Project Management

The Agile CIO as a Business – IT Marriage Counselor

April 1, 2011

Guest post by Tim Mattix and Mike Mariani If the relationship between developers and business users is like a marriage, sometimes the CIO’s job is akin to a marriage counselor. In a marriage, one spouse often wants the other to change. In the market, business executives want change, too; changes in the way systems operate so they can capitalize on new opportunities. And often the complaints in both situations are the same. It’s taking too ...

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10 Ways to be More Agile

March 10, 2011

Written with contributions from Michael Mariani, Tim Mattix, Ryan Finnamore and many others. You might think the word “agile” is synonymous with “paralysis” to see some organizations react to the idea of introducing agile development principles to their traditional systems development lifecycle (SDLC). Concerns about introducing too much change to the organization can stop agility discussions with the business before they start. But if the organization’s goals include increasing the speed of development, quickly uncovering ...

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Business Change Management Using Weak Signals

August 2, 2010

A Fortune 500 company embarks on an ambitious program to implement a Master Data Management solution. Three years and a $100M later, executive leadership decides that too much money has been sunk into the program and the anticipated objectives have not been realized. The program is shut down…...

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Inside the Huddle: Connecting Strategy with Execution

July 23, 2010

Co-authored with John Sviokla

Weâ€™ve hit the point in the summer when football training camps are almost upon usâ€”one of our favorite times of the year. Football, in our opinion, more than other American sports, exemplifies the three dynamics we at Diamond use in assessing a companyâ€™s â€œDigital IQâ€â€”Strategy, Mobilization, and Execution…...

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Is Your Troubled Project Jumping the Shark?

July 6, 2010

John Sviokla examines Google’s acquisition of travel information company ITA in his post Friday and wonders if they might be taking their eyes off the ball. He stops short of saying Google’s “jumping the shark” with this move, but in view of the growth of Facebook and even LinkedIn, it’s still an interesting question. References to “jumping the shark” have been coming out of nowhere lately to this term that refers to the point in ...

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The 9 Best Project Management Techniques You’re Not Using

June 17, 2010

Co-authored with Paul Tenuta We are spending a lot of time lately helping companies think about the “reasons behind the reasons” that projects succeed or fail. Just measuring scope, schedule and budget just doesn’t cut it. Here are 9 of the best project management techniques that you should consider adding to your management toolkit that dig deeper into the people, behaviors and decision-making that makes or breaks projects. Survey your business and IT stakeholders and ...

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Behavioral Economics and Project Failure

May 17, 2010

Over the last month, I have had three conversations that have dealt with large projects in various states of failure: A large financial services firm is several years, several attempts and $100M into a core transaction processing system replacement and is considering another $50-100M investment “to get it done this time” Three industry competitors are collaborating on a highly profitable on-line marketplace to bypass a popular intermediary, but one of them is trying to do ...

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4 Tiring IT Truisms

March 3, 2010

I’ve spent the last several weeks thinking a lot about the enterprise collaboration and enterprise 2.0 space given increasing interest by our clients. One of my colleagues sent along a link to a related post about Enterprise 2.0 adoption. The summary is much appreciated. What I don’t appreciate as much is the use of generic truisms by experts when asked for specific advice in thinking about a concept, approach, technology or vendor. There are 4 ...

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A Resurgence of Portfolio Management?

January 21, 2010

by Chris Curran and Jim Quick Portfolio management was all the rage 5-6 years ago, driven in part by some good management thinking from people like Peter Weill at MIT CISR and Dr. Howard Rubin and in part by some software tool vendors. Back then, most organizations added some kind of portfolio thinking or at least dabbled with it. While most of the interest seemed to be in the IT organization, some organizations actually drove ...

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6 Ways to Find Weak Signals

October 9, 2009

One of the fundamental mysteries in the practice of IT management is “why cant we get better at delivering projects?” Much has been written about the subject, with the balance focusing on the negative – project failure, IT Fail, etc. A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review got me thinking about another angle on this question – maybe we are ignoring some fundamental, but less obvious signs that our projects are not positioned for ...

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