From the category archives:

Process

Executive questions, IT answers, pizza parlors, and speed chess

May 24, 2008

Let’s mix some metaphors today, and attempt to relate them all to the world of information technology and project management.I have a good friend and colleague, one of the top IT consultants I know.  He’s able to execute crisply at the detail level while keeping the big picture in mind; he’s especially good at balancing [...]

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Why status reports really do matter

May 13, 2008

Do a poll: many IT folks regard doing status reports as their least favorite task.  My point here, though, will be that a lot of people, management and workers alike, don’t fully understand the real purpose of status reports, and that status reports should actually be a “must-have” arrow in your management quiver.  How a [...]

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Nuts: the biggest trap of all for IT stakeholders

April 28, 2008

As I promised last time, there’s one more key way, the biggest way of all, not to get what you want from your IT organization.  This is, in fact, the trap I have seen virtually every entity I’ve ever worked for fall into to some degree, some to the point of actually destroying the company. [...]

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How not to get what you want from IT

April 21, 2008

As much as any part of your company that supports the key prongs of the corporate mission (deliver product, sell the product, support the product), IT is constantly on the hook to deliver more and more.  As I’ve written before, expectations are deservedly high, and getting higher all the time.  And when expectations are so [...]

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Using feedback loops to improve IT department service

April 15, 2008

As I’ve written here before, I strongly advocate thinking of IT in general as a service organization to the rest of the business. Any service organization needs one or more forms of “feedback loop” to be able to gauge whether it is successfully accomplishing its mission.  However, I’ve observed relatively few IT organizations that actively [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI and how it misses the point: Part 2

April 10, 2008

As I promised in my previous post on this, and along the lines of the “intensely practical” goal of this blog, we’ll now take a look at the financial cost analysis for a specific project.  This is only an example, with details changed or obscured, but it is based on a real proposal from a [...]

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Financial metrics for IT: the holy grail of ROI, and how it misses the point: Part 1

March 19, 2008

Let’s talk some more about one of my favorite topics, project portfolio management (PPM). A lot of literature on PPM tends to focus on evaluating risks and returns. An excellent article on IT governance last week in The Wall Street Journal had the following sage advice: “Create an IT portfolio by evaluating risks and returns. [...]

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The flip side of common myths: how some are perpetuated by IT

March 4, 2008

As promised, I’m going to follow up on my last post (“Optimism, resilience, stamina: the make-up of the CTO/CIO“), covering the myths IT deals with on a regular basis, by talking about its flip side: the ways that IT itself can unfortunately perpetuate or contribute to some of the myths I’ve been discussing. Here’s a [...]

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