Author: Cynthia Low

Career Expert Offers 10 Tips for Staff Retention in the New Year

Toronto — Employers may have a common resolution in mind as the new year approaches: keeping top performers on board. As we begin to come out of a difficult recession, many companies recognize that their most valued employees will be presented with other opportunities.

It’s clear that potential employee turnover is a concern for many chief information officers (CIOs) heading into the new year: 44 per cent of 270 CIOs recently interviewed for a Robert Half Technology survey said retaining existing workers will be their number-one staffing priority in 2010.

“Technology professionals, in particular, are under increased pressure as companies proceed with previously postponed initiatives,” said Geoff Thompson, vice president of Robert Half Technology. “Preventing burnout amongst top employees is essential to maintain productivity and gain momentum as the economy improves.

Thompson offers the following 10 tips for retaining your top performers:

1. Re-recruit your best workers. Talk with employees about what might enhance their job satisfaction and remind them of the unique benefits provided by your company. Emphasize what your firm has to offer, whether it’s a great corporate culture, solid financial standing or strong industry reputation.
2. Evaluate workloads. One in four (25 per cent) CIOs polled for the Robert Half Technology survey said they plan on redistributing staff workloads to meet project demands. While every project may seem like a priority, there are likely some that can take a backseat to more pressing matters.
3. Provide project support. Employees who have lost coworkers to layoffs are, in many cases, now doubling down. If hiring is not an option, consider bringing in project professionals to help alleviate workloads.
4. Invest in professional development. Offering more training and professional development benefits both the employee and the company. Online learning opportunities, mentoring programs and tuition reimbursement are all good options.
5. Provide opportunities for career advancement. Structure positions so employees can grow their careers without leaving your firm. Offer promotions to workers who have demonstrated they can succeed at the next level.
6. Recognize excellence. It seems obvious, but a simple “thank you” and public acknowledgement of your staff’s contributions will strengthen their loyalty.
7. Communicate regularly with staff. Maintain an open-door policy year-round. Workers want to hear about company news, in good times and bad.
8. Encourage more team-building activities. No doubt, many companies have cut back on employee perks, but an occasional group activity, such as a trip to the movies or an offsite lunch, can make them feel more appreciated.
9. Consider compensation. While not all firms can offer employees increased salaries, there may be potential for spot bonuses at the end of a major project or team accomplishment.
10. Promote work/life balance. Give staff members the option to follow a flexible schedule or telecommute one day a week. It doesn’t cost anything to implement these changes and workers will appreciate the leeway.

With more than 100 locations worldwide, Robert Half Technology is a leading provider of technology professionals for initiatives ranging from web development and multiplatform systems integration to network security and technical support. Robert Half Technology offers online job search services at www.rht.com

The fourth and final part of my “Reinventing…” series (see links at end of article) concentrates on a project portfolio rollup chart. Since this charting technique also includes and tracks business priority, I call this communication tool the “Project Barometer”.

As with the previous articles, the chart attempts to maximize the amount of information a single diagram can communicate, without overwhelming the reader. However, unlike the previous techniques, which required the use of Visio, the barometer takes advantage of the simplicity of Excel.

Before I begin to describe the barometer, I should issue a small disclaimer: practically speaking, the chart could typically be cataloged as a Project or Program Management responsibility; however, for the purposes of my team, who tend to be more actively engaged with our stakeholders than are our Project Managers, it quickly responds to such prompts as, “What are you guys working on?” or “What is the priority of this project?” by providing relevant information at-a-glance. A key part of the BA role is to pinpoint areas of project neglect (areas where a project may have missed stakeholders or scope, downstream impact, etc.). This tool has proved extremely valuable, both in department reviews and, in a more proactive sense, for stakeholders or departments to view at will. I have also found this technique equally appealing to executives and individual contributors for the facile communication and information transfer it procures. Without the Project Barometer chart, our BA team would not be as effective.

The development of upcoming priorities is also something the barometer tracks effectively; my BA team is tasked with managing the upcoming IT workload, forming the demand queue through turning stakeholder ideas into project proposals. As such, we use the Project Barometer to help prioritize these stakeholders’ ideas, which we then communicate to the IT management. Lending a greater level of visibility before a project gets off the ground, the Project Barometer helps individual departments to align themselves with and keep focus on current efforts.

