Category: Lessons Learnt

What PMO leaders and executives are doing to secure their seat at the strategy table

I was privileged to lead the discussion on what successful project management office (PMO) leaders and executives are doing to secure their seat at the strategy table at the recent Gauteng PMO forum. The forum is an invitation only interest group under the umbrella of Project Management South Africa (PMSA) that provides members with a regular opportunity … Continue reading “What PMO leaders and executives are doing to secure their seat at the strategy table”

Building an effective business case for PPM software

There are a number of reasons behind an organisation’s decision to implement Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software. Key motives include a clearer understanding of the number of active projects aligned to the organisation’s strategic objectives in terms of benefit realisation, assessing the prioritisation and sequencing of projects given the company’s capacity, and measuring health and … Continue reading

15 principles that made Agile not so fragile for the PPO DevOps team

Project Portfolio Office’s DevOps team has made an almost natural progression towards Agile throughout the years. When the PPO tool was introduced in 2004, the waterfall model was the order of the day. PPO had ample scope to grow as a product and the projects we undertook were mostly large feature sets that took weeks, … Continue reading

A journey: About waterfalls, “tick-tock”, time-boxing and modern Agile

I’ve never liked the waterfall based model for IT project delivery. Even 20 years ago, it was obvious that a linear approach just didn’t work well when you didn’t know what it is that you wanted to build or how to go about it. It didn’t work for the large scale data warehouse projects that … Continue reading

3 Signs that you’re Being a Bad Project Sponsor!

Trying to deliver a project without an engaged sponsor is like starting a voyage without a captain, crew, lifeboat or a route plan and that’s a situation many project managers find themselves in (present company included!) We all know that strong executive sponsorship can make or break any project but do we truly understand the … Continue reading

3 Things Great Project Management Offices Do Differently For Awesome Customer Experiences

When considering the mandate of traditional project management offices (PMOs), the territory of customer service and thus a great customer experience (CX) is usually left uncharted. The week leading up to the latest instalment of the PMO Forum (a special interest group for PMO Leaders and Executives, endorsed by Project Management South Africa and sponsored … Continue reading

The things I’ve learnt on-boarding project managers for our PMO

Our company, Project Portfolio Office (PPO), develops and provides a software as a service (SaaS) project portfolio management (PPM) application to any organisation running and managing projects. In the last 18 months, we’ve moved from being a small organisation with highly skilled and versatile individuals (who did everything, and did it well from one office) … Continue reading

Is PMO Gamification a way to drive quicker adoption?

What do the introduction of new technologies, business re-engineering and process improvement projects all have in common? The answer is simple, these types of projects typically touch almost every aspect of a business and classified as organisational change projects. The nature of these projects require some form of integration and I don’t just mean the … Continue reading

5 Simple Steps to Project Status Reporting that People will Read

According to 2016 PMI’s Pulse of the Profession, “74% of PMO Directors believe their senior management understand the value of project management” and yet 33% of projects still fail because of a lack of involvement from senior management. In my role as CEO of Project Portfolio Office (PPO), I often perform the role of executive … Continue reading

Three Steps to Stop your PMO become a Statistic (50% close in 3 years!)

Three Steps to Stop your PMO become a Statistic (50% close in 3 years!) I recently read that the Association for Project Management says 50% of PMOs close within three years. It’s a very scary statistic considering the amount of effort organisations are putting into establishing PMOs. It then got me wondering what are we … Continue reading