No, that’s not me- it’s Einstein doing his first post!
Thought I’d tell you what you seem to like here at Project Management 411. Looking over my viewing statistics I see that you like controversy, trends, packaged series, New Years stuff, and soul searching two-worders. So, take a look at what other’s have been reading in order of popularity:
No. 1. What’s Harder Project Management or Management?
No. 2. Business Technology Trends Create More Projects
No. 3. Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series
No. 4. New Year’s Resolutions for Better Project Control
No. 5. Losing Touch
Comments from readers is what drives me to blog these days; there …read more

In my last post I said strategy mapping is “seemingly simple” because environments have different requirements depending on the industry, size, growth patterns, and degree of change. For example, an implantable medical device manufacturer I worked with was more concerned with having scalable business processes and systems because they expected extremely high growth once the FDA approved their new design. Typically companies have high level goals related to revenue and costs that drive all strategies. But the medical device company really wasn’t concerned with X% revenue growth- they were more concerned with business processes and systems that could handle being …read more

Aligning projects with strategies, assuming that the company has strategies, is one of the simplest ways to quickly see which projects are worth doing. Conversely, projects that don’t align with strategies should quickly be assessed and probably stopped. One of the ways to get a read on alignment is to simply put together a strategy map. The concept is seemingly simple:
1. Id goals of company- increase shareholder value, increase revenue by X%, decrease costs by X% are examples.
2. Id strategies to fulfill the goals- for the revenue goal it might be a customer response program or a web based presence …read more

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