Project Management

No matter what role you have within an organization – be it engineer, salesperson, consultant, marketer, or business owner – you’ve acquired a second responsibility: project manager. But managing projects has become more challenging than ever. Why? The work environment has expanded across departments, across job roles – and even across continents. To achieve organizational objectives, cross-functional teams form, collaborate, dissolve and re-form to tackle precisely defined projects and fulfill specific deliverables within carefully controlled deadlines and budget demands. Learn more today!

Is building custom software a necessary evil, a process that’s divorced from the really important parts of a business? Or is the ability to do this well the underpinning of every successful organization? The truth is probably somewhere in between these two extremes. One thing is clear, however: In many organizations, how well a firm executes its business strategies is inextricably tied to how good it is at creating and running new applications.

This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) white paper introduces the Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management processes and discusses the selection criteria for Service Catalog and Service Portfolio software solutions.Learn more today!

This white paper explores how this 'always on' eLearning resource can facilitate technology professionals' ability to increase productivity, pursue professional certifications, and improve collaborations and communication.

You've heard it a million times: Do more with less. It may be good business, but as budgets shrink and IT demands grow, you may start to wonder if the people who are saying "do more with less" think that it's a magical incantation. Run the servers without electricity! You've already taken basic cost-cutting steps and saved the easy money. You know that you need to dig deeper. But where should you start? This e-book, provided by IBM, will introduce you to the five big IT budget killers - and some of the best ways to knock them out.

By 2011, IDC expects mobile workers to make up 73 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Whether mobile employees are out in the field or at home, sitting in a satellite office or constantly on the go within a corporate campus environment, they're going to need an effective way to stay connected and productive.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library offers basic steps for managing a successful Windows Vista migration.

By 2011, the mobile workforce in the U.S. is expected to reach 120.1 million people. Embracing this trend is more of a question of "how" rather than "if": How will you measure, manage and build relationships with increasingly distributed teams and workers?

IT groups must support many applications and servers across multiple platforms that frequently operate independently of each other. However, coordinating job scheduling across all these applications and networks is often required to optimize resource utilization. The traditional approach of applying more staff, toolkits, and rudimentary scheduling software to cobble together automated batch processing solutions becomes cost-prohibitive, inefficient, and error-prone, as the number of moving parts increases and the environment becomes more heterogeneous.

Staples’ information systems play a critical role in delivering on their brand promise 'that was easy.' As part of a recent strategic imperative, Staples recently embarked on a major modernization of its systems architecture and supporting processes. The goal was to ensure IT’s systems could scale with the company’s continued global expansion without sacrificing the quality of the brand experience. One critical target for modernization was Staples’ enterprise job scheduling processes and systems. After researching the top software providers in this space, Staples selected Tidal Software to support its efforts to centralize and streamline automated batch processing.

With 50+ percent of all business processes leveraging batch operations, it is essential to keep your batch production running smoothly in order to keep your business running smoothly. Whether you are consolidating datacenter operations, moving apps to more cost-effective platforms, or transitioning from customized to packaged applications, learn how you can simplify and lower the cost of batch management with a single interface to all batch processes across platforms and applications and more.

This white paper by IDC shows how an investment in training improves the likelihood of an IT project chances for success through enhancement of team skills. The white paper provides an analysis of a comprehensive survey with 144 senior IT managers examining the impact which training and skill level had on the success of 377 IT projects.

Has your Enterprise made the strategic decision to consolidate remote site IT infrastructure into central data centers? Then you have probably discovered that consolidation projects are fraught with technical, organization, and implementation challenges that require a well thought-out strategy. Download this paper by Riverbed and discover a clear 5-step approach to making sure every consolidation project is successful.

ERP system acquisition projects are rarely deemed to fail.  All the well-advertised failures come later, during implementation and afterward.  Nevertheless, the seeds of these failures are invariably planted in the earliest stages of ERP acquisition planning.

ERP implementations fail – when they do – because implementation projects allow a few well-known risks to go unmanaged. These risks go unmanaged because the control of results slips from buyer to seller.  It doesn’t have to work that way.

It is a truism that in any complex activity, the critical, defining decisions should be made as early in the process as possible.  In ERP implementation projects this principle is routinely undermined by the nearly universal practice of separating acquisition and implementation activities into separate projects, performed by separate teams operating under separate control.

In what practical ways – if any – is ERP implementation project success different from the absence of failure? Both casual and thorough analysis of ERP failure agree on several interesting points.

Accurate communication is the key to the success of the bug tracking process. This communication takes the form of timely information flow between customers, QA and Development. Reducing the time spent on tasks that communicate bug information saves money.

Here’s a test: Can you list all the issues your software team is working on now? Can you sort them by severity, priority, features affected, and other criteria such as whether the issue is a bug, customer request, or product enhancement? Can you show the histories of all related comments and actions? Can you distribute this information easily to concerned individuals — showing only the information relevant to them?

Elementool, a leading provider of web-based project management tools for developers, including bug, defect, time-tracking and help desk tools, has announced the release of a bug tracking add-in tool for developers using the Visual Studio.NET 2005 platform. It is available free to Elementool’s community of project management solution subscribers.

Being the new person on a bug tracking team can be very intimidating. The other team members are likely very set in the process and know exactly what they are doing. They are used to working as a team and they understand what is expected of them. Being new, though, does not mean that a person can not fit in on the bug tracking team. All a person needs to do is learn a few beginner tips to using bug tracking software.

In 2005, O’Hare International Airport began a project to relocate and modernize a 2.1 million ft.2 runway. Five independent firms worked on the project design with the IT/data management led by Milhouse Engineering and Construction, Inc.  Milhouse implemented GlobalSCAPE WAFS which mirrors critical files to all sites. This provided fast local access to all project files automatically without any administrative burden and with no delays.

Demonstrating ROI for service management investments can be difficult, especially with multi-phase deployments like ITIL that can require significant up-front investment in exchange for returns produced in the future.  Learn how setting milestones and measuring the value of each phase of an ITIL implementation can help prove the project’s value and shape its focus.

Before your company launches its next package selection, implementation or upgrade, make sure you don’t cripple the project from the start by failing to identify your requirements – the number one reason that projects spin out of control. This white paper summarizes some of the key lessons we have learned through our industry-leading requirements definition practice.

The later in the system development life-cycle that major errors are discovered the more expensive it is to fix them. But the earliest stages of the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) are most often the least consistently executed. This paper describes a methodology that brings the early stages of the SDLC up to a high level of maturity: consistent, proven, and optimized for success.