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Tag: Requirements

Full Executive Support for the Project Manager: Is it Close?

Are we any closer to full executive support for the role of the project manager?

The easy answer is yes. The tougher answer is… it depends. Typical.

I think that the position of the project manager within today’s organization has certainly improved. The project manager is an indispensable commodity within most systems departments out there today. No senior executive who is in touch with the IT division could ever suggest otherwise. Mess with this role and you will seriously jeopardize the success of your IT projects. I cannot imagine any executive today not getting this. So yes, this is big improvement from just three to five years ago.

Let’s put aside the non-IT sectors that have understood the importance of project management from the beginning of time: construction, engineering, aerospace to name a few.

For other areas of our business, the jury is still out! I believe the role of the project manager is crucial outside of IT, but this is where the value and applicability of the role of the PM is still being debated.

Time will tell but for the moment these PMOs and individual project managers are still working under a threat of death. Many out there feel some of these other projects do not need a full time professional PM and thus the level of executive support we are talking about is questionable.

But as with IT, this too will change. As project managers get involved in larger, more mission critical projects outside of IT, their value to the organization will grow. And remember, the new CEO, CIO and other C-levels typically GET project management. Look closely and you will notice that some of them even have a PMP beside their names. This will help!

 


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

How to Start a Project Management Company without an IT Professional

Have you ever noticed that IT professionals are grumpy? I think that part of the reason is because they never get calls like this: “Hey IT professional, just calling to say that everything is working okay today and you’re great!”

The calls are typically more like this: “Hey IT professional, why is it that the only messages our spam filter prevents from getting through are our sales leads? Luckily, however, it does let all the Viagra ads through, which is good because it gives us something to read while we’re not selling anything. Did they have classes in spam filtering at the college you supposedly went to?”

Working in IT is somewhat like being a fireman. You can never respond to the fire fast enough, regardless of what you do. If I were starting a project management company today, I wouldn’t even buy a server. Rather, I would do everything with Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS (which means it is hosted online on someone else’s server). I would use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool like Salesforce, a contact management tool like Sugar, and an accounting application like Quickbooks Online Edition. I would also outsource my email and document storage.

In a nutshell, if I were starting a brand new project management company today, I would really try to have no servers at all, thereby avoiding the stale Linux/Windows debate. Without servers and their accompanying headaches, my IT professional could focus on serving our customers instead of building a bunch of technology infrastructure that is, at this point, redundant. IT professionals at project management consultancies have enough work to do without being constantly interrupted with projects such as installing a new network. These tasks can be accomplished elsewhere, which saves your IT professional time. And as we all know, time is money, especially in the project management world.

Not only that, but servers require updates, maintenance, backups and more backups, which, once again, translates into plenty of work. Very few companies, regardless of their size, do a good job with backups. Disks have grown faster than tapes have and this is causing a real problem: Where do we put all the data? Not only that, but all disk drives fail eventually. After 10 years in business, I’ve seen a number of disk drives tank, and it is never, ever convenient.

Consider this: if a tornado (or a disgruntled employee) obliterated all your servers right now, how long would it take you to get it all going again? How do you know the tapes will work? And where are they? Not in the same room as the servers, I hope. Did you know that tapes can sometimes be written to but not read from due to the technology of the tape drive and the error rate on the tape itself? Are those machines still for sale so you can buy replacements for the ones that were destroyed? Where would you get that copy of the operating system you were running? How many millions of patches from Microsoft did it have on it again? And how long will it take to install them?

But wait a minute. “What if a tornado destroys the SaaS site of my chosen vendor?” you ask. That’s a great question.

At my company, Journyx, we have hundreds of customers who run their business on our SaaS site. If we weren’t up and running, pretty much immediately after such an event, we would be out of business and I would be out of a job.

That frightening vision is very motivating to me. So much so that we have redundant hardware, lots of backups, tapes in a salt mine, multiple sites for data, etc. No one can do a better job of keeping our application up and running than we can.

“But what if someone nefarious and evil steals my data and gives it to my competitor?” you ask.

The bank has all of your data, and you aren’t worried about them giving it away. What’s the difference? What about the phone company? They know a lot about you. SaaS companies should be under the same constraints for protecting your company’s privacy as banks and telephone firms are. And so far, they all seem to be doing a fine job. For example, I’ve never heard of anyone swiping a competitor’s sales leads out of Salesforce.

