Cognitive readiness for complex projects and programmes

Cognition is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” It may encompass intellectual functions and processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and decision making, comprehension […]

It takes a good strategy and strong implementation to build a Smart City

The Austrian capital Vienna again tops the Smart City Index, Roland Berger’s analysis of 153 cities around the world. Second in the ranking is another European city, London. On average, however, it’s mainly Asian metropolises that demonstrate the most compelling Smart City strategies. Remarkably, 90 percent of the analysed cities still do not have an […]

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) for the Lean Enterprise

A few weeks ago I participated in a training “Leading SAFe” because some of our customers already use agile project management for  their development activities. Now they need to scale up and prepare their organisation for large-scale system developments. SAFe is mainly talking the language of software development, nevertheless, as all businesses are significantly affected […]

What we can learn from ancient cultures about sustainable project organizing

Last week I was fortunate to visit Anchor Wat, the remainders of the old Khmer Empire. About thousand years ago, it stretched from the tip of the Indochinese Peninsula northward to modern Yunnan province, China, and from Vietnam westward to Myanmar. The region of Anchor Wat and Anchor Thom was home of more than a […]

The interrelations between product and project management

This series continues with the interrelations between product and project management. Products are created through projects. It may start with a sketch or design of the product, continue with a prototype of the product to the delivery of a ready to go product. Whilst products of a project could be a physical object, a service […]

P’elfies (project selfies): Can they be useful for project management?

Selfie-storm has gripped the world in recent times. From nobles to nomads, from officials to ordinary folks; everyone seems to be lovin’ the idea to capture and share the life moments on-the-go. Even the robotic rovers have caught-up with the trend, regularly sharing ‘mars moments‘ and ‘moon moments‘ of their life from extraterrestrial habitat – […]

Strategic importance of Managing Services in a non-for-profit organisation: addressing IPMA-Operations!

In many non-for-profit organizations (NPOs) which are essentially driven by volunteers, it is important to help the organization flourish with a sustainable approach. This is both valid for an umbrella organisation as for all its members which are usually separate legal entities (NPOs, Charities) governed through a federal and decentralized approach. In order to achieve […]

Change Management Office (CMO) – Enabling change readiness in organisations

There is a lot of research on Project Management Offices (PMOs). A PMO enables an organisation, or parts of it, in managing projects and programmes by creating standards, training and coaching people in applying those standards, planning and controlling the portfolio of activities in a respective part or all of the enterprise (Enterprise PMO). Finally, […]

The interrelations between process and project management

Project orientation has experienced a similar upswing in recent years as process orientation. Both concepts are so popular because they promise better fulfilment of customer wishes while simultaneously improving effectiveness and efficiency. Projects and processes complement each other. On the one hand, projects can be described by a multitude of processes with the help of […]

Against all odds – learning from great projectors: James Watt

With this article we continue a series of pioneers and projectors to learn from. You are all encouraged to write about great projectors out of your context so we may learn from them and improve our way of performing projects. “Projector” is a term introduced by Daniel Defoe in “An Essay upon Projects” (1697). It […]