Advanced Project Portfolio Management
and the PMO:
Multiplying ROI at Warp Speed

By Gerald I. Kendall and Steven C. Rollins

-          amazing insights into building a project management office that executives will embrace, to be published in the spring of 2003 by J. Ross Publishing.

Synopsis:

This 425+ page book describes the vital ingredients that make strategic planning, project management and a Project Management Office (PMO) work well together.  Today’s project managers face huge problems in resource conflicts, project delays and commitment of team members. The topic of a 2002 speech to an audience of over 1,000 Project Managers sums it up: “This is Crazy! How to Get Your Life Back: Transcending the Madness of Today’s Projects.”

Today’s executives face huge problems in changing their organizations quickly enough to keep pace with customer expectations, competition and economic conditions. Projects are their vehicle for change, but poor project execution makes it difficult to implement a strategic plan. Who is to blame? Project managers point the finger at executives, claiming that executives constantly bombard them with new projects, without consideration of the resources available. Executives hear the complaints but are not bought-in to the resource issue. They continue to pressure their project managers to deliver. The resulting adversarial system, pitting project and resource managers against each other, is not working.

This book examines the PMO and strategic planning in depth, discussing what is missing from current approaches. The authors show why the current Project Management model must change drastically from focusing on cost and efficiency to focusing on project flow and throughput. This approach works wonders to drive bottom line value from a PMO. The authors reveal a PMO Maturity Model – how to judge any PMO implementation.

From over 60 years of combined experience, the authors reveal their road map to unprecedented project management success through four major processes:

• Choosing the right projects – the new way of strategic planning
• Permanently linking strategies to projects
• Managing the portfolios correctly
• Measuring the PMO explicitly

Each process is described in detail. In addition, the authors show how to eliminate, in a few weeks, the internal fights over resources and project priorities that have existed for years.

In a review of the manuscript, Dr. Harold Kerzner comments, “Today, the marketplace finally has a textbook, Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO, by Gerald Kendall and Steven C. Rollins, which is not only the most comprehensive textbook ever published on the subject, but should certainly become the standard for PMO development for years to come. If your organization has a need for developing a PMO, this book should be required reading for all executives.”

For further information, or to submit advance orders, please email Drew Gierman, editor, at dgierman@jrosspub.com or contact the authors. Email gerryikendall@cs.com or steve@pmousa.com

Author Biographies:

Gerald I. Kendall, PMP, Vice President, MarketKey Inc. is a noted management consultant, public speaker and training expert who has been serving clients in the U.S., Canada and overseas since 1968. 

His background includes extensive experience as a systems, sales, marketing, and operations executive with an international focus. Since the 1960s, he has specialized in helping large multi-national firms as well as government and not-for-profit organizations, manage large-scale organizational change issues. He is an expert at strategic planning and project management, with a top-down approach. Recent clients include Babcock & Wilcox, Alcan Aluminum, Tessco Distributors, Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin, Travelocity.com and Joy Athletic. 

Gerry is certified in the field of Theory of Constraints, and is a graduate and silver medal winner of McGill University. He is a member of PMI.

Gerald is the author of Securing the Future: Strategies for Exponential Growth Using the Theory of Constraints. He is also a contributing author in Dr. Harold Kerzner’s text on Project Management, A System’s Approach. In addition to numerous articles and speeches, he has also authored three white papers - “Integrating Critical Chain and the PMBOKÒ”, “Choosing the Right Project Mix”, and “How to Get Value from a PMO.”

Steven C Rollins MBA, PMP, is Chief Project Strategist with EPM Solutions Inc, providing consultative services for business PMOs and Project Offices through the PMOUSA Network (WWW.PMOUSA.Com). Steve is a well-known national subject matter expert in Enterprise Program/Project Management Office/Project Office startups, helping his clients focus their project management capabilities on improving their delivery processes to their associates through application of the project management value proposition.  Steve has been a featured speaker to many organizations including many American PMI chapters in recent years speaking on “Growing the Business through the Project Management Office’ and ‘The Value Proposition of the Project Managers’.  Steve is also the Executive Chair of one of the fastest growing entities in the PMI PMO SIG, the Mid-America Regional PMO Regional Group (PMORG). Steve is also the Knowledge Vice-Chair of the PMI Metrics SIG (WWW.METSIG.ORG) recently leading the innovative initiative to create the first comprehensive Project Management Metrics Knowledge Center available to the general project management community.  In addition he has also authored multiple white papers on PMOs, which have become among the most popular downloads from a multitude of project management web sites. These include “Achieving the Value Proposition of Project Management”, “Creating Business Value with a ROI-based PMO”, and “How to Get Value from a PMO.”