If you’re starting a new project management company today, go SaaS. Get a laptop. An office at Starbucks. If your time, your data security, and your piece of mind are worth anything, it’s definitely cheaper.


Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx (http://pr.journyx.com), a provider of Web-based software located in Austin, Texas, that tracks time and project accounting solutions to guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. In 1997, Curt created the world’s first Internet-based timesheet application – the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource.

Let

Having been involved with project management over the last two decades, I have seen a great evolution in what is expected of a good project manager. The traditional measure of a great PM was one who could focus solely on the success of his or her project to the exclusion of all else. In the name of ‘focus’ (aka blinkers), we might have been allowed to ignore what was going on around us in the organization, be selfish in negotiating the best resources, use creative estimating skills to get a generous budget, zealously guard that ‘signed off’ scope document and cross the finish line on time and on budget!!

Not so any more (thank goodness!). How often have we tripped on a project that was on time and on budget but was not deemed to be successful? As organizations embrace the concept of projects being the most effective method of executing strategy, they are demanding more from their project managers. Much to many a project manager’s dismay, the success criteria for projects are no longer confined to a list of deliverables, meeting timelines and budgets. Measures of success now often include specific references to:

  • Customer satisfaction
  • Increased revenue
  • Decreased costs
  • Seamless transformations

Could it be that projects, and therefore project managers, are now being held accountable for business results?

What an exciting yet intimidating prospect!! The project manager of the past thrived only because there was a huge assumption that every project initiated was the right one, and ‘someone’ usually the project sponsor, would take care of the minor matter of actually delivering the results. The reality is, that in a competitive market place, the way many progressive organizations rely on project management practices has changed significantly. Some of the changes in organizational behaviour are:

  • Management of project portfolios
  • Movement from individual projects to programs tied to delivering business value
  • Recognition that business strategy needs to be flexible
  • More sophisticated measurement of results
  • Global risk management

Though even today an overwhelmingly large number of projects relate to technology and engineering, more and more organizations have recognized the value of applying project management to the full spectrum of their business. It is commonplace to have projects that bring about organizational development, business acquisition and mergers, product development and launch, business process re-engineering, and even strategy formulation and strategic planning.

This more demanding and complex environment, combined with growing demand for leaders to fill the void left by retiring ‘boomers’, provides project managers with an unbelievable opportunity. The time is right to change the role of a project manager from ‘technical implementer’ to ‘strategic enabler’.

Does this shift mean that the traditional strengths of sound project management principles are no longer valued? Quite the contrary. We do need to, however, go beyond applying the people, process and tools aspects of project management. So what can we do to meet the new expectations?

  • Find out as much as we can about the business strategy our project is aligned with and linked to. Ask questions till we are comfortable that we understand the specific business goals and the rationale behind them.
  • Make sure that all activities and deliverables in our project are able to support the strategy and business objectives most effectively.
  • Be innovative and persuasive if we think there is a better way to get to the desired outcome.
  • If our project is a part of a program or portfolio, have a clear and accurate understanding of the interdependencies with other projects within the program and the portfolio. Prepare for contingencies.
  • Be prepared to take the back seat and play second fiddle to a more important initiative – we don’t have to be primary to be critical to the organization’s success.
  • Show integrity. If our project is going to deliver the outcomes but not the business benefits, speak up.
  • In our plan, include organizational change management considerations, as typically benefits are realized within the business operations. Make sure mechanisms are in place to measure and monitor how effectively our project is contributing to business results after it’s completed.
  • Constantly assess the validity of the project in relation to business objectives, especially if it’s one of significant duration. The competitive landscape and, therefore strategies, change quickly. Be prepared to be flexible enough to change direction accordingly.

But first and foremost, let’ s take off our blinkers!


Ruchira Chatterjee, MA, PMP, is a senior consultant with SPM Group, www.spmgroup.ca. With over 20 years of direct project management experience, Ruchira has led a number of highly successful programs and projects both in IT and business areas. She recently successfully directed the transition of a facilities management outsourcing program for a client representing $400 million annual revenue. She was the program director on a $35 million program related to wealth management system implementation resulting from an acquisition. She managed a program to bring about the operational and technology transformation of a property casualty business division. On multiple occasions she has held accountability for projects to bring about organizational changes, start up new departments and implement new processes. She has also managed a variety of technology projects related to such areas as conversions, expert systems implementations, vendor systems selection and implementations.

