2009 : 10Pulling Together : Lean, Six Sigma, and Project Management

Lean, Six Sigma, and Project Management : A Marriage Made in Heaven

Read this article if you need to reduce costs and optimize your results.

Both Lean and Six Sigma are highly useful disciplines for identifying waste and variability in processes. But when a business really needs to transform how it's run and make a step-change in performance, that entails taking an end-to-end view of an entire program. Ishai Perelman and Peter Wilson propose the amalgamation of all three components to obtain optimal results. Read article ›

Big Fix : Developing Warranty Excellence

Read this article if you need to reduce costs and eliminate financial waste in your warranty program.

The warranty business ties up billions every year for manufacturers worldwide. Perpetuating the steep cost is pervasive inefficiency showing up in major parts of the warranty operation. Jonathan Smith proposes a way out, based on Pcubed's experiences with a major automotive firm that eventually was able to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars of waste in its warranty management process. Read article ›

The Practice : Instilling Lean into IT

Read this article if you want to see how IT can learn from lean engineering practices.

The IT function needs all the help it can get. A 2007 survey found that 62 percent of organizations had IT projects that failed to meet their schedules and nearly half suffered from budget overruns and had higher-than-expected maintenance costs. While the overall picture may be grim, as Carl Dalby explains, we've found that applying principles culled from the lean practices of engineering project management will yield significant improvement for IT projects. Read article ›

Obtaining the Best Ideas

Organizations that outperform do so because of a combination of strong execution and great strategy. Effective portfolio management helps achieve outperformance, making strategy real through organizational change. In this article, excerpted from the new book Strategic Project Portfolio Management : Enabling a Productive Organization, Simon Moore explains the dramatic improvements to be found in improving the process of project proposal submissions. Read article ›

5 Principles of Program Management for Big Events

Read this article if you are struggling with a very large and complex pan organizational change program.

Ky Nichol heads up the major sporting events practice for Pcubed. Most recently, that involves work for the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympics Games in London. In this feature, Nichol shares five key principles he adheres to in his work for big events, guidance invaluable for delivering large, multi-agency initiatives in almost any field. Read article ›

10 iPhone Apps for Project Managers

Apple's App Store may boast tens of thousands of offerings, but only a few are really of interest to professionals for their mobile devices. This concise list shares 10 useful low- and no-cost iPhone and iPod Touch applications for project managers and busy executives. Read article ›

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