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 are some great discussions out there! Look for the “top 5″ “commented on” in my next post.

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Post from: EveryJoe

Top Five Posts Tell Me What You’re Interested In

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 a both a small company and then a large company very fast.

Another complication in strategy mapping is goals feeding goals and strategies feeding strategies. The map can get quite complex and heavy before it is streamlined and clarified. Then of course there must be agreement on which strategies are more important- AND who owns them. The good news is that if executives from different areas of the business are working on this, they will better understand their relative challenges and priorities. A PMO-like organization within the company can help prioritize projects to fit the strategy prioritization provided by the executives.

The process is fantastic because it tends to clear the air as to which projects are important. It can also reveal mistakes or misses in the strategy area. Strategy mapping is NOT a substitute for strategy creation. The assumption is that you already have a good process that has developed the goals and strategies. Typically the missing piece is linking the tactics and projects to the strategy map in a way that shows clear alignment with individual strategies and then goals.

What centralizing business process gets your executives to work together? Is it strategy mapping? Is there a central governance board that works on prioritizing strategies and projects? If so who does the work of gathering information and working up priority criteria for the governance board? Share your experiences! We can learn from you.

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Post from: EveryJoe

Strategy Mapping Aligns (and Eliminates) Projects

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 program.

3. Id tactics to fulfill individual strategies- for the customer response program you might have a software/business process implementation project.

The result is a map or a “tree” that reflects how projects fit in with tactics, strategies and goals . Each level, and item within a level, is owned by an executive, director, manager or project manager. Strategies drive key requirements and point out pain in some areas. The projects that result from the tactics that are agreed to must align with a strategy. More on why I said “seemingly simple” in the next post.

Do you have a strategy map process in your company? If you don’t, how do you know that projects are aligned with strategies? When strategies change do you reassess projects for alignment? Why or why not?

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Post from: EveryJoe

Aligning Projects with Strategies Leads to Strategy Execution

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 alignment, and prioritization. My guess is that the “mythical” queue is bloated because a project inventory isn’t done regularly and many projects are not aligned with strategies. These two things would decrease the amount of, and increase focus on, projects. Lack of prioritization criteria, and working the priorities as strategies change, contributes to “bad” muti-tasking (stop, restart, relearn). You end up with a mess that allows people to move from project to project without accountability and very bad estimating.

The PMO should be doing the type of support to standardize visibility, strategy alignment, and prioritization processes plus does everything it can to help projects accelerate. All of this is largely “outside” whatever software development process is used, as it should be.

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Do you suffer from the mythical queue? Tell me about it!

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Post from: EveryJoe

Projectmanagement411 Engages: The PMO and The Mythical Project Queue

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 Office (PMO). Amen.

Bob: That same pain that drives creation of a PMO can be it’s undoing: PMOs are often eliminated after the pain goes away. The pain also tends to create a PMO that is monitoring/cost based instead of value based- i.e., focusing on the value that can be created by projects vs. merely working to a budget. The value based PMOs tend to spur innovation and have projects aligned with strategies.

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What pain created your PMO? Is the pain gone? How about the PMO? Contribute your thoughts to the conversation!

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Post from: EveryJoe

Projectmanagement411 Engages: The PMO Relieves Pain