Project Portfolio-Program Management

Cover of Six Thinking Hats Discussions leads to solutions , mistakes leads to innovations, As part of innovation , solution approaches, models quite often used technique in healthy discussions on day to day basis is Brain Storming , mischievously known as blame storming. To the extent organizations build competency around subjects of real time situations, till it takes to materialized very few of them make it to the concrete implementations. Take for example Google revolutionized the way we use internet with countable team, that storm sustained and now second wave coming from Facebook, Linked etc. Questions asked about their revenue models but skepticism will always there, social networks are strong tools not only for marketing but of communication, collaboration, and increased productivity and realized intangible benefits. Discussions are full of Arguments, counter arguments, statements, facts, thesis, anti thesis etc. Contextually the term devil's advocate can be dis

Over the years inspiration and motivation to out do something which creates spark in the genre of concurrent times is always been challenge for all of us, to make things happen requires a plan, an out of the box solution to rationalize its existence. More often than not inspiration are unknown to us, which may leads to different scenarios of multiple ways of looking at things differently and indifferently also, anyways there are always n-1 degrees of freedom to think differently for n+1 different ways looking at things. Inspired by a spiral which is coincidentally a galaxy in our spatial system gives us views like --if one start from a point from outer end to reach at center, will reach from outside-in and if one starts from the center and circle outwards move than that will be inside-out thinking. So again its up to individuals, which way move. Traveling by we see stars and other objects binding each other with gravitational forces. Galaxy One of the many management stra

Vectorized from: Ken Schwaber, Mike Beedle: Agile Software Development with Scrum Prentice Hall PTR, 2001 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Over the years, its by human nature to quantify most of the aspect when it comes to Return on investment . Project dashboard are meant to provide bird view of the project's overall health from a top level perspective. Although it gives a broad level view of the time lines , resource utilization, budget and so on so forth. Can we quantify performance indicators like human aspect of deliverable like motivation levels of team members, quality of customer sustenance, business continuity etc. Since emotional intelligence has certain predominance over IQ definitely it matters. In concurrent times of agile development where practices like scrum, iterative development , extreme programming are kind of just in time techniques to deliver solutions to different kind of projects. can we be able to quantify human aspect of indicators in agile

A common comic mail circulates with this image, which gives good understanding of how requirements captured during a project life cycle goes like this: Typical Software Development Life-cycle explained Above picture succinctly tells about common perception of developing a software, how requirement understanding filters with changing roles, time and space with gaps between factual and results. Thanks to the  the word "agility", which has evolved in world of software technology with the evolution of Rational unified process the term use-case or scenario development for documenting and capturing requirement in the initial phase of software development. "A use case is a software artifact of systems and process of expected sequence of interactions between a module and an external actor, which leads the actor to desired goals and objectives. " Use case scenarios can be mirrored as clip of a movie making scene development where-in director has assigned a s

Is IT driven by business? I believe its a good question to be asked at this point in time after the doom of financial markets allover world. When top investment banks collapsed in USA and Europe everybody is asking a question how it is possible if the system in place. IT in general supposed to be driven by business requirements so its natural process that, as other component in business, this is also adding value to business, but is that benefits realized to business? Is IT a hype from time and again? Business value of IT measured in different metrics and methodologies that may or may not give true picture of IT value to business, so the contradiction lies in the hypothesis itself that IT is driven by business which is adding no value but continuing. In the concurrent world where businesses are competing for survival and existence IT is invaluable from intangible perspective.  Making sense of PM triangle  The infamous scope, cost and schedule trio can be realized for IT business val

