Connecting the Dots: Aligning Projects with Objectives in Unpredictable Times

by Cathleen Benko and F. Warren McFarlan

Book Overview

Organizations are struggling for greater return on their multibillion-dollar technology and project-related investments. Individual projects may be useful, but when examined collectively, they often work at cross-purposes, duplicate each other's efforts, or aim for obsolescing business objectives. And all are competing for scarce resources. In today's earnings-driven business environment, companies must look to their portfolios to better deliver on...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1578518776
• ISBN13: 9781578518777
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Quite an eye opener

I used this book for our annual management off-site and pulled the alignment exercise from the first chapter listing our top twenty projects from last year. Using the book to instigate a look back at these investments was very valuable. We always knew there was a lot of opportunity, but just not how to isolate it. The book offers some simple yet innovative tools to improve this gap, and the group enjoyed splitting up and experimenting with them.

Good frameworks for prioritizing your projects

A good mix of practical and strategic...worth the price. I found the book's frameworks easy to understand and functional; it was one of 3 books I had my senior team read in advance of our bi-annual planning meeting and I found it very interactive and a good cheat sheet/set of vocabular to working through the often painful process of prioritizing our many ongoing and pending projects.

Great book for the times

I don't read a lot of business books because most of them are to hard to apply to everyday business issues. As a senior executive, this book gives me and my staff real food for thought on how to make decisions about our may funded projects that can't all be kept with the economy the way it is. Great read and practical for the project owners.

Finally a practical set of IT portfolio management tools!

Connecting the Dots is a great read for anyone working in IT management. It can help you gain better control of your capital expenditures and information technology projects - both critical success factors in our industry. Some of the ideas in the book are new and some aren't, but the book has done a great job at simplifying these concepts (ie. portfolio management) and making them accessible and usable. Instead of the usual `pie in the sky' statements, this book dives into a company and illustrates how the tools and frameworks can be used in a typical business. It's refreshing to find the kind of book that can help you manage the execution of these issues.The book claims that a company's project portfolio is what moves it into the future and provides great tools and techniques that teach you how to get your company to focus on producing business results and think about the bigger picture: where all these projects are actually taking your organization. The book also does a good job at helping you bridge the technology and business sides of an organization even though I could have done without the business history lesson in Chapter 2.This book can easily be read in two to three hours. I just read it over the weekend and was able to start applying some of the ideas.

A timely and useful book

This book provided a useful framework for helping me think about the biggest challenge facing my company: growing the business while reducing costs. Connecting the Dots provides a unique approach by focusing on the project portfolio. Through greater alignment, organizations better focus on their goals while reducing costs through improved efficiency. It's a clever solution that breaks the logjam between growth and cost cutting that paralyzes a lot of organizations. The other new idea which I liked was how the book thought about the future. With an interesting historical context, Benko and McFarlan basically recommend that companies should focus on "adapting not predicting." They counsel companies to build "traits" into their organization. These characteristics reflect the future of the networked economy. It will require most organizations to take some time to wrap their heads around the concept and translate it into tangible goals for the company but I have already begun experimenting with the concept. Overall, the book gets you thinking about the importance of your project portfolio and how it can help you prepare for uncertainty. It then provides interesting tools and techniques for achieving greater alignment. The book is an easy to read and engaging. It's written almost like Warren McFarlan's speeches. Lots of historical references and analogies. Moreover, the book doesn't "preach at you", rather it understands that each business has it's own context. And they reconginze that you don't need to adopt all their recommendations and techniques. For conceptual thinkers, I'd skim chapters 5 and 6. They are for people who like to slog through the details. I found Chapter 1 was a great overview and Chapter 4 provided concise summaries of all the tools and techniques. If you are looking for a practical but novel approach to producing results, I recommend this book.