With a M.A in Economics from Calcutta University, India, Ruchira has also completed a Company sponsored Executive Management training program at Kellogg, Northwest University. She is a Project Management Professional (PMP) as certified by the Project Management Institute (PMI). Ruchira can be reached at [email protected]

Chicken, Egg, Process, Tool

A question often asked is how to sequence business process improvement initiatives relative to selection of a supporting application. General consensus from the customer’s perspective seems to be that process design should be undertaken first, followed by selecting the tool that best aligns to the resulting processes. The logic: We don’t want processes to be dictated to us by an application.

As a chicken that has been on both sides of the road, so to speak, I certainly have a deep appreciation for that viewpoint — no one wants to find their business needs compromised by software limitations. But, I have also laid a few eggs in the past by being a stubborn and myopic do-it-yourself customer, and my stance has been further tempered by implementation experience and best practice R&D the last eight years.

Certainly, in a perfect world, in-house staff would develop highly tailored processes specific to your unique objectives and the maturity level of your organization. Then, you would select an application, which would be seamlessly integrated into your processes at the touch of a button, and without a hint of compromise. But, to borrow from one of our customer tag lines, we don’t live in a perfect world, and that’s why you have vendors.

It’s also important to recognize that in today’s heavily automated business environments, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the tool and the process when all is said and done. With all that as a starting point, let me share a vendor perspective on the question, and make a case for why process development and tool configuration should be approached as an iterative, partnered effort.

Take stock of your process expertise

When embarking on any process improvement initiative, you should begin by analyzing the depth and breadth of organic process design experience that you can bring to bear on the given subject area. While I don’t want to infer that organizations aren’t competent in process improvement, you only know what you know, and you need to be realistic about the depth and availability of in-house expertise.

You are better off than most if you have a process architect in your company that has personal experience developing a particular process two or three times in a few different organizations. More likely, this level exceeds the collective experience of the entire process improvement team. While you can read and research and go to conferences for a more educated perspective on the situation, it will do little to bolster actual experience. The question is; is this enough? If you choose to just go with whatever limited experience you have, it may not get you what you really need, and could cost you plenty if it ends up simply propagating past process design issues that you need to alleviate.

Standards, alignment, and when compromise is your friend

The need for significant compromise is most common in organizations that choose to rely exclusively on internal expertise to redesign their processes. That usually indicates they have been self-reliant about a lot of things for a long time, which can have consequences.

When vendors design products, they do so to accommodate the widest possible interpretations of the most popular and successful methods of doing business that their target customers employ. This means that the majority of our customers do not have to make compromises of a magnitude that jeopardizes their success or objectives. There will always be matters of preference, technical considerations and differences in how to go about it, but vendors cannot stay on top for long by repeatedly failing to support the critical requirements of the customer base.

The reason this is important for customers to recognize is that if you find yourself routinely asking products to do things that the leading vendors can’t accommodate, it could be an indicator that you are trying to accomplish something that is out where the buses don’t run compared to accepted best practice. This should constitute a big red flag to the selection committee and process design team.

You could be that rare organization that is so unique or complex, compared to the rest of the modern business world, that your requirements have not yet been addressed. More often it is an indicator of what I call the Galapagos Effect — a condition where the organization becomes isolated because it lacks participation in industry forums and does not consider other sources of outside ideas. The result is that processes tend to evolve into strange animals over an extended period of time.

By not using outside support when the time comes for redesign, you risk continued divergence from industry standards. Even if these processes are working for you, when it comes to finding a supporting application, you may be constantly forced to either heavily customize off-the-shelf applications, build your own, or do without — all of which are expensive and frustrating propositions. Like a carnival sideshow figure, a peculiar process can have great personality and be loved by its mother, but it will still draw concerned stares from the town folk and be difficult to dress off the rack.

Independent process consultants

If you are determined to develop you processes independent of a tool, and realize you need assistance, you will most likely go to a business consulting service to obtain more experience. Many of these are highly respected and very good at what they do — but most of them cannot maintain the needed depth and range of contemporary tool expertise on all the latest releases of leading software applications.

We are in such a cycle of innovation and competition these days that tool design completely turns over about every two years, so an independent consultant’s past application experience becomes quickly outdated. Besides, you haven’t settled on any one product yet, anyway.