When designing this chart, I thought about some of the common problems faced by IT employees, managers and business stakeholders. Typically, project status updates take the form of multiple page documents, PowerPoint presentations and/or meetings to deliver this information, which can be difficult to navigate and time consuming. Although highly detailed reports serve a valuable purpose, the Project Barometer extracts relevant information from those reports and organizes it in a simple, unambiguous chart made accessible to all involved parties. As response to questions regarding status, priority, and effort, the Project Barometer provides immediate information in a concise, visual manner. Such an at-a-glance informational tool becomes ever more important the higher up the corporate ladder you go.

With those parameters in mind, I wanted to find a way to fit an entire program status on a single page. The Project Barometer is a result of these efforts.

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My barometer consists of 11 columns, which, in order from left to right, track priority, project name, project status, effort and the stages of the SDLC.

The rows are filled with the individual projects grouped together by department. The Sales and Marketing groups are shown here, each separated by the blue bars.

Within each cell, a coding scheme is used to communicate relevant information, I include a legend at the bottom of the barometer but, for the most part, it is self explanatory.

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In this next part of the article, I’ll provide a step by step guide to building your own barometer.

The easiest way to begin is to list all of your projects currently in progress. For each project, think about the amount of effort involved and which group owns which project. The grouping of projects by department is one of the things that make the barometer useful.

At the end of this effort you should have a list of projects, grouped by department and assessed for effort, such as the example below.

The next step is to think about the stages you track in your SDLC, typically it will be something like the completed barometer shown above, but because Excel is so easy to use, you can adjust the columns as required.

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It is now a simple exercise to add either the date the stage was completed or the percentage of completed progress to the individual cells.

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It would be reasonable to stop here and have a functional chart, but as we saw above, there is more information we can communicate. In order to make the chart easier to read, I grouped the projects together by department. To do this I simply merge a row of cells and then, for each section, add and repeat the headers. Moreover, I add the key stakeholder for each department; this is the person you would work with to set the priority of each project.

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To communicate a clearer idea of progress, we can apply colors to the stages. We’ll follow the standard traffic light format, green for good, amber for minor issues, red for major issues. If a stage has been completed, I always set it to green.

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During my barometer design, at this point I didn’t feel like the chart was providing as clear a picture as possible because I had all the stage progresses annotated the same way. It makes it hard to differentiate, at-a-glance, between completed and in-progress efforts. To eliminate this problem, when a stage is completed, I change the text color to a light green. This has the effect of making the white, in progress stage, stand out more. As you progress to making larger barometers with a greater number of projects, this effect will become more vivid.

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We now have a completed diagram mapping the current program status, but what about priority? What about upcoming ideas? As I demonstrated above, this can be built into the same diagram with minimal effort. To tackle priority, I simply add two columns, one labeled “Priority” which tracks position (position one should be the most important project to the stakeholder), and the second column labeled “Movement,” tracking any priority changes. The addition of these two columns makes the barometer a great negotiation tool. Combining the Project Barometer with the Resource Chart forms a powerful arsenal of persuasion, with the odds stacked in your favor.

Dealing with the practicality of keeping the chart current, if a project is added with a higher priority than existing efforts have or a project priority is downgraded, I generally only show the movement of the added or downgraded project (i.e., I don’t show the shift in movement through the list of each of the others).

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Adding and prioritizing upcoming ideas or requests is also easily facilitated. Add an extra column for status, add the ideas and then update as needed. You could also track any kind of status here. You may have a designation for small projects and large projects, for example.

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The diagram is now nearly complete, once the version and date range are added. I typically update at least three times a week.

In summary, we have again created a simple but highly readable diagram to demonstrate the current status of projects and ideas, and in so doing, provide a complete picture of the program.

