Innovation: Learn From Experiments ...

Increase your cycles of learning. Tom Kelley explores the culture of innovation, where learning faster than the competition drives competitive advantage. ...

... "Rely on The Experimenter to increase your organization's rate of enlightened trial and error. If you learn from each experiment, and run those experiments quicker and cheaper than others in your industry, you can accumulate more insights and convert them into value at a faster pace. " ...

Innovation: Learn From Experiments: Via Fast Company Now

Innovation: Reward Failure? ...

Tom Peters shares his thoughts on excellence, circa 2005. Here's one on innovation and failure. ...

... "Fail. Forward. Fast. (Reward Excellent Failures, Punish Mediocre Successes.) " ...

Innovation: Reward Failure?: tompeters!: Déjà Vu All Over Again ...

Innovation: Agile Project Teams ...

Companies are trying to break out of "commodity hell" through new product innovation. Embracing innovation requires acceptance that most projects fail and that project teams must be agile - quick, light, etc. Every "failure" yields something of value: data, information, experience, learning, prototypes ... which must be leveraged and reinvested to continue the hunt for the next great idea. ...

... "Bezos isn't just stubborn. He makes his constant experimentation economical by keeping project teams small and nimble. That way, even when they fail, they haven't spent much time or money. " ...

Innovation: Agile Project Teams: Via Business Week: Building An Idea Factory

Enterprise Project Management Software Industry ...

Competition in enterprise project management EPM software space is cut-throat. But, this behavior is crazy. ...

... "From October 2001 until July 2002, Business Engine used the passwords to gain unauthorized access to Niku's systems more than 6,000 times and downloaded over 1,000 confidential documents containing trade secrets, the complaint alleged. " ...

Enterprise Project Management Software Industry: Former software chief admits stealing trade secrets | Via Tech News on ZDNet

CIO ITStrategy: XBox Approach ...

Gartner recommends that we expand our horizons and understand emerging and consumer technologies to support the next wave of IT strategy. ...

... "The analyst group says technology professionals should see, touch and use at least three of the following in 2006: 1. Web based micro-applications such as Writely.com or Num Sum; 2. Flickr; 3. A new generation of consoles such as Nintendo Revolution or Xbox 360; " ...

CIO ITStrategy: XBox Approach: Via CNET: Gartner: IT managers should use Xbox ...



IBM delivers Power-based chip for Microsoft Xbox 360 worldwide launch: "Microsoft's aggressive timetable required that IBM take the Xbox 360 chip design from concept to full execution in just 24 months, said Ilan Spillinger, IBM Distinguished Engineer and director of the IBM Design Center for Xbox 360. IBM's success in delivering the chip to meet Microsoft's worldwide launch illustrates our commitment to innovative processor design that builds on IBM's wealth of intellectual property. The Xbox 360 project called upon the full range of IBM's On Demand technology capabilities, including our Engineering & Technology Services unit for custom design work and our world wide manufacturing resources to meet the aggressive time to market demands for this advanced microprocessor, said Jim Comfort, vice president and Strategic Client Executive, IBM Systems and Technology Group."

Project Management Baby Steps; Start Simple

One of the biggest mistakes organizations do when trying to roll out project management practices is start with a big-bang approach. Project management success does not happen overnight. Best to start with a good set of values or principles, and very lean processes.

Have you ever seen people on the dance floor who recently learned to dance? They're so busy looking at their feet and counting that they forget to have fun and feel the music.

Same thing with learning the guitar, which is probably an even better example. Better to start by learning some simple chords, so you can start playing some tunes and feel good about accomplishing something (in my day, everyone started by learning to play Neil Young's "Heart of Gold"). Then you can learn theory. In fact some of the best players never even learned theory or "playing by the rules" (including the Beatles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and others). Boy I'm dating myself.

It's the same with project management. Understand the principles first. Learn some basic lean processes (i.e. solve the problem, define the goals and requirements, document the scope, develop a plan... you get the idea). Then learn all the methods and rules for your toolbox.

Then break all the rules and focus on results and passion. Same as playing the guitar.

Project Management Heresy; Is Gold-Plating Really that Bad?

PMI has drilled it into our heads for years about the perils of gold-plating, and how we need to focus on just meeting requirements, yada yada yada.

Yet, when I think back to the most exciting work that I had done (years ago), it was when I had met with a client (a customer service specialist) to look into a simple request to develop a few reports. She needed this so she could have more information readily available to solve customers' problems. I watched this person work for a while and felt immediate pain at what she had to go through to resolve customer problems and take orders over the phone.

