I am heading back East to deliver my PPM presentation in Philadelphia and then in Boston. I am doing a special version in Boston, as a precursor to 3 PPM User Presentations.  The point of my talk will be to underscore the strategic and critical nature of the discipline. I hope to establish some enthusiasm for the Practitioners who will be sharing their PPM challenges and experiences with the audience.

As I modified my PPM presentation I found myself reflecting on my very first slide. The slide is titled, "Sound Familiar?" It is a list of first-person statements I use to kick off my PPM and PMO presentations. The idea behind the slide is to establish a sense of fraternity and connection with the audience by listing complaints to which they can relate. It also sets the stage for my following slide describing the problems to be solved with good PPM processes and PMO practices.

I won't be using the slide in my condensed version, but as I noticed something as I hit the delete key. I have not ever altered the slide. I started using this list of complaints almost three years ago and I use the exact same list today.

I use the same slide because it still serves its purpose. These issues continue to plague organizations around the world. The list continues to elicit affirming head-nods from the audience. I experienced these problems first-hand in my career, and I continually encounter folks who say these statements are true in their organizations:

• We don't have enough resources to get the work done.
• In our organization, there is no real portfolio planning.
• We don't prioritize our projects, or every project is a #1 priority, or our priorities are constantly changing with no explanation.
• Everyone is doing end-runs around the approval process.
• Funding tends to be very political.
• We can't kill a project. If we do kill a project, it always seems to show up again.
• We never have any objective measurements to overcome the politics in decision-making.
• We get funding to build duplicate systems for different business units and the end result is an ever-growing set of unsupportable redundant applications.

What do you think of the list? Are these statements true in your organization? Have you solved any of these problems? If you did solve them, how did you do it?

I would love to hear from those of you who no longer live with these issues. It is heartbreaking to know so many folks continue to deal with these circumstances. I am very much looking forward to the day when these problems are a thing-of-the-past. In the meantime, I expect more nodding heads.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist