Presenting at the upcoming PMI SAC Conference

I am quite excited about the opportunity of speaking at the upcoming PMI conference in Calgary on November 23rd.

Here is the link to the event and my presentation abstract:

http://www.pmisacconference.com/dnn/Program/MondaySessionsandWorkshops/tabid/156/Default.aspx

My topic is:

"Aligning & prioritizing Projects/Initiatives with the corporate strategy using Balanced Scorecards".

Specifically, I will be addressing:

'Doing the right projects or performing projects right! What is more important?’

Every organization has to decide at regular intervals which projects/initiatives they should execute and which ones they can delay. Also, are these projects aligned with the corporate strategy?

More specifically, do you need to answer any of the following questions?

1. What prioritized projects, services and products to concentrate on for the next 3-5 years to achieve maximum business success with resource and budget constraints?

2. How do I balance different stakeholder opinions before I build a roadmap?

3. How do I know that my roadmap/strategy is best aligned with corporate goals and is offering minimum risk for realization?

To answer the questions above, I will present an intelligent approach as well as a software toolset which uses Balanced Scorecards and Mathematical Optimization to rank and select projects for the PMO to balance various stakeholder needs, satisfy resource constraints and align with the corporate strategy.

I have successfully implemented this approach at 2 clients and elements of this work have been published in a paper at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2006, Shanghai, China).

I will be highly honored if you can make it to the session on Monday, November 23rd from 1-2 PM.

Aligning Projects with Corporate Strategy Presentation

First of all, I would like to apologize to all the readers of this blog for not being able to write something for a little while as I was traveling most of the time. At my PMI presentation last month about "Aligning project with corporate strategy using Balanced Score Cards", I got a lot of very interesting questions from the audience. Some of the questions were around stakeholder consensus, balancing of priorities, changing needs of business and actual implementation of Balanced Scorecards.

These questions definitely stimulate my mind in understanding the concerns other organizations may have in implementing Balanced Score Cards.

I would also like to thank Navneet Bhushan, a great mentor of mine for sharing an interesting WIPRO white paper on "Value of IT", where he has used AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) to obtain relative weights on criteria defined in an organization's Balanced Score Card. I will post more on this topic soon.... Here is the link to my presentation:

http://www.pmisac.com/data/uploads/Presentations/2007_10_25_AligningAndPrioritizing.ppt

Which Projects best align with my corporate strategy?

This month I will be presenting at the PMI dinner in the PMI Southern Alberta Chapter Dinner Meeting on October 25-th. It is a great topic and probably of interest to most PMOs and to executives who plan strategy.

The title is: "Aligning & prioritizing projects with the corporate strategy using Balanced ScoreCards".


I personally got very interested in this topic when I was reading the CIO Insight Research Study on Project Management, 2004. The study highlights some very interesting points as mentioned below:

1. 53% of the CIO's say that their project prioritization is politically driven;
2. Only 68% agree that all the necessary business and IT stakeholders are involved in setting IT project priorities;
3. Only 40% of the CIOs say that their companies use a portfolio management approach;

This is when time I started questioning myself on how best can you align your projects with corporate strategy so that the project portfolios can be driven and managed by the needs of the organization..... This was also the time when I actually understood how a true business case is created by using a company's real financial data like working cost of capital and market debt to equity ratio. There was definitely a need to measure projects and question if it was worth doing a project.

At that time, I had recently learned about Balanced Score Cards from an assignment at an Airlines company in Canada and also created some models using Mathematical Optimization under the guidance of my Master's thesis supervisor. The combination of these two led to the creation of the approach which I plan to present.

I was implementing this at Siemens last year and got a great opportunity to understand various types of businesses Siemens is involved in. I wish to share this experience with all of you.

I will post my presentation here on the blog as well and an the Excel Sheet where I built the model.