Project managers are ultimately responsible for making sure projects are completed on time, on budget and with the features and functionality specified by the project's stakeholders. So one would presume that project managers' performance would be evaluated based on those same criteria. It sounds obvious, right?

You need a Project Sponsor who will make time to address the key issues, enthusiastically and continuously champion the project and be alert to any threats to the project’s success

The US government warnings about tainted imports from China are ominous and ongoing. In July 2007 poisonous chemicals were found in toothpaste. This was just a month after imports of farm-raised Chinese seafood and lead paint in Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains were detained. And May had seen contaminated pet foods sicken and kill thousand of US cats and dogs. Now its humans, when earlier this month every parents' nightmare became a reality: Melamine contaminated infant formula poisoned more than 50,000 Chinese infants and resulted in at least four deaths.

The Eurostar connects Britain to Europe, but the beating heart of rail travel in Great Britain has always been the Midlands. For decades Crewe was synonymous with locomotive construction, and major rail companies to this day base their head offices in the Midlands.

Three books illustrate -- in fiction and nonfiction -- lessons that business executives and IT managers should learn. Find out why Mesh Collaboration, Business Focused IT and Service Excellence, and the original In Search of Excellence should be in your "To Be Read" pile.

Of all of the ongoing expenses needed to keep corporate IT running, network-related costs are perhaps the most unwieldy. New technologies, changing requirements and ongoing equipment maintenance and upgrades keep IT staff on their toes and money flowing out the door. But there are ways to manage network costs.

VMware CTO Stephen Herrod gave the VMworld audience a peek at VMware's near-term technology and product plans Wednesday, and while VMware continues to expand its management offerings on the server side, it's also got big plans for the desktop, with a new set of technologies dubbed VMware View, slated to arrive in 2009.

Does your value-focused project look like this?

Sure, CIOs can be clueless. But so can the programming staff. It's time for the other side of the story: CIOs and IT managers explain just how out-of-it their application development staff can be

The organization had had a very rough year in sales so the CIO froze all new projects for the upcoming planning period. During that period two new branches were opened, severely stressing e-mail, IM (instant messaging) and VPN systems already working at full capacity. Since one of the frozen projects was, in the way of these things, the communications infrastructure and services upgrade, the aftermath was two months of unreliable e-mail service and a huge blow to the credibility of IT’s capability to deliver services

In spite of spending millions of dollars to deploy project management methodologies and tools, executives still sense a lack of control over the projects in their domain