portfolio management

“Lean” meets “Demand Management” in IT – Managing the Constraints

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 15, 2012 ⋅ One comment

It has been a few months since I’ve posted, but I haven’t been idle – two significant projects (aside from working very hard at the full-time job), only one of which I can talk a bit about at this time. Tomorrow (Thursday, 16 Feb 2012) , I am presenting at a conference on IT Portfolio [...]

Market Driven Data Quality (Data Darwinism)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 19, 2011 ⋅ One comment

Just trying a little contrarian thought this week … Have you ever noticed how much time and energy goes in to data validation? I think it stems from visual forms development and the wide variety of clever data entry controls that are available – everyone wants to write an app that gets the oooo, cool! [...]

Managing Change: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 15, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Often, when trying to figure out how to “make things happen”, your focus switches between multiple targets. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And How can I get the others to understand what I am doing? Real change happens along a continuum that stretches from The Big Idea to Real Results, and [...]

If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

As the new year approaches, debates over the “value” of IT and business projects intensify; it’s not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I’m hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will “make the cut”. We will definitely iterate on [...]

PMO Nirvana is a Conversation, not a Schedule

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ February 22, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

We continue to iterate on our PMO processes – managing too few resources and too many project requests, an environment I have consistently seen in every IT group I have ever worked with. Our latest discussion concerned the concept of FIFO work on projects … … when presented with five things to do, I will [...]

Three Business-Case Arguments for Agile, & The Moose On The Table

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 15, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Another conversation at the start of the new year – this time in our PMO, concerning project prioritization and resource assignments. Many organizations follow a “parallel” model, launching multiple projects at any one time and working concurrently to move things forward. To be fair, this often occurs because we start work on one or two [...]

How to Cheat at the PMO Prioritization Game

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 15, 2007 ⋅ One comment

Many will say their Project Management Office (PMO) has been established to promote “Best Practices for Project Management” – better work product, alignment with business strategic direction, etc. That may be partially true, but let’s inject a little reality here … many PMOs were created to help solve what I call the Dirt Bag problem [...]

You can run but you can’t hide

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ September 5, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

I sent out notes to folks talking about my new situation, and some came back with interesting comments. Here’s one from W, a brilliant guy with Big-6 background and plenty of business acumen. However, he (like me) is a coder at heart, and really wants to focus on the technology (not like me). More power [...]

Pendulum swings – Santayana says …

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 12, 2005 ⋅ One comment

I saw Stewart’s article on customized software in ComputerWorld this week, and googled (Googled?) a bit more and found a pair of good posts from Scavo (Keller/AMR started it all), speaking of an apparent trend back to favoring custom-built software in business today. A few thoughts … A classic blunder made by many corporate IT [...]

portfolio management

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