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 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...

Mentoring and Its Role in Project Management

One of the great subsidiary benefits that an organization receives over the course of a project, which is often forgotten when crunching the figures of costs and profits, is how much team members improve their skills and abilities. Mentoring in project management is a subject that has always been around but until recently has been...

Project Failure: How to Better Incorporate Lessons Learned

According to PMI’s most recent Pulse of the Profession survey (PDF), organizations have been wasting up to 12% of their annual project investment due to poor performance for the past five years. While PMs may strive for 100% success, it’s no secret that sometimes projects fail. But a project failure doesn’t have to be the...

How to Make Better Decisions in Project Management

Holding a management role, no matter how many reports you have or how big your team is, means that you’re going to have to make decisions. Making them isn’t really the problem, however, it’s knowing how to make better decisions and to consistently make the best choice for your project that matters. Though it might...

Four Things to Consider When Crafting Your Next Project Plan

Writing a project plan is one of the most basic of project management skills, but it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily one of the easiest to master. Taking it as a guiding document that will define the timing, costs and scope of your project it is also rife with risk and opportunities for disaster. For...