Project & Portfolio Management Blog

Our Project & Portfolio Management blog provides content around PPM Best Practices, Agile Transformation, Organizational Change Management, Industry Tools and Kolme University to help you improve your PMO. We also recommend checking out PM Happy Hour – a great resource for frank and honest discussion about real world issues in Project Management!

PPM vs. Microsoft Project: 11 Reasons A PPM Is Better!

PPM vs. Microsoft Project? A question coming up more and more for project managers as they daydream of a better tool. Laziness breeds ingenuity – and thus PPM tools were born. It probably looked something like this:  Project Manager slams…

Effectively Managing Global Projects

Effectively Managing Global Projects is hard work! A common theme in business today is the myopia regarding an international and multicultural environment. As humans we usually all operate in one social context belonging to the nation from which…
How Much Does A PPM Tool Cost?

How Much Does A PPM Tool Cost?

If you are a Project Management Leader, you have probably got a mess to clean up. Maybe things keep going off track, maybe you have no easy way to measure what’s going on, or maybe you are just tired of struggling through portfolio reports…

You’re Finally A Project Manager! Now What? Transitioning Into the Role of Project Leader

What kid doesn't dream of being a project manager when they grow up? Well, guess what? You're a go-getter who doesn't let your dreams be dreams, and you finally got your big break. But now... how to lead a project? Recently, Kolme Group joined…

A Deeper Understanding Of PMI’s New Agile Hybrid Project Pro Micro-Credential

In what may be a nod to the reality that there may be no pure “waterfall” or “agile” in the world, PMI recently released a new “micro-credential” for Agile Hybrid Project Pro. It looked intriguing, so I dedicated an afternoon to…
Tailor Stakeholder Justification Messages

Tailoring Your Stakeholder Justification Messages When Investing In A Project Portfolio Management System

We’ve had a great review of the strategic benefits, and hard and soft cost saving that you need to consider for your justification and/or business case in our recent post, Justifying A PPM Investment.  But, how do we ensure that you are talking…
Getting Prepared for Your New PPM Tool

Getting Prepared for Your New PPM Tool - 6 Expert Tips To Accelerate Your Implementation Time

    “We need a tool!”  “We need a system that will make sense of this for us”  “We need help figuring this out”  “How do we track this?”    How many times have you said or thought…
ADKAR®: Reinforcement

How to Lead People Through Change – ADKAR® Series Part 5: Reinforcement

Finally, we've reached our final milestone – Reinforcement. In our last blog we covered the third and fourth element of ADKAR - Knowledge and Ability and mentioned that people need to have both the information on how to change and the ability…
ADKAR: Knowledge and Ability

How to Lead People Through Change – ADKAR® Series Part 4: Knowledge and Ability

Today, our focus is on the third and fourth ADKAR® milestone – Knowledge and Ability. They are related to each other, so I like to cover them together. In our last blog we covered the second element of Desire and mentioned that people need…
ADKAR: Desire

How to Lead People Through Change – ADKAR® Series Part 3: Desire

In our last blog we started with the first element of ADKAR®, Awareness, and mentioned that people need to know why the change is happening. Today, our focus is on the second milestone – Desire in the ADKAR acronym. As you just read in…

How to Lead People Through Change – Part 1: Intro to the ADKAR® Series

Ah yes, another elusive acronym for us to add to our business vernacular. If you stay with me on the following ADKAR blog series, I promise this acronym will become one of your favorites. Why? Because it is simple to understand and can make…

How to Lead People Through Change – ADKAR® Series Part 2: Awareness

Today, our focus is on the first milestone - Awareness in the ADKAR acronym. As you just read in our last blog we introduced ADKAR, which stands for Awareness In order to get people’s buy-in on the change they must first understand the…

Taking the Best Parts of Agile: Part 4 - Continual Learning

In the first three parts of this series, we started with sharing the secret sauce of Agile is understanding that Agile is a framework built on strong principles you adjust to fit your organization. The goal is to make the right adjustments while…

