An on-line community contributing to coherent enterprise management practices

Unlike technical professionals with automated monitoring tools and specialised instrumentation, managers sometimes have to rely on subjective, qualitative feedback. In this issue, we explore some tools and methods to make management more effective through objective and quantitative means.
Management by Numbers
Featured articles...
Target: Capability Level 5
Mathematicians have the concept of imaginary numbers. Odd as it may be to non-mathematicians, it makes one consider if achieving capability level 5 is similarly an imaginary, elusive number for organisations? Mark Paulk was in Australia in August to deliver a keynote to the ISSEC (co-located with PMOz) conference. To understa...
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Productivity Reporting
Many organisations use numbers or measures as a basis for day to day decision making in the management of their I.T activity. These measures provide the objective information needed to make sensible fact-based decisions.Making sense of all this information, however, may sometimes offer a challenge.   I can easily ...
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Measurable Motivation
In today’s times, management of a group of people has become progressively more challenging.  It is a well known fact that keeping people focussed and motivated in achieving an organisation’s objectives is a “must” in corporate survival. Happy and motivated employees will help drive the achievement of the organi...
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Viewpoints ...
Measuring Business Value Measuring Business Value
There are so many differing metrics potentially used within IT management today that it is challenging not only to decide which metrics to gather and analyze but which metrics to communicate to drive desired outcomes. The old axiom “what gets measured gets done” stands true. In most IT organizations, a fairly straight path ...
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Value Management Value Management
“Creating business value”, or “adding value” are terms that we frequently hear today, as organizations seek to expand, or even survive in a very competitive and often global environment.Often, a lot of the planned value creation takes the form of cost cutting, and particularly that of reducing human resources. However re...
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Capability Level 5 (Part 2) Capability Level 5 (Part 2)
In the first part of our interview with Mark Paulk, Senior Systems Scientist at the Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, we talked about high maturity, PSP/TSP, culture, measurement and IT services. In this second part of the interview we take a closer look at agile and sourcing.What is the market interes...
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Management by Numbers Management by Numbers
Plato apparently said “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers”. Having worked with successful balanced scorecards, KPI dashboards, measurement programmes with functional size measurement at its core, ISO/IEC 15504 capability level assessment baselining, one would expect that I would oppose Plato’s stateme...
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