Supply and Demand Chain Executive’s article on “2008 Supply and Demand Chain Executives Pros to Know” related the story of James Polak, Director, General Purchasing, PPG Industries. My background in spend analysis revealed a difficulty in getting firms to understand that there are tremendous savings in enabling corporate wide visibility of spend. PPG originally believed the same thing:
“In the early days of enabled spend analysis, around 2000-2001, segments of PPG believed that the project was a waste of capital and that there were no leveraged savings to be had.”
Polak made inroads into this area where he knew great savings existed …read more

My post on the PMO relieving pain prompted a response by ActiveEngine about pain being crucial to gain people’s attention. Pain and uncovering it can be a multi-layered process seemingly without end- i.e., dealing with one problem inevitably leads to having to deal with others which can get discouraging. This is probably because the “swamp is being drained”. Read my response below:
Pain is an interesting phenomenon. One of the analogies used for improvement is “draining the swamp”. When you drain the swamp you start seeing a bunch of ugly rocks. In project management this means getting rid of the projects …read more

Following up on Margaret Rouse’s post on my Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series, today we deal with the mythical queue:
Margaret: You really got me thinking. I think what REALLY blew me away was when you said that 74% of all projects fail — and that the number could be even higher for IT projects. I’m interested in any concrete strategies you can offer for avoiding getting small projects lost in what we used to call the mythical queue.
Bob: The PMO or, for smaller firms, some type of project control function, succeeds with excellent business processes for project visibility, strategy …read more

Margaret Rouse blogs at IT Knowledge Exchange on an amazing variety of topics. Read it and be informed! I find some of the most interesting blog commentors are IT people who engage with me about innovative project management processes- clearly they are making an effort to bring IT and the user together. Her post about my Choosing the Right PMO Vision Series led to a very nice conversation, edited for brevity, and repeated here today and tomorrow:
Margaret: The line that stuck in my head from [your] post was: Usually something painful drives the creation, or reevaluation, of a Project Management …read more

Recently a good friend told me that if you are not a man of your word that you can’t make, let alone keep, commitments. The corollary is that if you make a commitment you should keep it or risk degrading your “word”. A simple example is picking up a friend for work. You make the commitment but the night before you decide that you are not going to work the next day. You could justify not picking up your friend. But what would the impact be? What positive things could result from keeping your commitment? Your friend would upgrade their …read more

Commitment. It’s a word that creates more questions than answers because of the changes and distractions that follow commitments we make. I started this blog in October 2007 while working for a consulting firm specializing in project management software implementations. My rationale for the commitment was 1) it fit with my current position, 2) I wanted to learn about blogging and it’s potential for marketing and communication, plus 3) I like to write. I left the project management consulting firm soon after and had to make a decision. Do I stop blogging?
Stopping so soon after starting, although justifiable by most …read more

A great article in Strategy+Business, “A Blueprint for Strategic Leadership”, concentrates on how to lead innovation. In it the authors emphasize that the best leaders pay a great deal of attention to the design of the elements around them. Seemingly basic, but powerful, things to do are:
1. Articulate purpose,
2. Create effective teams,
3. Prioritize and sequence initiatives, and
4. Redesign the organization to make execution easier.
Apart from revealing the importance of doing the right projects, the article is full of fascinating examples of the deployment of these principles by the best executives; two from the experiences of A.G. Lafley, chief executive of …read more

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey and report in Strategy+Business (register for free) found NO correlation existed between R&D spend and innovation. It turns out that higher innovation performers spent less but made sure that innovation projects aligned with corporate strategy and paid careful attention to customers. This idea that a company can spend less and innovate more makes sense. Throwing money at innovation processes that are not well organized and/or measured and not serving the customer doesn’t work.
Black and Decker revealed the two key factors related to their innovation success:
1. Strategy alignment- align innovation strategies to corporate strategy.
2. Customer focus- …read more

Sometimes you get unexpected insights. My post “What’s Harder? Project Management or Management” elicited a wonderfully simple “boxes” analogy from Ren Garcia at Accounting Solver. In it he said:
“In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become rigid over time and the boxes neglect to communicate with each other (The managers or heads of boxes are supposed to be doing this, but often neglect).
Consequently, integration of all the functions / tasks / responsibilities within the corporation becomes a difficult process. The entire …read more

 
Fascinating conversation with an executive of an agile software development firm about transformation projects as they compare to lean manufacturing initiatives. Lean transformations have settled into starting with training heavily laced with practical activities. The reason that this is so important is that the approach is NOT intuitive.
Lean requires a person to experience how the concepts can change and increase the value of a process, whether it be software development or manufacturing products. One of the most valuable exercises is the traditional lean manufacturing simulation consisting of 4-5 iterations of improvement to clearly reveal how each lean concept influences results. Many times …read more