Author: Kiron Bondale

Pushing on a Wet Noodle – Demonstrating the Value of PPM

Written by Kiron Bondale on July 28, 2010. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Pushing on a Wet Noodle – Demonstrating the Value of PPM

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) has been around for at least thirty years and over the last decade there has been a proliferation of standards, publications, and conferences on the practice. While a significant amount of emphasis has been placed in these knowledge sources on understanding PPM critical success factors, good practices and processes, the same plethora of documentation is not available about assessing the benefits achieved by adopting PPM practices.

Don’t get me wrong. In product development organizations, there is a direct linkage between good PPM practices and improvements in overall return on project portfolio investments. But what happens if your company does not develop products or services? Even worse, what happens if you have decided to take a phased deployment to PPM practices by rolling them out within a single department instead of doing an enterprise-wide approach?

If you are a year or two into your PPM initiative and senior management is beginning to ask tough questions about value realized, what can you do? You could spend time interviewing stakeholders to gauge perceptions of PPM capability and benefits but these will be subjective and intangible – valuable to document, but not helpful towards developing a cost justification.

In the absence of a good baseline of past history, you could focus on quantifying the benefits of specific instances in which the application of PPM practices made a difference. If a project request that might have been launched historically was rejected by your governance committee, try to quantify the impact and costs if that project had been launched. If a project that in the past might have been allowed to continue through to completion, was terminated “in flight” to continue through to completion, assess the opportunity costs. Which other projects might NOT have been resourced? If information about a project that resulted in the “right” decision being made in a timely fashion had not been available at that time, what could the costs have been? On the cost side, assess the organization costs of PPM – staffing costs, training and coaching costs, and tool implementation and support costs.

As you can see, this type of retrospective value justification can be challenging and effort-intensive, so how can you proactively avoid this dilemma?

Identify key organization performance indicators (financial or otherwise) that the PPM initiative will improve.
Capture a baseline of data about these indicators over a quarter or two.
Develop realistic, achievable targets for changes to these indicators.
Develop a business case based on these improvements taking into account the hard and soft costs of the PPM initiative.
Secure appropriate executive sponsorship to provide you with both the funding and visibility for the project.
As PPM changes are rolled out, measure these indicators on a regular basis (as well as the costs of the initiative) and provide annual (or better yet, quarterly) updates to senior management regarding the benefits achieved.

Quantifying the value of PPM is a true example of the saying “if you fail to plan, you’ll plan to fail!”.

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Don’t be an Ostrich; Proactively Address Unpredictability about Project Resource Availability

Written by Kiron Bondale on June 30, 2010. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Don’t be an Ostrich; Proactively Address Unpredictability about Project Resource Availability

Dontbeanosterich A systemic lack of predictability regarding resource availability threatens to trump unmanaged scope creep, technical complexity and organization change resistance as the primary source of project risks. Achieving an organization’s strategic objectives gets impacted as transformational projects require specialized skills that are in high demand and in low supply – this was admirably depicted by Scott Adams in a recent Dilbert cartoon (http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-06-21/).

The obvious solution to this is to either add more resources or take on less work in parallel. The first choice is usually unrealistic and success with the second is not achieved overnight. Reducing the volume of multitasking is a key to more predictable throughput, but convincing senior management that you can actually do more by doing less is not easy.

In the interim, here are a few tactical steps that a project manager can take:

