Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

If you’ve followed this series so far (See Part 1 and Part 2 on the PM College blog), you’ll know that we’re looking at both sides of the Artificial Intelligence in project management debate. I’m not ready to sign on as an enthusiast, but there are some powerful arguments… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

There are 100 pages of data in The State of the PMO 2022, so I could present about it every week for months without repeating myself. In this week's webinar (sign up here, this Thursday, Sept. 15 at 2 pm ET) PM Solutions' VP, Client Success Eric Foss and I will be hitting the high points. A sampler:… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

One thing that makes a smaller organization more nimble, usually, is its size: there aren’t a lot of layers between decision makers and the boots on the ground.So it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that smaller organizations can derive value from adding more managerial infrastructure, but that’s the story we… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

Our newest research study, The State of the PMO 2022, compares and contrasts PMOs in participating organizations in a number of ways. One standout finding has been that PMOs that operate on the enterprise level outperform all others -- those established at the departmental level or business unit level-- on a majority of the key performance… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

A quarter-century of working at the interface between publishing and project management has shown me that, in at least one way, project management is a lot like editing: When it is done well, it's invisible.Perfect project delivery means ... nothing bad happened. To the outside observer (executives, for example, or users), it's like… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

Hot off the presses! PM Solutions Research has just released the results of our new State of the PMO 2022 study. If you've been following us for a while, you may know that The State of the PMO has been our flagship research, repeated biennially from 2008 through 2016. During that time, we tracked the development of… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

If you're like me, when you get an invitation to fill out a survey, your first thought is: why should I bother with this? What will I get out of it?In the case of The State of the PMO 2022, the answer is pretty clear. This study, performed every other year through 2016, has provided… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

It's a long journey, this working life of ours. Sometimes it's a slog through a jungle, or a desert. Along the way, many forks in the road. Sometimes you can see the way ahead, but a lot of the time, you're down in the weeds. What distinguishes the lost and desperate from… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

For ten years, through 2016, PM Solutions Research conducted a study on the roles, functions, and maturity of PMOs. Over the course of that decade, we saw the PMO grow from a rare departmental unit with limited powers, to a widespread organizational feature that gave project management--and project managers--visibility and clout. As the average age of… Read More »

Posted by Sydni Neptune, PMP, CSM | 0 Comments

[Editor's Note: Continuing our series of responses to questions asked by our webinar attendees, please welcome our Agile SME Sydni Neptune to the fray! The recorded webinar can be viewed here.]Q: What are the areas of work that can have the greatest impact to moving forward with agile transformation and improving maturity? Of… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

In Jan. 2021, PM Solutions Research conducted a survey to determine what project management strategies companies had used during the pandemic to continue meeting goals, and how well those had worked, both within projects and for the organization as a whole.The most compelling finding was that organizations achieved better performance in 2020 than in previous years! … Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

Welcome to Part 2 of our three-part blog series exploring questions that were left unanswered at the end of my presentation during PMI's Dec. 9 virtual event (to read Part 1, click here.)Q: Is there a PMO maturity questionnaire and model that you would recommend and share?A: Yes … and no.There’s no… Read More »

Posted by J. Kent Crawford in Most Popular | 0 Comments

The Who and Where of PMOsA few weeks ago, one of the members of our PMO of the Year Group on LinkedIn asked a question that sparked a lively discussion with numerous group members chiming in.I thought I'd recap the back-and-forth and add some of my own thoughts.It all started here:… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

Our co-presentation with Preferred Mutual at last November's PMO Symposium was so well-recieved that we decided to reprise it as a webinar. Join us on Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 2 pm for a free (PDU available!) event as PM Solutions President Bruce Miller and Preferred Mutual's senior VP of Strategic Services, Michele Graham, discuss the 1… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

I had the opportunity yesterday to chat with those of our executive team who attended the 2019 PMO Symposium. Here's a recap of their top insights and takeaways from what they all agreed was "a very impressive conference," "the best I've ever attended," and "much more engaging" than previous years.CEO J. Kent Crawford… Read More »

Posted by Matt Crawford | 0 Comments

Speaking of asking the right questions, in the session entitled “How PMOs can enable business & organizational agility," Joanna Vahlsing from Centro, began by posing the question of what fears we have about moving to a more agile organization.  Some of the audience responses were:Lack of timeliness Lack of trust Lack of… Read More »

