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More and more, we are seeing that PPM solutions live or die based upon the solution’s ability to gain user adoption. Like most front office systems, or any database application for that matter, if the users don’t use it, there’s no data and thus no information, and with no information there’s no value.

This is obvious, you might say. Don’t we already know this? If so, then why do organizations struggle with it?

For full article and posted comments (IT Tool Box) - click here

Following on from our eariler article - Seven Deadly Sins of IT Projects - I’ve come across an excellent posting from the Brown Consulting Blog on the same subject that I would like to share with you all.

According to a recent report from the UK National Audit office about IT project failures, the following reasons were cited as the top reasons for failure:

1. Lack of clear link between the project and the organization’s key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success.

2. Lack of clear senior management and Ministerial ownership and leadership.

3. Lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.

4. Lack of skills and proven approach to project management and risk management.

5. Too little attention to breaking development and implementation into manageable steps.

6. Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value for money (especially securing delivery of business benefits).

7. Lack of understanding of and contact with the supply industry at senior levels in the organisation.

6. Lack of effective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain.

To read on click here

According to Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) should be something that every project manager should embrace…and we agree.

According to Jeannette, there are 3 reasons to embrace PPM:

1. PPM brings realism to an organization’s planning processes.

2. PPM brings rationality in the allocation of resources, both human and financial.

3. PPM brings visibility to project work and project people.

Jeanette’s article presents a solid argument for PPM.

For those of you who want a quick overview here’s a basic primer.

Click Here to read argument (Posted on Brown Consulting Group Blog)

Part 1 of 4: Excerpts from the forthcoming PPM book - Project Portfolio Management: Leading The Coporate Vision by Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James Waller

We are proud to introduce the 1st of a 4-part serialisation of the forthcoming book on Project Portfolio Management. Project Portfolio Management: Leading The Coporate Vision is a real-world business guide into the how to successfully deploy a PPM process within the business and builds a practical step-by-step framework for its successful implementation within a low-risk high value environment.

The book is for executives and business leaders who need to manage projects as business investments and to measure their impact on the bottom line. It is also for programme, project, resource portfolio managers who need to improve their methods of managing multi-project environments and to ensure that they are able to make their projects accountable to the corporate goals of the business. At the centre of the book are the 10 commandments of PPM. These commandments underpin the successful implementation of a PPM process and solution and include:

1. View projects as business investments: Project Portfolio Management is not just another project management process – it is about how the business manages projects as strategic short, medium and long term investments. PPM looks to empower the business, not just the project process. From the strategic viewpoint it allows stakeholders, business leaders and executives to see clearly and understand how effective their strategies are and if necessary which programmes and projects to review. From the operational view point PPM empowers the portfolio, programme, resource and project managers with tools, support and necessary corporate accountability to execute project delivery.

2. Achieve the correct balance between processes, people and tools: Implementing PPM involves a careful blend of people, processes and tools. Success is based on the balancing of all three and ensuring the correct tool selection, for example, ensuring that software is designed to support, aid and improve process effectiveness and efficiency. Remember, do not let software bend and break your business’s backbone, nor allow processes to bog down and adversely affect your organisation culture.

3. Aim for low risk, high value deployment: Avoid a ‘big bang’ or ‘rip-and-replace’ approach and look to deploy PPM in bite-size chunks, by developing a Proof-of-Benefit or ‘Model Office’. This approach provides an actual, real-world view of the value of a PPM solution within a low risk environment and is an excellent way to communicate its potential Return On Investment (ROI) and Return On Opportunity (ROO).

4. Ensure business-wide visibility: Enterprise- or business-wide visibility is delivered through the deployment of role based dashboards. Role based dashboards are designed to empower all project stakeholders within the business with project information that is relevant to their role and position. Role based visibility is about providing fast and effective means of integrating the strategic with the operational and delivering a practical means for real-time opportunity detection. Role based visibility enables the business to drill through layers of management and is designed to provide business and projects leaders with the ability to spot project redundancies, resource appropriately, understand budget allocation and spend, as well as keeping close tabs on project progress and how it impacts on the bottom line.

