Today’s business environment often demands complex, high-risk change efforts such as aggressive cost reduction, ambitious revenue enhancement, or bet-the-future turnaround programs. But the traditional project management office (PMO) is better suited to running departmental projects on time and on budget than to managing complex, interconnected, cross-enterprise efforts. What’s needed is an SIO—a strategic initiative office that focuses on organizational alignment and value delivery. The authors explore which circumstances merit an SIO and offer guiding principles for success.

Program management is now the preferred vehicle for bringing about major organizational and strategic change in many sectors. Unfortunately, former project managers entrusted with major programs are frequently not up to the task.

Jay Rollins shows you how to get away from using the old operational and strategic breakdown for aligning your organization's IT projects. He also includes a link to a free example of a portfolio mix.

In a new paper, "Vital Signs for Virtual Teams: An Empirically Developed Five-Trigger Model of Leader Interventions," Dominic M. Thomas reveals five triggers or indicators that virtual team leaders need to identify when monitoring team interaction and intervening to improve it. Among them, internal interference, such as team size and team-member cultural differences; information and communications technology (ICT) inadequacy, including reliability/availability issues; and dealing with trust/relationship inadequacy between team members.

Recognition of the strategic importance of Project Management (PM) in the corporate world is rapidly accelerating. One reason for this acceleration may be strong belief by business leaders that aligning project management with business strategy can significantly enhance the achievement of organizational goals, strategies, and performance. This paper addresses three aspects of an under-researched topic in the strategic management literature, aligning project management with business strategy. [BNET Annotation]

Usually, when an IT project fails, management is the last to know. But eventually, like a fish left too long in the refrigerator, the failure becomes all too obvious. When the situation reaches that point, your only option is the IT equivalent of pulling everything out of the refrigerator and scrubbing it out with baking soda.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, project management is getting better. More projects are succeeding, fewer projects are failing outright, and projects are returning more of the IT dollar invested.

Still, only about one-third of all projects are complete successes. Often, the difference between success and failure is spotting the critical early warning signs that a project is in trouble. Here's a quick look at some of the earliest symptoms that all is not right with your "fish"-and what you can do about it before you have to break out the baking soda.

You don't have to be a genius to deliver a project on time, nor do you have to be steeped in a mystical project management methodology to be a project manager. This straightforward guide covers key principles and successfully planning and implementing a project. It includes the purpose of the project plan, the fine art of scheduling, risk management, and staying on track. [BNET Annotation]

Information Technologies (IT) are the central nervous system of today's enterprise. At the same time, implementation of increasingly complex and interdependent IT systems results in a high rate of project failures and underperforming assets. In order to address this challenge, organizations need to adopt a dynamic, streamlined framework for IT implementation that is complementary with the formalized and rigid software development methodologies already in use. The IT Resource Gap Framework offers a model for mapping the perceived quality and quantity of six critical IT resources. The resulting IT Resource Map can help identify relative project risks, systemic weaknesses, and strategic concerns so that project managers can craft a strategy for shifting resources towards alignment and increasing the success rate of implementations.

The bigger and more complex a project gets, the more you need formal processes and techniques to effectively manage the work. This article explains the purpose, value, and implementation of the most critical aspects of successfully managing a project.

Information technology (IT) projects fail regularly-considerably missing expectations, drastically overrunning budgets, significantly missing their deadlines, and far too often having to be abandoned entirely. Research shows us that this is the rule, not the exception. Research also tells us why. What is the impact of failure on enterprises, IT professionals and software and services providers? Does it have to be this way?

In this paper, the authors advocate that a configuration perspective is needed to capture different kinds of project/programme governance approaches. The basic assumption being that different situations involve different environments and different characteristics and that project management governance cannot be taken out of context. Understanding these situations and contexts, and adapting decision-making and learning systems accordingly, is crucial. The underlying assumptions that have guided the development of corporate strategy are presented under the three umbrella titles of "capability", "guerrilla" and "complexity" core concepts. The theory of complexity and its core concept of emergence are used to support the more recent enactment theory of strategy. The authors also present practical applications of the above.