Bottom line, application-agnostic processes inherently limit the level of detail you can initially develop. Configuration and workflow automation details of the selected tool will likely surface a lot of considerations that haven’t been addressed, and they may force some adjustment of the original process design.

I’m not saying using a third-party consultant is a bad approach to take — just be aware that process development will most likely be a two-phase effort, and you will still have to employ the services of the application vendor to provide technology expertise. Make sure you factor that into your budget and time line.

The case for parallel development with a full service solution provider

A good solution provider will be able to supply a flexible and full featured software product, as well as provide broad industry experience and a significant amount of product-specific process development and adoption expertise. For example, at the company I work for, most of our business consultants have likely been through where you are today at some corporation, in addition to personally leading numerous product deployments, including process design. They are bona fide Crouching Chicken, Hidden Process Ninjas.

Finally, the most compelling consideration that isn’t often recognized is the degree of process innovation inherent in today’s product design and support. While customers fret over concerns that they will have to compromise too much, they may fail to appreciate that application vendors have the greatest exposure to latest approaches on process design and efficiency — specifically, what works and what doesn’t.

This means we can suggest new approaches and insights into how best to accomplish process improvement and integration that were probably never even on the radar of the in-house team. Best of all, they are in tool-specific context, so there is less potential for friction between process and technology. This asset often far outweighs any perceived liability of tool compromises.

Recognize that processes and tools are interdependent. An iterative approach to process design, tool configuration and joint validation often results in the best balance between leveraging latest innovations and highly functional processes. It also allows you to perform these steps in parallel rather than in series, shortening the overall project.

No one knows your business and its needs better than you do, but a good vendor adds specialized competencies that few independent consultants or in-house staff can provide. By combining the two, there is greater potential for quicker, lower risk, and more cost effective results.

So, the next time you are evaluating how to approach a process improvement initiative, consider looking for a full service vendor that can provide not only software and technical expertise but also be a trusted process design and integration partner. Take as much time and care looking at these capabilities as you do software functionality, and insist that they come from a single source. This will ensure alignment and avoid your being caught in the middle between the consulting group and software provider, pointing fingers at each other if conflicts arise.

Hey, if this sounds self-serving, it’s because I know we do this right and I’ve seen it done poorly a lot. Besides, if your Mom and Dad had told you this stuff, as you were growing up, you wouldn’t have to hear it off the virtual street from the likes of me!


Terry Doerscher has more than 24 years experience in practical process development, project management, PMO, business strategy, and work and resource management in construction, nuclear and IT fields. Mr. Doerscher is the Chief Solution Architect for Planview, an Austin-based software company dedicated to creating project portfolio management solutions. Mr. Doerscher also writes a blog, Enterprise Navigator, where he frequently discusses issues pertaining to portfolio management and IT, http://blogs.planview.com/tdoerscher/.

 

What to Expect From Your New Project Management System

You have heard about project management (PM) software. You are aware that many companies use it, but that those who do are typically large IT companies, or perhaps large construction companies. You might be wondering: “Would it fly in our place?” The answer is: Perhaps it would.

I remember many years ago, when I was a rather newly minted project management software instructor, speaking with someone who had attended a course that I had delivered approximately six months previously. He was working for a federal government department that had decided to push a certain scheduling tool out to all managers with the instructions “get some training on this tool – you are now all project managers.”

I asked this individual how he was doing with the software since the training. To paraphrase, he replied “Not so great. I thought this software was supposed to mean less work for me. Now, I have to build these schedules, think about the activities, how long they take, what order they must be performed in, who is working on them, track progress… etc. It’s a lot more work than I was doing before.” I asked him, “Were you not doing any of those things in any form before?” “No.” What this person had not understood prior to the training was that he was now expected to manage his project using the discipline of project management. He did not initially see that the tool’s job is to facilitate and automate a process that would be extremely cumbersome to manage otherwise.

“What about the benefits of all this work?” I replied. “Are you better able to anticipate workloads on your team? How about your ability to meet deadlines? Has that improved?” “Well – yes,” he replied. “Very much!”

Project management software: more than just a tool

The single biggest challenge to implementing a project management system is not the technology itself, but rather the discipline of an organization changing from a functional management process to a project management process. You may have heard some people say that project management software is simply a tool. If unused, it is merely a disc or two.

I recently purchased a sliding compound miter saw. I love this tool. I enjoy working with it, and I find myself looking for projects that require me to use it. I purchased it shortly after starting a crown molding project using a table saw. When it came down to the fine details, I just couldn’t get my table saw to easily do what I required of it. To get the job done right, you need good tools.

