Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
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The standard plan framework establishes the high-level activities that need to take place across all projects. To drill down, Pilewski and the project planners, managers and developers use software from Primavera that provides dashboards and progress reports for project tracking. They can compare original estimates with actual costs, see if milestones are met, list activities required for completion, or view all the projects that a functional group in IT is working on. Primavera also provides the data to the project management office, which uses it to identify when different IT functions should be brought into a project or when activities such as building test plans need to take place. All the company’s 126 projects follow Pilewski’s framework, so they’re measured the same way; the same activities are monitored across all projects using the software; and the data that project planners feed into the software is consistent and yields apples-to-apples comparisons across projects.
Notably, the standard plan framework does not specify how project and functional managers should perform each of those 25 steps, which distinguishes it from a traditional project methodology. By outlining what they need to keep track of instead of how they need to keep track, says Pilewski, the framework gives project managers the flexibility to break down their own work. In addition, they can use the framework in conjunction with any application development methodology, he says. That’s important because project managers can find standard project management methodologies too rigid and constraining.
"Companies are too big and too complicated to standardize on everything," says Patrick Boylan, CEO of Intellilink Solutions, a boutique consultancy specializing in project management. "They need to find a way to get some form of control over projects while also giving the IT department the flexibility it needs to respond to clients." A.G. Edwards has done exactly what Boylan suggests using its standard plan framework.
Although the standard plan framework is flexible, it was a tough sell inside the IT department. To win over the staff, Parker and Pilewski used various tactics. First, Parker appealed to his team’s sense of professionalism. He knew they weren’t happy that projects took years to complete. In one-on-one conversations, meetings with individual teams and formal town hall sessions, he told his workers that the framework would help them meet their milestones.
Pilewski then identified the project managers receptive to new ideas and hungering to improve their effectiveness. He asked them to get involved in pilot projects—a small product acquisition project and a large infrastructure application upgrade—where they used the standard plan framework for the first time. Pilewski then used those project managers as evangelists to get the rest of the team on board.