She had to make a zillion phone calls and run back and forth to the plant flooor to see the status of an order, most of the time calling the customer back hours or days later. I went back to my team, and we decided it would be just as easy to give her an online "dashboard" right from her primary order inquiry screen (this was before dashboards were popular).

From there, she could see inventory allocation, and at what point material would be in stock to complete the finished products for the order, as well as other related info. She could track the customer's products from order through manufacturing. This saved her daily walks to the plant floor. Not only that, she could now address her customers' problems while they were on the phone!

Upon seeing the impact this made, we then asked if she'd also like to be able to look up shipping information, delivery tracking, and accounts receivable as well, and of course she was overjoyed. The system revolutionized customer service for this company.

One might call this gold-plating, but I call it excitement. We were excited about making a huge difference in the ability of the client to solve problems, and the client was excited to offer this benefit to her customers. Of course, I first watched the client in action so I could easily tell what was needed, so this was still a pragmatic approach.

As long as innovations have a practical use, then it's not really gold-plating. It's gold.

In our relentless pursuit of "meeting requirements" and "attaining better efficiency", let's not forget that passion and excitement can energize teams and customers, and often leads to further innovations. Above all, it leads to action and movement! Ironically, this critical mass can increase throughput even better than traditional efficiency and scheduling methods. Bottom Line: We need to bring passion and creativity back into the workforce!

SAP Project Management Strategy: Public Education Industry ...

One of the keys to SAP / ERP implementation success is to develop a repeatable project strategy and build on that for future implementations of modules and feature/function points. Demir Barlas profiles a successful SAP project and change management strategy in the public education space, by Orange County Public Schools system. ...

SAP Project Management Strategy: Public Education Industry: Via Line56.com: SAP Education Benefits ...

... "The important factor going forward is that OCPS has already worked out a change and project management strategy that is in place for its upcoming functionality expansion. " ...

SAP has a history of delivering successful ERP solutions in public education. ...

Via SAP: Public Schools Improve Operations with SAP® E-Solutions: Intranet Resource Frees Teacher and Administrator Time for Better Education of Students ...

... "SAP Public Services Inc., a subsidiary of SAP America, Inc., which is itself a subsidiary of SAP AG (NYSE ADR: SAP), showcases the successful implementation of three K-12 customers that have selected SAP e-solutions to manage budgets, track student and employee records, and streamline district operations. Seattle School District No. 1, Oklahoma City School District, and Polk County Public Schools (FL), each chose a comprehensive SAP solution to more efficiently, transparently, and cost-effectively operate and manage their respective districts. SAP is the world's leading provider of e-business software solutions. " ...

Project Portfolio Management: CA Clarity Best in Europe ...

CA recognized as "Best" solution and vendor by European IT execs at Gartner project portfolio management PPM conference. ...

Project Portfolio Management: CA Clarity Best in Europe: Via CA: CA's Clarity Voted Best Solution and Best Vendor at Gartner Project and Portfolio Management Summit ...

... "CA (NYSE: CA) announced that it was voted Best Vendor and Best Solution for its Clarity system at the 2005 Gartner Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Summit Europe. This is the fourth consecutive PPM Summit Best Vendor award for CA's Clarity (formerly Niku). The Gartner PPM Innovation Awards recognize technology and service providers for their solutions, programs, service and support. IT executives representing key business decision makers driving PPM adoption and implementation voted on the awards at the PPM Summit, Nov. 30 - Dec. 2 in Lisbon, Portugal. " ...

ITGovernance: Software Quality Assurance ...

Paul Krill reports on the next wave of software capabilities planned by Compuware and NextWave. ...

ITGovernance: Software Quality Assurance: Via Computerworld: Ajax, app quality enhancements are readied ...

... "CARS 5.1 has been integrated with the Compuware Changepoint IT governance solution. A subset of Changepoint capabilities for request management, knowledge management, and reporting are featured in CARS 5.1. " ...

Compuware introduces IT governance solution that provides metrics for software development: a quality index. ...

Via Compuware: CARS 5.0 Provides Maximum Business Value to QA Organizations Through the Implementation of Effective Governance Models to Deliver Reliable Business Applications ...

