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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the team at Stoneseed! We’ve been blogging on a weekly basis for just over three years now and hope you enjoy reading our posts. We look forward to sharing many more with you in 2017. We’ll be back on 3rd January with a great year of articles ahead. In the mea...

I recently wrote a piece on the apparent lack of CIOs and similar IT professionals at board level of many companies. It followed a thought-provoking article in The Times newspaper that suggested just four specialist technology professionals had made it into the boardrooms of FTSE 100 companies. Whil...

During the summer I wrote about where an IT Service Delivery Roadmap may take you. Thanks for some great feedback especially to my conclusion 'somewhere better than where you're at now'. Having addressed 'where' it could take you let's take a look at 'how' you put together an IT Service Delivery roa...

I heard a cute joke today from an IT Service Manager friend's son Benjamin, who is only 10. Q: Who makes sure everything goes to plan in the anthill? A: The govern-ants. Great isn't?! Made me smile. And well done Benjamin for identifying the value of asking ‘who?’ ‘Who’ is one of the most important ...

Originally published in CIO magazine. Do you really need a Project Management system? Would a new software system help or hinder? Could it be like buying the Emperor’s new clothes? When I work with companies on Project Management assessments I often hear software systems getting blamed for failures,...

Planned changes to IR35 in April next year are potentially going to have a seismic effect on public sector IT. How much depends on how prepared the sector is by then but now is the time to act. It's time to hit the G-Cloud and get to grips with what's new in the Project Management as a Service (PMaa...

Only four specialist IT professionals have made it into the boardrooms of the UK's FTSE 100 companies. Put that another way ninety-six of the UK's biggest firms have no tech representation on their board! I think this should be a major action plan for EVERY company or organisation. OK, a technology ...

Here's something interesting, in Gartner's IT Glossary there is no entry for "Scope". Now, there could be two reasons for this. It could be that its scope is such an obvious thing that Gartner feels there is no need for a definition. Or it could be that scope is such a movable concept that it actual...

Aren't PMOs amazing? In recent years the Project Management Office has evolved from the brink of extinction to in many cases a vital driver of critical strategic change. Consider that transformation for a moment - from a position where lots of organisations where questioning the point of even having...

Originally published in CIO magazine. Project, program or portfolio? Probably. How about power, potential and pioneer? While governance and process are vital to the smooth running of IT projects and their ultimate successful outcome, strong leadership is essential. “Essential to what extent?” you ma...

Do you have them? Projects that set out with the greatest of intentions but which failed to deliver and because no-one ever put them out of their misery they stumble on devouring resources with every uneven step they take. Zombie projects. Most CIOs, Project Managers and Project teams will vehementl...

"He who truly knows has no occasion to shout". It’s a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It sprang to mind this week after I had been chatting to a Project Leader friend. He had been struggling with an IT Project but had managed to get it back on the rails thanks to a very simple trick. He liste...

A blog with some real straight talk originally published on CIO.com - When asked “What does good look like in IT Project Management?" here’s why I answered, 'Probably failure.' It was a brilliant IT Project Management question from a client. "What does good look like?" I breathed in ready to answer,...

No-one sets out on an IT Project imagining that it's going to fail. IT Projects are never designed this way and yet many teams make life so hard for themselves that failure is almost inevitable - almost as if by design! I would love to ban the f-word, 'failure', until after everything has been tried...

Have you ever considered how much of your IT Service Delivery time is spent managing vendors? It's OK if you haven't, most don't give it a great deal of thought. Actually, it often gets lost under other headings. For example, there may be a due diligence issue (that’s caused by your vendor selection...