Project Objects

Hiring for a brave new world – part 2

In the last entry I looked at a situation where an executive was looking for a new leader for the IT PMO to begin the implementation of PPM, initially on IT focused projects, but ultimately across the whole organization and with the transition from PMO to EPMO. In this entry I want to look at the advice that I gave and why I think that is the best approach for this organization to take. Let’s…

As you have probably figured out during the course of my blog posts, I am a big fan of PPM – probably just as well as I am writing about it!  However, I wonder whether there are some signs of apathy in the project management industry about the whole concept.  If that’s true then it is worrying, because it means that we haven’t been able to get across the benefits that PPM can deliver.  Here’s…

A PM’s view of portfolio management

One of the things that I like most about my job is the fact that I have the ability to work with all levels of project execution – from the executives that approve portfolios to the project teams that work at the frontline.  Today I was teaching a project risk management course and got talking to one of the attendees – a relatively new project manager, about portfolio management.  She said that…

PPM and business planning

I was recently asked how PPM fitted into the concept of business planning – not from the perspective of planning the portfolio, but rather from the perspective of establishing operating budgets, predicting PPM related costs, etc – in other words planning for the cost of having PPM within the organization.  That seems like something that we can talk about here, so here are my thoughts.

We have to…

It’s not hard to do, it’s hard to keep doing.

I recently caught up with a PMO leader who had spearheaded the implementation of PPM in his organization a couple of years ago.  Obviously I asked him how things were going and whether or not they were seeing the benefits that they had expected.  Broadly speaking he was very happy with the results, and he felt that the organization had embraced the concepts very well in general – he mentioned…

The last couple of entries have been a little bit doom and gloom – dealing with some of the perceived problems of PPM, so let’s try and make this post a little more upbeat.  I was recently asked how PPM could support ‘secret’ projects – those initiatives that are known only to a very few people in the organization, at least initially.

I think that we need to break this idea down into two separate…

Correcting misconceptions – take 2

In the last entry I started to look at some PPM misconceptions, and this time around I want to continue that – there are plenty more out there!

PPM only works with an EPMO

The idea of an Enterprise Project Management Office or EPMO is a good one – an enterprise wide PMO that consolidates all PMO functions into one place and controls project execution for the organization.  It’s a logical…

Once you have developed and implemented processes to introduce portfolio management to the organization’s project execution processes you will be faced with the reality of having to drive unpopular decisions into the project teams.  Problems elsewhere in the portfolio, or changes in the organization’s goals and objectives, are going to create a need to realign resources, reprioritize projects and…

In the last couple of posts we have looked at socializing the concept of PPM with the project teams and helping them to understand and accept the fact that the implementation of portfolio management will have some impacts on their projects and the way that they manage.  The next step is to develop processes for portfolio management that will allow for a strategic management approach to the…

Portfolio Management – Building a foundation

In the last entry we looked at the idea of introducing portfolio management as a concept to the project execution teams within the organization.  While some people will understand and embrace the concept immediately, most people will be wary of the changes and will automatically assume that portfolio management will have a negative impact on them.  This may be unfounded, but it is a natural…

Successful Portfolio Management – The groundwork

In the last entry I introduced the idea that a portfolio manager would need to create an environment for success within the project execution teams before an organization could truly be successful at portfolio management, and I suggested that the portfolio manager would need to do some groundwork first before introducing the concepts.  Without that groundwork there will be no foundation for the…

In the last three entries I have looked at some of the thinking that is available on PPM.  Some of it is very encouraging, some of it not so much, but one of the themes is an emphasis on the strategic work that is involved early in the portfolio cycle – planning and project selection / approval.  This is the most obvious place for a strategic function like PPM to focus its effort because this is…

The benefits of PPM are real

Building on the last entry that looked at the Global Project Management Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), I want to specifically look at the factors that were identified in that report as being critical to success. Specifically, PwC suggested that the three biggest factors in success were:

Aligning the portfolio with the organization’s strategy

Using an Enterprise Project Management…

Why is it still not being accepted?

Continuing my attempts to look for independent PPM information available to everyone I want to now look at one of the recent studies that did look at portfolio management in a fairly comprehensive way.  In 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) conducted their third global survey on the state of project management.  You can see the report here – http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/public-sector/assets/pwc-glo…

Did they really just say that?

So in my last entry I questioned why there wasn’t more independent information on the web about PPM, and offered some thoughts on why that was.  However I was determined to find something out there that didn’t come from a software company and I thought that I had managed to find something.  To protect the guilty I’m not going to name my source, but here is part of a blog entry that I found:

“PPM…