Taking the Best Parts of Agile: Part 3 - The Power of Teams

In the first two parts of this series, we described the secret sauce of Agile is understanding that Agile is a framework built on strong principles you adjust to fit your organization. The goal is to make the right adjustments while not losing…

Taking the Best Parts of Agile: Part 2 - Connecting with Customers

Last post, we reviewed - the secret sauce of Agile and shared this important idea: Agile is a framework built on strong principles you adjust to fit your organization. The goal is to make the right adjustments while not losing the underlying…

Taking the Best Parts of Agile: Part 1 - Smaller Bites

Agile is getting a lot of great press lately as we see companies like Amazon thriving by leveraging the concepts. But we also see push back from other business leaders on why Agile won’t work for them, or companies that have tried going Agile…

If You Are Not Doing Hybrid Projects Yet, Chances Are You Will Be Soon

Traditional project management has been around for a while. Taylor’s scientific management, which provided a way to define, analyze and improve workflows, was published in 1911 and Henry Gantt created the Gantt chart in 1917 (in case you ever…
Justifying a PPM Investment

Justifying a PPM Investment

Justifying a PPM Investment and running a project delivery organization is tough – and your organization is making this job even tougher if you don’t have a toolset. It’s hard to stay on top of the portfolio when your data is spread across…

Why (and How) You Can Master Clarizen Configurations

Hi! I’m Kim Essendrup, one of the founders of Kolme Group and co-host of the Project Management Happy Hour podcast. At Kolme Group, we’re really proud to be a Preferred Implementation Partner for the Clarizen Project and Portfolio management…

OKRs: What are they?

What Superpowers Do They Give My Organization? A while back I had a conversation with my father, who is in his seventies and has been retired for over 10 years. For the last 20 years of this career he worked as an HR manager for a global company.…

Resource Management Skills: Crawling to Walking

This is the third part in our series, “Getting started with Resource management.” If you haven’t caught the first two parts, be sure to check out : Resource Management: Learning to Crawl + Resource Management: Foraging and Collecting…

Customize Your Financial Planning View In Clarizen

We’ve premiered another quick win Kolme University mini-masterclass, showing you how to embed a Financial Planning view into a custom panel.  Normally, if you want to see the financial panel, you have to go to a dedicated view. BUT, by…
Powerful Timephase Functionality In Clarizen

Powerful Timephase Functionality In Clarizen

Clarizen just released some amazing new functionality for their Clarizen One platform which opens the door to some really powerful financial functionality.  We're going to teach you a solution that uses a custom Invoices Module to track…

Do I Need A PMO?

To PMO Or Not To PMO?  Of the many questions our team gets around portfolio management, PPM tools, and PMOs, probably the most important one of all is, “Do I need a PMO?” The reason it is so important is that if you don’t have…
Coaching Through Change

Coaching Through Change

What You Need To Know To Better Support Your Teams In Times Of Change   The world is experiencing the biggest change process that anyone has ever seen - Lockdowns, social distancing, being unable to do ordinary activities... Everything…
Clarizen Input Form + Notifications Using HTML

Clarizen Input Form + Notifications Using HTML

Here is another one of our favorite Pro-Tips to make Clarizen even more user-friendly than it already is. Learn how to create a user-friendly Clarizen Input Form + Pop-Up Notifications using HTML. As with all of our expert advice, these…
Clarizen Action Buttons

Custom Clarizen Action Button

We are going to share one of our favorite Pro-Tips to make Clarizen even more user-friendly than it already is. Introducing the Clarizen Custom Action Button (AKA Smart Button)! These will save you and your team a lot of time! As a premier…

Change Management: Fundamentals

Recently, Kolme Group aired our second chapter of the EmPOWer your PMO Series titled - “Change Management Powers, ACTIVATE.” In this webinar we discussed the interesting fundamentals of Organizational Change Management. Kim Essendrup, Kolme…

Project Management: C-Suite Conversations

Kolme Group aired our first episode of the EmPOWer your PMO Series titled - “Crushing Conversations with your C-Suite.” This webinar focuses on tough C-Suite conversations Project Managers often have to have and how to best prepare for them.  If…
Change Management Skills

Managing Change: Absent Processes Hurting Your Projects Future!

