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 Evaluating PPM Software

Whether you’re a professional or “accidental” Project Manager, the burden of evaluating software solutions will likely fall on your shoulders at some point in your career. I say burden and not responsibility because the pressure to deliver is real, visibility among executive stakeholders high and change management a tricky process to navigate. So how do...

Make the Right Strategic Decisions on Your Project Portfolio

If your organization has been busy managing a portfolio of projects, you should already be aware that the traditional annual planning cycle hinders adaptability of effectively managing the portfolio in today’s continually changing market. Portfolio planning must be continuous to minimize missed revenue and maximize opportunities so your organization can capitalize on new demand that...

Stop Working on Projects That Are Not Priority

Projects still remain the vehicle for executing on strategy. Even if the current pressures facing executives around strategy are ignored, and assuming strategy remains unchanged, project failure rates will continue to remain alarmingly high if there is no clear unified vision for execution. Only 29 percent of projects were completed successfully in 2015, according to...

Where Does Your PMO Fit?

OK, we already know there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to the PMO. But does your PMO attempt to do too little or too much? Or are they hemmed in by your organization’s oversight or lack of PPM maturity? You’ve got questions and Gartner has the answers. In their new report,...

Cast Your Thoughts on the State of Project and Portfolio Management for 2017

We’ve been benchmarking project and portfolio management through an annual survey for three years now and have seen some surprising and not so surprising insights come out of it. When asking 100+ project and portfolio management professionals, it is always interesting to see how project management changes over time and how among all the changes...

American Airlines Flying Higher with Investment and Capacity Planning

Merging organizations is never easy – especially when the end-result is the world’s largest airline with 120,000 employees and 554,000 daily passengers. This was the challenge American Airlines faced when they merged with US Airways…Spreadsheets were the primary tool for resource management which proved to be painstakingly insufficient to forecast, plan, and manage the resources...

7 Principles of Business Agile in the New World of Work

In the past, saying the phrase “use an agile approach” in most enterprise environments would trigger two very different reactions: developers would perk up, and everyone else would tune out. That’s because agile was linked exclusively to software development projects. And while scrum (and its many applications and expressions) remains alive and well, agile isn’t...

Making Resource Management Everyone’s Responsibility

Whether blamed for lengthy project delivery times or less-than-stellar project results, many PMO leaders find themselves in the cross-hairs these days. No one wants to be accused of being slow or process-heavy when it comes to resource capacity planning. But PMO leaders and resource managers can’t manage resources one project at a time. Instead, the...

Tips for identifying project risks

As a project manager, you can feel certain on almost every new project that something will go wrong along the way. You may not know what exactly it will be—unavailable resources, scheduling conflicts, changes in requirements or something else—but chances are that at least one part of your project plan will break. What separates average...

Powering the work journey with in-context collaboration

It is widely understood that collaboration is essential to organizational growth, success and, in the long run, survival. However, many organizations that have attempted to enable and promote enterprise social collaboration have discovered that the quantifiable benefits are underwhelming. Yes, there are many more conversations taking place – both online and offline. But no, performance,...