Author: Cynthia Low

When Talk Fails, So Do Projects

Written by Cynthia Low on April 1, 2009. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on When Talk Fails, So Do Projects

Fifty years ago, Peter Drucker – widely considered the father of “modern management” – coined the term “knowledge worker.” Today that term is frequently attributed to software engineering and quality professionals, whose mission is to infuse their knowledge of a particular domain into creating today’s modern computer software. Software is what puts the smarts into today’s smart devices, whether they are iPhones or Blackberries, GPS navigation systems, or supermarket scanners and the like. Without smart software, hardware is mostly dumb.

In recent times, it’s become apparent that a major contributor to success or failure on software projects has to do with team communication, both internally and externally. From a systems view, creating great software is about taking expert thinking and domain knowledge, and then efficiently moving it around the team in short feedback loops. This rapid-fire collaboration and conversation is what blends the minds of a team in both an additive and combinatorial process to create high-quality killer apps. Killer apps are essentially software models of the thinking mind, in order for an otherwise dumb device to mimic the logic of intelligence beings.

Three key ingredients often determine project success or failure: domain knowledge, deadlines, and dialog. You can think of them as “The Three Ds.” Domain knowledge is obvious. It takes smart people with the right knowledge to create the right stuff. Deadlines are also critical – there has to be adequate time to make things right; under time pressure, haste makes waste. What is also vital is the last D – Dialog. In fact, if you examine the tenets of approaches like Agile software development, you find that collaboration and communication is an essential part of its philosophy, explicitly stated in the value statement known as the Agile Manifesto.

Creating good software is hard, especially under pressure. It gets even more difficult when what you’re trying to build is complex or when members of a team are dispersed, which is often the case in a flat world. Recently, as a management consultant, I had the opportunity to compare projects at two case study companies: one a remarkable success, the other a dismal failure. In many ways, the outcomes could be traced to how well or poorly they handled the Three Ds.

Since I tend to favor happy endings, let’s consider the failure first. In this story, the company brought in a new “green” team from an outside contractor to augment its staff for a medical IT application being rushed to market. These developers were learning about this product and its features for the very first time. But a critical problem existed: key players inside the company who knew the products had quit and were unavailable to help. Much of the brain of this company was hollowed out, as in a lobotomy because of low morale and attrition.

Score on Domain Knowledge: LOW

Next came the subject of Dialog. Members of the new team were on distant shores, a 12 hour time-zone difference. Processes necessary to move critical knowledge from one continent to another were not well established. They also skipped a critical co-located release planning meeting because it was perceived that “there was not enough time.” Thus, face-to-face relationships and a well-knit team weren’t established — quite different compared to a cohesive group where members know and trust each other like family.

Score on Dialog and Communication: LOW

Lastly, time pressure can often make or break a project. Just enough pressure and there’s a sense of challenge and manageable urgency, enough to cure an occasional dose of complacency. Too much time pressure and you get what’s known as a Death March project (the term is made famous by the book by Ed Yourdon), wherein teams feel hopeless resignation from trying to do the impossible in too little time.

After a few months, the project was cancelled. It never got off the ground because of the looming deadline. As Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister state in another excellent book, Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, “Time removes cards from your hand.” This team never had a chance. The deadline was set first, and it was fait accompli that low domain knowledge and ineffective dialog would manifest in lower productivity. They missed every project milestone in quick succession. Management lost faith, pulled the plug, and the VP was asked to resign.

Score on Project: CANCELLED

Interestingly, projects like this often don’t make it into industry statistics. When projects disappear, no data is left behind. But what’s sometimes left is the lore among those who witnessed it. And in this project and many others is the lesson, “When domain knowledge is low, and dialog and communication fail under an impossible deadline, failure is virtually guaranteed.”