Pity the poor resource manager who has competing demands on his/her resources’ time! Unless your organization follows an objective project prioritization approach, priorities are likely set by whoever screams loudest. In this situation, your best chance of improving resource availability predictability is to have a positive relationship with these resource managers so that they will try to be as considerate as possible with your resource needs. If you are really lucky, they may even be motivated to assess and modify the resources’ operational duties to help you out.
Reduce the degree of project internal multitasking – it’s bad enough that your team members are likely working on other projects as well as operational activities, but at least try to avoid their having to context switch between tasks on your project!
Multitasking creates inefficiency as a result of context switching. Reduce the effort wasted in context switching by simplifying the ramp up/ramp down for team members. One way to do this is to decompose work activities to a low enough level of detail, so individual tasks can be accomplished within one or two context switching cycles at most.
If your organization does not have a standard PM methodology, work with your peer project managers to define a consistent set of expectations for team member progress and issue management. If a resource knows that the reporting requirements are consistent across the concurrent projects they are assigned to, that’s one less thing for them to worry about learning (and re-learning!).
Walk a mile in their shoes. When team members have multiple projects and operational activities to complete, increase the likelihood that they will want to work on yours by ensuring they understand how their tasks (and the success of the project as a whole) will benefit the organization and them. Remove as many barriers to their being able to efficiently complete their tasks as possible. That means no unnecessary meetings and be sure to streamline project administration and communications as much as possible! Take a page from agile approaches and embrace the role of a project manager as being responsible for clearing the hurdles from the team’s path.

Resource availability unpredictability is here to stay. You can make like an ostrich, stick your head in the sand and hope the problem goes away. Or you can take some tactical steps to increase the odds of success for your project, while simultaneously evangelizing the merits of reduced multitasking!

Which is it to be?

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The Power of Effective Communication

Written by Kiron Bondale on June 2, 2010. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on The Power of Effective Communication

There is a strong likelihood that if you have taken a project management training course within the last decade you have heard some variant on the saying that “90% of a project manager’s time is spent communicating.” As with everything else, too much of a good thing can cause problems.

I have worked with junior project managers (as well as some seasoned ones) who focus on over communication instead of effective communication. Their concern is that the perceived importance of information is in the eye of the stakeholder. They are concerned that, if the project manager does not provide “full disclosure” to stakeholders, sponsors or team members, the project manager’s information filtering could spawn or worsen a project issue.

This is a valid risk – a lack of open communication of assumptions, issues or risks has likely caused more project failures than scope creep or limited resource availability.

However, to swing the pendulum from limited communication to the other extreme raises some risks. For a sponsor or stakeholder to find some data that is of value to them, they have to wade through reams of interesting but low value (to them) information. Additionally, drowning stakeholders in minutiae is a good way to lose their interest or attention in your project, to say nothing about reducing credibility in the project manager’s capabilities.

While useful for sharing project information or eliciting feedback, online communication methods such as Twitter, Instant Messaging, and worst of all, e-mail can dramatically aggravate this situation. While this information overload issue is dangerous for traditional projects, it is lethal for virtual projects as it increases the probability of stakeholder isolation or withdrawal.

So how does one determine the sweet spot for project communications?

Include a thorough stakeholder analysis as part of your project communications planning. For key stakeholders as well as your sponsor, make sure you understand what, when & how do they wish to be get apprised about.
Leverage both push & pull methods of communicating – push information that is time sensitive or requires action. Let other information be pulled by stakeholders (unless they have specifically asked you to push it to them).
Refresh your communications plan based on feedback. Meet with stakeholders on a periodic basis to gauge if they feel that your level of communication is effective.
Be consistent in communication content & structure. This helps to reduce effort spent by team members or stakeholders in processing information and demonstrates predictability and professionalism.

I wrote in a previous article (http://kbondale.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/communication-communication-communication/) that a governing principle of project management is “Always Be Communicating” – perhaps this should have been re-framed as “Always be EFFECTIVELY Communicating”.

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Quantifying Contingency; a Bonus Outcome of Risk Management

Written by Kiron Bondale on May 5, 2010. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Quantifying Contingency; a Bonus Outcome of Risk Management

You have likely experienced this at least once in your project management career – your team has thoroughly planned a complex project and has decided to add contingency reserves to hedge against “known unknowns.” Even in the halcyon days preceding the current global financial crisis, it was common practice for sponsors or other governance bodies to challenge or strip out such perceived buffers.

While not the only cause, one of the primary contributors towards this rejection of contingency reserves is the subjective approach used for their definition. Risk perception is susceptible to bias – customers tend to be optimistic about expected project outcomes so it can be challenging to convince them of project risk severity. The more a team can do to quantify the level of risk on a project and to educate sponsors or customers on the use of contingency reserves, the greater the likelihood that decision makers will support the need for these reserves.

