Showing results by author "Rania Al-Maghraby" in All Categories

This is a paper outlining the importance of a PMO in an organization, its intended role, how to establish a PMO in a certain organization, the components necessary to exist in that PMO, along with its organizational structure, and roles and responsibilities of PMO staff. It’s intended to be a practical, implementation oriented presentation of the subject. This paper has been published in the May 2011 edition of the PM World Today eJournal.

Portfolio management is an important discipline within any project-based organization. It's the function that keeps investments in line with the strategic goals intended to be achieved, and continually reviews the balance of costs and resources among all running initiatives. Thus, knowing how to apply several techniques of performing portfolio management tasks is essential to making the whole practice successful and with added value. In this paper, we show some of the core essential techniques used in performing portfolio management activities, ranging from initiatives evaluation and ...

The purpose of this paper is to survey the SEI's CMMI model and the PMI's OPM3 model as being used in appraising organizations based on maturity. Organizations seeking appraisal of their current maturity, either for internal strategic goals, or for external commercial and trade requirements, will consider basing their maturity assessment and improvement efforts on a global framework which was developed for satisfying these organizational improvement needs. Most well‐known models currently are CMMI (with several constellations) from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie ...

This paper explores the research areas of Quantum Computing, and the real-life applications in which this new field of research can transform human lives on earth. We first introduce the idea of Quantum Computing and how it is different from traditional computing, then we highlight main application areas and use cases of quantum technologies that will enhance people life and turn many experiments that had never been feasible before into a handy undertaking. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of Quantum Computing as a research area and the promising life changing ...

Among many concepts of Enterprise Architecture, which in many cases are explained and perceived as abstract ideas, we deal in this paper with the concepts of Continuum and Repository as related to Enterprise Architecture practices. These two terms are interrelated and applied together when implementing tools for performing enterprise architecture activities, and they are core for successful adoption of enterprise architecture practices, either at the first creation of these elements, or for repetitive use in the long run. We are explaining these concepts, relating them together, and looking...

This paper addresses the subject of project management office maturity, by introducing the functions of the PMO unit, what maturity means and how it impacts performance, attempts to define a PMO maturity model, and assessment of the PMO maturity based on such models. Generally speaking, the discussion in this paper will be independent of the specific project management methodology followed by the PMO and the overall organization, since the functions of the PMO unit are the same regardless of whether the project management methodology is traditional or agile, and the standard framework ...

There is a number of Project Management Frameworks available in the community, each has been developed, adopted, and promoted by well-known and highly reputable institutes. Each of these frameworks has its strong points and advantages over the others in different application areas. Examples of these are ISO project management standards, PMI PMBOK, Agile methods, IPMA ICB, and APMG PRINCE. This paper will try to conduct a comparative analysis on the variety of the available frameworks and recommend each in specific application areas or purposes. This paper was published within IPMA 24th ...

This paper addresses statistical analysis of OPM3 model assessments. As for all questionnaires used in various purposes of research and study of a certain phenomenon, statistical analysis ensures validity and reliability of the instrument used. The variables included in the questionnaire, the questions addressing each variable, and data values collected in response to this questionnaire, all contribute to this analysis. Statistical significance of the findings of the study is also considered. This kind of analysis is of interest to all users of the OPM3 assessment, as it determines how much...

Service, Product, and Project are three of the primitive terms that are well known and familiar. But there are some subtle relationships among them that require some attention when it comes to management. This is an article that was published in the PM World Journal, Jan. 2013 issue.

This paper discusses the value of professional certificates available on commercial basis, as compared to academic education programs. We attempt to answer questions like: are commercial professional certificates sufficient for designation of qualified and knowledgeable individuals? Can commercial professional certificates replace academic education in some fields? Are commercial professional certificates considered an equal education opportunity for people who missed the chance for academic education? What are the negative and positive sides of both paths, and can they be complementary to ...

In this paper, I will show how the Project Management Office (PMO) can be viewed as a service provider, and in turn how service management concepts can be applied on the PMO to provide its services to the intended customers. I draw from ITIL and other service management best practices, showing how this can be applied in implementing and providing the PMO services regardless of the specific industry of the projects being implemented by the organization that the PMO is servicing, whether IT projects or others. I will first discuss the PMO services, and creating a service catalog for the PMO. ...

An article describing the phases of the Arabic Common Market establishment project, its risks, obstacles, and recommendations. This article has been published in the June 2011 edition of the PM World Today eJournal.

With the increasing trend of adopting cloud technologies, IT departments, as IT service providers, are now virtualizing their environment to benefit from cloud promises. With this come challenges of how to adapt IT service management practices to preserve service levels and meet customer expectations and our commitments within the new environment. This paper explores how various ITSM processes can be applied to cloud IT environments, and what adjustments will need to be made to each process so that maximum benefit is gained from cloud offerings, while maintaining the business bottom line. ...

This paper shows how our PMO Maturity Assessment tool works in measuring the maturity level of the PMO on a 5-level scale. It builds on maturity level assessment guidelines found in the CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) model from Carnegie Mellon University, and the P3M3 (Portfolio, Program, and Project Management Maturity Model) from Axelos Limited. Although none of these models addresses PMO maturity specifically, they address general aspects related to project management, as a subset of the considered process areas in the former, and as a detailed analysis in the later. We ...

Autonomic Computing is a steadily emerging and promising research field. It aims at simplifying interoperability to diminish the management complexity in several industries. To this goal, some standards have been worked on to establish a common basis for communication and interaction on all management areas. This work focuses on one of these standards, CIM - developed by DMTF, trying to enhance its support for localization handling by proposing some modifications and additions that are intended and designed to facilitate the configuration of different localization aspects.

Autonomic Computing is a steadily emerging and promising research field. It aims at simplifying interoperability to diminish the management complexity in several industries. To this goal, some standards have been worked on to establish a common basis for communication and interaction on all management areas. This work focuses on one of these standards, CIM - developed by DMTF, trying to enhance its support for localization handling by proposing some modifications and additions that are intended and designed to facilitate the configuration of different localization aspects. This paper was ...

This paper is a trial to view the ITIL® V3 framework for IT Service Management from a Project Management perspective, highlighting the aspects of project management in ITIL® V3 that represent intersection points between project management and IT Service Management, viewing Project Management from the point of view of PMI’s PMBOK®3, and IT Service Management from the point of view of ITIL® V3 framework, towards the objective of successful integration of ITIL® processes within PMP® processes. Preceding this correspondence is an overview, collected from literature, on ITIL® and IT ...