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TANSTAAFL – There Ain

TANSTAAFL – It’s an acronym meaning “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch” coined by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein many years ago and, as a commentary on the work ethic, it’s something I think about often. The notion that you have to be prepared to work for the results you achieve is a good one. There’s another expression that I’m sure Heinlein would have agreed with and that’s “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. With the ubiquitous Internet available to all of us, there are many tools available to project managers that are absolutely free, and I thought I’d spend a moment pointing some of them out.

Ganttheadwww.gantthead.com

Gantthead burst onto the project management scene over 10 years ago. Their model was to be a center of excellence for project management information, and they’ve done a fine job. There are thousands of project managers who visit the site on a regular basis. One of the draws on the site is the remarkable number of articles, processes, downloads and other free information. Just sign up for a free login and you’ve got instant access to tons of information.

Microsoft Office Online Templatesoffice.microsoft.com/en-us/templates

If you’ve got any recent Microsoft Office Product, then clicking Help will bring you information from Office Online. This is an area of Microsoft’s website that carries templates for all sorts of products. Don’t choose the product first – just do a search on Project Management or just Project and you’ll find templates for MS Project, but also for Visio, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and even Word.

US Small Business Administrationwww.sba.gov

The US Small Business Administration gives away a ton of information to those interested in creating a small business. A lot of this information is of use to anyone doing project management. It’s worth browsing around for 10 minutes to see if the online courses, templates for business plans, or articles are of any interest.

ITeamworkwww.iteamwork.com

This free use site allows you to use the web-based system for creating a list of tasks, assignments and notes and seeing your tasks online. It’s best for smaller projects where you can work online.

AceProjectwww.aceproject.com

Here’s another interesting hosted system. It’s free for up to five users and five projects. Users can then log into the hosted site to see their assignments. You can schedule tasks, assignments, manage inter-project workload and more. If you’re a small team – it’s a tough deal to beat.

TaskJugglerwww.taskjuggler.org

More free scheduling and resource management software. This one is a Linux/Unix product available for downloading and use by a project manager who wants to see a Gantt and other key information about their project. It’s an Open Source product.

Project Workbenchwww.openworkbench.org

This product is a free open-source download of the old Project Manager Workbench by ABT. ABT was bought by Niku, and Niku is now part of Computer Associates but the product still has depth and a strong set of tools for scheduling projects, grouping them into portfolios and assigning resources. Workbench was popular among the IT scheduling crowd. The publishers decided to make this product open-source and freely available for download years ago while they concentrate more on their enterprise project business.

Google Documentationwww.docs.google.com

How can you beat this? The free Google Docs service lets you upload files or create them on the fly. Since you can share docs with others in your network, you can create an easy to access site for document collaboration almost instantly.

Bluetiewww.bluetie.com

Got a project team and need an online home to collaborate? Check out Bluetie. You can become your own “Enterprise Manager” for free and add your project team right online with their own user logins. Then add tasks, contacts, calendar events and documents, and then see your to-do list along with how your team is interacting. You can upgrade to the commercial service if you need more people or capacity. If you’re keen to create your own collaboration environment, then take a look at SourceForge (below) there are numerous Windows and Linus Collaboration portal tools available for free download. Just search for “Collaboration” “Portal” on the SourceForge site.

SourceForgewww.sourceforge.net

There’s too much to list here. SourceForge is a huge repository of open-source products. Some are available for Windows, some for Linux, some for Mac and some for multiple platforms. You’ll find everything from web-based project offices to collaboration tools. Do a search on “Project Management” for literally hundreds of possible downloads.

There are many free tools and services but it’s worthwhile thinking for a moment or two before you jump on board with one or more of them. First of all, just because software is free to download doesn’t mean that the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) will be less than if you purchased a product from your regular supplier. Here are a few things to think about:

Support

How will you get support for this product? Will you have to hire someone who is an expert in that programming language or that software platform in order to be sure that you get the service you need? In some cases, you might find an open source product but not on your most commonly used platform. We have seen products in our office, for example, that would work only in Linux and the total cost for us in using them would have had to include adding personnel, or training personnel in skills that are not part of our core competency. With an Open Source product, will you have to do your own technical support? There’s no one to complain to if a calculation is wrong. If this is for a small personally run team, then perhaps the impact of such problems are minimal – but you need to think about this carefully in a corporate context.

Licensing

If you’re downloading “Free” software the license agreement is something that you might want to take a few minutes with. For example, some license agreements put responsibility on the end-users who use the software. These obligations might include posting any changes that you do to the product and not embedding the product into something you resell without offering royalties to the original publisher. Again, for the individual this isn’t likely to be a concern but in a corporate context you need to take a moment to be sure this is what you want.

Migration

Sometimes we’ll start on a product or hosted service with the notion that it looks just right for our team. But what happens if you expect down the road to move this information to a corporate system? Will you be able to extract the data in the format you need and migrate it somewhere, or will you be caught re-creating that data when you eventually migrate?

