EVOLUTION OF BPR

Re: Can project portfolio management prevent IT train wrecks?

Posted on the March 7th, 2008 under Business Risk, Change Management by Gregory Yankelovich

In another excellent post Michael Krigsman interviews Jon Collins, Service Director at Freeform Dynamics, a UK-based analyst firm, and co-author of “The Technology Garden,”. In an interview, he described a few PPM success factors, one of each is:

Good program managers are hard to come by, but in my experience a high quality person at the helm can overcome poor organizational processes, whereas the best processes can fail if the person in charge doesn’t know how to steer the ship. One can become a slave to project metrics.

I could not agree more, but wonder why it is so rare these qualities are articulated in job requirements and advertisements. Even if HR starts by doing so, during interviews the conversation quickly slides to requirements for “hands-on” skills in technology du jour instead of leadership skills, thorough understanding of business process and economic values.

Reflect on KM and Enterprise 2.0

Posted on the March 5th, 2008 under Change Management, Value of BPR by Gregory Yankelovich

I am new to blogging and, being involved with a few Enterprise software implementation projects during last few months (or years?), have missed a lot of discussions going in this space. Therefore I do not consider myself an expert on this subject, however I was involved with practical implications of sharing "tribal knowledge" within enterprise for quite a few years. In that context wiki/search and other "repository" type tools did not appear to add much value in my experience yet. Given enthusiasm of my many colleagues to experiment with these tools, I was wondering why so little practical results was achieved.

The latest attempt, I was a part of, involved using wiki as a project management methodology and Best Practices knowledge repository for the mid-size organization in Software Industry. The process of content development was very vigorous, democratic, cooperative and enthusiastic, the infrastructure was put in place and communications were issued to everyone in the company. The quality of the content was very impressive, but the knowledge did not find it’s way into the practice of the delivery of projects, did not improve at all quality of estimates or project management. Unfortunately this experience was consistent with the previous ones, and I can’t help, but think that the "passive" nature of wiki tools is the reason for failure.

People in everyday life don’t seem to use referential source of information until they are "stumped" and cannot proceed without specific piece of information. That leads me to believe that unless KM is contextually integrated into business process supporting/controlling systems, their value in an Enterprise environment is very limited.

Yet another software disaster!

Posted on the March 4th, 2008 under Uncategorized by Gregory Yankelovich