I’ve received some positive feedback on this series of articles, so thank you for taking the time to read and reply with your comments. In the majority of emails, I receive requests for a template. Now that I have finished the series, I’m working on bundling the templates and stencils into something you can all download.

http://www.batimes.com/component/content/article/106-articles/453-reinventing-the-swim-lane-diagram-part-1.html

http://www.batimes.com/component/content/article/106-articles/463-reinventing-the-swim-lane-diagram-part-2.html

http://www.batimes.com/articles/106-articles/490-reinventing-the-resource-chart.html

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Mark Jenkins is Manager Business Analysis Group at Websense. Mark has spent the last year establishing this formal business analysis group that now plays an active role in all major business projects at Websense. As part of the development, he created new process and documentation standards, which assisted in the overhaul of IT Project processes, placing the BA Group at the forefront of the IT to business interactions. He can be reached at [email protected] and on twitter www.twitter.com/JenkoUK.

If history has taught us anything it is this: “No matter how well a business application project’s scope is defined, it changes time after time.” Managing the scope of a project is always plagued with some form of scope creep. Scope creep has been the bane of project managers since project management began. The scope of a project is somewhat fluid in nature and tends to morph as the project progresses. Like hurricanes, the path followed can only be projected within a certain margin of error. However, hurricane path forecasting utilizes different models, each based on a series of uncontrollable factors that can and do change over the course of its life. The closer the hurricane is to landfall, the more accurate the projections.

Unfortunately, most scope-management frameworks are designed around the definition of a finite scope based on limited knowledge and advocating tight controls to manage change. Scope changes can be driven by many factors, including new ideas, regulatory change, change of needs, poor understanding of requirements, heuristic discoveries, financial circumstances, changes in leadership and more. In addition, in the absence of an agreed-upon objective and quantitative methods, assessing the impact that scope changes will have on the success of the project, emotions and politics will most likely rule the day.

The challenge is how to weave change and scope recalibration rules into the fabric of the project that proactively allows for resources, budgets and delivery times to change without attracting management’s ire. Here are eight strategies you might find useful in meeting the scope management challenge:

1. Use a Discovery Phase to Establish a Stable Scope

One of the quickest ways to improve your ability to develop an accurate and creep resistant scope is to conduct a “scope discovery phase” out of which a detailed understanding of deliverables will be developed. Typically, these phases are like mini- design phases with requirements traceability from objectives through workflows to applications, programs and data structures. The result is a very detailed list of deliverables making it easier to spot any additions to the mix. In addition, since the deliverables can be classified as to their complexity and type, it is possible to use standard estimating metrics to compute the effort needed for completion. Finally, understanding the business processes, applications, programs and data structures in play allows you to identify the talent and resources needed to support the effort. Discovery Phases typically take from one to three months to complete and consistently yield scopes that are 95 percent accurate (and that ain’t bad!).

2. Develop Formula- and Event-Driven Models for Establishing Budget Needs, Resource Requirements and Delivery Dates

Imagine a project scope that was virtual in that it was constantly recalibrated based on predefined criteria and events. Only the most uninformed and naïve believe that the factors that influence a project remain static over the life of that project. Every experienced project manager knows that the scope set at the beginning of a project in terms of budget and deliverables is at best an educated “best guess” at the time and is going to change; thus the reason for “change orders”.

A mature management will want to approach projects in such a way that the remaining time to complete and monies that need to be spent, reflect the most accurate possible appraisal of reality. However, in most cases management wants to cast early estimates in concrete and threaten grave punishment to the project manager should they miss budgetary and delivery date targets. This in turn often incents those leading the project to lie about progress, representing to management that the project-amazingly–is as complete as the monies that have been spent. The old adage that “project progress can be declared on track right up to the remaining 10 percent of the effort” has roots in this contradiction–and management’s stupidity in such matters.

A more mature and sane approach to managing projects is to recognize from the beginning that events can occur that could substantially impact the project’s budget and delivery date. Based on this analysis, a set of planned recalibrations can be forecast, along with the trigger points that would indicate a change in scope was needed. Being proactive in this regard is the key to being intelligent about true scope management.

3. Drive Scope Changes Based on Delivery Date Impact

Truth be known, when push comes to shove, delivering a project on time is more important than delivering it on budget about 99 percent of the time. This is because any project that sports an attractive ROI is worth having sooner than later. In addition, most mission-critical projects have a window of opportunity that, once closed, might not reappear for some time. Using a Delivery Date-driven approach to scope management provides a great yardstick for evaluating whether a change in scope is worth the acceleration or delay of the project’s due date.