The same can be said for PM software. With the right tool, many organizations have embraced project management simply because the tool has allowed them to plan, execute, monitor and control their projects infinitely more efficiently than they could ever hope to otherwise.
The real benefit of PM software is that it automates what would otherwise be very difficult and time-consuming to perform manually. Just as a word processor does not guarantee a good novel, project management software does not guarantee a good plan, but it does set you on the road to building a better one. With good scheduling principles applied, it forces you to think about what needs to be done, how long it will take to complete, what order tasks must be performed in, whether you have the resource base to perform it within a limited time frame, and what it will likely cost.

Picking the right tool

You might find some applications easy for the average person to use upon startup but in the end limiting, when it comes to accounting for all of the reporting requirements that arise over time. When it comes to selecting a project management system, be careful in your selection process. Make sure that it does all the things you need it to do. Knowing what it needs to do requires that you take a good hard look at what you are doing now, and how your current methods fall short of your management requirements.

So what are some of the key requirements you may want to consider when looking for project management software? As a first consideration, you might want to examine whether you need to manage programs, or simply projects in isolation. The latter option is often employed by construction companies. Many of these firms are simply interested in developing a schedule of tasks over a given timeframe, often without the use of “resources” to plan and track who or what is required to complete the work.

Other organizations take things to the other end of the spectrum: managing programs of interconnected projects, resources and their related work assignments with associated project costs, all in a single database repository, accessed by windows-based and web-based client tools.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, consider that an application that stores all data in a single database will provide a better vehicle for maintaining consistent processes, reports, and data structures, such as a resource pool. It means that upper management can be provided with information from attributes that are made common to all projects to answer questions such as “How much are our West-coast projects doing as compared to our East-coast projects?” or “What division has the greatest return on investment?” For middle and line management, it can mean answering questions such as “What projects are my engineers working on?” and “Do we have the staff to complete our objectives by year end?”

When it comes to selecting a project management system, be sure to get some advice from those who have implemented their systems many times before and know the ins and outs. The implementation of these systems is not rocket science, but it does demand a process, and there are plenty of things to do wrong. Just ask a rocket scientist if he or she would dare to launch a rocket without the use of a good project management system. The key to the success of any system ultimately is in the hands of those who use it. The software itself may be filled with many features, but features are only valuable if they are put to use. Good and rigorous training is the key to this.

Project management software differs greatly from other desktop-type applications such as word-processors or electronic spreadsheets. If, for example, you choose to learn a word processor by yourself, you could probably start by simply typing a letter on day one, and then learn how to perform a mail-merge a month later, without losing any of the work you did on day one. On the other hand, with project management software, you really need to understand the basic mechanics of the entire system prior to using it. Your data should be defined with the correct level of detail, and in such a way that the system is able to carry out it’s most basic function: that is, to calculate activity dates. This is something that is typically not evident when a new user starts using a scheduling tool.

Get the right training

Training should typically come in three forms: initial tools training, which should cover the basic mechanics of the system; what it can and cannot do; customized training; after configuration, how the system is to be used in your organization, and finally, follow-up mentoring. This last step is where many organizations fall short. As an instructor of project management systems, I have met many individuals who completely understand the system during the initial training sessions, but soon forget the information in the months that follow due to lack of post-training practice.

In many software courses, each feature is typically taught once, with its functionality reinforced perhaps a second time during a follow-up exercise. This is often all that is required to understand a feature by itself; however, when combined with 30 to 60 other features over a three day course, many students are likely to feel slightly overwhelmed. Nobody ever walks away from a project management course ready to teach it to the next person, but with a bit of practice and familiarization with the system, most participants report within a few weeks that they are comfortable with, and enjoy using the system.

A final word of advice: if possible, establish a project management office (PMO). The members of the PMO typically provide support to the rest of the organization by standardizing and maintaining project management processes and procedures, as well as managing the system. These individuals usually become the system “gurus” who ensure that data structures are maintained, technical issues are dealt with efficiently, and that management is able to rely consistently on the information as being accurate, relevant, timely, and valuable. In short, a PMO will allow you to expect good things of your project management system.

, is Director of Product Knowledge with Project Management Centre and has been training and implementing project management systems since 1994.

 


Adrian Pierce, B. Com., PMP