Somebody (‘most everybody) Does it Better

Stories like this have played out many times in my 20 years as a software industry consultant. But what about the blazing successes? Indeed, were it not for these, work would get pretty depressing. What if you were a doctor and most of your patients died because they didn’t heed your advice? You stay on because other times, there are those who do and they thrive and prosper, creating excitement, hope, and optimism.

One company that comes to mind does all the right things compared to the previous example. It dominates market share, prospers in lean times, and is by all accounts a fabulous place to work. Imagine routinely building killer products with twice the quality and in half the time, at a $1.3 million dollar lower cost (without off-shoring) compared to industry benchmarks. Imagine that management – all the way to the CEO – recognizes this success, expands work at home, growing innovation and the teams that produce it, while rewarding employees. What did they do around the Three Ds?

They kept their best and brightest people and executed a conscious strategy to hold onto their veterans. Domain Knowlede: A+. They built a brand new environment and pooled these bright minds into one large room, pairing programmers side by side, co-located with business analysts and doing the work in short feedback loops. Communication: A+. Group leaders were given autonomy when it came to release planning and estimating, using techniques designed to make sure that there was the right combination of project scope and the dates to deliver. Deadlines: A+.

Manage all Three Ds with aplomb and you get success, not failure, and a team that loves what they do and where they work. What an innovative idea!

Michael Mah is the Managing Partner at QSM Associates Inc., a company that helps solve deadline and budget challenges on software projects, through use of state-of-the-art software measurement and estimating tools combined with techniques from modern negotiation science. He is also Cutter Consortium’s director of the Measurement and Benchmarking Practice and senior consultant for the Agile Software Development & Project Management Advisory, and the Sourcing & Vendor Relationships Advisory. His writings (and blog) can be found at www.qsma.com.

The Psychology of Risk and How It Relates to Project Risk Management

Written by Cynthia Low on March 25, 2009. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on The Psychology of Risk and How It Relates to Project Risk Management

Risk and risk management have been around for a very long time. But until recently, they have not been applied well to project risk management. In this article we shall examine the psychology of risk and see how it affects our attitude towards project risk management.

We shall look at the following points individually and then link them to project risk management:

What does the term risk mean?
Controlled and Uncontrolled risk
Perception of risks
Framing risk questions
Project risk management

When one hears the term risk, we might think of:

Doctors who tell us about risk factors
Executives/Bankers who do financial risk assessments
Insurers who perform risk managements to determine coverage
MBAs who think about upside and downside risk
Athletes who think about risking their bodies
Actors who think about risking their self
Project managers and team members who think about risk to their project

All of the above come to mind without thinking about what the term “risk” really means. In everyday life, we face the issue of controlled and uncontrolled risk. For example: if we choose to snow ski, it is voluntary. We believe that we have control (of the skiing process) and therefore we have control over the level of risk we expose ourselves. But is this really true? Once we start down the ski slope are we really that much in control of the outcome? Even expert skiers have serious accidents, some are fatal. Another example: if we choose to smoke, we do so voluntarily, even though the dangers of smoking have been well documented for some time. However, once the decision is made to smoke, we no longer have control over the risk of contracting lung cancer.

When confronted with risk, people generally find they are turned off by it. But this is not a universal feeling. In fact, there are some people who are attracted to risk (bungee cord jumping, etc.).

Our perception of risk varies widely and can lead us to the wrong conclusion. Our perception, for instance, of a rare disease such as botulism, which is only slightly less lethal than a more common disease like asthma. But the fact is that asthma is actually many times more likely to kill you than botulism. Despite this, we fear botulism more than asthma. Another common example is the fear of flying; people who feel flying is too big of a risk often opt to travel on the ground. Most studies demonstrate, though, that your chances of being killed in a car accident are about 500 times greater than being killed in an airplane crash. But the risk seems so much greater when you are several thousand feet in the air and in the hands of someone else – the pilot.