Quantification begins with SMART (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria ) risk identification to improve credibility in project risk management practices (see http://www.projecttimes.com/kiron-bondale/capturing-the-hearts-and-minds-of-project-risk-stakeholders.html for more insights on engaging stakeholders through risk management). If your project sponsor or customer is involved in the risk identification process, he or she should already be aware of the specific risks that requested reserves will cover.

Once the risk register has been populated, project teams can use techniques such as the Delphi method to come up with reasonable estimates for probability and impact of occurrence (even if historical data is not available). Probabilities of occurrence can be estimated as low (25%), medium (50%) or high (75%). Estimated impacts should not assume the worst case scenario as that will negatively impact credibility in the evaluation. Once this evaluation is done, expected impact values for risk events can be calculated by multiplying the probability percentages by the estimated impacts. By summing the expected impacts for all schedule-impacting risks and all cost-impacting risks your project team will have a “maximum” value for contingency reserves. Obviously you should not present these figures, but you are in a better position to justify the rationale for suggesting that a reasonable percentage of these be allocated as reserves.

Beyond risk quantification, it is important that sponsors understand how contingency reserves are used – a common misconception is that these are “slush funds” that will be misused by project teams. Educating them on (and following!) a consistent process for the use of contingency reserves (e.g. critical chain project schedule buffers) can help to ease these concerns.

In spite of these recommendations, you might still encounter the occasional holdout who rejects your request for contingency reserves. In these cases you consider stating (as diplomatically as possible!): “I understand that you do not feel that contingency reserves are necessary for this project. As such, would you be willing to sign a decision record reflecting that you are guaranteeing that none of these risks will be realized?”

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Post-project Resource Evaluation – a Forgotten Contributor to Project Success

Written by Kiron Bondale on April 7, 2010. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Post-project Resource Evaluation – a Forgotten Contributor to Project Success

In the course of assessing project management capabilities for clients, a practice that I’ve found absent across most non-projectized organizations is the evaluation of team members at the end of a project by the project’s leadership. Usually, the rationale provided for this gap is that the functional managers do not consistently solicit this feedback from project managers, or when this feedback has been offered in the past, it has been ignored.

If you are struggling with “selling” this practice internally, consider using one or both of the following issues as the catalyst for introducing this change:

With the exception of purely operational staff, most resources spend a reasonable percentage of their time working on projects. When evaluations are conducted annually, functional managers lack objective criteria to assess performance on project work and must either resort to generalizing performance based on a resource’s operational performance, or will use anecdotal feedback received from the most recent projects. This impacts the consistency and objectivity of the evaluation process.
A common belief is that staff will focus on activities that will directly impact their evaluations. In a matrix model organization, if post-project feedback is not provided, team members may prioritize their operational work higher than their project work. This may not be a conscious decision, it might simply be conditioning over time – a functional manager is a constant for the resource, whereas a PM is a transient authority (at best). This increases the likelihood of overworked or heavily multi-tasked resources procrastinating or delaying the completion of their project tasks.

To increase the likelihood of consistency in the evaluation process, the following practices should be incorporated:

Use an objective evaluation scorecard with a few (five or less) questions that either have a Yes/No answer, or a numerical answer (e.g. on a scale from 1-5, how would you rate…). Provide room for comments, but ensure that the majority of the feedback is solicited objectively.
Insist that PMs establish expectations about the evaluation process with their team members as part of the project orientation process – it does no good to have someone evaluated at the end of a project if they don’t understand the basis for this evaluation.
Structure annual evaluations to include the aggregate scores from projects as a component of the overall score – the specific percentage will vary based on the amount of time that a given role spends performing project work.

Even if your organization follows a functional (i.e. not matrixed or projectized) model, these practices can still apply. While your functional managers might be leading the majority of the projects that their direct reports work on, conducting consistent objective evaluations at the end of each project can vastly simplify the work effort for managers during annual evaluation time.

Without balanced resource performance evaluations across operational and project performance, similar to lessons learned (see http://www.projecttimes.com/kiron-bondale/lessons-learned-avoid-the-oxymoron.html), those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it!

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