Following up on Margaret Rouse’s post on my Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series, today we deal with the mythical queue:
Margaret: You really got me thinking. I think what REALLY blew me away was when you said that 74% of all projects fail — and that the number could be even higher for IT projects. I’m interested in any concrete strategies you can offer for avoiding getting small projects lost in what we used to call the mythical queue.
Bob: The PMO or, for smaller firms, some type of project control function, succeeds with excellent business processes for project visibility, strategy …read more

Margaret Rouse blogs at IT Knowledge Exchange on an amazing variety of topics. Read it and be informed! I find some of the most interesting blog commentors are IT people who engage with me about innovative project management processes- clearly they are making an effort to bring IT and the user together. Her post about my Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series led to a very nice conversation, edited for brevity, and repeated here today and tomorrow:
Margaret: The line that stuck in my head from [your] post was: Usually something painful drives the creation, or reevaluation, of a Project Management …read more

 
My recent attempt at developing a compelling marketing offer for a PMO consultancy revealed that this process is not a one-time effort. It is a continuous improvement process that is truly an on-going project. In my role as Director Sales and Marketing I introduced the concept to the owner of the consulting company. We agreed that what we were really providing our customers was the ability to execute strategies. The things that customers hate about the industry that we want to eliminate are:
1. Lack of value at each step of the process.
2. Poor knowledge transfer.
3. Poor expectation setting- lack of clarity …read more

I’ve mentioned an on-going marketing project for advanced PMOs in my “Vision Beyond the Vision” post in the “Choosing the Right PMO Vision” series; this project is developing, and continuously improving, a compelling marketing offer. The way to view this is to ask your customers what they hate about dealing with the industry you are in- NOT what they hate about dealing with you, because that is a different issue.
The idea is to understand, and eliminate, those things that a customer hates about the industry so that you can provide a clear differentiated product offering. One example from Eli Goldratt’s excellent book …read more