project management

Features

• Project portfolio management - Part 2

  By David Braue | 07 March, 2012 14:48

  Data-driven project portfolio management Project management suffered an identity crisis half a decade ago, when ever-more-empowered developers were learning to work directly with their business patrons as Agile development philosophies encouraged developers to co-ordinate their activities in tight-knit teams that regularly report, evaluate, reassess and re-plan their short-term strategies.

• Project portfolio management - Part 1

  By David Braue | 05 March, 2012 15:58

  It’s never easy to bring two organisations together, but when they’re both huge companies with millions of customers and deeply entrenched cultures, the difficulty level goes up dramatically. Throw in the pressures of Australia’s cutthroat telecommunications industries, and it’s no surprise that Chelsea Love looks back on the consolidation of Vodafone and Three Australia with some relief.

• Time to get Agile

  By David Braue | 13 December, 2010 08:00

  CIOs and project managers talk about Agile in the trenches - the good, the bad and the ugly.

• An IT department's crucial role in a new product launch

  By Kim S. Nash | 22 July, 2010 07:01

  In late 2008, Monsanto licensed a seed coating that helps corn, soybean and other seeds fight insects and disease during the tricky germination stage. By early 2009, company scientists had finished work on that cocktail of fungicides and insecticides, dubbed Acceleron, and the company wanted to get the coating to market in time for the 2010 planting season. "We were going after that opportunity very aggressively. If we don't hit season, that opportunity is another 12 months away," says CIO Shirley Cunningham.

• Desktop Virtualization: Comparing Options Frustrates IT

  By Kevin Fogarty | 04 May, 2010 04:55

  Virtual desktops-once the most rigid, least friendly way to put applications in front of end users-have become a hot topic by promising to deliver the security and easy maintenance that was always desktop virtualization's strength. The trouble: Desktop virtualization now comes in so many varieties that even vendors confuse terms referring to the flavors.

• Advice for Evaluating CRM Cloud Platforms

  By David Taber | 04 May, 2010 02:07

  A day doesn't go by without headlines about cloud computing, virtualization, and the next computing platform. No doubt these computing models are important, but when it comes to CRM - what's important about cloud computing? And how should platforms be evaluated for CRM applications?

• Inside Project Managers' Paychecks: Salary Survey Results

  By Meridith Levinson | 27 April, 2010 06:05

  Despite the global recession, historic unemployment and massive corporate budget cuts, U.S. project managers are largely optimistic about their salaries in 2010, according to data from the Project Management Institute's (PMI) recently released 2009 Project Management Salary Survey.

• Deliver a New Product or Service to the Business

  By Stephanie Overby | 20 April, 2010 06:38

  There's nothing like having to deliver a new product on a tight deadline for a customer that accounts for a quarter of your company's revenues to put your priorities in focus.

• How to measure your IT vendor management office

  By Patrick Connaughton | 06 April, 2010 05:00

  Over the past few years, many companies have taken the first steps in setting up an IT Vendor Management Office (VMO), but many are still very much in the early stages of refining what exactly the role of the VMO is within the organization. And the definition of a VMO can vary widely across companies - ranging from a broad marketing term used to describe the process or a specific term used to refer to a dedicated group of staff who oversee and manage suppliers.

• Using Portfolio Management to Meet Company Goals

  By Chris Potts | 30 March, 2010 06:16

  The fundamental principle of portfolio management is that you first choose the goals for your portfolio and then select the investments that will achieve them. For investments in change, these goals are expressed as the results you want to accomplish (with corresponding measures and milestones) and the shape of the enterprise that the investments must deliver.

• ERP Application Consolidation: When It's Time to Cut

  By Thomas Wailgum | 23 March, 2010 07:45

  Remember Aron Ralston? He was the mountain climber who, back in 2003, was forced to cut off his own arm, which was trapped under a boulder, to save his life. Ralston had recklessly hiked alone and neglected to tell anyone where he was headed. His grave six-day ordeal was extraordinary and captivating.

• Portfolio Management Back in Style

  By Chris Curran | 09 March, 2010 07:53

  Portfolio management is poised to go "retro." As organizations are preparing to come out of the recession, they are thinking more broadly about the types of investments that will be required to support business growth. As a result, some organizations are revisiting the idea of portfolio management as a way to organize and evaluate.

• Project Portfolio Management: Three dangerous myths

  By Adam Bookman | 23 February, 2010 04:12

  The Standish Group's "CHAOS Summary 2009" report shows a marked decrease in IT project success rates, with 32 per cent of all projects succeeding. It's one thing to know that 68 per cent of all IT projects don't succeed. But it's another to look across your company and realise you have no way of knowing which of your projects might be in the 68 per cent bucket and which have the potential to be in the 32 per cent bucket.

• CRM tips: The trouble with activity management

  By David Taber | 16 February, 2010 08:11

  CRM systems are almost always used for lead, contact and deal management. Sales and marketing put data into the system so that pipeline formation and deal flow can be seen and worked in a systematic way. Many companies also use CRM for customer service, which uses calls and cases as the core workflow. Once your company gets a decent proportion of the customer interactions in the system, you can easily produce reports and dashboards that allow management to see more about the business, spotting bottlenecks or other problems in your operation. Consequently, most companies use data from the CRM system to set standard performance levels for the sales, marketing, and customer service organisations, measuring them against quotas by month or quarter.

• Windows 7 Rollout Lessons Learned by Early Adopters

  By Shane O'Neill | 16 February, 2010 05:18

  Windows 7 may have helped propel to record levels, but many enterprises are still slowly, carefully deploying the OS, if at all.