Lets start with a story, Once upon a time there was a herd of tiny elephants. who gathered for a competition. The goal was to reach to the top of a very high peak . A big crowd had gathered around the peak to see the race and cheer on the participants... The race began... Honestly, No one in herd really believed that the tiny elephants would reach to the top of the peak. Crowd yelled statements such as: "Oh, NO WAY, too difficult!! They will NEVER make it to the top." "Not a chance that they will succeed. The tower is too high!" The tiny elephants began collapsing. One by one...... Except for those who in a fresh tempo were climbing higher and higher... The crowd continued to yell "It is too difficult!!! No one will make it!" More tiny elephants got tired and gave up......But ONE continued higher and higher and higher... And he had made to the top ................ Can you guess why he is able to make it to the top...... All of the ot

Games People Play in context to Projects: Contextually life and projects full of games, work on  dynamics of human relationships by   Dr. Eric Berne guides us not only in many social but relationship situations in corporate world also. In Todays concurrent world where we are living in a global village with Orkut, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and other social media leads to discounts of information in social network, where more of transactional games played knowingly(conscious) or unknowingly(unconscious). Precede to this let us understand game, A game full of transactions played with different roles by players changing their roles for a outcome in different ego states like Parent, Adult and Child ego states that will payoff.  Continuing with Payoff, specifically in context to Project teams where transactions happen at concrete or transformational levels where people not necessarily behaving rationally and motivations are not known. These "Transactions" can be used f

Project Portfolio Management Tools : Issue/Incident Management Why PPM :   Its similar to manage a portfolio of different asset classes  in financial world with varied set of information available to manager. Every portfolio manager wants to increase return on investment with limited available resources. In the same fashion every Project Manager demands for successful completion of project best quality project deliveries, within budget and on-time. In managing such diverse information and resources one may face challenges like, change of requirements, internal competition for resources of staffing, infrastructure etc. So a robust PPM framework enabled with online tools is necessary to manage projects. Project Portfolio Management Tools: A set of projects portfolio managed across organization via a common tool for issue tarcking and incident managemtn helps a lot in managing and resoloving issues within a definite time period. Organizations are using project portfolio management (PP

Simplifying ITIL one by one: ITIL V3 best-practice guidelines across the five stages of the service life-cycle are complex in nature and understand to interpret. ITIL libraries are abstract and didn't provide implementation details. The ITIL process framework concentrates on the service lifecycle and the how that service management components are structured and linked in that framework. It personifies road-map for IT companies that are looking to improve on service quality levels and align more closely with business objectives to create value for their clients. Process Improvement Program(PIP): PIP a small concept but have larger impact, Process improvement program designed on multiple aspect of any process with a Plan-Do-Check-Act (P-D-C-A) steps and a strong feedback mechanism will make process pitfalls to more robust. Looking from the microscopic level at any of the existing process in an organization from concept of PDCA cycle and multiple checks will increase the probabi

IT service management (ITSM) Model and its effectiveness: In today's Agile environment where clients needs and fast changing business environment keeps service delivery  on top of the minds of CIO, over a period of time many frameworks have grown up as part of service delivery management which have standardized as well like ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) that guides us in delivering services with quality and efficiently which satisfy client needs and demands. ITIL objective focuses on implementation of delivery model and how efficiently we can optimize resources to best availability to infrastructure and other services offered. ITIL encompasses as structured framework which has five elements as part of service life cycle named as  Service Strategy,  Service Design,  Service Transition,  Service Operation,  Continual Service Improvement. Now the question is how these elements be accommodated in day to day operational level implementation. Above listed service life-cycle eleme

Everybody has question in mind what will be  trends in Project Management in new decade and obviously how 2011 factor will laid out its plans to shape things road ahead. The way technology is driving humans from outside-in, so a common answer expected would be the technology platforms and their use in project management will be a key role to play in shaping communication,  collaboration, planning and many more ideas will be generated over a period of time. Existing Collaboration tools like  messengers(voice, non-voice), video conferencing, virtual meetings via remote computers(it may be device other than PC, like tablets, iphone etc.) are contributing a lot on connecting and communicating. Evolution like facebook, twitter, google tools like online spreadsheet and other Google docs shared across globe at same time will drive dissemination of information in broader and effective way to be observed closely, how it will be used productively in managing projects. Although a debate ove