Insights/ArticlesAre you looking to stay ahead of challenges facing today’s business and technology leaders? SEI’s topic articles are designed to provide insight and thought leadership on timely and relevant issues affecting the success of your business initiatives and impacting your growth potential. Select from the links below for a list of articles.
Risk: Manage It or Be Managed By It
July 2010
Risk management is a core and indispensable element of sound project management, and if omitted, can result in the project sponsors and managers constantly mitigating unforeseen issues over the course of a project. These unforeseen issues can affect projects in a variety of ways from delays in project milestone completion to project cancellation. Read more about how our approach to risk management can increase the successful implementation of your projects.
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A practical approach to vendor selection
April 2010
Selecting the right vendor to further a corporate initiative is an endeavor where good decision making is imperative and yet the process is often managed without a defined approach. Adhering to an approach which emphasizes open communication and strong governance works towards preventing the common negative outcomes of vendor selection: This article identifies a practical approach for successfully managing the vendor selection process.
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Change for Good: Sustainable Approaches to Doing More with Less
September 2009
The reality in which we must succeed today is one of increasing pressure to deliver tangible benefits and quantifiable value with an ever-tightening resource belt. Too often organizations rely solely on quick hit conventional cost cutting strategies during down turns, crippling their ability to take full advantage of the time-sensitive tipping point of the economy's recovery. Despite (or perhaps with the help of) the current market, an organization can leverage a combination of strategic project/program management program and cost optimization approaches to prioritize initiatives, emerge successfully and sustain that success over time. This article highlights some key principles and approaches to help position your organization for long term success.
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Virtual Teams – A Business Solution
February 2009
Work teams are defined now more than ever by their uniformity of purpose rather than their location and the same holds true for today's worker. Rapid upward trends in teleworking require that best practices and processes be identified and developed in your organization in order to support the implementation and management of virtual work technologies and teams.
Virtual teaming, just like any other business concept, will only yield the desired benefits for the organization if implemented correctly. With this article we provide insight into the benefits and considerations for such an undertaking from the employer, project/project team, customer, and employee perspectives.
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One of the largest threats to your project’s success: People
February 2009
“People risks” are not warm, fuzzy, or squishy. They are very real threats to your project’s execution and ROI.
We all expect a Project Manager to manage risks. We talk about dependencies, resource constraints, contingency plans, funding, back-out plans, volume testing, and compliance risk. Yet even after documenting, quantifying, and mitigating all of those, the team may still have a sinking feeling that they just can’t put their finger on. We may be sensing danger but choosing to overlook it because they are dangers of, well, a “human” kind. That sinking feeling may actually precede the sinking of the project; people issues are icebergs in your path to success.
A project that was “successful” (based on flawless, on schedule/on budget execution) can be a failure if the users never fully adopt the new system or process and thus fail to yield the promised ROI. A project that was “successful” (based on ROI) can be a failure if it were to be measured on the amount of “change pain” it introduced. In this article, we review some dangers and warning signs, and lay out a concrete plan of activities to help you minimize risk related to the people side of change.
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Optimizing Your Existing PMO
November 2008
Your organization may have considered one or more of these steps in the past, but a careful evaluation of the presence and effectiveness of these components can help ensure your PMO is on the right track to provide business value. In this article, we explore Data Governance implementation as an example of a project that requires a holistic view involving people, processes, and technology. It involves an organization-wide cultural change toward understanding data as a strategic asset; every person must recognize that they have some sort of data accountability. As such, it is critical that organizational change management (OCM) tools and techniques be employed to mitigate risk to your organization’s ROI.
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Implementing a Project Management Office
August 2008
You're tired of projects missing key deadlines and going way over budget and out of control. You're ready to put some processes in place so that you can rely more on proven methods rather than on eleventh hour heroics from those within your organization. In our previous article, we talked about the need for and the benefits of having a project management office (PMO) in your organization. You've thought about it and decided your organization should have a PMO. In this article, we'll focus on some specific tactics of starting up a PMO and what it may look like.
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The Project Management Office (PMO): A Proven Method for Increasing Project Success
February 2008
Let's face it, your business needs successful projects that are done on time and on budget, but successful projects can be elusive. Based on trusted sources such as a 2004 PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey of executives and project managers from 200 companies in 30 countries, only 2.5% of these companies completed 100% of their projects on time, within budget, and within the originally defined scope. A solution to these project challenges may well be a Project Management Office (PMO), as discussed in this article. The PMO, backed by senior management sponsorship, establishes consistent implementation practices for projects across your organization. This consistency from the PMO helps your organization in ensuring higher project success rates. A 2003 PMI and CIO magazine survey shows that project success rates increased 46% as a result of having a PMO.
