
Don’t Fill Your Project Portfolio with Abandoned Carts
There’s a well-known concept in retail that’s also relevant for project teams, and that is the abandoned cart. We’ve all done it at some point—perused
Our proprietary Duration-Driven® Methodology is what distinguishes us from other companies.
It is the foundation of our success and essential to the continuing success of all the projects we support.
In this e-book, we’ll analyze the top ERP implementation obstacles and explore solutions to overcome these hurdles and move your project towards a successful completion.
PMAlliance provides immediate project and portfolio management solutions that can transform the way your company manages projects, enabling you to achieve consistently successful results.
A trio of industry-leading insurance subsidiary firms relied on PMAlliance to apply our proven portfolio management methodology to gain control over their existing projects and ensure they could meet upcoming compliance deadlines.
Challenges:
PMAlliance has been serving clients for 20 years. Our dedication to our client’s success remains our top priority and is what sets us apart. Your success is our success. Our proprietary methodology can be applied to any project in any industry.
A manufacturing company asked PMAlliance to redirect its efforts to implement new strategic projects that would increase sales and profitability. The project teams faced several significant challenges, including project plans without realistic scheduling or resource allocation, how to integrate the new projects with day-to-day tasks, and inadequate reporting to the project’s stakeholders.
Challenges:
Our mission is to partner with our clients to deliver a flexible combination of services that are tailored to their needs. PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management (PPM) services
In this e-book, we’ll analyze the top ERP implementation obstacles and explore solutions to overcome these hurdles and move your project towards a successful completion.
Our proprietary Duration-Driven® Methodology is what distinguishes us from other companies.
It is the foundation of our success and essential to the continuing success of all the projects we support.
In this e-book, we’ll analyze the top ERP implementation obstacles and explore solutions to overcome these hurdles and move your project towards a successful completion.
PMAlliance provides immediate project and portfolio management solutions that can transform the way your company manages projects, enabling you to achieve consistently successful results.
A trio of industry-leading insurance subsidiary firms relied on PMAlliance to apply our proven portfolio management methodology to gain control over their existing projects and ensure they could meet upcoming compliance deadlines.
Challenges:
PMAlliance has been serving clients for 20 years. Our dedication to our client’s success remains our top priority and is what sets us apart. Your success is our success. Our proprietary methodology can be applied to any project in any industry.
A manufacturing company asked PMAlliance to redirect its efforts to implement new strategic projects that would increase sales and profitability. The project teams faced several significant challenges, including project plans without realistic scheduling or resource allocation, how to integrate the new projects with day-to-day tasks, and inadequate reporting to the project’s stakeholders.
Challenges:
Our mission is to partner with our clients to deliver a flexible combination of services that are tailored to their needs. PMAlliance uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management (PPM) services
In this e-book, we’ll analyze the top ERP implementation obstacles and explore solutions to overcome these hurdles and move your project towards a successful completion.
There’s a well-known concept in retail that’s also relevant for project teams, and that is the abandoned cart. We’ve all done it at some point—perused
The on-deck project. It’s there, waiting in the wings, ready to go as soon as your team wraps up its current efforts. You and your stakeholders are probably excited to get going on it. It may be a garden-variety project, or it could be a one-time, strategically important initiative that will catapult the company forward. Either way, if its start date hinges on completing other tasks, it’s in a precarious position, because if something—anything—goes wrong with your present schedule, that on-deck project will almost surely be bumped.
When multiple sub-teams and cross-functional groups are working on the same project, there is a risk of disparate project plans popping up. These are typically fractured and incomplete, and they create all sorts of trouble for PMs and the organization’s leadership. One key to project success is avoiding this proliferation of different plans and schedules, particularly when executing large, complex, or high-visibility initiatives that are strategically important to the company.
One common problem organizations encounter is the existence of multiple concurrent plans for a single project. Between the various cross-functional groups, from accounting to engineering to HR, you may discover there are too many schedules in use. With all these timetables floating around, how can you trust any of the resulting progress estimates? The true status of each activity soon becomes a big question mark. Sound familiar? It’s the “many truths” problem and it could doom your project to failure.
Scope creep is a problem that plagues projects across the spectrum. Small or large, simple or complex, a project’s success can be threatened by stakeholders eager to add just one more activity to the list. If the team doesn’t know how to keep those parameters in check—or if they don’t have the tools to know when the approved scope is in jeopardy—they’ll have difficulty resisting requests to take on more than the project’s budget and target timeline can support. Failure often follows, as the Project Team’s resources are expended early and the schedule falls apart.
Fortunately, there are some strategies organizations can implement to help maintain order and eliminate ballooning project boundaries. These approaches will also aid in avoiding the related schedule delays and cost overruns, not to mention the strain on team members’ workloads.
The need to develop new processes should be an expected part of any facility startup project. Depending on the type of site that’s being launched, the organization may not have established protocols that address any number of functions—inventory management or materials receiving, for example. Or it’s possible that formal processes do exist within the company, but that they aren’t comprehensive enough to encompass all the activities that will occur in the new facility.
In the early phases of project planning, there are many things the Project Team doesn’t know. But as the process gets underway, the team needs to make it their mission to ensure they get the information they need to understand where risks exist, to determine the most efficient and effective scope and timeline, and to make the best decisions as they move forward. If the data being used by the Project Team is incomplete or inaccurate, the project could go over budget or even fail to achieve its goals.
Every project is comprised of a number of individual tasks. Some tasks can and should be executed simultaneously, and at other times one task must be completed before the next activity can begin. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that can go wrong with these task chains, and the potential for problems grows along with the scope and complexity of the project. For example, the Project Team might not realize that one delayed task doesn’t just impact one other activity, it actually affects the execution plan for many other tasks that are scheduled to happen later in the project.
Information is one of the core pillars underpinning every successful project. With the evolution of technology and more compute power available than ever before, there’s little reason centers of excellence should continue to rely on data that may be days or even weeks old when it comes to identifying potential issues, forecasting activity schedules, making strategic decisions, and pouncing on opportunities in the marketplace.
You’ve probably noticed that setting start dates for projects—and sticking to them—is often a challenge. Smaller initiatives may not be as difficult, but bring a large, complex, or high-visibility project to the table and suddenly the prospect of a start date can become downright terrifying for stakeholders. Everyone typically wants the project done and most people are eager to participate in the planning phase, but try nailing down a date when the actual work will start and watch the avoidance behavior begin.