Chapter 1
The Project Landscape
The first bit of business for you as a member of the senior management team (SMT) is to understand the project environment within which your project, program, and portfolio managers and their teams must work, and within that environment, the challenges you will face in establishing and supporting an effective project management environment. The needs of that environment have changed dramatically in the last 15 years especially with respect to the tools, templates, and processes that support it. The result is confusion and the introduction of yet another silver bullet every Tuesday. Those silver bullets appear very enticing but let me make it clear that there are no silver bullets now nor have there ever been. There are strategies and you are going to learn them from this book but they will require work on your part in order to implement them and continuing attention from your office for them to become and remain effective in your organization. I recognize your dilemma in the faces and through the reactions of my client organizations as they attempt to support complex project management and offer you what I have learned over the years.
Let me try to put this in a context that relates directly to the SMT. A recent worldwide survey (IBM, “Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study,” 2010) conducted by IBM from September 2009 through January 2010 reported that over half of the 1541 executives from the 60 countries ...