Backups

With a free hosted service how canl you be sure your data is properly backed up? Given what you’re paying (nothing!) there’s not a lot of leverage to complain when your project plan or your bid documents go missing. Check with the service to find out how you can be sure your data is safe.

Free Hosted Plans

With all the free-hosted plans, the service agreements state that there’s no guarantee the service will continue to be free or, in fact, continue at all. So, what is your contingency plan if the service evaporates overnight? Do you keep off-site backups? Can you recover your data if need be?

In the end, Heinlein has a point: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Still, some of these free products and services have some great capabilities and functionality and are worth keeping track of. The “Free” hosted services are almost always attached to paid-for services that are also extremely interesting. Go into these products and services with your eyes open and you might just find a gift horse.


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]

If I Were to Create a Project Office

David Barrett’s Monthly Blog

I met someone the other day who was asked to roll out a PMO at a large financial institution. I was really impressed with her story.

The interesting part was not what she created but how she created it.

  1. She spent four months touring the project management teams and interviewing PMs across the whole company. She asked them what they wanted. Important to note that she did this before step two. She made no promises but just collected information.
  2. She then went to her sponsor – the executive that gave her the task. No reporting on the results of step one yet – just the same kind of questions: what do YOU want and how should it work?
  3. She asked for a commitment – from her executive sponsor – for the financial support, the long term commitment to the project and, most importantly, for the authority to do what she was going to do.

I often tell people that there are currently 2,436 different ways to create a project office. Honestly. I counted! Truthfully, the result isn’t the important issue for me today as I write this piece – but the process is. I have seen many project offices open and close because no one was asked what they wanted. Like many of our projects, we are too often handed the budget, the timeframe and the specs, and told to build it.

What we really need here is a business analyst – or we need to talk and walk like a BA before we go anywhere near building the project office. This is what my friend did. She got in front of the customers, the users and the sponsors and didn’t move until she knew full well what everyone wanted.

There would be no guarantee that she was going to make everyone happy. But she certainly knew everyone’s expectations.

Some day I am going to write a book on all the PMOs out there.

is publisher of Project Times, Conference Director, ProjectWorld and BusinessAnalystWorld, and Program Director of The Masters Certificate in Project Management, Schulich Executive Education Centre.

 

 


David Barrett

The true why of project management

The true “WHY” of project management: it is not about delivering on time, on cost and on specification!

I was a member of the Core Leadership Team responsible for the development of the PMI new standards released in the spring of 2006: The Standard for Portfolio Management and The Standard for Program Management. Actually, as one of the main co-authors of the portfolio standard, I had not spent much time looking at the Program standard. I was, however, receiving occasional emails on the Program Management standard development. I remember seeing an email trail including heated arguments about stating or not stating that projects had to do with generating benefits. PMI’s official position at the time was naturally coherent with the latest PMBOK version! The final word on these arguments was to include in the Program Management standard an artificial distinction between managing projects and programs, stating that (extracted from what I call the infamous Table 1.1, page 8 of the Standard for Program Management):

  • In projects, success is measured by budget, on time and products delivered to specification.
  • In programs, success is measured by Return on Investment (ROI), new capabilities, and benefit delivery

I realized what was written, too far into the development process. It was too late then to show indignation (mea culpa!). Too bad since, in my opinion, this “disctinction” is not only in the blatant contradiction of PMBOK’s own definitions of:

  • project quality – quality is about meeting requirements, not about meeting specifications; and of
  • project success – meeting or exceeding project stakeholders’ needs and expectations

It also perpetuates bad project management practices. No wonder we can’t get clear ROI from project management when we deliver stuff for the sake of stuff, while our main focus is to respect time and budget constraints. No wonder programs do not deliver expected benefits, when we don’t bother to track the benefits materialisation potential of the project deliverables associated with these programs.

Projects are not only about “What, When and How Much”. They are, first and above all, about meeting “Why” questions, about meeting expectations. And expectations are not well represented by ill-defined specifications, but rather by generating benefits for stakeholders. Last spring, during a project management workshop, where I discussed at length the real purpose of projects, one project manager told me that, after close to 30 years working on projects, he was realising for the first time that projects had to answer why questions before answering what, when and how much questions. What a revelation for him! What a shame for project management best practices!

Answering WHY questions is for me THE major issue in projects. Many project personnel would gain a lot of useful insight in this matter by reading Product Centric Project Management: The Missing Link to Business Results a very interesting article by Curt Raschke, PhD, PMP that appears in the last issue of the e-zine PM World Today (https://www.projecttimes.com/wp-content/uploads/attachments/Raschke-10-07.pdf). What he calls Product-Centric Project Management, I call Benefits-based Project Delivery, but we are really telling project managers the same thing: “Next time you start or take over a project, make sure you have a project charter. You ought to have one; if not, write one and get it approved by your stakeholders and make sure that that it includes in its first sentence: This is WHY we are undertaking this project. And make sure this WHY does not state a solution but rather the benefits anticipated from this project.

If you don’t do that, you will not only be wasting your efforts on this project, you will waste your stakeholders’ time and money and fail to meet their expectations. Do that and you will promote good project management and achieve project success by improving your customers’ ability to materialise benefits faster and more economically. And THIS is the true” WHY” of project management.

