Project Management 411

Trend Analysis Results in Prescriptions and Cautions

by Bob Turek on February 9th, 2008

What good is analyzing trends? Well, first of all you can determine whether you agree with them. Then decide if they will impact you. If so, you need to figure out how to deal with them. The last few posts have done this type of analysis from an “every company” point of view, and here are the results:

First a summary of the STRATEGY and MANAGEMENT trends from CIO Insight’s list of Top IT Trends in 2008 in as brief a format as I dare:

Economic slowdown, customer e-service demands, m-commerce opportunities, technology enabled process improvement, change in world markets and resources, changes in CIO’s role and IT management, IT grad/resource shortages, new innovation sources, and focus on data management.

Refer to these previous posts, and/or the CIO Insight list , if you need more details:

STRATEGY Sum Up, detail posts 1 and 2

MANAGEMENT Sum Up, detail posts 1 and 2

Then my summary of the prescriptive, cautionary remarks related to the trends:

Make sure projects fit with strategies first, before ROI and staff analysis,

Don’t underestimate size, complexity, and on-going nature, of customer-facing projects related to E-Service and M-Commerce,

Use a PMO to research business process innovation outside the company, industry and country.

Pay attention to changes in “growing market” living standards and IT maturity when partnering, acquiring, and resource offshoring/outsourcing.

Focus first on centralizing non-IT executive control and awareness of ALL (IT and non-IT) projects, then possibly on expanding the CIO’s role.

Harness current data and systems for innovative decision-making through Master Data Management.

I’ve attempted to deal with these significant trends in a general way resulting in a response to the trends. Hopefully, you see the value of this process in relation to generating company-specific prescriptive measures.

How do you analyze trends? What sources and processes do you use? Did my trend analysis process inspire you to take a look at trends and how they are impacting you? Is this part of your strategy development process? How does trend analysis impact your project priorities?

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POSTED IN: Solutions and Trends Requiring Projects