Manager-Leader Gap in IT Strategy

An illustration of the manager/leader gap discussed earlier (here) is drawn in this back-and-forth among Glenn Whitfield (here), Andrew Meyer (here), and others.  All good stuff, though the last two comments on Glenn’s post — from Long Huynh at CIO Assistant and Glenn himself — get closest to my perpsective.
The idea that a CIO can perform well [...]

Value Management and PMOs

I’ve been working on an initiative called “Value Delivery,” which will incorporate value management into our various PMO methods, tools, etc.  These activities are often listed as typical PMO functions, but this really only honored in the breach.  Value management never seems to take off given a PMO’s traditional emphasis on implementing project management methods, [...]

Great post/thread on Mathematics, PM, and complexity

Glen Alleman and a number of commenters contributed to a great thread on math, PM, and complexity (here). 
I try to keep the ideas of complexity “science” in mind when planning strategy and its execution.  In particular, I have a deep respect for the power of self-organization and the need to create flexible rather than brittle [...]

PMI and Agilests?

Greg Balestrero — CEO of the Project Management Institute — recently posted (here) on his experiences at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando.  In my experience, Greg and the PMI staff have been very eager to foster a better relationship among the various methodology camps.  Per Greg’s post,
[t]he intent of the visit was to bridge the [...]

Project Management as “table stakes”

Regular readers know that I’ve been harping on the increasing importance of program management, especially when it comes to realizing the benefits or value of projects.  Project managers who simply run projects without reference to the larger business environment are becoming a commodity. 
During the recent Global Corporate Council forum, I heard two thoughts that illustrated [...]

WSJ Interview on “The Experience Trap”

FYI, a Wall Street Journal article (“Dangers of Clinging to Solutions of the Past”) based in part on interviews w/ yours truly came out today (link here, page B4 in the paper).  Thanks to Kishore Sengupta of INSEAD for pointing the WSJ my way and to Phred Dvorak of the WSJ for conveying the perils of [...]

SAP PMO Webcast Recording

As a follow up, over 250 people attended last week’s SAP PMO webcast (original post here) hosted by Keith Johnson, the VP for the SAP North America PMO VP and Jim Curry, Program Delivery Director.  It’s always great to have a customer — in this case, Kelly Gear, Senior Program Manager, Johns Manville — confirm [...]

More on estimation principles

I saw this comment by Dennis Stevens (Dennis’s blog is here) on Glen Alleman’s post on software estimation practices (here).  His comment hit on two points that stood out.
Effective estimating requires a strong understanding of variance in estimating and how to account for/govern this variance.
Ditto and amen… my experience in implementing logistics optimization (I worked for [...]

Surviving PMO Success — The Process Maturity Trap

One of the unexpected challenges in our PMO journey has been that success can make an enterprise-level PMO appear less relevant.  A PMO must transform its approach to stakeholders or it won’t take full advantage of the improvements it fostered.  One manifestation of the problem unfolds thusly:

An enterprise PMO composed of PM thought leaders executes a [...]

PMI CEO’s perspective on the stimulus package

I forgot to link to this Greg Balestrero post (here) on the US stimulus package (then still in debate).  He asks a lot of great questions about whether Congress and the Obama administration have thought through how to make this portfolio most effective.
I’ll focus my comments on Greg’s first two PM-oriented suggestions for the plan [...]