When it comes to risk and probabilities of negative events, people choose their behavior based on the way the risk scenario is framed and not on an actual evaluation of the risk. For example: imagine that the US has two different alternatives to combat a new disease that is expected to kill 900,000 people. If treatment A is implemented and followed, 300,000 people will recover. If treatment B is implemented and followed, there is a 1/3 probability that all 900,000 people will recover and a 2/3 probability that no one will recover. When presented with these two options (A or B), almost 3/4 of the people choose treatment A even though both have exactly the same expected outcomes. In this instance, people over-value the probability that no one will recover.

Now, let’s frame the same issue in a different way. If treatment program C is implemented and followed, 600,000 people will die. If treatment program D is implemented and followed, there is a 1/3 probability that no one will die and a 2/3 probability that 600,000 people will die. Only slightly more that 1/5 of the people choose treatment program C when presented the choice, even though both choices again have exactly the same expected outcomes. Here the people over-value the probability that 600,000 people will die.

In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli described the “best bet” as the one that maximizes the expected utility of a decision. He developed a summation equation (which we shall not repeat here) that calculated “expected utility.” This theory provides a basis for making best bet decisions when risk is involved. We know that it is impossible to make risky decisions that turn out best in every situation, so we regard decisions as gambles and attempt to make the best bet decision.

There are additional human factors that affect our ability to properly assess project risk. Frequent events are usually easier to recall than infrequent events. Residents of countries frequented with violence, like suicide bombings, repeatedly hear about people being killed by the acts. Since it happens so often, the people probably feel their chances of meeting the same fate are high, given that these types of events occur so often. But because in other places, like the United States, where we don’t hear about bombings very often, it would appear that your risk of meeting a similar fate is not very great.

However, single mega-disaster events are easily recalled and often result in over evaluation of the risk. Sometimes we segregate risk into components such that we only see one side or part of the risk. Sometimes we eliminate common parts of the risk and do not consider them. An example of this is not thinking about the additional risk of driving 65 mph instead of 55 mph. Another common mistake is failing to recognizing the risk altogether, such as using a cell phone as we drive a car.
Classical risk theory is choosing between fixed and known risky alternatives. But in the real world of project risk management, alternatives are not given, but must be sought. Many times not all risks are identified because the search usually ends when we find the alternative we like or have found three or four risks. This leads to risk identification being incomplete and biased. Because of this, our projects suffer greater consequences from risk events than is necessary.

William (Bill) J. Scott is a Global Knowledge Professional Skills Instructor. He has two undergraduate engineering degrees and a Certificate in International Operations from the Stockholm School of Economics in Stockholm, Sweden. Bill Spent 30 years in corporate America as a project team member, project manager, functional manager, project sponsor and in senior management. He ran his own project management consulting and training company for nine years prior to joining Global Knowledge in April of this year. For more information visit (www.globalknowledge.com).

Can You Still be Trusted as a Leader?

Written by Cynthia Low on March 25, 2009. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Can You Still be Trusted as a Leader?

Most leaders will readily agree that earning and keeping the trust of others is critical to their effectiveness as a leader. That’s true whether you’re running the organization or a project team.

It is quite possibly the single most important prerequisite for leaders at all organization levels. Unfortunately, it can also be the most fragile. Recent events in the economy have spilled over into all business sectors and have shaken the confidence in organization leadership to the core.

To the leader trust is not simply one more element on a long list of desired characteristics. It is more like the foundation that will support all your leadership efforts. If people do not trust you, everything else you do as a leader becomes inconsequential. Forget trying to be inspirational, coach-like, innovative, supportive, a team leader, or visionary. If you don’t have people’s trust they may follow your orders because you have positional authority, but you will not get the passionate engagement that is the result of true leadership.

So how high is your trust index these days? Here is a quick check up. Ask yourself the following four questions. Do you think most people in your organization or on your project team:

Trust you?
Trust you more or less now than they did a year ago?
Have faith in you?
Have more or less faith in you now than they did a year ago?

These are important questions. If you are uncertain about the answers now might be a good time for a 360 assessment or to consciously ask for feedback?

