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.

The Art of Process in Marketing Operations

In marketing operations, a process is a collection of similar tasks which are aligned towards a singular set of objectives. It will have inputs, throughputs and outputs and generally a number of different stages which are followed and information components which are included. For example, a marketing campaign management process might go through these following...

How to Spot Project Failure Early

Not every project is destined to be a roaring success, in fact some are doomed before they even get the go-ahead from above. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that we can’t know how things will change or turn out when we set out on a certain path. The best we can ever do is...

Marketing & Operations: BFFs or Frenemies?

The rivalry and conflict between marketing and operations has been in existence ever since business moved beyond a sole trader model, such as when prehistoric siblings Ubb and Asha decided to take their stone tool making side-hustle full time. Ubb, the marketing whizz, soon got annoyed that their glacial production pace meant they weren’t able...

4 Lessons for Striking the Right Note with Your Teams

Your pile of unread messages is teetering on the verge of collapse. Your phone is blowing up. The day is packed. Finding composure in the storm is tough, but as a leader, you have no choice when communicating with your teams. Hitting the right note is a constant challenge. Team coordination has largely shifted from...

The Journey Towards Embracing Agile: A Holistic Approach for the PMO

The past four blogs in our series are based on the whitepaper, The Agile PMO: 5 Steps to Driving Agility at Scale and have centered around how the PMO can guide the enterprise towards greater agility. It requires the PMO to reinvent itself from a central command organization to one that enables and empowers with...

How One Woman Changed Sin City – Part One 

You might not know it, but your mom’s favorite singer also happens to be one of the world’s best-selling recording artists of all-time, and the woman that potentially saved Las Vegas. While she is best known for her soaring vocals, powerful ballads, and French-Canadian accent, Celine Dion also holds the record for Las Vegas’ two...

How to Better Allocate Your Time for Success

Effective time allocation does not necessarily mean putting more time in, it is about making the best use of the time which has already been given to something and can often be the difference between success and failure in a project. Putting time management skills to use has effects across every aspect of a project,...

Improving your Project’s Visibility Within Your Organization

Every project manager would love to be able to know exactly what’s happening within their project at any given time. For other stakeholders, further outside of this information loop, such a dream is even more fanciful. Outside of some kind of project visibility superpower, unfortunately, such immediate and actionable insight is impossible. However, that doesn’t...

The Importance of Communication (& How to Improve It)

A lot of the literature one might read about project management and efficiency in the workplace might pull out stats on the time spent on emails and meetings as being “wasted” and an easy place to improve productivity. This is underpinned by a rather misguided relegation of the importance of communication for project success, a...

Resource Constraints and Skill Shortages in Project Management

We’ve written before about best practices for resource management. There’s no doubt that these practices – like understanding the resources available, tracking time, prioritizing work and creating efficient workflows – are integral to project management. There’s nothing that spells disaster for a project more than a situation in which resources aren’t covering the work that...