{"id":918,"date":"2015-06-11T21:15:57","date_gmt":"2015-06-11T21:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/77.104.180.154\/~andrewdo\/blog\/?p=918"},"modified":"2017-10-01T20:47:38","modified_gmt":"2017-10-01T20:47:38","slug":"of-project-portfolios-and-an-uncertain-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2015\/06\/11\/of-project-portfolios-and-an-uncertain-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Of project portfolios and an uncertain future"},"content":{"rendered":"
Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to attend the Gartner Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and IT Governance summit<\/a>. I approached the event with some trepidation\u2014this is my field and it would clearly be useful to be amongst peers and understand what the latest thinking is, but I expected it to be full of vendors voraciously pushing their wares and lots of attendees who were wrestling with nuances of Microsoft Project and getting ‘resources’ to work with the processes they had rolled out. Although there was indeed some of this, 80% of the content over the two days was extremely valuable. Many of the sessions had big overlaps with topics covered in Lean Enterprise<\/a><\/em>, a fantastic book I read earlier this year which has really honed my thinking about the right way to approach IT and product development work within a large organisation.<\/p>\n

The final keynote presentation of the day was extremely thought-provoking. Donna Fitzgerald<\/a> and Robert Handler<\/a> gave a talk called ‘Gartner Predicts the Future of PPM’ but it was so much more than just a talk about project portfolio management. The key issue is on how fast<\/em> the world is changing around us and how quickly we will need to adapt. Early on, they quoted Ray Kurzweil<\/a> in saying that:<\/p>\n

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“Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The basic messages that I took away from the presentation were as follows:<\/p>\n