IT Project Planning for 2010

Still refining that growth-focused IT project proposal with the less than tangible business case? According to recent Gartner survey, now may be the time to shift your portfolio weighting to projects with a growth emphasis. ...

... "Business leaders are gasping for growth after a long period holding their breath, and they are expecting to increase the importance of IT in their post-recession approach. " ...

Via Manufacturing Computer Solutions: Business-led IT during 2010

High Potential Project Portfolio Category

A good portfolio should have an innovation category for high-potential, game-changing investments where the risk of failure is moderate to high and the governing body accepts failure as a way to learn and fail forward. ...

... "It's important, he says, to allocate some portion of the budget and IT resources for investments in high-potential projects. " ...

Via ITBusinessEdge: Project Portfolio

Platinum Projects Stay Funded

Credit Suisse CIO Karl Landert was recently appointed to the company's executive board and reports to the CEO. He shares insights into steering the IT ship using flexibility and agility in staffing, while ensuring that the highest priority / value projects in the portfolio remain properly funded. ...

... "By and large projects that are on our radar screen as prioritized -- or platinum projects, as we name them -- have not been affected. We have gone through the same process we go through every year, which is that the demand and appetite for new things is much higher than we are prepared to fund ... " ...

Via Wall Street & Technology: Credit Suisse CIO

Strategic Position of Projects

IT project portfolios are currently under-review for reducing investment. Portfolio reviews are a healthy process. Visibility into the business case financials and support for the current business strategy are key inputs to enable the discussion. Exercising this (even if painful) will increase your process maturity, eventually leading to an increased return on the portfolio. ...

... "if the project really is strategic -- if it involves the executive team and will enable transformation across the business -- then it is by definition more than an IT project ... " ...

Via Computerworld: Project Portfolio Management

Document Project Portfolio Moves

Document your project portfolio changes --- in-summary on the portfolio dashboard and in appropriate detail in offline documentation --- so you have a reference to your history. ...

... "At some point in the future, you may find this decision to be called into question. Even if the decision wasn’t yours to make, you may find yourself asked why Project X was ever shut down. " ...

Via Baseline: Pulling the IT Project Plug

Innovation Projects

While we are confronting the strongest headwinds since the Great Depression, leave room in your shrinking project portfolio for innovation and growth investments. It is understandable that operational efficiency and financial stability will move to the forefront and the portfolio balance will shift. There are innovation and project investment lessons to be learned from similar times. ...

... "Neoprene, which DuPont publicly announced in November 1931 and introduced commercially in 1937, became one of the 20th century’s major innovations. By 1939, every automobile and airplane manufactured in the United States had neoprene components. " ...

Via McKinsey Quarterly: Innovating during the Great Depression

Project with Short Term Benefits

Advice on information technology is mixed, as we head into this economic storm. For some enterprises, shifting to short term payback may be necessary to emerge from trough of this economic cycle. However, the some companies will use this environment to implement transformations and shift their position in the marketplace. Whichever path you take, now is the time to revisit your project portfolio and pipeline and readjust priorities. ...

... "Hackett recommends that companies reevaluate any IT projects currently underway and consider eliminating those that are unlikely to generate short-term performance improvements ... " ...

Via Smart Pros: Strategies to Weather the Storm

Navigate Project Minefield

The CIO agenda and the underlying IT project portfolio can benefit from navigating the political waters in an enterprise. Project managers should tap into the cross-line of business and function perspective provided by the IT organization to sense and respond to developing situations - ultimately doing what's right for the enterprise and adding value. ...

... "CIOs could use their cross-disciplinary view to understand the different agendas in play. Very often they will discover the different agendas have more in common than they thought, she said. " ...

Via ComputerWeekly: Office politics

Manage Project Portfolio During Recession Environment

This recession could cause your enterprise to scale back its investment commitment for projects. Now is a good time to refine your project ranking and scan the pipeline for high-value ungoverned project proposals. Investment scenarios can be helpful to facilitate a portfolio review with your governance team. Consider preparing them in advance. Also, remember that economic downturns can also be a time for considering strategic investments that can change the company's competitive position as the storm blows over. ...

... "More typically, failure lives in shades of gray, and choosing the worst projects among a mediocre group can be tough. " ...

Via ZDNet: Managing Projects during recession

Managing Project Portfolio

Reference for tips on getting started in project portfolio management from AMR Research and other practitioners. It will take some energy to define and apply portfolio categories, value definitions, and status codes to properly instrument your organizations portfolio view. ...

... "Project portfolio management involves a number of activities, the most basic of which is to get everything into one place. That helicopter view onto a number of projects is a major step forward for a program manager, IT exec or CIO ... " ...

Via ZDNet: IT Project Failures

HP IT Transformation

CIO offers insights into HP information technology transformation, where data center consolidation, application architecture rationalization, and project portfolio management are the rule of the day. ...

... "A deep dive into a company's technology infrastructure will help open a technology manager's eyes. Some of the 1,240 IT projects Mott cataloged at HP during a 30-day review weren't slated to be finished for 20 years. " ...

Via Information Week: Incremental IT

Project Portfolio Management PPM Tools Market Leadership Analysis

CA's PPM software (previously Niku) makes strong showing in Forrester's recent project portfolio management software market analysis. ...

... "CA is moving up in its leadership position. Priced and built to perform as well in medium-sized shops as in large installations wrote Lewis Cardin, vice president at Forrester and the report's author. He added, CA's Clarity is a strong performer across the majority of important PPM offerings. " ...

Via CA: CA Named Leader in PPM Market