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…
Lots of good conversations recently about managing IT, Finance, and other constrained resources for projects. We have implemented tools to model available time; when trying to understand what new work can get added to the pile, it helps immeasurably when you understand how much time you have available, plus what else has been committed. This has become a powerful process for managing chronically constrained resources - but one side effect is that other folks on the team can find themselves…
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…