Change is inevitable in today's professional climate. We are constantly transforming the way in which we work, where we work, and whom we work with. Organizational Change Management (OCM) is a practice that…

Project Management Critical Success Factors

Which Project Tools and Processes Correlate Most With Project Success? Download Our White Paper Kolme Group conducted a study with over 60 Project and Portfolio leaders at the 2018 PMO Symposium to try and highlight Project Management…

PPM Product Comparison Matrix

PPM Comparison Matrix White Paper Download Our Matrix At Kolme Group, our forte is helping you select and implement the right Project and Portfolio Management tools for your organization. Our PPM Analysts stay on top of the latest developments…

Choosing The Right PPM Platform

Key PPM Platform Differentiators Download Our White Paper Now Need to select a Project Portfolio Management solution, but not sure where to start? With the recent explosive growth of SaaS PPM systems, it's becoming increasingly difficult…
Resource Management Skills

Resource Management Skills: Foraging and Collecting Data

This is part two of our series on Resource Management skills and best practices.  In part one, "Learning to Crawl," we helped you determine if resource management is right for your team or organization. Now to start building - it's time…
Resource Management Skills

Resource Management Skills: Learning to Crawl

This is part one of our series on Resource Management skills. What is resource management, and how do we develop resource management best practices in our businesses? The journey into resource management often starts with one, or several, of…
Clarizen Periodic Project Report (PPR)

The "Missing link" - Clarizen Periodic Project Report (PPR)

After today, the Clarizen Periodic Project Report (PPR) + Document Publisher will be much easier for you to use! Imagine, a "one-click" status report inside of Clarizen that can save you a huge amount of time! This article will teach you…

Avoiding the Timeclock Blues: Gamify Time Tracking

It’s Monday morning, and you are about to send a status update to your project team and sponsor. You pull up your project tracking resources and…nothing. Now, you’ll spend the next few hours emailing, texting, pinging, or calling your…
ContinuousNEXT

ContinuousNEXT - Digital Business, Maximum Value!

Hello from London! Last week, Kolme Group EU team members attended the Gartner Program & Portfolio Management Summit 2019. This year’s two-day summit had a variety of interesting sessions related to this year’s hot-topic: Digital Business,…

Time Tracking: Should We or Shouldn’t We?

Time tracking in today’s professional business world may be similar to playing a tense game of Frogger. You know you need to cross the road but no matter which way you leap, there is a high probability that you will encounter obstacles that…

A Quick Overview of Clarizen Portfolio Optimization

Clarizen Portfolio Optimization (CPO) is a free "add-in" for the Clarizen One PPM platform, which some of our clients have expressed interest in. So, we decided to take a deeper look at this add-in and how it can be used to support your portfolio…
TSH Collab

Kolme Group Expands to Europe

Competing in a global market is no small endeavor, but Arizona based Kolme Group, LLC. have found their niche supporting project and portfolio management (PPM) initiatives for global enterprises. In April 2019, the Company announced the launch…

The Art + Science Behind Project Leaders and Coordinators Working Together

Seth Norburg of Caterpillar spoke at a "lightning talk" during the PMO Symposium '17 short-format breakout session. In his session, he discussed how they split project management duties, in all projects, between what they call a Project Leader,…

5 Components To Competitive Advantage

Dr. Rita McGrath kicked off the PMO Symposium '17 with a talk on the 5 Components to Competitive Advantage. In her keynote, she noted that the goal of strategy used to be achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. But the pace of innovation…

Caterpillar Heavy Equipment's Agile Journey

One of the most talked about sessions at the PMI Symposium '17 was delivered by Seth Norburg, Program Management Supervisor at Caterpillar. In his session, Seth walked through the Caterpillar Equipment's Agile Journey and what it was like introducing…

What Is Organizational Agility?

Hello from Houston! Another fascinating discussion at PMO Symposium 2017 with the theme: What Is Organizational Agility? Mark A. Langley, CEO of PMI, opened up the morning session by talking through some of the key points of PMI's Thought…