Business built on agile foundations is fuelled by change from the bottom up, with teams on the frontline spotting opportunities as they arise and getting the executive buy-in to take advantage of them. This is especially true for modern organizations, where technology can change in a flash, and it’s up to those with their fingers...

Agile McFly: Go ‘Back to the Future’ for Better Results

Dr. Emmett Brown: Marty! I need you to go back with me! Marty McFly: Where? Dr. Emmett Brown: Back to the Future! Great Scott! In the epic 1985 film ‘Back to the Future’, Doc Brown avoids being gunned down by angry terrorists because someone from the future had a different plan in store. By defining the...

Debunking 3 Marketing Ops Myths

Some myths in life are harmless, or even pleasant and helpful. For example, many parents lean heavily on Santa Claus to keep their kids from doing things that would get them on the dreaded “Naughty List.” And the Tooth Fairy comes in very handy when it comes to convincing a child that a loose tooth...

How to Manage Marketing Projects Like a Boss

Marketing in the Age of Agile has become an interconnected, data-driven and cross-collaborational environment that would be wholly unrecognizable to either the real or fictional founders of the profession. That doesn’t mean, however, that it has lost any of the swagger that made it such a cool club during its golden age, except now its...

How to Put Together an Effective and Flexible Risk Response Strategy

Planning a risk response strategy that is flexible enough to address the major issues that may face your project is essential for ensuring that you are prepared for whatever may arise during the project’s course. Like so many elements of project management, the key to high-quality risk assessment and creating an effective response strategy lies...

How to Learn From Project Failures

Projects failing is a natural part of all business operations, with some statistics showing that up to 70% of all projects fail (i.e. fail to come in either on time, on budget or with the outcomes they were supposed to have). What’s worse is, the bigger the project, the more likely it is to fail...

Five Things That Make Teams Great

As performance expectations continue to rise, so does the desire to pinpoint what goes into creating successful teams. That’s because a great team doesn’t simply combine the talents of its members—it enhances them, allowing them to achieve far more than they could alone. In the words of the philosopher Aristotle, “The whole is greater than...

Better Leadership Through Learning

Learn to Grow: How Pursuing Learning Helps Leaders—and Their Companies—Get Ahead In 2011, Herbert Hainer, the CEO of the Adidas Group, announced the company was going to try something new. It wasn’t a new line of shoes or testing out the latest in athletic technology. Hainer wanted to invest in his company’s employees by creating...

7 Characteristics of High-Performance Agile Marketing Teams

What separates elite, high-performance agile marketing teams in some enterprises, from their hard-working — and in some cases even harder working — yet less successful counterparts in other enterprises? It’s not that they borrow a page from the Folger’s Crystals playbook and secretly replace their marketing people with Scrum masters (who are kind of like...

Why Process is the New Black for Marketing Ops

Marketing operations can be roughly defined as the elements of marketing that allow it to run effectively and efficiently, including functions such as analysis, budgeting, project planning and reporting. As one international marketing operations consultant has described it, it’s “an injection of left-brain thinking into the typically right-brained-heavy marketing function.” With the rise of new...