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Managing Successful Projects: Where Disciplines Meet
May 2007
Why do some projects fail, while others succeed? Our experience tells us that it could simply be a factor of the project resources skill-set. In this article we focus on the "people skills" that increase the likelihood of project success. Specifically, those skills related to project leadership, which are commonly found in resources highly versed in both the Organizational Change Management and Strategic Project Management disciplines. By identifying the key skills required during each phase of a typical product development lifecycle and the associated action steps that should be utilized; you will be better prepared to select the "best" resources and implement corrective measures to keep your project on track.
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Making Project Management a Strategic Advantage
February 2007
Project Management, and the role it plays in modern business, has changed. Project management is no longer just about ensuring successful project execution. Instead, it ensures organizations are aligning their project initiatives and business resources with the business objectives. It focuses on partnerships, collaboration and continuous improvements. This shift is forcing leaders to evaluate their existing project management capability and its role within the organization. We have developed an article defining the different project management approaches and the changes organizations can implement in order to make it a strategic advantage.
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System Stability & Performance - A Roadmap to Proactive Management
July 2010
The reliability and performance of our companies’ systems and applications is often taken for granted. High reliability and performance does not happen by accident but rather by careful planning, monitoring, and continuous improvement. This article presents a set of stages from the most reactive to the most proactive approach to system stability and performance. Each of these stages is discussed in detail leaving the reader with enough information to start asking the right questions.
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Concurrency: How multi-core systems will change the way you develop software
April 2010
The shift to multi-core technology is happening before our eyes. It lures us with promises of greater computing power - but only if your applications are designed to take advantage of it. If your current applications do not take advantage of this power they may in fact run slower than they do today on a single-core machine. However, if we take some time to understand the impact of this multi-core world and prepare for it, we will continue to see the productivity gains that have driven our industry since early days of Moore's Law.
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Turn on a Dime: Leveraging Agile Development with Virtual Teams
November 2009
Your business must be able to react quickly to the changing needs of its customers, which requires you to be agile and flexible enough to change course midstream when needed. Agile software development methodology combined with a virtual team approach can enable this flexibility while reducing project risk and costs. While this combination can pose some challenges, we’ll discuss some ways to mitigate them and achieve a truly high performance development organization.
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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Governance: Critical Success Factors
May 2009
SOA's goals are to build business applications by reusing existing software services, to increase consistency and to reduce errors. The goal of SOA governance is to manage changes to consistently support business objectives and to deliver return on investment. Successful governance immunizes the organization against the symptoms of an uncontrolled environment. So what makes a SOA governance effort successful? And when do you move beyond people and process to implement a tool to manage the SOA governance activities?
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PHP - Worth a Second Look
May 2009
When was the last time you considered using PHP for your business solutions? PHP, an open source tool, has grown into an enterprise level application delivery toolset and is currently being used by some very popular social web sites that you may be using today. An experienced developer can quickly get up to speed with PHP, positioning you to increase your speed to market and reduce your delivery cost.
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Keys to Successfully Integrating the Enterprise
August 2008
Today's requirements for quicker, higher-quality decision making and the need to adapt to a changing business environment has been coined as "agility" in the business press. A strategic approach to application integration can be a key enabler of business agility. Integrating a company's internal applications with each other, their customers, and their suppliers is not a new challenge, but the recent explosion of proprietary and open solutions has added many choices. This article will take a look at the current integration landscape, providing some practical guidelines for some of the key decisions as you choose the best approach to integrate your portfolio of applications.
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Oracle 10g – Upgrading, Now What?
November 2007
In this article we will explore four technical approaches for executing your migration, support offerings to leverage, and a collection of our lessons learned and best practices from past migrations.
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Oracle 10g – What You Should Know Before You Upgrade
August 2007
Looking for new functionality? How about improved performance tuning and monitoring tools? Or do you prefer the stability of your already fine-tuned environment but merely want to stay current on a supported version? With support of 9iR2 already ending and the recent release of 11g, should you consider the direct jump to 11g? These are only a few of the questions to be considered when planning your Oracle 10g upgrade. There are some well-advised tasks to consider and risks to evaluate prior to launching your upgrade project. In this article, our Oracle database experts explore inputs to timing and strategy decisions like training of your technical staff, evaluation of related infrastructure upgrades, and coordination across application owners and end users.
