Want less to do? Kill zombie projects
Published:
August 11 2009, 11:22 AM
by
Pradeep Bhanot
I just read a direct and insightful article by Bob Lewis at InfoWorld article, in which he reminds us that if you want more time to do the important projects, kill the ones that are already dead. Bob provides some examples of the kinds of projects that need to be put out of their misery. Some of the cases worth a mention are an uncommitted or absent sponsor and big projects that are over 6 months overdue (that need to split up).
My friends in California will be familiar with the notion of a zombie company, the San Francisco Bay Area is littered with companies that are startups that have already failed but are kept on life support as the last round of funding dries up. They missed their first mover advantage, the product failed to get a set of commercial companies to sponsor them or they went out of vogue. My startup was an Open Source development marketplace with went of fashion around the time as other business to business exchanges did.
An organisations project portfolio exists in a constantly changing environment where sponsors come and go, competition moves into your opportunity and the economic environment impacts your projects prospective target market. In light of all this change, it makes sense to have the infrastructure (such as a central PPM system) in place to enable planned (quarterly) or unplanned portfolio reviews. Lean IT thinking encourages us to consider how to reduce time wasted projects that are no longer relevant to our customers.
You never know what's around the corner.
By: Pradeep Bhanot
Pradeep Bhanot markets CA Clarity PPM in Europe. Prior to CA, Pradeep worked at BT, the UK Department of Energy, ECGD, Watson Wyatt, Oracle, and Serena Software. He is ITIL v3 Foundation certified, a PMI member and holds a Computer Science Degree from Greenwich University.
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