Last week, one of our consultants came to us with a question from a client: "What is the ideal or standard number of projects per project manager?" Questions like this are the heart of our research program. We aren’t academics and don’t aspire to be. PM Solutions Research was established… Read More »

My first introduction to the concept of a “project office” came in 2000, when I covered a Project Management Benchmarking Forum in Scottsdale, AZ for the newsletter then being published by this organization (The Best Practices Report). The forums were the brainchild of a University of Phoenix professor, Frank Toney, who regularly gathered practitioners… Read More »

My last blog post picked the brain of PM Solutions’ consulting practice director, Roger Bryson, on the reasons why companies reach out for expert assistance with projects and programs. His comments renewed my interest in the topics of knowledge transfer and expertise. Consulting thrives because we operate on the assumption that expert knowledge is… Read More »

The value of project management knowledge is, of course, the bedrock of PM Solutions' business. Recently, new research by the PM College and PM Solutions Research validated that companies with higher-skilled project managers experienced better business results. But what if, like the majority of companies in that study, your organization lacks those key individuals to… Read More »

Over the years, our research has consistently shown that having an effective project manager on the job makes the difference between project success and project failure.  So we aren’t surprised by the results from PM College’s latest study, “Project Manager Skills Benchmark 2015,” showing that organizations with highly skilled… Read More »

To continue my diatribe about talent and capital … a recent Harvard Business Review article sent me back to our own recent research studies. The article, “Talent Management for the 21st Century,” likened the problems companies now face with finding or developing talent to the issues faced by manufacturers in times past. The… Read More »

PC-based project management software tools arrived on the scene in the early to mid-1980s; the first ones had crude graphics and reporting that was limited by today’s standards. The real value-add was the relational database network used to track a project schedule. For the first time, project managers could create a series… Read More »

In our third interview in this series, we asked PM Solutions senior consultant John Casey to address webinar participants’ questions about resource management. (Missed the webinar? Click here.) We weren’t surprised that this was an area that drew many questions; in all our research studies over the years, resource management has loomed… Read More »