You will be hard pressed to find a person that has taken some project management training who has not drunk the purple Kool Aid called Earned Value Management (EVM). You may have run into EVM “evangelists” at project management conferences or symposiums. You can recognize them by that glassy stare that comes from rolling up one too many work package cost calculations and you may have even learned to run for the hills when they have cornered some neophyte who expresses ignorance about the whole concept or (worse) challenges its practical applicability.

All joking aside, with the emphasis placed on EVM’s benefits, you may be inclined (or coerced) to apply it to your next project. To help you avoid some of the more common beginner pitfalls with use of EVM practices, here are three tips:

1. Consistent progress reporting on tasks or work packages is crucial. If you do not set expectations about standards for progress reporting across your project work packages (or even worse, in a portfolio/program situation, across the different projects that you are overseeing), rolled up value calculations will magnify these inconsistencies. Whether you want to be a purist and accept only 0 or 100% (good luck “selling” that in most organizations!) or see the world in a few limited shades of grey (0, 25, 75, 100%), ensure that there is consistent progress reporting to ensure that you can do an “apples to apples” comparison between project, sub-projects, or work packages.
2. Be aware of non-critical paths. If you have team members that are neglecting critical path activities but have completed multiple high value non-critical path activities, you could end up with favorable schedule variance calculations even though you are behind on the critical path. I recall a project where team members spent a significant amount of time on non-critical path work packages and the project manager reported favorable schedule performance far past the point where the end date was in serious jeopardy. This is where you may want to consider doing a separate set of earned value calculations focused on critical path activities or at least do not use schedule variance as the sole metric for evaluating schedule performance.
3. Be aware of cost imbalances between one-time costs (e.g. capital expenditures) and ongoing costs (e.g. labour or consulting fees). Similar to the previous point, if one time costs occur earlier or later than originally planned, cumulative cost data could negatively impact the accuracy of variance calculations. Variances in these one-time costs can also “mask” performance issues. If a computer server is much cheaper than was originally budgeted, the cost savings could hide poor labour productivity or performance on another work package. As much as possible, separate one time costs so that you can get a more accurate performance picture.

Earned Value Management IS a recognized best practice for objectively assessing project cost and schedule performance, but, as Ben Parker would say, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

What do you think? You can reach me with feedback at [email protected] or visit our website (http://www.solutionq.com)

Solid planning and implementation methodologies prepare business for the process of managed projects, improved processes and established change with measurable results. Doing it Right relates to the business objectives, the process and work discipline required to successfully achieve a change within an organization.

The desired change should be business driven beginning with requirements identification and shared business analysis. The business requirements could be any number of things. For example, decrease costs, minimize risk, enhance processes and improve productivity or increase revenue and profits. Identifying the business needs and required results helps in developing plans and making sound strategic decisions. Shared business analysis is the first key to creating success.

Once direction is determined, project management should emphasize accountability, shared implementation, mentoring and transition strategies. All operational resources should move towards the desired result as quickly as possible with the least amount of resistances. There are many methods of managing this process. Picking the right method, strategy and people during the upward swing of project implementation and resource development is critical to having small or large initiatives accepted and integrated. Often a combination of economic, organizational methods and influence must be applied.

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Project managers must consider operational resource’s abilities to provide the support services required to make changes and business improvements viable. You must consider corporate culture and the business mandate. If you need to get a project done, resistance or slow moving efforts get you nowhere. You should focus on communications in an enhanced way of making things happen. Provide mentoring and make it part of the corporate routine.

If the initial investigation phase, planning phase and execution phase are successful then there should be an improved measurable result. The organization capabilities should have shifted from the business operations perspective. Benchmarking should be used to measure the improvements that include both economic and organizational measurements with the appropriate business services support groups. Being departmentally inclusive is important.

The business project team accountable for the process needs to exit the environment with a pre-exit plan in place. They should ensure that the operations people can manage the changed environment. A training and transition plan must be implemented early in the process. The exit requirements should be identified prior to the project engagements with strict efforts on measurable results. Closure to the project and change process is critical for all parties involved. Once support teams take over operational responsibility, there should be a monitoring and measurement system in place to ensure that objectives are reached. By now the business project team is no longer involved but accountability still exists with key assigned members and stakeholders. There should be identified audit points that exist outside the project and into the operational departments.

Business departments that emphasize using best practices for projects and process change can establish themselves as innovative leaders by establishing work management discipline principals, measuring their activities, and showing the results that they made. This approach can be applied to any number of departments and projects; for example changes in technology, business processes, risk advisory or staff training.

When managing projects and business operational change it is important to keep your exit in mind with a disciplined approach. Measure your success and you will learn and achieve greater results.

