Managing a successful PMO (Project Management Office) is difficult at best—and if that PMO is global, the challenges increase exponentially. This paper addresses those hurdles, including risks and best practices, and highlights the PMO director’s behaviors that are critical to …
It has long been recognized that good project management is not enough to ensure project success. For example, de Wit argued “good project management can contribute towards project success but is unlikely to be able to prevent project failure” (de …
Project management (PM) is a mission-critical process. Projects are performed to implement new or changed products, address customer requirements, make operational improvements and comply with internal and external standards and regulations. If projects are not being performed as effectively as …
Project success rates are falling —but not for everyone. Here’s how to buck the trend toward mediocrity, economic turbulence be damned. First, the bad news: Project success rates dropped 10 percentage points over the past four years, according to the …
While project managers can often become consumed with day-to-day administrative details and status updating, they can sometimes lose sight of key steps that are a critical part of the foundation of any successful project. Specific pitfalls that too often derail …
In difficult economic times, “doing more with fewer resources” requires smarter planning and new concepts to help your projects succeed. This paper introduces the new concepts of project management constraint theory and a category of constraints to ensure positive outcomes. …
The biggest of the success factors is learning and adapting from experience (continuous improvement). Failure to learn from an experience should be considered a worse failure than a failed project. Continuous improvement happens not only at the project or organization …
What change-agile organizations have found is that impacting these four operational systems of change agility requires a deep understanding of what drives the systems to be successful—or not. One organization saw repeatedly that sponsorship was tepid. It undertook some of …
Change is difficult, individually and organizationally. Individually, humans seek stability, and research has shown that even when they accept and internalize the value of change, they frequently fail to change. Kegan and Lahey (2009) suggest that even when we set …
Organizations that are undertaking agile transformations are usually defined by rigid phase-gate approaches. Departments may even have been created to enforce rigid compliance to pre-defined processes and policies. Overcoming this cultural inertia can be daunting. Restructuring organizationally can be damaging …