Strategy & Projects Blog

PM Training: Not “One Size Fits All”

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:50:23 +0000

Whether you call it The Vanishing Mass Market (as Business Week has done), or The Long Tail, (as Wired blogger Chris Anderson terms it) or Nouveau Niche, it’s obvious that the way we interact with the marketplace has changed. Consumers want what they want, not some lowest-common-denominator, one-size-fits-all product. That’s why we have or 100 [...]

The PMO: The University Within?

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:51:06 +0000

Continuing to crunch through the raw data from our Value of Project Management statistics, a coincidence struck me: across the board, the top-performing companies are training more intensively, and doing more training in non-technical subjects, than are the companies whose performance data falls in the lowest quartile in the study. This jives with Frank Toney’s observation, [...]

Some Good Links on Social Media in PM

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:50:51 +0000

I wrote that last post on my personal computer where I don’t have all the work-related bookmarks stored, so I wanted to come back and add a few links to good articles and information about how successful companies are using collaborative tools to manage people and projects. From AMR Research, this article grandly titled The Future [...]

The More Things Change …

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:25:22 +0000

I’m writing this in Paris. (Okay, you are right, I should not be working.) But an experience today made me want to post here: Two elderly ladies sat down next to me on a park bench in the garden behind Notre Dame, and one remarked that she had seen on television the night before a story [...]

Back to School

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:36:54 +0000

September already! Yesterday I saw my first scarlet maple leaf, artistically arranged on top of a daisy, as if to graphically depict the change of seasons. The university and the high school are back in business in my little town (you can’t miss the traffic on Main St. … or the young, invincible drivers). And, speaking [...]

Blue-Horizon, Lights-On, and Bread-and-Butter: Balancing the Bad Times Portfolio

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:04:26 +0000

I’m still digesting that Accenture research on what companies that emerged strongly from the 1990-91 downturn did differently during the bad times. As I said in my previous post, this is one of those business news articles that is all about portfolio management, without ever mentioning it. I suspect that is because a lot of companies [...]

Spending (Less) Money to Make (More) Money

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:29:08 +0000

Everyone is writing about how business can thrive in spite of the downturn … including me. We’re working on a new white paper on the ways that project management discipline can help companies contain costs and become more efficient. (You’ll be able to read it here on or before August 13). But something about the [...]

A Postscript … and Some News

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:49:33 +0000

Just as I completed my last post, a colleague sent me an article with the very timely title “Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Things that Never Happen” - which was my argument for why PMOs often succeed themselves out of business. The article, from 2001, focuses on quality management initiatives, but it isn’t hard to [...]

PMOs: Great … and Gone

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:44:36 +0000

I wish this were not true, but ever since 2002 when we began facilitating project management benchmarking groups, I have been meeting PMO directors who brought project management to the attention to senior management, created PMOs or Centers of Excellence, drove PM improvements across organizations, improved project and portfolio performance … and wound up unemployed. Of [...]

More On Governance and the PMO

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:48:12 +0000

I’d like to tie those last two posts together with a couple of thoughts engendered by listening to Kent’s keynote, and by some of the conversations I shared with PMO directors at the Summit. “Governance” is in danger of becoming a buzzword. It’s one of those ideas that many corporate leaders accept is important, and necessary, [...]