... "One of the major challenges facing CIOs today is maximizing the business value of IT investments. CIOs know that business value means shareholder value, and increased shareholder value means revenue growth and/or improved operating margins. Previously, these types of goals were left up to the business managers to accomplish through business initiatives. Now business is increasingly looking towards IT to not only be linked with these initiatives, but also to be an enabler to accomplish these goals. With CARS 5.0, Quality Governance™ enables IT organizations to deliver the processes, systems and metrics to accurately assess the value, cost, risk and performance of the services they provide. By integrating with Compuware IT Governance by Changepoint, project portfolios that contain development projects will benefit from new metrics that communicate a software quality index. This integration not only increases the accuracy of tracking and evaluating a project’s health and risk, it also reduces the administrative burden of collecting and entering data into multiple systems for reporting. CARS provides CIOs with more detailed metrics about the quality of the application portfolio. This improves decision-making, and allows for better alignment with the business. " ...

Low Intensity Project Management

It's interesting how ideas resurface from time to time. Here's one that was coined a couple of years ago and came back during a discussion of project management maturity assessment recently. Low Intesity Project Management describes an approach to Project Management in circumstances where there is little appetite for a formal methodology. It involves an experimental approach to introducing low profile, low effort project management activities in the expectation that some of them will stick. To one steeped in traditional project management, this might also appear to be a low value approach that would, at best, get an organisation to level 2 (planned) maturity. In any case, it's interesting to re-read the article and identify some of the classic environmental characteristics that make project management such a tough sell.
Low Intensity Project Management

Project Management Continuous Improvement ...

Project management offices (PMO) perform, at a minimum, an assessment or debriefing of projects during close-out. Those lessons-learned need to be incorporated into a continuous improvement program to drive project management maturity and quality higher. Recent government report demonstrates that lessons-learned from government IT projects are not really learned from until root causes are identified and/or process defects are eliminated. ...

Via IT Week: Project breakdowns avoidable, says MPs report ...

... "Major government IT project failures over the past decade could have been avoided by learning from past mistakes, according to MPs. " ...

Via Committee of Public Accounts, UK Parliament: SEVENTEENTH REPORT: ACHIEVING VALUE FOR MONEY IN THE DELIVERY OF PUBLIC SERVICES ...

... "The Committee has identified seven key areas which departments need to focus on if improvements in the delivery of public services and their efficiency are to be achieved: planning carefully prior to implementation; strengthening project management; " ...

Situational Project Management Model; Not One Size Fits All

Companies often roll out complex, rigid project management processes, and what happens is that the novices abandon them as soon as a project gets hairy, and the veterans ignore them completely. Enter the Dynamic Baseline Model for Project Management, created by Mark Seely and Quang P. Duong in 1999.

From a high level, the premise is that, depending on the level of experience of the project manager, among other factors, they can be led by Rules, Methods, Objectives, or Values. This flexible approach is much more realistic and is more likely to be successful.

For the details, check out Max Wideman's presentation on the model below...

The Dynamic Baseline Model� For Project Management

Project Management Myths

Glen Alleman has an interesting post on his Herding Cats blog. He talks about the three erroneous assumptions of traditional project management. He raises some good points that again support an agile, realistic approach to projects.

Above all, he points out the myth that "accurate predictions of project duration and resource demands are possible once the requirements have been determined." On many projects, especially in the IT field, these things are discovered well into the project, which is why an agile, or at least a rollling wave approach makes sense (where phases are planned as their horizon approaches).

It's a shame the PPM acronym is already taken, or I'd use the term "Pragmatic Project Management" to define these more forward-thinking approaches.

I do agree with one person's posted comment though that change requests should at least be tracked and approved, assuming they impact any promised deliverables or target dates. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Herding Cats: Three Erroneous Assumptions of Traditional Project Management

Why Are Projects Over Budget?

It's a project management epidemic. For years now, the figures have remained pretty much the same. Seventy-five percent project failure rates, many of which come in over budget.

I believe there are three reasons for this.

1) Project managers not tracking the budget closely enough. My view on this is that this is the least frequent reason. Project managers are under siege to monitor costs closely (and it's an indelible part of the process in some organizations), and still the projects don't come in on budget.

2) Bad estimates. Now we're getting closer. Are we learning from mistakes? Do we have checklists to alert us to necessary resources and standard execution times for tasks? If so, much of this can be remedied fairly easily.

3) Pressure to lowball the budget to get the project approved. Ah-ha! This is the silent killer of projects. I contend that project managers frequently either feel compelled to promise a low budget or are pressured to succumb to a low budget in order to get a project approved, and that this is the reason why most projects end up over budget.

In a worst-case scenario, all three reasons exist (and, indeed, this happens more often than we care to admit), but I contend that the third is the most overlooked cause of project failures.

