operational excellence

If your sheet of music is different from everyone else’s, then you need MDM – Part II

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In the last post, we looked into what Master Data mean. Now I will talk about the why it is so important in today’s competitive business landscape.

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ARMing yourself for success for the new year

Today is the first day of 2010. This year, as we exit a global recession our hopes for success are much larger than before—while our margins for success are tighter than they have been for many years. Use of Active Risk Management (ARM) can be vital helping us navigate these challenges…

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Ten critical success factors for using dashboards to manage your program portfolio

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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…

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Tip 3 – Map your portfolio dashboard to your business value chain

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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…

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Tip 2 – Pick dashboard metrics that drive success

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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…

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Tip 1 – Identify the stakeholders you need for 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…

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