Insights on project management consulting, PMO setup, and IT project delivery — practical lessons from real-world programmes.
Say “PMO” to the owner of a fifty-person company and you can watch the shutters come down. They picture what they saw at a former employer: a department of template enforcers, a methodology binder, status meetings about status meetings. They are right to refuse that. They are wrong to conclude that governance is only for…
Ask a delivery team how long something will take and you will get a number. Ask them three months later why it took twice that, and you will get reasons: the requirement changed, the interface was undocumented, the key person was on leave, the test environment arrived late. All true. All predictable. None of them…
Every failed project we have ever been called to rescue had one thing in common: a stack of green status reports. The project was drowning, and the reporting said swimming. There is even a name for it, the watermelon project: green on the outside, red on the inside. Fixing that is not a template problem;…
Nobody calls a rescue manager when things are going well. By the time an IT project rescue is on the table, the symptoms are usually the same: milestones slipping for the third time, a steering committee that has stopped believing the status report, a vendor and a client quietly blaming each other, and a sponsor…
Most project businesses don’t lose money on the projects they fail. They lose it on the projects they deliver successfully, and then under-bill, bill late, or never bill at all. The work happens. The value is created. And somewhere between the timesheet and the invoice, a slice of it simply evaporates. For any organisation that…
A fixed-price contract feels safe. The scope is written, the price is locked, the risk is the vendor’s, on paper. In practice, most of the troubled programmes we are asked to rescue involve a fixed-price integrator contract that quietly stopped protecting the client years before anyone noticed. The contract was fine. The oversight was missing….
Ask a founder why startups fail and you’ll hear about the idea, the market, the competition. Ask the data, and a quieter answer emerges: most of them run out of money, and they run out of money because they couldn’t see it coming. CB Insights, analysing hundreds of startup post-mortems, found that running out of…
One in five enterprise projects still misses its goals. Here is why IT projects fail, and how disciplined project management and a right-sized PMO keep delivery on track.