Project success rates for many companies and government organizations are dismally low, yet executives never seem to look at the big picture. They continue to make adjustments in the way projects are run by addressing isolated problems. However, projects are part of a much larger system and should be addressed in that context. To do that, companies must define how their strategic plan will use people, projects, and technology to achieve their goals. This paper discusses one approach to make this happen.

Project management has been accepted in many businesses as a discipline critical for continued growth. To improve project performance, companies have levied rules on how projects should be run, defined common reporting requirements for all projects, and pooled and shared their project management resources. Even with these functions, projects still struggle to meet the needs of the customer. In order to improve project outcomes, the way in which they are managed must change. Project managers must become leaders, paying more attention to soft skills, managing their stakeholders, and identifying solutions to organizational issues that are limiting project success. The following paper discusses techniques developed by the author to address these needs and improve project success rates.

Value: Rather than scope, schedule, and budget, value is the lynch-pin of project success. Although the former three constraints are key factors in project success, there is no guarantee that meeting these constraints will result in a positive outcome. Instead constantly tracking the value of the project and making adjustments to the triple constraints to attain sufficient value is critical. Arguably this is the project managers most critical deliverable in the project. It requires significant insight into the project’s customer and a thorough understanding of their needs versus their wants. Project managers have to be leaders (leading subordinates, leaders, and customers), be able to assign priorities based on a critical, objective view.

eCameron took a serious look at project sponsorship by conducting a series on non-scientific interviews. Initially the focus was the healthcare industry. As patterns started to emerge, however, others outside of that industry expressed serious interest. To address that interest and better understand the larger issue we expanded the interviews to outside healthcare. Candid and confidential interviews were conducted with project related personnel including executives, sponsors, project managers, and Project Management Office (PMO) managers. In summary:

• Sponsorship is an issue in all business domains.
• Good sponsorship is an essential component in creating successful projects.
• Many issues are pervasive across industries.
• Sponsors need to work with project managers to design a successful project outcome.
• Sponsor roles are neither properly defined nor supported.

This white paper presents the results of the research and highlights areas where organizations need to improve to change their project success rates.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations fail at an alarming rate. For the last fourteen years, numerous independent parties have come up with the same dismal statistics. In fact, your implementation probably will not meet your goals either. The graphic above does not bode well for anyone heading out on that journey. To be sure, configuring the software is significantly more difficult that it appears at first glance. As much as one wants to blame Salesforce, Microsoft, or some other software vendor, though, the trouble lies much closer to home.

For the astute onlookers it is easy to tell when the implementation is going the awry. It is the argument over who is going to drive the project—IT or Sales and Marketing. Unfortunately, these are the wrong people to have in the discussion.

I have never posted email marketing results, because... well, let's face it... it is kind of tacky. Now and then, however, there is a story to be told. In my opinion, this set of statistics is a little over-the-top in what it shows. I can only see one way to interpret it other than Information Technology "leaders" simply do not care about leadership.

To understand how I can make such a brash statement, you need a little background...

Projects are never a success when they are delivered—their product must be adopted to declare success. Whether you are delivering a process for HR, creating new model of cell phone for your customers, or implementing a new ERP system for your company, if they do not see value in the output of your project, it is a failure. Most project teams, however, are focused on maintaining scope, schedule, and budget, they are far removed from the end-user, and they have little concept on how to persuade someone to use what they are developing. The fact of the matter is, though, that if they are the first people involved in the making a tangible product that their customers can use, adapt, and enhance to create value.

Organization Change Management for Project Teams helps your project manager, their teams, and their stakeholders:

"Our Changes just don't stick!" That is the cry of too many executives exasperated by the waste of resources trying to get people in their organization to adopt new processes. A major portion of the reason is the lack of an organization change management (OCM) mentality in the organization. This is no more apparent than in the method in which initiatives and their constituent projects are executed. Lack of end-user involvement and adoption accountability are at the core of this failure.

Few will disagree that sponsorship is critical to project success, yet how many times to you hear, “Our project sponsor is not engaged!” Our research shows that 80% of all PMs will tell you that engagement is the primary issue they face with the executive sponsor. Even more serious, when discussing the topic with executives, a very large majority will say that consistent, high-quality sponsorship is the number-one problem they see in executing initiatives successfully.