Of Projects, Programs and Initiatives

When I talked about the business's love/hate relationship with IT, one of the items was never-ending projects. But yesterday I was talking to one of my key business manager customers and her take on that was that it was executive management, not IT; when executive management grabs on to every "neat" idea or "trendy" direction and leaves last year's initiatives to whither and die, nothing does get finished. This is where I think good project management, kept in check, is a very good thing, unfortunately the PMO needs executive backing to keep things under control. I guess all that project management, program management stuff that I hear about constantly is more than the bureaucracy that those of us in the trenches think it is...