In response to the explosion of use of social media over the past 12 months, many leaders are developing formal Social Media Polices to guide their staff in approved use of these tools inside the enterprise. By using bottom-up design principles, leaders can create Social Media Policies that productively encourage creativity—without risking their enterprise’s mission and reputation.

Even the greatest Program Dashboard will not help if you do not use it to manage your portfolio more effectively. Here are 10 critical success factors I have learned in the process of using dashboards to drive successful outcomes on over 3,300 projects and programs…

Setting up metrics to manage and track a small project effectively is easy. Doing this for a large program or portfolio initially looks harder. However, it becomes easy once realize a program is simply a series of aggregated projects all working together to achieve a single objective. Once you do this, creating and using your Dashboard is easy…

I have heard metrics that indicate that anywhere from 50% to 75% of all projects and programs are late or fail to meet their business objectives. However, I repeatedly see Program Dashboards that indicate that everything is “Green.” They key to avoiding this is picking Dashboard Metrics that create incentives for forward-looking behaviors that will drive success…

So you have decided to create a Program Dashboard. The first thing you do is build a spreadsheet and start using it to collecting data. At the end of the month you brief your results to your executive team – and it falls flat. Why? Because you did not first look at your stakeholders and determine what THEY want to see…

We are at the time of the year when most of us are both measuring the success (or failure) of our 2009 portfolio and finalizing our plans for 2010. A key tool I have used across several industries to manage (business and technological) success is the Program Dashboard. This blog series will share the lessons I have learned doing this over 15 years.