Editor's Note: as is probably obvious from the description above, this article was written by an academic and is not an easy, clear or especially interesting read...but some of the material covered, especially regarding strategy logics, is very worthwhile.

Note: TWM articles ARE still available BUT: (1) you must be a member (free for existing members, not free for new members)   (2) you must be logged-in for the link to work. If you get an error page, visit the homepage, login and then try the link again.

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This series of articles - or 'units' - will not deal with all the complexities of big time project management. Instead, it will cover the sort of projects which all managers have to deal with on a regular basis within the framework of a business whose primary aims are not project based.

But in doing so, it will cover the management principles which govern all projects, large or small, thereby giving some insights into why so many projects fail to deliver what was promised. This will provide a starting point both for those managing small projects and those who are responsible for the oversight of larger projects being carried out by more specialised project managers.

Successive units will go through the stages of a project, identifying the management requirements at each stage and the tools which are available. This will be followed by some extra units covering more general issues, for example, common problems faced by the project manager, managing risk, coping with departmental politics, handling outside contractors. We will also cover process improvement projects. And finally we will add items raised through feedback.

Editor's Note: I personally found unit one to be of much less value than subsequent units...

This paper describes a three-phased approach to the development of a comprehensive project based performance framework. It presents and discusses in some detail a project based strategy map, a set of KPI and project initiatives. It identifies the points of interface between BSC and C/SCS and discusses the project governance issues that must be addressed by the project team. A comprehensive approach to project management such as this can enhance the chances that projects are consistently delivered on time, within budget and to the specification.

This article discusses why it is essential to manage project investments in a proactive, disciplined manner, explores the notion of a "project," and provides an overview of what project portfolio management entails.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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This article argues that critical path thinking (CPM, PERT, Gantt chart) is not appropriate where project goals are poorly defined. Contingency thinking is better.

You are about to embark on an important project. It is a good idea to hold a project kickoff meeting. Don't miss this excellent opportunity to get across important communications and establish the tone for the project. This article discusses the 10 objectives of a project kickoff meeting, how to achieve them, and templates for presenting them. In Part I, the first three reasons are discussed but you will be left on the edge of your seat in anticipation of Parts II and III.

The discipline of project management is dedicated to improving the odds that every undertaking is completed within a set time frame and budget and that it achieves an acceptable level of quality. Project managers must know how to apply the right balance of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to the myriad activities required to reach the specified goals. However, many companies do not give project management the attention it deserves because they don't realize that without a consistent method for managing large initiatives, they have no way of predicting whether a project will meet its time, budget and quality goals.

Today, the paradox of systems development and management is that as the business and technology environments become more complex, delivery methods must become simpler. This fundamental approach to methodology is essential for success.

Note: CEO Refresher articles are no longer free...

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So, you've spent six months on a project. You've developed it perfectly. It's neat, clearly labelled, signed off. It looks great on paper. So why isn't anything happening? Get together half a dozen or so colleagues and run this simple exercise.

To achieve real value from your business-technology projects, try out a benefits-realization process.

The right project management software and business processes enable companies to prioritize resources and gain competitive advantage.

In the new economy, all work is project work. And you are your projects! Here's how to make them all go Wow!

Editor's Note: despite the reference to the New economy and the fact that this was written in 1999, there is some good tidbits in this article of lasting value.

By using Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) templates, you can dramatically reduce the time it takes to create project plans and improve the quality of the projects.

Companies can't make the right decisions about which projects to green-light, expand, downsize, or cut unless they've put in place good processes to keep track of exactly how much they've invested in various deployments, how those installations are progressing, and how closely they track with strategic business goals...Portfolio-management software provides data and reports that help executives make smarter decisions.

You have a tough enough time managing on-site teams. Scatter team members among locations, and it becomes even harder. One IT consultant shares the lessons he learned on the way to success.