Did Our Projects Deliver the Promised Benefits? Finding Out Isn't So Easy

Presentation Description

Are you selecting the right projects?  Are you getting the return you expected across your project portfolio?  Did that project that promised to save 30 minutes a day for 300 people result in improved productivity?  How can you know?   These are some of the questions our IT and Business Lines Leadership put to the IT PMO.  “By the end of the year we’d like you to have processes in place that tell us whether we are getting what we paid for.”  

We knew this wouldn’t be easy.  Not all benefits can be meaningfully quantified.  Our different business lines had different cultures, different metrics, different portfolio management systems, and even different ERP systems.  Projects required by regulation needed to be treated differently from capital projects with strategic long-term benefits which again are substantially different from maintenance projects.  When projects go awry they can sometimes impede people’s commitment to transparency.  Tracking project benefits was going to require an enterprise-wide change-management effort.  

This presentation will tell the story of how we went about designing and implementing a project benefits tracking program.  We will talk about the complexities of designing the program, getting ‘buy-in’ from the business-lines as well as from the IT project management community, and some of the technology needed to support the effort.  We will also talk about some of the realities ‘on the ground’, the dirty little secrets that every organization has and how we had to address some of them in order to effect a useful process.

About the Presenter

Joe Tanenbaum is a member of the PMO for PPL Corporation, a Fortune 500 electric utility headquartered in Allentown, PA.  He considers his career in project and program management as a natural outgrowth of his prior careers in ministry and technology. “Leadership is helping people know where they want to go and then, helping them get there”.  

Joe ran his own consulting firm for several years, but when his wife and he made plans to adopt, he decided to make the switch to the corporate world.  “When I was my own boss, I was never home”.  Since then, he has led international projects for Lucent Microelectronics and Agere Systems and for the past 2 years has been developing a vibrant PM Community of Practice across PPL companies in order to greatly expand PMO services.

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