Posted by Matt Crawford | 0 Comments

At the opening general session, The Project Economy – The Future of Work,  Bob Safian, Founder of The Flux Group and Former Editor of Fast Company, delievered a whirlwind look at the lessons of innovation, pros and cons of "The Project Economy" and a recap of PMI's 50 most influential projects of the last 50… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

(If you are wondering what happened to Part 2 of this series, check out Deborah Bigelow Crawford's responses to questions about training and coaching on the PM College blog here.)I've saved the best for last. One of our webinar attendees asked:Question: Please review more of the roles and responsibilities of the Agile… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

We enjoyed a series of thoughtful blogs about the PMO Symposium this year, thanks to my colleague Johanna Mickel, both here and on the PM College blog. To wrap up, I asked our CEO J. Kent Crawford to share his impressions of the PMO of the Year Award finalists. Kent has a long history with… Read More »

Posted by Johanna Mickel | 1 Comment

Yesterday was a mix of validating old ideas and being surprised by new insights.Conference breaks always afford the opportunity for some wonderful conversations, hearing what is going on in other organizations, and sometimes having my own experience or ideas validated. Case in point: I had to smile when one topic that surfaced was the… Read More »

Posted by Johanna Mickel | 1 Comment

Panel discussions at the PMO Symposium give me writer's cramp! It's hard to take notes fast enough, especially when confronted with an array of highly knowledgeable practitioners. The panelists were:Melissa Eckers, Accenture Brian Murphy, CapGemini Jan Musil, SAP Noel Smyth, JP MorganThe upshot?The PMO is evolving and changing; no longer… Read More »

Posted by Johanna Mickel | 0 Comments

Hello from the PMO Symposium, where the theme, “Mastering Value Delivery,” feels so congruent with what we’ve been working on with clients recently. I loved the “beauty pageant” kickoff where the Session Preview gave multiple speakers a chance to pitch their sessions. The only problem: I can’t… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin in Benefits Realization, Culture & Change Management, Project & Program Management, Human Capital, Project Management Office (PMO), Project Management Research, Resource Optimization, Strategy Execution | 0 Comments

Now, there’s a loaded question. But it is one we constantly strive to answer in our consulting practice; take a look at the “Results” sections of our client case studies, posted here, to get situation-specific answers.In addition to these industry- and organization-specific value datapoints, we just ran across some research… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

I’ve left the most complex question for last. One of our webinar attendees queried:What is the best way to engage in a conversation about traditional PMO roles and activities in an organization that is using Agile delivery and methodologies?One of the problems with answering these questions after the webinar has ended… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

Our founder and CEO Kent Crawford stays on the road a good deal, teaching classes for the PMI SeminarsWorld series, as well as visiting client sites and attending conferences and speaking engagements. In doing so, he keeps a front-line view of what is going on in organizations across a broad array of industries. So, once… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 0 Comments

Bruce Miller rejoined PM Solutions/PM College as our President in early November and jumped right into the fray by attending the PMO Symposium. We caught up with him by phone to ask him if there were any surprises there for someone who had stepped away from working in the project management consulting field for… Read More »

Posted by Johanna Mickel | 0 Comments

Now that I have time to catch my breath after the whirlwind of information that is the PMO Symposium, I wanted to skip back to Monday and share a few insights from a panel of C-Suite luminaries convened by PMI for the occasion:Bruce Rogers, Forbes Chief Insights Officer, noted that we are in an… Read More »

Posted by Johanna Mickel | 0 Comments

According to keynote speaker Rita McGrath, competitive advantage is an elusive, ever-moving target, what she termed in her speech "Transient Advantage."For organizational success, we need both strategy and innovation. In the past, the “Holy Grail” of strategy has been to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Often when companies reach the top, they… Read More »

Posted by Johanna Mickel | 1 Comment

We are excited to be attending the PMO Symposium again this year! If you can't be in attendence, here are some quick thoughts from the first day's schedule of events.The CEO of PMI, Mark Langley gave a keynote that defined the theme of the conference. According to Langley, Organizational Agility (“OA… Read More »

Posted by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin | 1 Comment

Although we have not released the formal research report yet, and the numbers are still being crunched, there are a couple things I found in reading through the raw data collected by our Strategy Execution Process Benchmark that I couldn't wait to share.Like the majority of companies out there, those that participated in… Read More »