This is what I say! And you? What do you say?

Monitoring to Serve and Protect, Not to Play Big Brother!

Mike Lecky’s Monthly Blog

I’m becoming an advocate of independent project monitoring. This is because I believe it to be the one single thing that can be done, more than any other measure, to ensure projects contribute as expected and to keep projects on the rails.

Monitoring serves the project by providing objective assessment of performance. It protects the investment by uncovering problems and facilitating solutions to get things back on track.

Let’s face it there’s only so much value in reporting milestones hit and missed. This often is the sole product of the monitoring activity. Monitoring is much more. When done properly, it keeps abreast of the ever-changing business need and highlights disconnects in project scope as they arise. Monitoring tests the waters on attitudes and confidence that the project will be successful. Monitoring looks down stream and considers trends to highlight potential outcomes and issues.

The real value in having an independent monitor is that they’re more likely to cast light on risk triggers sooner. This can go a long way to paying their way! And we all know the additional overhead of an independent monitor can’t be justified without some payback. Knowing about risk events sooner is sure to improve their treatment, making them easier to avoid or mitigate.

In most organizations the health of projects is reported by the project manager based only on their observations and assessment.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Project managers are usually excited by progress and have a tendency to be optimistic in their reporting. And why shouldn’t they? It’s their job to keep it moving forward, to keep people motivated and spirits high. Yes there are other things they are responsible for, like reporting deviations from the project plan. Project managers can use all the help they can get. Since monitoring is a function that can add so much value, if done well, it seems logical to assign it to someone who can render independent, periodic assessments of health over the life of the project.

When selecting project monitors we should be looking for skills like collaboration, facilitation and observation and not action-based competencies like leadership and motivation. Monitoring is about observation, influence and collaboration. It doesn’t replace or interfere with the leadership provided by the project manager. In fact their relationship should be symbiotic and their skills complementary.

When things go awry a monitor can and should work closely with the project managers and other key stakeholders to influence outcomes and facilitate smooth project progress and alignment to business goals. The monitor confirms and enriches what the project manager reports and serves to broaden the circle of understanding of what is going on with the project and the project environment.

Independent monitoring is a great way to build collaboration into the management level of projects….and it has great payback!

 


Mike Lecky is a consultant at The Manta Group, a management consulting company specializing in IT governance, Project and Portfolio Management, Service Management, Risk and Compliance. Mike has degrees from the University of Waterloo (BScEng), The University of Western Ontario (MBA) and the University of Liverpool (MScIT). He worked for 12 years in aerospace electronics and as a Project Engineer managed several general aviation and US Military contracts. He teaches project management online with the School of Applied Technology at Humber College. Now, with over 25 years experience, he is a PMP and an information security professional (CISSP) and has a broad range of program and technology implementation experiences in the high tech and service sectors. Mike can be reached at [email protected].

 

The Key to Being a Good PM: Go Operational

Andrew Miller’s Monthly Blog

The PMI PMBOK guide defines a project as “a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.” (PMBOK guide, 3rd edition) So we all know what a project is…..it has a beginning, an end and something unique in between. However, those of us that have worked on large implementations, especially those where new processes or systems are being implemented, know that there is sometimes a fine line between project close and organization open. What I mean by this is that many projects these days focus on reengineering, or optimizing, or consolidating, or centralizing, but the common theme is that the organization does not look the same after the project is complete. Resources are re-deployed or let go, manual processes become automated and organizations focus on more value-added activities. So where do the project manager’s responsibilities end?

As a project manager, how can you lead an organization through a large transformation implementation without defining the new organization or at least participating in its development? My experience is that this is “bonus work” that the project manager performs, because most companies do not think of it up front when staffing the project team. Project managers are brought in to lead the team through the implementation, but someone must perform the tasks once the project ends…..that is where the operational team comes in. A good PM will be thinking about the operational team right from the get go, even while developing the project team. A good PM will be identifying where knowledge transfer needs to occur later on and a good PM will be advising their organization or client that these decisions need to be considered earlier – not later – in the project timelines. No one wants to complete a successful project implementation only to realize that there is no one to perform the ongoing work. Regardless of how successful the implementation may seem, if that is the case, then the PM has failed.

An easy way around this is to think operationally right from the start. Ask questions like: What should the organization look like when the project is over? Who will support the systems and processes? Who will carry the torch when the PM disappears? Then and only then, can one achieve serenity and success as a PM, and that success takes the form of a stable organization instead of one in flux, scrambling to determine roles and responsibilities.

 


Andrew Miller is President of ACM Consulting Inc. (www.acmconsulting.ca), a company that provides supply chain and project management solutions. Andrew is PMP certified and has led a variety of clients through complex systems implementations and organizational changes. He is an Instructor of the Procurement and Contracting course, part of the Masters Certificate in Project Management program through the Schulich School of Business Executive Education Centre (SEEC) in Toronto. Andrew has an International MBA from the Schulich School of Business with majors in Logistics and Marketing. He can be reached at [email protected].