Unleashing Corporate Innovation: Identifying the Constraints
Corporate innovation struggles, and not from a lack of ideas or capital. More often, the constraints are time and attention.
“Lean” meets “Demand Management” in IT – Managing the Constraints
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 Management in Rosemont, IL - a case study on how we use ideas from Lean Manufacturing and Demand Forecasting to solve a fairly common problem…
If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?
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 our scoring framework, adding a cost / benefit template to facilitate more apples-to-apples comparisons between projects (yes, don't scoff - it is possible - more…
PMO Nirvana is a Conversation, not a Schedule
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 only [emphasis added] work on them in the order received. This is an exceedingly poor assumption for your personal run-rules, and a short-sighted objective for…
When is a project a Project? How to prevent the buildup of backlogged requests
I just wrote something up (internal wiki) that I thought was common knowledge, but I think it's one of those soft-skills things that makes total sense once you hear about it - but somebody needs to tell you. I think of one of the reasons that IT (at times) intimidates the business - or why IT gets the cold shoulder when it comes to process improvement efforts - is that we can get a bit too wrapped up in the…
Three Business-Case Arguments for Agile, & The Moose On The Table
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 things, only to have additional worthy business requirements pop-up as time goes by. Unfortunately, we don't stop the first project or delay the second; most…
How to Cheat at the PMO Prioritization Game
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't fit 10 lbs of "dirt" in a 5 lb bag. I'm talking about the project prioritization process; I have 100 different project…
Documentation Redux – a Shorthand Proposal Framework, and the PMO Surprise
McDonald sent a nice comment on my last post - he's writing a lot about project management lately, and we even chatted about some research he's doing around boomer flight. Since I don't get a ton of comments, I thought I'd respond with a post, instead. He poses the question: I am wondering if documentation of the communications associated with coding and testing (emails, archiving of successive release of code, meeting recordings, archiving of test results, etc.) can in any…
Finding shapes in the fog – How to frame a wispy, wandering conversation
An excellent discussion this afternoon, on a fairly complex topic we're trying to move forward. When dealing with broad system concepts that have been trivialized into TLAs - think CRM, PLM, BPM, TQM, yada - you need to help folks define some sort of framework to focus and steer the initiative in a general (hopefully correct) direction. Precision is not required in the early stages - like herding cats, we can start making progress when we can capture a generalized,…