Inside the Black Box Crucial to Megaproject Success

Despite their importance to the global economy, most megaprojects fail to be delivered on budget or schedule. Here’s how managers could improve on that dismal record.

The Project Economy Has Arrived

Research shows that only 35% of the projects undertaken worldwide are successful—which means we’re wasting an extravagant amount of time, money, and opportunity. To take advantage of the new project economy, companies need a new approach to project management: They must adopt a project-driven organizational structure, ensure that executives have the capabilities to effectively sponsor projects, and train managers in modern project management.

Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight JTBD Framework

In my work as an angel investor and advisor, I often find myself dishing out the same advice: Do the work to make sure you are building a product that people will actually find valuable. That requires an incredibly deep understanding of the user, their hopes, and their motivations, instead of taking the easier path of operating off of untested assumptions.

Many entrepreneurs may do this … [ Read more ]

I hate MVPs. So do your customers. Make it SLC instead.

Product teams have been repeating the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) mantra for a decade now, without re-evaluating whether it’s the right way to maximize learning while pleasing the customer.
 
Well, it’s not the best system. It’s selfish and it hurts customers.
 
MVPs are too M and almost never V. Customers see that, and hate it. It might be great for the product team, but it’s bad for … [ Read more ]

The 4 Types of Project Manager

Your organization’s growth opportunities fall into four different categories, and in order to develop your business in a commercially sustainable manner, you need four specific types of project manager to pursue them. The employee types and the growth opportunities that they are best at pursuing can be positioned along two dimensions: (1) Is the growth opportunity in line with our existing strategy? (2) Can a … [ Read more ]

How to Prioritize Your Company’s Projects

In over 20 years of experience in prioritizing, selecting, and managing projects, Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez has developed a simple framework that he calls the “Hierarchy of Purpose.” It is a tool that executive teams can use to help them prioritize strategic initiatives and projects.

Controlling the Enterprise

Which projects are in the best interest of our company? What is the best use of its existing and future financial and operational capacities? Alternatively, which projects should we stop, suspend or delay in case of sudden economic downturn or change in our strategy? Providing the means to answer those questions more rationally is precisely the objective of project portfolio management (PPM). PPM is the … [ Read more ]

Making Better Decisions About the Risks of Capital Projects

A handful of pragmatic tools can help managers decide which projects best fit their portfolio and risk tolerance.

Why are MBAs Not Teaching About Project Management?

Senior executives seem to neither understand project management nor regard it as an important means of business strategy execution. Only a few top business school’s Masters of Business Administration (MBAs) teach project management as part of their core course curriculum. I have spent the last 10 years trying to understand why.

Failure Points: Where BPM Projects Tend To Falter

Business performance management software can deliver great benefits, but many BPM software implementations fail as a result of the company’s inattention to some key characteristics of a successful initiative.

Better Fostering Innovation: 9 Steps That Improve Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma brings rigor and discipline to project management, but its approach to project selection is lacking. A new approach incorporates a structured, enterprise-level view of metrics to jump-start corporate innovation.

Product Management Gets Stronger

An innovative approach to managing product portfolios—the strong-form model—can help companies stay ahead of change.

Delivering Large-Scale IT Projects on Time, on Budget, and on Value

Large IT efforts often cost much more than planned; some can put the whole organization in jeopardy. The companies that defy these odds are the ones that master key dimensions that align IT and business value.

Curbing Risks in Complicated Projects

Some types of risk pose a peskier problem than others for the success of complex projects, but the outcome of large-scale initiatives ultimately rests on how capably managers and their subordinates can detect and respond to unforeseen emergencies. Changing requirements for the project, shifting customer needs, and communication breakdowns are the most frequent and damaging types of risk.

The Cost of Bad Project Management

Projects often fail because organizations put more emphasis on rational factors than on employees’ psychological engagement — and the cost to organizations is enormous.

Executing Change: Beyond the PMO

Today’s business environment often demands complex, high-risk change efforts such as aggressive cost reduction, ambitious revenue enhancement, or bet-the-future turnaround programs. But the traditional project management office (PMO) is better suited to running departmental projects on time and on budget than to managing complex, interconnected, cross-enterprise efforts. What’s needed is an SIO—a strategic initiative office that focuses on organizational alignment and value delivery. The authors … [ Read more ]

Thinking and Acting as a Great Programme Manager

Program management is now the preferred vehicle for bringing about major organizational and strategic change in many sectors. Unfortunately, former project managers entrusted with major programs are frequently not up to the task.

Use these four classifications to align projects in your company

Jay Rollins shows you how to get away from using the old operational and strategic breakdown for aligning your organization’s IT projects. He also includes a link to a free example of a portfolio mix.

Five Triggers to Watch For When Managing Virtual Teams

In a new paper, “Vital Signs for Virtual Teams: An Empirically Developed Five-Trigger Model of Leader Interventions,” Dominic M. Thomas reveals five triggers or indicators that virtual team leaders need to identify when monitoring team interaction and intervening to improve it. Among them, internal interference, such as team size and team-member cultural differences; information and communications technology (ICT) inadequacy, including reliability/availability issues; and dealing with … [ Read more ]