It is likely that during the past year both your personal trust brand and your company’s trust brand have diminished. In a recession as serious as the one we are in now, people tend to operate in a climate of personal fear, a consequence of which is an erosion of trust. This personal fear includes fear of loss of income, loss of position, loss of relationships and loss of security. Most of all it includes fear of what the future is going to look like. That is where you come in as a trusted leader. One definition of trust says that it is “the confidence to guide them to a place and create hope”. If people cannot see a better tomorrow they will naturally tend to trust in you less, even though on a personal level you may not have changed.

Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm (www.edelman.com.) recently published its tenth annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The results show that nearly two thirds of the people surveyed trust corporations less than they did a year ago, and only 17% said they would trust information from a company CEO (insert your name here if you are a senior leader!).

Most alarmingly of all, 77% of the people said they refused to buy products or services from companies they distrusted. That’s quite a sobering thought for anyone, whether you operate in a business to business organization or one that directly serves the consumer.

So what steps can you take to actively try to recover the trust that has been lost?

It’s worth recognizing that it typically takes much longer to regain people’s trust than it does to lose it. Just ask yourself, how long do you think it will take Main Street to start trusting Wall Street again? As Tom Peters once said, “There is no such thing as a minor lapse in integrity” It is going to take time and effort on your part to build back the trust you have lost, especially as this climate of fear is unlikely to disappear in the short term.

Regaining your company’s trust brand could be the subject of a whole other article, but here are a few suggestions for regaining your personal trust brand, and if it is going to take a long time you may as well get started now!

Be Inspirational. Right now, it is more critical than ever that you as the leader are able to create hope. You need to build back your people’s confidence in you, and in your team or organization. They need to know that if they respond to what you are asking of them that the future will be brighter than today.

Be Visible. It is unlikely that sitting behind your desk or hiding in your office is going to cut it. Get out there, be visible and let your people know that you are willing to confront the issues head on.

Earn Their Respect. If you are asking your people to go the extra mile for you right now, make sure they know you are willing to do the same for them.

Communicate. People’s sense of fear tends to grow when they are kept in the dark. We naturally fear the unknown, and tend to think the worst when confidence is low. On the other hand most people can handle the truth and will trust and respect you more if you communicate openly, and often.

Self-Awareness. Take a moment to look at yourself. Are you still acting in accordance with your own values or are you sacrificing some of your core beliefs in return for some short term relief. Do people still see you as authentic? Does the room light up when you walk in …or when you walk out? Now more than ever is when your people are looking to you to stand up for what you believe in and lead with integrity.

Put all of these into practice and make them part of who you are as a leader and you just might be able to reverse the trend and see your trust growing back.

Bryn Meredith is a principle of Bluepoint Leadership Development. He has extensive experience as a business leader, entrepreneur and leadership development specialist. Bryn can be reached at [email protected]

Shouldn

Written by Cynthia Low on March 17, 2009. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Shouldn

I tend to talk often in this column about “Enterprise” Project Management (EPM) Software. It’s a hot topic these days because so many organizations want to get their project management personnel to coordinate their actions, and management often feels left out of the loop due to the lack of consolidated project management reports. Organizations which do projects have an interest in such topics regardless of their size. So it’s perhaps worthwhile to take a moment and examine what project management software vendors mean by “the enterprise” If we think of the spectrum of project management systems, it’s pretty easy to identify the opposite ends of the spectrum.

At one end we have the individual project manager. He or she is responsible for the projects which they impact directly or for which they provide schedule and other project analysis and reporting. In some organizations, there is only one project manager who only has a few projects to manage. In such a situation, this project manager wears all the hats. They do schedules, estimates, cost control, project tracking and project documentation.

With all the different roles such individuals play, it’s not surprising to find that they are most likely to have their own box of tools to get through their day. In the project management software realm, the most common two tools are Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project. According to some estimates, there are about 35 million project managers using Excel as their primary project management tool and another 20 million using Microsoft Project. There is a plethora of other tools to be found that target this market from freeware to open source to tools of all descriptions. So, it’s fair to say that this part of the market is very well served by the project management software industry.