Under this method, the cost of the change would be equal to the actual cost to perform the work plus/minus the loss/gain in return. This pendulum swings both ways as sometimes the elimination of a deliverable can shave precious time off the delivery date.

For example, assume a set of deliverables (not functionally critical of course) were estimated to cost about $75,000 and take two months to deliver. If the original project budget were $5 million and the estimated return was 20 percent, then the monthly value of the return would be over $80,000 a month. Therefore, to add this change to the project would have a cost of $235,000 (75k + (80k X 2), while deleting these deliverables would have a equivalent savings. This approach can be very sobering to management and keep things very honest and above board.

4. Build Recalibration Point into the Project Plan Based on Changes to External Factors and Knowledge Gains

For over 12 years, I have been building recalibration points into project work plans. These points often coincide with milestones or phase breaks and, by design, are planned opportunities to revisit the scope of the project and its value to the organization. Not once has management seen this as an issue–it has embraced the forward-thinking it represents, providing them options at critical junctures during the project. Each recalibration point consists of a set of tasks that includes validating the delivery time, resources requirements, opportunities for acceleration, assessment of new risks, market conditions, external events and, of course, a recasting of the budget. Once completed, a “go forward” recommendation is submitted to management and – if approved – the project continues.

These short sanity checks only take a few hours to perform because they are planned, and most of the work completed before the date due. There are times that, without the use of this strategy, projects that ended up being successful might have crashed and burned in failure.

5. Drive Budgets and Delivery Dates Using More Granular Deliverable Definitions

In September of 2007, gantthead published my article entitled “Identifying Requirements from BPI Documentation”, where I presented a method for extrapolating very granular requirements from high-level BPI documentation. By granular I am referring to every explicit and implicit input, process and output that is needed to support the improvement opportunities identified in a BPI initiative. This same approach works outside the BPI environment and is based on a set of rules that can be applied to any set of processes and data structures. I encourage you to read this article; the approach has been well-tested and goes hand-in-hand with the discovery strategy previously presented.

6. Add a New Deliverable Assessment/Acceptance Process to the Project Governance Framework

Nothing vets a proposed change to a project’s scope than a pre-defined process for assessing and evaluating the change requests. As stated in the beginning of the article, people are going to change their minds about what they need and want – it’s just part of human nature. To suppress this process is to invite people to buy out of the project and become points of continued angst and risk. Every week, change requests should be consolidated and an associated impact analysis performed. Then, as part of the normal project portfolio status meetings, the requests should be scored and ranked based on the assessment criteria (i.e. value to project, impact on delivery date, cost, resource availability, trade-offs, etc.). The project plan is updated (budgets, timetables, etc.) for changes that are approved. In this way, the change process is orderly and manageable and-voila!-scope creep is a thing of the past.

7. Allow for a Deliverables Trade-off Process

Sometimes, requested increases to the scope of a project can be accompanied with offsetting scope reductions. This is often the case when budget is rigid and, in essence, the organization wants as much as it can get for a finite investment. Under this strategy, people requesting new deliverables must also be willing to trade-out other deliverables. Just like in the above strategies, this is best accomplished using a predefined set of evaluation criteria so the value of the trade-offs can be quantified, reducing the emotional side of the equation in the decision process as much as possible.

Once again, the project plans are recalibrated to reflect the changes approved and things continue on, business as usual.

8. Create a “Time Boxes” Releases Strategy

“Time boxing” is a well-accepted method for chunking deliverables into a series of smaller groups that can be delivered quickly. Not all projects lend themselves to time boxing, but many do. The most difficult part of this strategy is to get people to accept a partial set of deliverables. Often, those using business applications are fearful that they will only get one chance to get what they want and thus pile on the requirements until the project is so big and costly they end up with nothing at all. This of course reinforces their fear, and thus a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies occurs.

