One of the first things I need to do whenever I go into a company to talk about Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is to get some kind of a consensus of what it means. I can hear some of you laughing. “Surely after all this time,” you’re saying, “we have a common understanding of such a basic term in the project management industry.” No, I’m afraid not. It’s perhaps remarkable in an age when we…
Project Management systems – it’s about deployment. Sure, there are lots of functions to consider and everyone wants to know your “methodology” but if you are committed to having projects fit into a an organizational system, it all comes down to deployment. Can you assemble a system that will actually be accepted and used by the end-users who will have to use it. Deployment includes all of it: developing the concept, buying or writing the…
In our last issue I talked about determining your requirements for a corporate project management system. This month we’ll talk about creating your plan for the deployment of your project management system. What?! You don’t have a plan? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, you’re not alone, many project managers have attempted to deploy their project management system without a plan. The bad news? You’re not alone, many project managers…
So, it’s time to bring it all together. You’ve used your talents thus far to choose the perfect project management software system; to implement it perfectly within your organization and to train your personnel within an inch of their lives. Now, it’s time to fulfill on some of those promises you made to management when they approved the budget in the first place and to integrate the project management system with other systems in the…
Project Portfolio management starts with understanding what’s important to your business.
It’s the hot button lately in project management circles. How can teams collaborate? It’s not idle chatter. It’s been apparent for a long time that a project manager’s role is not just calculating a schedule from his hidden laboratory deep in the bowels of the organization. Now a project manager is expected to spend the vast majority of his or her time working with others. They may be negotiating with the clients or recruiting new…
Dashboards and creating beautiful and shiny indicators of performance are all the rage but how do you ensure that your heat maps, thermometers, speedometers and traffic light icons are showing you what’s useful?
When is a proof of concept a benefit and when is it just more work with nothing to show for it? This article covers some of the basic elements of making proof of concepts work for you.