Opinions

Management consultants are being called on to help establish project management offices that are simply not equipped to succeed after they leave. Here are three things they’re doing wrong.

Based on the best practices of winners and finalist from PM Solutions’ annual PMO of the Year award, a new book offers tips, insights and checklists for people management, performance measurement, strategic alignment, organization design and more.

It’s no secret that command-and-control management methods aren’t very effective at motivating today’s workforce to produce greater value with fewer resources. At Toyota, the role of Shusa instills a sense of personal ownership in project outcomes. Here are thoughts on creating a similar environment for your teams.

A strong resource planning process contributes to PMO and portfolio productivity. At the annual Resource Planning Summit, practitioners gather to share insights, approaches and results.

PMOs might take a page from New York City’s war on crime, which produced a sustained drop in reported crime. By focusing on solutions instead of symptoms, then targeting the most serious strategic or execution-related pain points, a PMO is more likely to make a transformative impact.

Collaboration is a common theme throughout many of the leading trends for project management in 2012, as determined by a global panel of senior executives and subject matter experts.

A huge challenge we face as project leaders is creating an atmosphere where everyone on the team takes ownership of their tasks and the bigger picture. To get people to commit on a deeper level, tools need to go beyond status updates; they need to provide transparency and visibility into the meaning behind the work.

Agile practices are not intrinsically “value-adding” — they must be aligned to business needs and goals in order to provide true value. By measuring their agility based on compliance with a particular method, organizations may prevent their teams from adapting practices to suit projects with different characteristics and needs.

The Critical Chain approach to executing projects has been compared to Lean, which also shares common ground with Agile-related techniques such as Kanban. Is there untapped synergy between Critical Chain and Agile methods? A recent conference helped to shine light on their similarities and key differences.

When implementating a program or portfolio management solution, it is better to have 80 percent of the potential users of the system (adoption rate) using 20 percent of the system functionality, than to have 20 percent of the users exercising 80 percent of the system functionality.