Lesson: Don't feel pressured to come in with a lower budget than you anticipate the project will really need. Stick to your guns when it comes to presenting the case. If the project gets declined, you're better off.

SOX SarbanesOxley: IT Asset Management: Webinar

Peregrine and Protiviti collaborate in Web Seminar, Dec 8, on driving SOX Sarbanes-Oxley compliance through better management of information technology assets. ...

Via Peregrine: Peregrine Systems and Protiviti to Participate in InformationWeek TechWebCast on Sarbanes-Oxley and the Role of IT Asset Management ...

... "The WebCast will take place on Thursday, December 8 at 9:00 a.m. PST, and will discuss how organizations can minimize the total cost of ownership for IT assets and mitigate the risks associated with software audits. Although a number of major milestones have been met since Sarbanes-Oxley regulations were enacted in 2002, there is still a long way to go to achieve effective long-term compliance, especially within the IT organization. During this discussion, experts from Peregrine and Protiviti will draw on their experience working with business and technology leaders to offer advice on what's necessary to meet Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements and discuss a fast track approach to establishing leading IT Asset Management practices. " ...

IT Governance: Management Business Model ...

GM CIO, Ralph Szygenda, is advancing the state of IT governance through an aggressive information technology business model that drives competition and cooperation across a group of core outsourcing vendors. Stan Gibson explores the outsourcing plan at General Motors through interview with Ralph Szygenda. ...

IT Governance: Management Business Model: Via eWeek: GM Takes Wraps Off Outsourcing Model ...

... "Szygenda said he believes he and his team have developed an IT management business model that will be used widely in the decades ahead, one that will not only make IT governance more effective but also enable IT providers to streamline their own operations in becoming more standardized. " ...

Project Management: A Global Career Opportunity ...

It's clear that all around the world, the project management career path is seen as a growth opportunity for the future. Valerie Khoo explores the project management career. ...

Project Management: A Global Career Opportunity: Via The Age: The perfect job for organised people ...

... "Markus Meier-Lindner, corporate services manager for the Australian Institute of Project Management, says project management is a growth area. Dedicated project offices are already established at many organisations as they seek to manage whole portfolios of projects simultaneously, he says. " ...

Matrix management for Project Teams

Reading Kerzner recently on project management maturity, an important principle was reinforced - effectiveness of the organisation in matrix management of project team members is a requirement for level 3 maturity. In this context, matrix management usually refers to dual management of individuals making up the project team. The first, traditional management line is the functional one - e.g. engineering, procurement, design, accounting. The second is the project organisation under which the project manager directs the resources for the effective execution of the project to deliver the product - and sometimes appears under the title 'product management'.
Since a project is, by definition, temporary in nature it can be difficult to visualise a permanent matrix organisation since only the functional management dimension is permanent. Worse, there may be multiple projects on which team members would work so there could be multiple reporting lines for a team member. If you add in recent trends towards individuals having more than one functional responsibility the situation can be terribly complicated.
Looking for some additional insight into the issue, I came across this paper from the Journal of Management. It describes the continuum of matrix management styles and discusses the influences at work. One really important point is that the success of any level of matrix organisation depends on the quality of communication across the different management dimensions. Of course - aren't we always crying out for effective communication? Well, yes. But this is more - it's not only sharing information, it also implies the effective receipt and approeciation of the communicated information. There's more gold in the article and it deserves reading in full.
Journal of Management: Cross-functional structures: a review and integration of matrix organization and project management

PMO Lessons From Toyota; Support Project Managers First!

More great lessons from Toyota. This report from F.R. Parth of Project Auditors shows how Toyota Financial Services learned from previous false starts at Toyota in creating a PMO and finally figured out the right way to do it. Some key lessons are:

1) A PMO must begin by supporting project managers first, and management second (this is consistent with the philosophy of my colleague on the PMI Program and Portfolio Management Standards leadership team, Claude Emond, who has made the same statement quite often).

2) Like anything of lasting value, a PMO is not created overnight. Full maturity can take up to 3 years, and full benefits can take up to 5.

3) Organizational resistance can be expected to be high. First solve project managers' pain points and develop basic project management processes (with their input). Gain support and credibility at the operational levels, and then evolve to auditing projects and supporting executives with strategic portfolio management and metrics.

By starting with a traffic cop or cost control mentality, you might as well pack it up now because the PMO won't get past the initial resistance.

Here's the full report, which not only outlines how this PMO is achieving success, but also shows why the earlier ones failed...

Frank Parth Publications / project management articles / white paper