PPM Perspectives

Resource management vs. resource scheduling

Human resources are the biggest expense in IT. So it's no wonder resource management is getting a lot of attention. Earlier today I asked Paul Ewry, an Innotas' consultants with years of PPM experience, what is the typical way in which he has seen companies determine if they have the resources they need for a project? He laughed: "Funny you should ask, in over 80% of the meetings in which I have asked that question, after a few moments of silence, somebody licks their finger and sticks it up in the air, followed by nervous laughter from everybody."  I'd love to hear other examples. But there has to be a better way.

Gantt Charts

I’ve been looking at Gantt chart functions and have been going round and round on whether Gantts need to be interactive or not, and if so how interactive. The main benefit provided by a Gantt chart is that it gives the people involved with a project an easily understandable visual representation of the project’s tasks over a timeline. It can be particularly useful when planning the project because you can see where the tasks fall on the calendar and you can see how the tasks relate to each other.

Corporate PPM – reality or fantasy?

I recently attended an industry conference on PPM in Orlando. At the conference I talked with many large companies who have bought PPM solutions at the “corporate” level and are frustrated. One corporate CIO’s story was something like this:

Five years ago we were sold a “site license” to one of the big PPM vendor’s products. We were promised the grand vision of a single corporate IT dashboard that would bring all of our projects, resources, time, requests, etc all into one place. This would allow us to make the most optimal business decisions about new corporate initiatives, staffing and resource allocation, and duplicate project elimination.

 

Project Management vs Project Portfolio Management

I have been involved in a couple of our new customer implementations recently. As a result I have been looking through some of the materials that our services team uses during implementations and I discovered what I consider to be an interesting presentation that is targeted towards project managers. What I found interesting is that it outlines the key differences between Project Management and Project Portfolio Management (PPM), and what you can expect from PPM, in a very clear and no nonsense way. And it sets the stage for what one should expect from any PPM system.

EPMO - we got it all wrong!

There is a a great disruption going on: while IT-based PMOs are trying to take their structured, PMI approach to the rest of the enterprise, the lines of business are saying "No way!"
So, what is the skill set required to have a working enterprise PMO?  And do companies really need one?