At the opposite end of the spectrum we have the ‘large enterprise’. The precise definition of such organizations is different from one project management software to another but suffice it to say that the big vendors think ‘big’ when they use the word ‘enterprise’. This typically means somewhere above 2,000 employees and up to the largest organizations in the world of several hundred thousand employees.

When there are thousands of licenses of something to be sold, all kinds of large project management software vendors line up to try to get a piece of the action. There are several categories of vendor who focus on large enterprise project management solutions. In the ERP/Finance world we have the big players, SAP and Oracle who have finance-oriented solutions with project management and resource management modules. In the specialist camp we have the omnipresent Microsoft with a collection of tools referred to as the Microsoft EPM Solution along with Primavera (now an Oracle company), Clarity from Computer Associates and Planview.

These large scale tools really need to be thought of as more of a building platform than a closed set of functionality. All of them arrive at the client’s door with tremendous potential and tremendous flexibility but little in the way of plug-and-play in the manner we think of the individual project management tools.

So far so good.

But, there is an incredible number of companies in between these two huge markets. The ‘mid-market’ is rather under-serviced and simultaneously rather over-promised.

Where the ends of the project management software spectrum at the individual and enterprise levels are served by a relatively small number of vendors and products, in the mid-market, there are hundreds if not thousands of possible options.

The market is characterized by demands that the implementation of organizational project management be as fast and inexpensive as the individual end of the spectrum, but deliver the complex functionality and integration from the enterprise end of the spectrum. This is obviously not possible. The notion of ‘easy-to-use enterprise project management software’ is a fantasy. The concepts themselves aren’t easy and the culture change; the change-management aspect of the implementation can be terribly challenging. I’ve talked about these challenges in here before.

So what do you do if you’re in this no-man’s land of organizational size – let’s say between 50 and 200 employees?

There are probably a hundred different paths you can take. First, just as it is with all organizational solutions, it’s very important to start by defining the problem. What are the business problems you’re trying to resolve? If the problem is reporting based, perhaps you can overcome this by having a centralized super-user who will generate, analyze and publish reports. If the problem is resource-oriented, perhaps you can look at combining tools to have a small central group of project managers distribute reporting information to all the other personnel. If the problem is team communication and collaboration, then perhaps one of the many collaboration tools can overcome this challenge without having to consider a large implementation of specialized project software.

If I was faced with such a challenge, here’s what my most likely response would be:

People
First I’d look to create a tiny (maybe just one person) Project Management Office. If there’s to be any coordination of efforts in the project management realm, it won’t happen by accident. There has to be a central rallying point for the initiative and for future evolution of the structure. Next, I’d look to create a very small cadre of experienced project managers and I’d dedicate them to the Project Manager role. This is one of the things that’s so rarely done and most executives don’t realize the cost due to lack of efficiency of not having specialist personnel in these roles.

Tools
I’d almost certainly leverage the low cost and quick-to-deploy individual project management tools, but I’d look to extend them with some add-ons. If my challenge was team communication, I might consider using a collaboration tool, but I might also just look to see what I need the team to communicate about and see if there were tools that lent themselves to the process that could be managed centrally. If my challenge was reporting and viewing of project data, I’d consider one of the low-cost viewers for Microsoft Project or Primavera or a report writing tool.

Here are some add-on or mid-market targeted tools I might consider:

EasyTaskSync (www.easytasksync.com)
This tool moves data back and forth from Microsoft Project to Outlook, allowing a single project manager to get a lot of personnel involved in the project through a tool that is likely to be on everyone’s desktop.

DecisionEdge (www.decisionedge.com)
This report-writer produces a range of great looking reports from data contained in Microsoft Project or Primavera. The resulting reports can be made available over the web or in printed form.