The interesting dynamic is that once time-boxed projects are successful, the user population usually insists on this approach on all future projects. This presents an excellent opportunity to implement a formal release strategy that offers upgrades to the application base on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Once in place, maintenance costs are typically reduced as a much more prudent approach to change management is employed. Under the release strategy approach, requests for application improvements are accumulated and mapped into the existing application base.

Similar requests can thus be combined to take advantage of any economies of scale that might exist. This reduces the overall cost and labor that would otherwise be experienced. The improvement requests are then parsed into a series of logical releases based on what can be accomplished in three- to six-month segments. Few IT organizations ever really get this level of order and stability to their project environment, when it comes to the care and feeding of the installed application base. Of course, this approach does not lend itself to new application deployments like an ERP, CRM or data warehouse project.

Summing it up

Armed with eight real-world strategies, you are ready to tackle and master the process of project scope management. Scope creep should be a thing of the past and, if successful, you should expect your PM prowess to be that of legend. Good luck!

References

5.0 Project Scope Management
Wikipedia on Project Scope Management
Project Scope Management
Tutorial – Project Scope Management
Managing Project Scope – a neglected dimension of effective performance on diverse projects – by Walter A. Wawruck
Defining the Scope in IT Projects – Neville Turbit
Business Dream – Project Scope Management

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Michael Wood is a CPA, and Subject Matter Expert on IT Strategy and Business Process Improvement. He is currently a freelance consultant. Prior to that, he was the President of The Natural Intelligence Group. In the late 1990s, Michael was the Executive Vice President of Outcomes Management for the Corporation for Standards and Outcomes (CS&O), a leader in the development of outcome-based management methods and Internet applications in the behavioral healthcare industry.

Before joining CS&O, Michael was the Vice President of MIS for Showboat Operating Co. In addition to his traditional CIO duties, he led the implementation of all technology used at Showboat’s newest properties in Sydney, Australia, and Northwest Indiana.

From 1981 through 1989, Michael headed Helix Corporation, a management consulting company, with clients in the entertainment, aerospace, healthcare, gaming and distribution industries.
As an educator, Michael served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine University’s MBA program and as Associate Professor at California Lutheran University.

His broad industry background and experience has positioned Mr. Wood as an expert in the field of business process improvement and reengineering, which is the focus of his new book The HELIX Factor: The Key to Streamlining Your Business Processes. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0965980936/qid%3D969905403/102-7216132-7996939

Copyright © 1999-2006 gantthead.com, Inc. Reproduced by permission of gantthead.com, Inc.

Orlando, Fla., 20 Oct. 2009 – Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR), a company that designs, builds and maintains projects for governments and clients in diverse industries around the world, has been honored by Project Management Institute (PMI) as the winner of the Project of the Year Award for their engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning of Newmont Mining Corporation’s (NYSE: NEM) TS Power Plant (TSPP) near Dunphy, Nev.  The award recognizes the accomplishments of a project and the involved project team for superior performance and execution of exemplary project management.

Commissioned and managed by Newmont Nevada Energy Enterprises, Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Newmont Mining Corporation, the TSPP started commercial operations on May 1, 2008.  This facility, one of the first in a line of new coal-fired power facilities going into commercial operation, has exceeded the planned performance guarantees resulting in significant fuel savings to Newmont that will be realized over the life of the facility.  In addition, actual plant output exceeded the contractual output.

Newmont’s TSPP facility recycles a significant amount of water, thereby maximizing water utilization and minimizing waste.  The facility also incorporates large evaporation ponds to allow it to be a zero liquid discharge plant.  Moreover, during the entire tenure of the construction project, there were no environmental citations of any type.

“At Fluor, we feel that project management is one of our key differentiators and to be recognized by PMI and our peers for a second time in three years is a testament to the way our teams execute with excellence,” said Fluor Corporation’s Chairman and CEO Alan Boeckmann. “We are honored that our client, Newmont Mining, would think enough of our work to support our nomination for this prestigious award.  This recognition is a tribute to hard work, dedication and innovation of the combined Newmont/Fluor team.”

Over the span of two years, more than three million safe hours were completed without a lost time accident.  In recognition of outstanding safety and health efforts on the project, the TSPP was awarded a “Safe Partner Award” by the State of Nevada.

