Project & Portfolio Summit 2008

Audrey Apfel VP & Gartner Fellow Enterprises execute change through project-based activities under the PPM (program and portfoPPM Practices: A World Gone By lio management) umbrella. The methodologies, roles and best practices for these activities have been written about, standardized, certified, promoted, and documented. Yet “success” (the ability to pick the right projects, execute and deliver to deliver to expectations) is often still elusive for today’s IT organizations. In this presentation we discuss how to find the real critical success factors – the ones no one taught you. In addition, we take a look into the future and find increasing evidence that even less of the standard project methodology foundation we depend on today will serve us effectively in the future. We’ll discuss what the future holds and how projects and programs will need to change. Key Issues: (1) What are the critical success factors in today’s world of complex projects and programs? (2) What roles and skills should organizations develop in order to provide PPM leadership? (3) What are the future trends that will shape PPM practices and leaders? The Process of PPM While portfolio management disciplines are becoming more prevalent, there’s still confusion over just what a PPM process looks like and how it should be set up. As with most governance structures, a ‘just enough’ approach that matches prioritization schema to the organization’s culture and needs are important, and it’s quite likely that any organization-wide approach to PPM will need to be customized depending on the users of the process. However, there are a set of steps to follow that are consistent across a just enough domain and across multiple PPM processes within an organization. Key Issues: (1) What is PPM, and how does it fit within an organization’s governance structures? (2) What are the basic steps of a PPM process? Matthew Hotle General VP, Distinguished Analyst Measuring and Improving Application Projects Most organizations are simply terrible at measuring the results of their applications projects. Even more are even worse at using those measures to change and improve their processes. While the ‘post-implementation review’ (or ‘post mortem’, as it’s usually appropriately called) is a common artifact of the project process, there’s no common improvement vehicle in most organizations to take the results of the review (either business results or project results) and DO anything, rendering the project review to essentially be a waste of time. Here, we will cover these key issues to drive improvement around project results: (1) What are the domains of measurement that are most important for projects? (2) Who ‘owns’ measurement, and when? (3) What key structures must be in place to use measures for improvement? Matthew Hotle General VP, Distinguished Analyst

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