EPMLive (www.projectpublisher.com)
EPMLive hosts Project Server with a pre-set list of functions. Views, User Defined Fields, structures are set up in an attempt to make the big Project Server system a little easier to swallow.

Daptiv (www.daptiv.com)
While we’re talking about hosted systems, another option would be Daptiv who has portfolio management, scheduling and resource management in a web-based structure.

SteelRay Project Viewer (www.steelray.com)
Afinion Project Viewer (www.afinion.com)
Seavus Project Viewer (www.seavusprojectviewer.com)
Houstatonic Project Viewer (www.projectviewercentral.com)
Live Project Viewer (www.kadonk.com)
Each of these claims to be the top Microsoft Project Viewer on the market and I’m sure there are a hundred more.

When you’re in the massive mid-market for organizational project management software, there’s unfortunately no clear leader or small number of tools which dominate the market. You’ll need to be a little more crafty, and put in a little more homework before you land on just the right combination of tools to get to the particular solution that’s appropriate to you.

Remember the basics: Articulate the particular business problem you want to resolve with these project management tools and make sure the vendors you talk to are ready to empower this thinking at the appropriate level for what you require.

Chris Vandersluis is the founder and president of HMS Software based in Montreal, Canada. He has an economics degree from Montreal’s McGill University and over 22 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and is the founder of the Montreal Chapter of the Microsoft Project Association. Mr. Vandersluis has been published in numerous publications including Fortune Magazine, Heavy Construction News, the Ivey Business Journal, PMI’s PMNetwork and Computing Canada. Mr. Vandersluis has been part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council since 2003. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University’s Executive Institute. He can be reached at [email protected]

Are You

Written by Cynthia Low on March 17, 2009. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Are You

The U.S. government is getting ready to make unprecedented investments in energy, healthcare and education. Whether you see it as pork or progress is not the question. The question is what can you do as a project manager to be shovel ready?

Think about what many of these projects have in common: technology and infrastructure. For project managers, this means we have an opportunity to play a major role in rebuilding the economy. We just have to be shovel ready.

In project management, shovel ready can be abbreviated to three letters: PMP. The federal government now requires the PMP certification to be part of most contracts, and many state governments are following suit.

You may be thinking, how can one project manager like me have an impact on programs this large? Think about it this way: All of these huge programs are made up of smaller projects, and in order for these programs to succeed, the projects have to be successful.

That’s where you come in armed with your PMP and Project Management expertise. The good news for PMPs is that the PMP is much more than a certification that gets you in the door; it’s even more powerful once you are through that door. Your PMP gives you the knowledge and skills to meet deadlines, manage resources well and be able to bring projects in on time and within budget. If you are in transition and looking for a job, the PMP can give you an edge in the market, and research shows that PMPs can earn as much as $10,000 more per year than those without certification.

Here are five ways you can get shovel ready and be a project manager who is part of one of the largest infrastructure government programs in history.

Five Ways to Get Shovel Ready

Become PMP certified, or if you are already a PMP, keep your certification current with ongoing PDU courses
Manage resources effectively so you can consistently show results that are on time, and within budget.
Understand where you and your Project Management skills can fit into the big picture of any large program.
Use your Project Management knowledge to assess and manage the risk in any project.
Keep building on your Project Management skills so you can capitalize on emerging opportunities quickly.

I know there’s a lot of debate about the government stimulus package, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: We need to be as effective as possible with these programs. As project managers, we’re already ahead of the pack. We just need to arrive, shovel in hand, and ready to go!

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP is the founder of Cheetah Learning, and author of the Cheetah Success Series. Recently honored by the Project Management Institute, Cheetah Learning was named Professional Development Provider of the Year at the 2008 PMI Global Congress. Michelle was previously recognized by PMI as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the world. She is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner President Manager’s (OPM) program and also holds engineering degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Dayton. To hear more about what Michelle has to say about getting shovel ready, download her podcast at http://podcast.cheetahlearning.com/podcastgen/