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SOA – Creating the Intelligent Enterprise
November 2006
SOA represents a fundamental change in the way technology is implemented within the enterprise. In an SOA, business is the key driver and technology is secondary. BPM and Workflow drive business processes which interact with services as required. The result is a dramatic increase in business agility and flexibility. Our SOA experts analyze the role SOA fulfills within an organization including the benefits and advantages of transitioning to a SOA.
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Virtual Teams – A Business Solution
February 2009
Work teams are defined now more than ever by their uniformity of purpose rather than their location and the same holds true for today's worker. Rapid upward trends in teleworking require that best practices and processes be identified and developed in your organization in order to support the implementation and management of virtual work technologies and teams.
Virtual teaming, just like any other business concept, will only yield the desired benefits for the organization if implemented correctly. With this article we provide insight into the benefits and considerations for such an undertaking from the employer, project/project team, customer, and employee perspectives.
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Process Holes - The Unseen Risks and Rewards
May 2008
Too often the work of Process Improvement is viewed in the context of small, incremental gains across large numbers of repetitive tasks. Organizations which do not have high volume repetitive tasks or which have custom processes, often see little value in Process Improvement Initiatives. This article focuses on the dramatic benefits to the business of identifying and repairing "Process Holes". Process Holes are often "Big Picture" issues which are easily missed or ignored because they do not lend themselves to simple analysis and often require thinking "outside the box". At the other extreme, they may be "easy-to-fix" issues (with major business impact) which are overlooked because they fall between the boundaries of process activities or organizational responsibilities.
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Organizational Change Management: ‘Hard’ Value from ‘Soft’ Skills
November 2007
Organizational change management (OCM) is a discipline which may be applied to a broad range of organizational change efforts, from enterprise-wide transformations to individual capital or technology projects. When enterprises embrace and employ Organizational Change Management methodologies and approaches, quantifiable results are achieved.
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The Impact of Organizational Change Management on Outcomes in Business Transition
November 2006
With knowledge, technology, and globalization increasing at exponential rates, change is a common and pervasive experience. Within the business organization, the ability to understand and manage change is essential for successful outcomes through transition. We have created an article that defines the attributes of change, the different types of change, and how change management techniques can be applied to ensure a successful outcome.
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Data Governance: Building Your Team for Success
November 2009
In previous articles, we have introduced the relevance of governance in Data Management initiatives and in Master Data projects particularly. SEI’s governance approach takes into account the balance across People, Process, and Technology within an organization. This article concentrates on the People aspect of the governance program, articulating how to create a team to ensure a successful implementation.
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How to Succeed in Delivering High Quality Scorecard/Dashboard Initiatives
September 2009
No one would purchase a vehicle whose dashboard instruments presented unreliable data which was minutes or hours old. Imagine the driving experience if speedometer information was delayed ten minutes or if the oil warning light came on two days after the engine blew up. Nor would drivers tolerate instrumentation which was difficult to understand and required extensive training, multiple menu selections or detailed explanations. Consumers reward companies whose products provide real value and are easy to use. Often, however, in scorecard and dashboard initiatives the product delivered to the end user results in disappointment, frustration, and eventually disuse.
This article is intended to highlight potential pitfalls in these initiatives which create disappointing deliverables. Additionally, it discusses key issues which must be addressed before, during and after a scorecard or dashboard initiative. Driving a scorecard initiative with clearly defined executive and user goals, quality and timely data, appropriate tools, adequate support resources, and ongoing iterative improvements will create satisfied and appreciative users who are able to take meaningful actions from the information presented.
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Data Governance: Critical to MDM Success
November 2008
We discuss what a typical Data Governance for a Master Data Management (MDM) initiative entails from the people, process and technology perspectives, and best practices for managing the organizational changes required. With MDM coming to the forefront of both the operational and business intelligence space, it is essential to be aware of the benefits and risks involved in this discipline. Having to agree upon a standardized view of information across multiple business areas, and on the accompanying processes and procedures for the utilization of that information, can appear to be an overwhelming task. Without an active management strategy in place, this could be an insurmountable undertaking.
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Determining Your MDM Implementation Strategy
May 2007
In this article, we begin to examine the spectrum of MDM Implementation strategies, while providing a set of common questions that will help guide you in selecting the correct implementation strategy for your environment.
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Insights into Master Data Management
February 2007
Master Data Management (MDM) is quickly coming to the forefront of the IT project pipeline for almost every corporation. As companies look to invest in such a potentially broad, risky and significant corporate initiative, SEI offers our insights on the business case, various approaches, and potential challenges to engaging in such an effort.
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