PPM Perspectives

Innovation by Design

In an interview article with Tim Brown, CEO at Ideo, I came across a statement that caused me to stop reading and sit back in my chair. The interview question was about the process of innovation within an organization:

"Tim Brown: Even though companies want everyone to be thinking about innovation all the time, the reality is that everybody’s got other roles to play. So innovation is not a continuous activity; it’s a project-based activity. If you don’t have a process for choosing projects, starting projects, doing projects, and ending projects, you will never get very good at innovation. Projects need some form—you call them something; you run them in a certain way; you fund them in a certain way. That sounds simple, but, actually, a good process for getting projects going and done is often not obvious to companies."

Let me just spend a few more characters here and repeat one phrase: "innovation is not a continuous activity; it’s a project-based activity."

The quick background on Ideo is that they do new ideas. These guys noodle on everything from medicine delivery techniques to consumer products to childhood education. They are an idea laboratory. Their product is the new idea. They "create impact through design."

One might be tempted to look at this kind of innovation as a mysterious creative process, a process that cannot be clearly identified and that it is imbued with inscrutable shades of genius and black magic. Perhaps even a toad leg or two.

A confession: reading this statement felt like victory. When I started working on ways to create transparency in the project life cycle, I knew that one of the biggest objections would be the fear of stifling innovation. My response was always that we only stifle innovation in a transparent environment if we are not committed to invest in innovation in the first place. If innovation has to happen via secrecy and subterfuge, then what kind of organizations are we running?

As I have said "The future state of an organization is controlled by the people who lead it, and that future state is orchestrated via projects."

I'll let Tim Brown have the last word on why this stuff matters: "In the end, all businesses exist to serve some kind of human purpose. If you can’t somehow frame what you do in terms of having an impact on the world, I don’t see how you can have a very effective business."

by Demian Entrekin at ITToolbox

A CIO Perspective on PPM

Interview with the CIO of a major brand - discussing the role of IT; why PPM; why Innotas; who uses PPM and why; results; and lessons learned. Unfortunately the PR department of the company this CIO works for does not allow their employees to be featured in interviews so I had to omit all direct references to them. Other than that, the content of the interview has not been changed.

The quickest path to IT portfolio management

Why IT organizations need portfolio management? Because change happens and adjusting priorities and assessing the impact of changes is critical to the business and cannot be done on a spreadsheet. The question is: how hard is it to put portfolio management in place?

Where do you start with PPM?

Let's get practical. Leaving aside all the big discussions about objectives, alignment, executive sponsorship (don't get me wrong, these ARE important)...where do you start to get PPM done? Is there a pattern of implementation that is the most common across successful PPM implementations?

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.

New White Paper

I don't usually know exactly what I'm going to write in a white paper.  I usually have a preliminary hypothesis and then I try to focus on The Question I'm asking.  It is more of a discovery process than a proof.  Here is section 4 of the white paper in progress.

How Large?

How large does my Organization have to be before I should have a Project Management Office (PMO) and follow Project Portfolio Management (PPM) processes?

I was thinking about this question a few days ago in the context of Innotas the company. We aren’t a large company (yet!) and some people might say that we have only a few initiatives and manageable staff size and therefore there is no need for a PMO or PPM processes. We all know what the company is working on and why. We all understand the decision criteria used to determine if we’re going to take on a project or not, and we all understand the tradeoffs of those decisions.

Time Capture Profiles

I recently compiled the following profile outlines to help identify the types of information and level of detail needed by organizations when tracking time. Does one or more of these profiles match what you do or would like to be doing? If one or more do match, what is the balance in your organization? If none of the profiles match your needs, what are you tracking and why?

Project Culture (part 42)

I received an excellent comment from Ken Tobin via email on my previous post called "On Time on Scope?"  I was pretty sure that post would stir the pot a bit, and I got some good feedback on it. 

Below is Ken's comment: