Top Project Management Trends

As we come to the end of a big year in project management, it seemed appropriate to look back and revisit some of the major trends we’ve been reporting on and revisit them as they’re sure to have an impact on the year ahead.

Project management is having a moment. It’s become a descriptive for not only the certified professionals, but increasingly being used to define anyone tasked with managing anything from planning to completion, regardless of size, scale and scope.  Over the course of the past year we’ve seen more chatter on what is termed the “accidental project manager,” though that doesn’t mean we’ve been silent on the more technical workings of project management. We’ve published countless articles on a range of topics for the project leader and the project manager, from stakeholder management to time-tracking tips to trends in PMOs. See what have been our biggest trends throughout the year.

project management trends 2015

Stakeholder Management

Contributor Mike Clayton addressed stakeholders in a two-part posting on our site. In the first installment he wrote about how it’s better to engage than manage your stakeholders. Leading a project is all about managing the resources, but your stakeholders, as Clayton wisely notes, demand a different type of relationship, especially if you hope to have a productive project.

By engaging with your stakeholders, Clayton writes, you’re going to earn their respect and facilitate the processes you though could be controlled solely through managerial skills. Of course, first you must identify the stakeholders , then you have to in a sense analyze them in order to know how best to engage with them.

For part two, Clayton goes into greater detail about how to plan a campaign for engaging with your stakeholders. Here he delves into the importance of message and tone, each of which must be specifically tailored to the individual stakeholder. This includes figuring out what medium is best when communicating with your stakeholder, what approach can motivate the changes in the project you want from your stakeholder and creating a mechanism for feedback.

Timesheets

Elizabeth Harrin, who owns and operates the blog A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, spend the year explaining the importance of timesheets. She wrote about how timesheets can curb the bleeding lose of billable revenue if we focus on making them more accurate. She explored why timesheets are often inaccurate and how to get the right data.

Timesheets may not be sexy, but Harrin loves them, as she explicitly stated in another article. First she debunks the commonly held myths about timesheet, such as it being authoritarian, micromanaging and a waste of time, among other things, and then shows how in fact it supports enterprise, foster return on investment and supports your team.

Timesheets can also help you get better estimates. The resurgence in timesheets is hand in glove with the current craze for data. Timesheets provide great data and that data can assist in giving you better results when estimating. Past projects can provide facts which then can be applied to future endeavors. You can assess performance and better understand how your team works. Tracking hours is also helpful, if you’re going to bill for them.

You should go back and read all of Harrin’s insightful writings on timesheets, and if you’re convinced on how helpful they can be then read ProjectManger.com CEO Jason Westland’s article on How to Get Your Team to Start Using Timesheets. It further explains why timesheets matter and shows how easy it can be to use them as well as train and support for them.

Leadership

If ever there’s been a topic that has been beaten to death, it’s leadership. But we took a few swings at the subject and thanks to contributor and project leadership coach, trainer and consultant Susanne Madsen, we managed to breath new life into the subject.

Through a series of short tutorial videos, Madsen showed how to build trust with your team on the four pillars of competence, connection, communication and honesty. She furthered that discussion in the video on influencing different people on your team, by separating them into four groups — driver, expressive, amiable and analytical — and offering practical advice for dealing with each.

A leader has to deal not only with resources but stakeholders, and Madsen provide a pragmatic approach for dealing with difficult stakeholders. And she knows that a true leader doesn’t do it all by themselves. Being able to delegate is crucial to getting a project done on schedule. Madsen knows how to delegate elegantly and shares her approach, as well as noting what to and what not to delegate.

PMO

Another contributor, Lindsay Scott, a former project office manager for Hewlett Packard, who remains active in the field with her monthly meet up group PMO Flashmob and the PMO Conference, wrote an educating post on the evolution of PMO tools and offered her thoughts on future trends.

Beyond an informative history lesson, Scott provide more practical advice on how to set up a PMO. She discussed what the four different types of PMO are as well as how most organizations set up a PMO. Once a PMO has increased its activity, Scott wrote about the Center of Excellence model of PMO, which creates and maintains the standards of project management within the business, and then how to advance the PMO.

There’s a hidden role of the PMO in that it fosters collaboration, which Scott also addressed in a post. A PMO can help team collaboration through the creation of a project room, daily standup meetings and a visual overview of the project’s progress. On remote teams, Scott said the se of a virtual water cooler conversation and virtual project wall are both good ways to build bonds over distances.

Nuts and Bolts

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of project management, our resident expert and video host, Jennifer Bridges, PMP, took us into the weeds and then held our hands to help us find our way out. She produced tutorials on everything from an introduction to project planning to advanced project planning. She spoke to some of the topics above, such as showing how to make timesheets fun for your team and when to push back with stakeholders.

Project managers, embrace your social side

Social collaboration (known also as enterprise social or enterprise social collaboration) has been silently transforming the way employees interact and work across organisations. For those organisations who’ve delivered on a considered social collaboration strategy, they’ve benefited from reshaping the way work gets done, by embedding social collaboration into the day- to-day work flow, they’ve fundamentally transformed conventional business processes, enabling a more productive and more enjoyable working environment. One that brings out the brilliance of their workforce. It’s no wonder there has been a surge in the uptake of social collaboration over the last five years.

What is social collaboration? 

It is a fresh way of working, one that harnesses the power of human networks as a means to get employees working together better. It delivers the ideals of personal social networks (connecting and interacting with others, information sharing, and discovery) and extends this with group-centric features, empowering people to work together to achieve common goals.

Why has social collaboration finally happened? 

Unsurprisingly there have been technological advances in the social collaboration platforms, but these haven’t been significant success factors. Surprisingly it’s the people that have permitted social collaboration to succeed. Employees, accustomed to using social networking in their personal lives, have become more accommodating in adopting social and collaborative approaches in their working lives. This relaxed employee attitude has finally permitted organisations to adopt innovative social collaboration approaches. Additionally, with the realization by senior management, that top-down directives don’t work for social implementations, better outcomes are achieved when these are compelled by their employees.

How is this relevant to programme and project managers? 

In a nutshell, adopting social collaboration in a programme or project environment results in more effective collaboration between the team members (and stakeholders/partners if you extend it out to them), knowledge sharing (especially with virtual teams) and speedier communication channels, altogether leading to more successful project teams.

Imagine if you were given an environment that enabled your team members to get projects completed efficiently and promptly, assisting them to rapidly find the information they need, when they need it; straightforwardly sharing knowledge, experience and skills; communicating spontaneously, and seamlessly work together across geographies to achieve common business objectives of the project. Now extend this out to those difficult stakeholders you need to handle warily on a day to day basis; If they could participate in a collaborative manner would they be easier to deal with? Could you leverage this approachable engagement to overcome challenges and speed up project delivery?

What does this mean to the programme and project manager role? 

It’s changing the way we work. Many in project management are still shying away from taking the plunge because social collaboration may seem overwhelming. But with the right strategies, tools and engagement, social collaboration can be a remarkable way to improve outcomes for your programmes and projects.

In a project environment, social collaboration has proven to improve communications, work management, knowledge management, cross-project interchange and innovation.

Project communication - Effective communication is a critical differentiator on whether a project is a success or not, in an environment where 50% or more of a project manager’s time is consumed by communication. Communication challenge only increases as the complexity increases in a programme environment. Social collaboration extends traditional communication channels (that are often direct and restricted, such as email) to encourage more inclusive engagement and collaboration, across organisational and geographical boundaries. It also enables virtual relationship building and discovery of people who can add contextual value to your project. 

Personal work management – Enabling the project team to do the right thing, at the right time, with access to the right resources or rapidly discover people that can assist. 

Skill and knowledge management – Encourages sharing, capturing knowledge, experience and skills, often on an open informal basis. It enables ramping up of skills, speeding up on-boarding of team members, and lessons learned for project initiation. Even providing local expertise to over-all knowledge capture. Locating individuals with expertise, social collaboration provides an ideal way for a project manager to find new and untapped talent within the organisation. 

Cross-project interchange – Enabling an exchange of ideas, problem solving and insight across interrelated projects and programmes. Improves relationships with management and teams delivering these initiatives. This may also extend outside the organisational boundaries to partners. 

Innovation – The ability to combine, capture and develop numerous perspectives has proven to facilitate problem solving, idea development, and innovation. Finding people with others with shared interests to help them solve large problems. Organisations have nurtured this insight through communities of practice, wikis, micro-blogs, etc. means that knowledge is retained and can evolve over time, benefitting future projects.

For many programme and project manager that have been tasked to deliver these social change projects, they have begrudgingly entered unfamiliar territory. One where collaboration is a key outcome of the project, as well as a prerequisite enabling it.

Experience has taught me that it is best to adopt an “eating one’s own dog food” approach to delivering these social collaboration endeavors. One where the project team utilities the social collaboration platform and adopts collaborative behaviors. Whilst this technique helps develop and test the social collaboration “product”, it also enables lessons to be learnt in a “safe” environment and empowers the team to explore more innovative outcomes.

Top Project Management Trends

As we come to the end of a big year in project management, it seemed appropriate to look back and revisit some of the major trends we’ve been reporting on and revisit them as they’re sure to have an impact on the year ahead.

Project management is having a moment. It’s become a descriptive for not only the certified professionals, but increasingly being used to define anyone tasked with managing anything from planning to completion, regardless of size, scale and scope.  Over the course of the past year we’ve seen more chatter on what is termed the “accidental project manager,” though that doesn’t mean we’ve been silent on the more technical workings of project management. We’ve published countless articles on a range of topics for the project leader and the project manager, from stakeholder management to time-tracking tips to trends in PMOs. See what have been our biggest trends throughout the year. 

project management trends 2016

Stakeholder Management

Contributor Mike Clayton addressed stakeholders in a two-part posting on our site. In the first installment he wrote about how it’s better to engage than manage your stakeholders. Leading a project is all about managing the resources, but your stakeholders, as Clayton wisely notes, demand a different type of relationship, especially if you hope to have a productive project.

By engaging with your stakeholders, Clayton writes, you’re going to earn their respect and facilitate the processes you though could be controlled solely through managerial skills. Of course, first you must identify the stakeholders , then you have to in a sense analyze them in order to know how best to engage with them.

For part two, Clayton goes into greater detail about how to plan a campaign for engaging with your stakeholders. Here he delves into the importance of message and tone, each of which must be specifically tailored to the individual stakeholder. This includes figuring out what medium is best when communicating with your stakeholder, what approach can motivate the changes in the project you want from your stakeholder and creating a mechanism for feedback.

Timesheets

Elizabeth Harrin, who owns and operates the blog A Girl’s Guide to Project Management, spend the year explaining the importance of time sheets. She wrote about how timesheets can curb the bleeding lose of billable revenue if we focus on making them more accurate. She explored why timesheets are often inaccurate and how to get the right data.

Time sheets may not be sexy, but Harrin loves them, as she explicitly stated in another article. First she debunks the commonly held myths about timesheet, such as it being authoritarian, micromanaging and a waste of time, among other things, and then shows how in fact it supports enterprise, foster return on investment and supports your team.

Time sheets can also help you get better estimates. The resurgence in time sheets is hand in glove with the current craze for data. Timesheets provide great data and that data can assist in giving you better results when estimating. Past projects can provide facts which then can be applied to future endeavors. You can assess performance and better understand how your team works. Tracking hours is also helpful, if you’re going to bill for them.

You should go back and read all of Harrin’s insightful writings on timesheets, and if you’re convinced on how helpful they can be then read Projectionist CEO Jason West land's article on How to Get Your Team to Start Using Time sheets. It further explains why time sheets matter and shows how easy it can be to use them as well as train and support for them.

Leadership

If ever there’s been a topic that has been beaten to death, it’s leadership. But we took a few swings at the subject and thanks to contributor and project leadership coach, trainer and consultant Susanne Madsen, we managed to breath new life into the subject.

Through a series of short tutorial videos, Madsen showed how to build trust with your team on the four pillars of competence, connection, communication and honesty. She furthered that discussion in the video on influencing different people on your team, by separating them into four groups — driver, expressive, amiable and analytical — and offering practical advice for dealing with each.

A leader has to deal not only with resources but stakeholders, and Madsen provide a pragmatic approach for dealing with difficult stakeholders. And she knows that a true leader doesn’t do it all by themselves. Being able to delegate is crucial to getting a project done on schedule. Madsen knows how to delegate elegantly and shares her approach, as well as noting what to and what not to delegate.

PMO

Another contributor, Lindsay Scott, a former project office manager for Hewlett Packard, who remains active in the field with her monthly meet up group PMO Flashmob and the PMO Conference, wrote an educating post on the evolution of PMO tools and offered her thoughts on future trends.

Beyond an informative history lesson, Scott provide more practical advice on how to set up a PMO. She discussed what the four different types of PMO are as well as how most organizations set up a PMO. Once a PMO has increased its activity, Scott wrote about the Center of Excellence model of PMO, which creates and maintains the standards of project management within the business, and then how to advance the PMO.

There’s a hidden role of the PMO in that it fosters collaboration, which Scott also addressed in a post. A PMO can help team collaboration through the creation of a project room, daily standup meetings and a visual overview of the project’s progress. On remote teams, Scott said the se of a virtual water cooler conversation and virtual project wall are both good ways to build bonds over distances.

Nuts and Bolts

When it comes to the nitty-gritty of project management, our resident expert and video host, Jennifer Bridges, PMP, took us into the weeds and then held our hands to help us find our way out. She produced tutorials on everything from an introduction to project planning to advanced project planning. She spoke to some of the topics above, such as showing how to make timesheets fun for your team and when to push back with stakeholders.

Outsourcing

To be fair, organizations desperately need new models of PMOs. Despite of research, frameworks and tools, most PMOs fail to achieve their mission and to deliver benefits, which explains a third trend we observe currently: outsourced PMOs and project management services.

Although it would be nice to have a good in-house PMO and to build internal project management capabilities, some organizations find it too cumbersome and time consuming. Besides, there is a perception that consulting companies specialized in project management are more capable to provide those services with excellence and at a reasonable price.

Project management services might include the planning, execution and control of a single project or a set of projects. It is a growing business for consulting companies and project management IT providers (platform, templates, methodology etc). As a matter of fact, outsourced project management is propelling PMO As a Service. And we expect to observe new players on that field.

Decentralization of Project Management

Considering that Project Management is an interdisciplinary approach to tackle temporary endeavors, at operational levels PMOs should provide consistent guidance to initiate a project properly, to plan the project with enough detail, to support the project’s execution, to monitor and control the project through its life cycle, and to close the project formally.

There are plenty of standards, methodologies and best practices created by private companies, governmental institutions, professional organizations, and more. The Project Management Institute is one of the leading organizations in promoting project management practice with the PMBOK Guide. The International Project Management Association holds the Competence Baseline and the Axelos Global Best Practice now sponsors PRINCE2 and MSP standards, to name a few.

By definition, a Project Management Office is an organizational structure and it should operate according to a business model aligned to corporate goals and strategy. New types of PMOs surge to face current organizational challenges. As pressures for more agility mounts, traditional PMOs stumble to keep pace with innovative approaches and hybrid methodologies. On top of that, cloud-based project management platforms made easier for organizations to adopt more than one solution. 

Decentralization is a trend in which PMO’s functions are distributed, and sometimes duplicated, among different business areas to suit their particular needs. For example, a large aerospace company structured an Engineering Division around project management communities of practice while the IT Department possess a PMO to manage outsourced projects.

When it comes to PMOs, there is no “one size fits all.” 

The key take-away here is that organizations are preferring to have virtual PMOs, decentralized PMO’s functions and even temporary PMOs instead of traditional corporate PMOs. As project management professionals and practitioners mature, it is expected that they take over some of the PMO functions.

The Fall of the Traditional PMOs

Although there is solid research supporting the need for PMOs, emphasizing their benefits in linking organizational strategy and project execution, most of real-world PMOs fail miserably in delivering value. That’s because these PMOs are created out of the blue without proper change management, usually based on half-backed recipes and standardized tools. In the absence of a common understanding on the PMO’s mission by senior management, organizations end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of processes and functions without tangible results.

By far, the biggest and most common mistake we observe when organizations try to implement a PMO is lack of project management knowledge, experience and maturity. Senior executives see PMOs as black-boxes to successfully (and magically) deliver project results. Lack of bottom line improvement and low increase in project success rates frustrate senior executives’ expectations. They don’t understand the role played by organizational structure and its impact on project management.

Failed PMO implementations frequently rely solely on project management processes and tools without paying attention to organizational fit. Connecting the dots between organizational strategy and project execution demands strong alignment and proper support.

In general, most organizations are upset by low PMO performance. Senior executives feel either burned by poor PMO implementations or trapped by black-box PMOs without clear indication of value added. Poor past experience with PMOs undermined credibility. Before implementing a PMO, answer these Frequently Avoided Questions.

Project practitioners have now the difficult task of reinventing PMOs and re-connecting them to the organizational strategy as PMOs have a trip back to prove their value in the eyes of skeptic business managers.

The key take-away here is that PMOs are now under serious scrutiny of executives and we expect to continue witnessing a decrease in PMOs, which leads us to a new trend in decentralizing and outsourcing project management.

Getting to the delivery stage for a large-scale project requires a great deal of up-front work.

By the time it gets to the point where a delivery team comes into play, a company could have spent one million dollars over the course of a year. Whether it is a consulting company or an internal organization, the effects of what the delivery organization produces will determine if the project was successful. This could be a highly technical software project or a business process development project. If you do not deliver what was agreed to in the timeframe expected, the chances for additional business is remote. That is why the delivery organization has to be in sync with the sales group or internal organization requesting the work on the front end and the support team on the back end. If the support team has difficulty maintaining the product, costs will increase, personnel will get frustrated and leave, and the client will be quite upset. 

So what does the profile look like for a delivery director? Look for it in my next blog entry. 

What is Delivery Management?

Delivery Management is a much broader scale of project management. It is the organization, administration, and supervision of the people, processes, and technologies, which when combined into a comprehensive plan, provides the business and technical functions needed to successfully achieve what a client expects to receive. The person responsible for this type of work is referred to as the delivery manager, delivery director, delivery vice president, or account manager depending on the organization. For purposes of this blog, the term delivery director will be used. 

There are many likenesses between a project manager and delivery director. Whereas the project manager will get into more of the details, the delivery director oversees what is going on at a higher level and across more areas of responsibility. The delivery director is typically a more experienced individual that gets assigned to the larger, more visible projects. This individual also has more direct involvement with management at a higher level such as with the client, third party vendors, executive steering committees, board of directors, etc. The delivery director anticipates the actions, thoughts, and directions of the client, and manages the client without them really knowing it. 

Let's begin by understanding what delivery is all about. There are many stages in the business cycle such as getting a lead, turning the lead into a prospect, working towards the sale, closing the sale, and then making the magic happen - delivering what was promised. Now some of the readers may say they do not have to worry about this cycle because they work in a company where they get a request to do the work and their management tells them what to do. In some cases it may be that simple, for example, very small projects such as those under a work-month. However, if you look a little closer, you will see there is a lot of internal selling going on at various levels. 

Below is an example of a scenario of what may occur behind the scenes. As you will see, there is a great deal of work that has to be done before it gets to the delivery stage. 

- Don, the VP of Finance for Southwest Vending was having lunch with an old friend (Lori) who heads up a Finance department in another company. 

- Lori explained to Don that they just implemented a new application that allows the customers to review their records via the web, which has saved Lori's company thousands of dollars. 

- Don believed that his company would benefit from a similar application. After lunch, Don called in his department heads to tell them that he wants the same type of application that Lori has, but better. 

- To get the project started, Don assigned Randy to serve as the Project Sponsor. In this role, Randy has to figure out what is needed to make this happen so he calls his friend Mark, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in the Information Technology (IT) department. 

- Randy and Mark discuss the situation so that Mark can get a better understanding of what Randy and his boss are looking for from a business perspective and also determine how much of an impact it would be to the IT area. Mark tells Randy that this is something his department can handle but to get this officially started, Randy will have to fill out a request for services so that the project can be estimated and approved by upper management. 

- Randy is not familiar with this process so Mark has him work with Kristin, his Application Manager in charge of financial computer systems.

Whether it is a third party or internal organization, many of the same steps occur in advance of the development. Depending on the actual need for the application, the funds available, and the degree of politics that take place in the company, it could take a year before the development actually starts. 

Cloud Advisory and Infrastructure in High tree Consulting

Designed and delivered well, Information Technology (IT) contributes to growth, profit and competitive advantage. Designed or implemented badly, it can burden and constrain an organisation.

We make a difference to our clients by combining deep industry knowledge and technology expertise to develop and implement strategies that deliver real business value from IT assets.

Our Technology advisory practice helps our clients to realise the business value from IT by addressing a range of challenges including:

IT strategy and alignment
Enterprise architecture
Cloud Advisory and Infrastructure
IT sourcing advisory
IT performance and cost improvement
Client side project management

How to utilize the Digital utility transformation

“From grid management to customer relations, an effective digital strategy can revolutionize all areas of the power and utility business. It’s at the heart of the energy transformation challenge.”

Digital transformation is at the top of companies agendas and key digital technologies such as data mining and mobile customer engagement are strategically important for power and utility companies. But successful capture of the benefits of digitization has been tough for many organizations.

Digital is affecting not just the way companies face their customers or the changing dynamics of that relationship but is also bringing deep changes in the core operational activities of utilities. It’s important that power and utilities companies ask hard questions about their digital strategies.

More than 80 senior executives and experts from 12 different countries gathered for PwC’s round table discussion on the digital utility of the future and the strategies that companies are implementing to get there.

Read our summary to find out more:

making moves along the digital transformation road
digital promise and reality
different customer expectations in a digital world
delivering digital securely
digital in the world of the ‘internet of things’

Understanding your business needs to find solutions to your business and technology problems

Business analysis is the foundation for good IT design, planning and business-IT alignment. Lacking an understanding of the business need, it is virtually impossible to craft an appropriate solution.

Our team of business analysts can articulate your requirements in variety of contexts including a request for proposal (RFP), an internal software development, a business processes re-engineering project, or a broader effort to align project scopes with the business’s objectives.

How PwC can help
PwC can help you to better understand your requirements to make cost-effective and business aligned business and technology changes. The team at High tree consulting can help with:

RFP development, management and evaluation support: We can provide support through the entire procurement lifecycle. Using our ALIGN™ framework, we can accelerate your procurement by developing the business requirements and RFP requirements at the same time. And, through the use of our RFP templates, service catalogues and evaluation tools, we can help you set up a fair, and transparent vendor evaluation process.
Managing requirements throughout the systems development lifecycle: We help you to implement the governance, processes and tools required to successfully manage requirements for a systems development and implementation including initial requirements capture, requirements change management and traceability to testing and delivered functionality.
Project business alignment and scope review: With an understanding of your requirements, we can help you to understand how a project aligns with your overall business objectives and what capabilities are mandatory or optional to achieve your goals. We can help you better understand and capture the needs of your stakeholders to support system selection, business case development, business decisions and IT strategy development.
Business process modeling: Our trained business process modeling advisors can facilitate the timely and accurate capture of your current and future state business processes in the context of a business process automation, or business process re-engineering project leveraging industry process modeling standards such as UML or BPMN.
Business analysis training: We can help you improve the effectiveness of your organization’s business analysis capabilities. Our business analysis advisors can work with you to deliver a customized training program including hands-on application to an existing project. We can also coach your team on leading practices in light of recent trends. For instance, owing to mergers and a search for internal cost savings, many organizations are moving to consolidate and centralized their services -- a situation that often gives rise to competing and conflicting requirements. How to resolve such conflicts in the context of building a service oriented / web services architecture is the topic of a recent course taught by PwC professionals.

Improving the effectiveness of your IT operations with High tree Consulting

High tree consulting can help you mature your IT operations from a reactive (“firefighting”) mode of management to a proactive orientation that can improve IT service delivery, cost efficiency and customer satisfaction.

We can help structure your organization with the right skills, capacity, processes and governance to proactively manage the day-to-day IT operations in support of your overall business priorities.

Our team can also assist you to categorize and understand your IT spending, to benchmark your spending against comparable and leading organizations and to identify opportunities for cost reduction and service improvement.

How PwC can help

High Tree Consulting provides greater strategic value from your IT investments in the following ways:

Service management improvement. Using industry standards such as ITIL and COBIT and PwC’s Tiered Services Management approach, we can assess your service delivery, service management proficiency, and workforce to assess gaps between the current IT function and leading industry practices. We can then work with you to design and implement new processes to address identified gaps and provide training to improve your organizations capability maturity.
IT spend analysis. We can benchmark your organization against comparable and leading organizations to understand if your investment in IT is yielding appropriate results. Using our IT Comparative Analysis and Total Spend Analysis™ (TSA) tools, IT Service Catalogue, IT Chart of Accounts and industry benchmarks, we can help quantify your IT spending and rate it according to impact on business objectives and risk. Our team can assist you to categorize and understand your IT spending and to identify opportunities for cost reduction and service improvement.

Helping your programs and projects succeed

The information technology (IT) project and portfolio management team at high tree consulting can assist you in implementing proven methods to help your business meet its goals.

How PwC can help

Our experienced team combines industry knowledge with competencies in a variety of areas such as risk and controls, information technology, regulatory standards, and process improvement..

We can help your business with:

Program and portfolio management
Program governance/capability coaching
PMO execution
Project recovery/remediation
Project and program risk reviews/maturity assessments
Contact us and find out how we can help you coordinate your projects and align them with your overall business goals.

Process Involving Technology Advisory

Technology is one of the largest expenditures for most organizations. It is a critical component of today's business infrastructure and at the core of many customer service, productivity, risk management and cost reduction initiatives.

But technology spending is often questioned and with good reason. Research reveals that 10% to 20% of a typical company's technology budget is wasted or used unwisely and just 32% of projects are delivered on time, on budget, and with the required features.

While executives are uncomfortable with the current situation, many are unsure what to do because of the lack of relevant information needed to evaluate technology decisions, or to measure technology spending and performance.

How PwC can help

PricewaterhouseCoopers is a leader in technology advisory services. We provide the following four core services:

Strategy

Our multi-disciplinary professionals understand the business, technology and industry drivers that are critical to making strategic decisions.

Whether your organization is merging with another organization or is seeking a longer term strategic plan, we can help you develop a blueprint and roadmap that aligns your technology investments with your business priorities while managing related risks and compliance issues. We do this through our expertise in:

IT Strategy and Governance
Enterprise Architecture
IT Merger Integration

Best Technology Advisory in Chennai

Here at High tree consulting , we know how hard running a small business can be.  That is why we offer technology related business consultation services as part of our service to your company.  It is not good enough to just provide support for your technology.  Helping you to make the strategic decisions about what technology your company should or could be using will keep your business efficient and profitable.  We will work with you to strategically plan and keep your business’s technology on the right track from our first meeting.

We will assign a dedicated Virtual Chief Information Officer (VCIO) to work with you to plan, select and implement the right technology in your business.  We’ll help you choose the correct software, customer and vendor interfaces, security and privacy policies, disaster recovery plans and internal systems to improve employee and business productivity.  We guide you on all technology issues and help you stay on target with your business goals.  We provide the knowledge to keep you focused on your business and not stressing about technology.

Some examples of accomplishments of our VCIO services are:

Improvement to order receipt through EDI transactions and implementation of order processing workflow for a jewelry business
Customized and automated order processing for a local restaurant’s Holiday bakery purchasing program
Development of disaster preparedness and recovery policy for medical practice
Implementation of HIPAA survey and implementation of privacy policy for medical practice
Migration to Cloud based infrastructure to enhance mobility and remote access for all employees
Expansion of the use of existing software application to improve efficiency of mobile technicians

Process management Consultants

Business process redesign (BPR) examines the efficiency and effectiveness of a company's most critical processes. It is a key enabler to deliver the highest-quality of service, in the most productive way, at the most competitive cost and time to output.

Bain works with each client to prioritize key processes based on the value at stake. For each priority process we develop a view of the current state based on operational data, using detailed process maps and analysis to help identify major gaps. We then work together with a cross-functional client team to define a series of principles that will guide the solution generation phase, and create a vision of the future state of each process from the ground up, along with the roadmap to achieve the near and long term results.

We work very closely with our clients in this type of project, enlisting a team from all the functional areas impacted at the leadership and the solution generation level. This allows us to eliminate waste, unnecessary wait times, reports, handovers and sign-offs, while ensuring the integrity of the process.