Category: Lessons Learnt

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

3 ways to get your CEO to value your PMO

Even though I’ve spent the last 15 years in the project portfolio management (PPM) space, I started my career as an accountant and have always loved numbers and analysis. I recently attended the Gauteng Project Management South Africa (PMSA) PMO Forum, an invitation only forum of PMO leaders and executives, and the session re-affirmed the … Continue reading

Becoming a project-oriented company

With competition across all sectors steadily increasing as well as the challenge of having to respond to constantly changing demands from customers, organisations now need to deliver projects faster and with a greater success rate than ever before. So says Andre Nortier, managing director of TenStep Southern Africa, specialist in consulting and training in business … Continue reading

Drawing the line

As the management framework within which project decisions are made, project governance differs vastly from corporate governance, and unlike the King III legislation that presides over South African businesses, it needs to be fit for purpose per project and organisation. It is widely accepted that project governance is fundamental to ensuring project success and control. … Continue reading

Shaping the “innovation funnel”

According to Guy Jelley, CEO of Post Vision Technology , many businesses struggle with being able to encourage free thinking and idea generation while at the same time ensuring the execution of these new ideas is completed with the necessary governance. “Most businesses have some form of ‘innovation funnel’,” he explains. “The funnel should be … Continue reading

Lessons learned – key to project management success

A critical aspect of successful project management is to review completed projects, identify successes and failures, or “lessons learned”, and incorporate them to help deliver value for future projects. “The recent implementation of PPO, Project Portfolio Office’s online project portfolio management (PPM) application, at one of Africa's largest retailers of food, general merchandise and clothing, … Continue reading