I was surfing the blogosphere and ran across an article about how Project and Portfolio Management strategy (and software) are musts for CIOs in hard times – I would argue that the belt tightening in lean times and the wild-wild-west rules when times are good is all the more reason to invest in PPM tools for the enterprise.

If you need a tool to tell you what you ought to cut out in one economic climate, it stands to reason that this strategy would work all the time.

I’ve never heard someone say, “Wow, I’m glad we wasted all that money while the stock price was good”… – have you?

PPM strategy a CIO’s must-have in hard times

Do you know how your project’s performing? Are you sure???

Measuring project results occurs in every project – task completion, performance to schedule, etc. Many PMs, managers and leaders believe that the efforts they are making toward measuring project results are “good enough”. There are, however, potentially fatal mistakes (figuratively) that can be made in managing the data collection and analysis of project measurement results. You can’t manage what you can’t measure is almost a cliché – but this saying has never been more appropriate.

So how do you avoid the 7 deadly sins of measuring project results? Knowing what to avoid or stop doing is half the battle. If any of these sound familiar – stop it! Set out at the beginning of your projects to define a data collection & measurement plan and strategically develop your method to measure your project’s success.

Here they are: (more…)

In the early phases of a project, the team members, stakeholders and sponsors are all focused on the work ahead – they are gathering requirements, setting up a business case or getting familiar with the product that will be central to the project. One of the items that doesn’t get much attention during this initiation phase is project success criteria, or said differently, what dictates project success.

This is an innocent omission by most accounts – there should be plenty of time to capture success criteria. However, more often than not, project teams and project managers alike forget to factor capturing and verifying success criteria back into the mix. (more…)