 Managing user or client expectations is challenging - whether external, such as in a consulting project, or internal, such as when you're part of a team helping to deliver a new program in your company. Before the work actually begins, people can have very different ideas about what the project will entail or about what life will be like once the project is done. To avoid having your project fail right out of the gate, Pcubed's Sean Laffin shares hard-learned lessons for managing user expectations. Read article ›
  Sometimes people within an organization are wildly enthusiastic about making changes to their business processes, especially where the status quo - how work has always been done - is insufficient to keep up with increased workloads. And that was the situation at publishing giant Zondervan, which had decided to implement Project Server 2010 to manage publishing operations. As Zondervan's Aaron Dickason and Pcubed's Rich Weller explain, even in environments where users want to modify business processes, the company must go through the right paces. Read article ›
  The risk that companies and government agencies face in not dealing with the human aspects of change programs is that the projects will be delivered late and over budget. In some cases, the projects just fail. What are the secrets to managing people during a change initiative? Pcubed's Martin Wolf and Andrew Garner offer six ideas for doing it right. Read article ›
 The road to project success is often littered with conflict resulting from disagreement among stakeholders. Program leaders must function with incomplete or inaccurate information. And there is often ambiguity or a lack of a clear definition of success in key program elements. Some teams and team leaders appear to thrive under those conditions of conflict, uncertainty, and ambiguity, while others seem paralyzed by indecision. Pcubed's Shan Rajegopal proposes a leadership model for managing team dynamics that takes into account the four common characteristics all effective project teams share. Read article ›
  Hedge funds have been thrust into the operational risk spotlight as concerns over their controls were highlighted during the financial meltdown. Clients are asking, are my statements correct or has someone tampered with them? Are my investments really secured? Pcubed hedge fund experts Craig Spielmann and Melissa Martinez have found an interesting dynamic: "Structured environment" has no meaning to hedge fund staff. That puts investments at serious risk. Read article ›
 Pcubed is often tapped for advice on how to encourage adoption of new tools and processes in an organization to ensure the success of a change initiative. Carl Dalby shares two aspects of project portfolio management (PPM), sometimes referred to as enterprise project management (EPM), that always seem to surface in client engagements. Read article ›
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