5. Establish a single version of the truth: Implement a process that accesses project information from a single data source in a real-time environment. A single point of entry keeps information consistent, accurate, complete and also ensures that the management has a single, reliable version of the truth. This single data source removes delays to management and execution of critical business processes.

6. Negotiate executive sponsorship: Sponsorship from the top provides an infrastructure whereby the right authority is empowered to drive the right behaviour in the organisations and ensures that the deployment of PPM is strategically driven. In others words, a truly strategy driven approach to managing an organisation’s projects must start at the top in order for accountability and transparency to extend throughout the organisation and to lend the PPM process both credibility and suitability.

7. Implement as a change project: The implementation of Project Portfolio Management has to be managed not only as a project but as a change management project. Introducing the Project Portfolio Management process is a business process change initiative and as a result the leadership involvement and cultural change expected from the stakeholders are fundamental for the successful implementation of the portfolio process. A process champion must be actively engaged in using, funding, promoting, and defending Project Portfolio Management. Senior managers, functional managers, and project managers must understand the portfolio management objectives and processes. They must be actively involved in pushing the approved processes out to the organisation and willing to enforce the process and deliverable requirements.

8. Develop project management competence and maturity: Project managers must have the skills and tools available to them to produce quality project plans. A quality project plan indicates there is a high degree of confidence in the project manager’s ability to identify the tasks necessary to meet the project objectives and to provide good estimates for the resources required to accomplish the tasks.

9. Define an agreed and accepted PPM process: The PPM process defined and established must be a consistent and repeatable process that captures project and portfolio metrics that enable consistent comparison over time across projects and the portfolio. It must be a process that obliges organisational staff to work together as a team and share resources across departments, thereby improving resource utilisation and increasing the return on investment from the portfolio of projects accomplished

10. Embed PPM capability in everyday business working: The Project Portfolio Management outputs (reports, and so on) must be used to guide decision making and enforce the process. When staffs see managers are using this data to make decisions, they will want to keep their own project elements accurate and up to date. Further, it is important to provide PPM process oversight and support to ensure staffs are properly educated to contribute to the portfolio management process.

• Authors: Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James Waller
• ISBN: 0230507166
• Format: Trade Book
• Price: £25.00
• Pub. Date: 15/03/2007
• Publisher(s): Palgrave Macmillan

To pre-order you copy click here

Sun Tzu and the Project Battleground: Creating Project Strategy from “The Art of War” by by David E. Hawkins and Shan Rajagopal.

Although this book isn’t new, it is an excellent read. ‘The Art of War’ by Sun Tzu has influenced a generation of business leaders and strategy gurus. Yet for many people in business and students of management and business execution this remains a mystery. For the first time the authors provide a fully comprehensive account of this work and the influence of Sun Tzu in creating project strategy to effectively translate good strategic thinking into actionable and achievable plans that will yield the desired operating result. Their book will give the reader the opportunity to appreciate and benefit by the knowledge that successful implementation of business strategies are supported by excellence in project strategy execution.

Contents

• The Battleground
• Strategic Assessment
• Doing Battle
• Planning a Siege
• Formation
• Force
• Emptiness and Fullness
• Armed Struggle
• Adaptations
• Manoeuvring Armies
• Terrain
• Nine Guards
• Fire Attack
• On the Use of Spies

To order this title click here

Shan Rajagopal a co-author of this book is a popular speaker at major conferences and seminars worldwide. He has captured his rich experiences in books and contributes articles to journals and magazines. His other book includes: “Strategic Supply Management: An Implementation Toolkit”. His work experience covers clients in the Aerospace, Defence, Electronics, Finance, IT, Minerals and Manufacturing sectors