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Richard Lannon , founder of a BraveWorld, www.braveworld.ca works with organizations to clarify their goals and objectives and train their leadership and staff on how to achieve them. He is a dynamic speaker, trainer and facilitator with senior management and leadership experience in business and the technology industry. Richard links organizations and professionals’ business brainpower with bottom-line thinking. His blueprint enables organizations to be SET for Success (structure, engage, transform). That’s why his client’s call him the Setability Expert. He can be reached at: 403-476-8853 or [email protected]

Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved. Richard Lannon.

How to Create a Winning Team. Part 1.

I have been manager of technical support at my company, Journyx, for seven years, and as such, I can say that creating a winning team was one of the most significant projects I have ever had to complete. When I started, we had disgruntled customers in all different directions, but no more. I learned a lot along the way, and in retrospect, I see things that should have been done sooner, as well as things that shouldn’t have been done at all. Consequently, in this three-part series I will outline effective methods for change and improvement within your technical support department.

Communication and Planning

You might compare technical support to a team of jugglers. It requires a lot of communication and teamwork to be able to handle flying bowling balls, knives, flaming batons and pianos. For instance, you will need to know when a baton or knife is heading your way, or who will be able to catch the piano. There are three big processes to put in place in order to facilitate the communication required to do this juggling.

• Decide on 3-5 levels of case severity and decide on service requirements for each (how quickly you intend to respond and fix). If you already have priorities defined in your maintenance contracts, try to use them. Discuss the plan with your team and make sure they understand that top priority cases must be addressed first, so someone must pay attention to incoming cases and prioritize them immediately.
• If you find that you don’t have the time to fix a problem so the customer never sees it, an alternative is to publish the solution in order to allow them to solve problems themselves. If you don’t have the time to provide all of the necessary technical details, you can write up a rough version and copy-and-paste.

In order to make this work, you need to document the problem and solution whenever you come across an issue that you haven’t seen before. Do it while you still have all of the test sites in front of you. Eventually, if management allows it, you might want to publish the problems and solutions in a public knowledge base. At our company, this has proved infinitely valuable for us. Our first knowledge base was a text document on a shared network drive, but now we have help desk software with a knowledge base feature.

Software companies, take note: You need developers within your technical support team. Asking the development team for bug patches frustrates both sides. Developers don’t want to stop working on their new, fun codes, and you probably resent that, when you ask for a low-level design change, they give you a better error message. Having your own developer eliminates this conflict, and he/she will find and fix things you didn’t even know were broken.

Repeat after Me

Having the right attitude is integral towards a successful tech support team, so try to encourage the following values among your people:

• I am responsible for getting this fixed, and for documenting the problem and its solution.
• I understand that people are frustrated and angry, but I won’t take their anger personally.
• I will empathize with the frustration that my customers feel, and tell them that I understand and share their feelings. I will calm them down with my words and manner.
• I will not accept abuse.
• I will not blame the customer.

Leading them by example goes a long way, so take them to lunch and tell stories about how you handled various situations. Answer a few calls in front of them. Let them see you embracing the right attitude and putting team values into practice, and they will follow suit.

Baby Steps

Redesigning your team involves creating a game plan for progress. You do this by setting short-, medium- and long-term goals for future improvement. Your current state can be easily ascertained by asking yourself the following questions: How many cases does tech support receive each week? How many are handled by other departments? How many customer complaints reach the executive team?

Once you understand where you are, then you can decide where you’re going. Short-term goals might be to get permission to go about rebuilding your tech support team, choosing the tools you will use to accomplish this, and putting them in place. Medium-term goals can be to handle all calls within the team and resolve problems before customers become too angry. Finally, a long-term goal can be to reduce support costs. You can do this by reducing costs per product line, product launch, customer and customer attribute (e.g. market, size, industry, salesperson, title of primary contact, etc.).

Customer data becomes viscerally important when you use it to make important decisions for your company. For example, pairing customer attribute data with data on

income per customer will show you that some types of customers are more expensive to support than others. This is useful information for senior management to have when they are making decisions about such issues as product direction and pricing.

Are We There Yet?

By implementing a help desk tool, you will be able to see how well you are doing against your goals. The right tool will run reports on the number of cases opened and closed per day, week, and month and the amount of time spent on each. When you need more advanced reports, you can do one of three things:

1. Duplicate CRM and accounting data in your help desk
2. Merge the CRM, accounting and help desk data
3. Connect your help desk to your CRM and/or accounting system

As your number of cases goes up, you will need to hire more employees. Look out for Part 2 of the series soon, in which I will discuss hiring the right people for your improved support team.

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Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including: Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company’s largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at [email protected].