The project was completed two months ahead of schedule. Project managers for the system upgrade incorporated concepts outlined in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide), the global standard for project management published by PMI.  Mr. Boeckmann and the Fluor team were presented with the PMI Project of the Year Award on 10 October during the PMI Awards Ceremony at PMI^® Global Congress 2009-North America in Orlando.

October, 2009 – Kathleen B. Hass, author of Managing Complex Projects: A New Model has been awarded the Project Management Institute (PMI^®) David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award for her progression of international project management practices. The award was presented on October10, during the PMI Awards Ceremony at PMI^® Global Congress 2009  – North America in Orlando, Florida.

The PMI David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award recognizes an author for advancing the project management knowledge, practices, procedures, concepts or techniques that demonstrate the value of using project management.  The publication may be on historical, current or future endeavors. 

 

Kathleen B. (Kitty) Hass, PMP is the President and Principal Consultant for Kathleen Hass & Associates, Inc., a practice that specializes in building mature business practices including: strategy execution, project management and business analysis. She also serves on the board of directors and the senior leadership team for IIBA, International Institute of Business Analysis

As needs change and challenges grow, project management continues to evolve to meet 21^st century demands. In Managing Complex Projects: A New Model, a groundbreaking study of complex project management, Ms. Hass addresses what it takes for an organization to thrive, indeed to survive, in an environment rife with uncertainty. Ms. Hass offers a method for dramatically improving the performance of today’s large-scale projects. She shows how complexity thinking can complement conventional project management approaches to enable project managers and leadership teams to manage large-scale initiatives successfully.

Ms. Hass has developed a Project Complexity Model that empowers project decision-makers to assess a project’s various complexity dimensions, determine the project’s complexity profile, and apply appropriate techniques to maximize successful results. By applying a simple project complexity formula, the project manager can tailor an approach that takes into account the project’s dynamic features, such as team composition and performance; the urgency and flexibility of cost, time, and scope; strategic importance and political implications; and levels of organizational and commercial change.

The simplicity of the model is what makes it so artful-and useful. The Project Complexity Model provides a framework for diagnosing complexity on a wide range of projects. Depending on the level of complexity of a particular project, the reader is guided through a straightforward process designed to ensure that the most suitable project leader is selected and the most appropriate project cycle is used. Ms. Hass then turns to a project’s complexity dimensions, offering practical suggestions for adopting a management approach that responds to each successfully. She addresses the complexity dimensions of large, long-duration projects; large, dispersed, culturally diverse project teams; highly innovative, urgent projects; ambiguous business problems, opportunities, and solutions; projects with poorly understood, volatile requirements; high-visibility strategic projects; large-scale change initiatives; projects with significant risks, dependencies, and external constraints; and projects with a high level of IT complexity.

Throughout the book Ms. Hass draws on the ideas of thought leaders in the field of project management who are grappling with the new challenges that complex projects are increasingly being called on to address. She explores the best current thinking about managing projects; she then builds on that foundation by developing her own framework for taking the management of complex projects to the next level of thinking and accomplishment. She does it all from the perspective of a seasoned project manager who understands global 21^st century demands and the practical, day-to-day challenges that project managers face in meeting those demands. 

“The PMI Awards Program recognizes excellence in project management across a broad array of categories for organizations, individuals, community advancement and our chapters and their volunteers,” said Gregory Balestrero, president and CEO of PMI.  “Winning this award is a testament to the value project management brings to our varied stakeholders.”

In addition to this award-winning book, Ms. Hass has authored numerous white papers and articles on leading edge business practices, the Business Analysis Essential Library series, and contributed to The 77 Deadly Sins of Project Management.  Feel free to contact her for information about her services, including a cutting edge Complex Project Management Interactive Workshop based on this award-winning book. Ms. Hass can be reached at 303-663-8655, [email protected], and at her Website, www.kathleenhass.com. 

To read reviews by renowned authors in the field and to purchase the book, go to: http://www.managementconcepts.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=275&PageID=643&mcTarget=publication&mcTargetID=management/ManagingComplexProjects.asp&cached=true&mode=2&userID=238