Customer facing projects

Round out your list of growth and efficiency projects with customer-facing initiatives that drive intimacy and satisfaction. Getting closer to your customers adds extra growth potential to your IT project portfolio. ...

... "Campbell describes TfL's new IT strategy as highly customer focused. He plans a string of customer-facing projects ... " ...

Via Computer Weekly: TfL CIO Ian Campbell

Project stakeholder satisfaction

Do you track stakeholder satisfaction during your project? Besides the sponsor, have you identified any other stakeholders worth consulting? Identifying and engaging your stakeholders can position your project for success. Read on for insights into stakeholder engagement. ...

... "One of the best ways to do this is to work with IT project stakeholders -- the people who will be affected in some way, shape or form by the result of the project. " ...

Via SearchCIO for the Mid-Market: Communication with IT project stakeholders

Clean data pays off

Data quality projects are hard to justify. Here's some business value anecdotes to help with the next business case -- cleaner data can drive increased revenues. ...

... "With information managed more effectively, Oliver estimates that you can encourage a typical supporter to spend 25 per cent more by using targeted promotions. However, building a clean database of accurate information is the vital first step. " ...

Via The Irish Times: Data is the team player

PMO Focus + Flexibility = Value

How project management offices (PMOs) function differs as widely as the organizations they serve.

A PMO may oversee and execute projects, implement process improvements, serve as a center of excellence, or align projects to the organization’s strategy.

The consensus seems to be that the more focused and flexible the PMO is, the higher the chances are that it delivers value to the organization—and that is the ultimate goal.

Read more...PMI - Community Post

Map Process on path to Improvement

Steps to improving business processes, include mapping and characterizing the current state. ...

... "Verify the Process Map: Gaining Buy-in — In Step 5, the process map is reviewed to be sure that it accurately reflects the existing process. " ...

Via Chem.Info: Steps to Business Process Improvement

Operating Cost Impacts in Project Business Case

Cost transparency involves educating the governance team about the impact of today's investments on tommorrow's operating costs. ...

... "Factoring in costs of collateral impact should also happen at the project management phase as applications are being developed. While an organisation's impact metric might state that a new application for 1000 users will require five help desk people ... " ...

Via Computerworld, NZ: IT cost calculations

Project Management Forces

The Next Business Intelligence Project

Business intelligence is a critical investment area in many enterprises. BI projects focus on creating the data warehouse, Extract/transforms/loads, report library, and portal delivery, for example. The opportunity is in making sense of the data, especially market information that provides unique insight that you can obtain faster and more accurately than your competition. Now, that would make an interesting business case for your next BI project proposal. ...

... "Clark, like many data visualizers, believes we're on the front end of a revolution in information presentation. There's a lot of work done called scientific visualization or business intelligence graphics ... " ...

Via Harvard Business Review: Twitter Data Analysis

Measuring Innovation Performance

Innovation measurement should go beyond ... the count of research projects at each stage-gate and the NPV of the portfolio ... to culture metrics that sense the breadth and depth of the spirit of innovation. ...

... "Quantitative metrics in this area may be more activity-oriented, i.e., how many people are participating in innovation efforts and what percent of employees have been trained in creative or strategic thinking disciplines ... " ...

Via Blogging Innovation: Innovation Metrics Strategy

Act on Ideas

Projects and product enhancements at Google start as ideas and gather momentum through actions that influence and garner support. ...

... "Many products and product improvements at Google start with one person having an idea, sketching it out, showing a prototype to others, getting feedback, and soliciting support from others. " ...

Via Poyner: Google projects

New ISO Standard for Project Management: Is this Necessary?

For those who haven't heard, there is a new ISO standard being developed for project management ---- ISO 21500.

Considering that PMI standards are already establshed internationally, the first question that comes to my mind is "why?"

Apparently, this standard will build on existing global standards, and will incorporate the work of a number of national standards as well. The project brief for the effort claims that there is a need for common terminology in the face of multiple standards, and that the ISO name recognition goes beyond project management circles, thus gaining broader accceptance.

I'd be curious to hear from others. Is there a compelling need for this? Is there room for another standard, even if this one is from a recognized body like ISO? Does this help or hurt PMI (i.e. can it help PMI by opening up new avenues for promoting project management?). What happens if the two major standards bodies conflict?

My personal opinion is that there will be minimal impact to PMI. PMI standards are well established. The PMP (and now PgMP) credential is sought after by organizations looking to staff and individuals looking to boost their credibility. PMI will probably align with the ISO standard anyway. The ISO standard will probably only serve to augment the industry with additional credibility and recognition. PMI will continute to flourish through its maturity and its focus on community.

Here's the announcement from ISO about their new standard...

Project managers keep your team on task

Case is made for focusing team members on as few tasks as possible ... ideally, the critical path. ...

... "Studies have shown that our brains switch between one activity and another (called executive control). We really don't do two things at once very well. " ...

Via Teamwork and Leadership Blog: Multi-tasking?

Agile predicts, senses, and responds

Robert Kaplan sees agile techniques applied to business, where information is leveraged to support prediction and modeling of strategic responses. ...

... "It's also keeping track of competitive forces as well, to be able to offset that. But the front end of agility is information because it's what you're being agile with respect to. " ...

Via SearchCIO: Robert Kaplan, Balanced Scorecard

Project management maturity assessment

Scenario Planning IT Problems and Outages

While planning for problems is a valuable exercise on projects, application management and support groups need to perform periodic risk assessments of critical business systems as user adoption evolves over time after the original implementation is complete. Are your business continuity plans fresh enuf to serve your enterprise during the next glitch? ...

... "Risk management exercises — reviewing likely scenarios of failure and preparing for them — should be a part of every IT project. Huge catastrophic glitches aside, the day-to-day glitches also add up ... " ...

Via ZDNet: Software glitches

The Data Center Consolidation Project

Data center consolidation projects are not out of fashion yet. NYC and the feds move to consolidate their sprawling infrastructure to gain financial and energy efficiencies. ...

NYC Data Center Consolidation via InformationWeek: "current IT infrastructure of New York City is fragmented, with more than 50 unique data centers serving nearly 48 city agencies, many located in prime commercial real estate space. " NYC IT plans overhaul of data infrastructure: "The consolidation will lower the City’s cost of operations by up to $100 million over five years, reduce energy consumption and emissions, strengthen security, and improve overall IT service quality for agencies."

Federal Data Center Consolidation via Data Center Knowledge: Agencies are challenged to ... "prepare an inventory of the IT assets by April 30 and develop a preliminary data center consolidation plan by June 30. " by Federal CIO.

Project Goals and Team Members

Keep a pulse of your project team members, especially off-line, to surface any mis-alignments before they derail your critical path. ...

... "find a way to surface the underlying goals and expectations of project participants. This may involve private meetings, group discussions, or perhaps even a combination of sorcerer’s potions ... " ...

Via ZDNet: IT gridlock

Intel Data Center Strategies Drive Business Value

Top 100 Project Management Blogs

I was recently notified about a great list of the Top 100 Project Management blogs on a construction industry blog called The Fixer Upper. It's a pretty comprehensive list, with great descriptions of each of the blogs. I was of course pleased to see PMThink made the list.

Check out the list here. You're bound to find some excellent blogs, some of which you may not have heard of.

Structural IT Business Alignment

Use Business Value Dials to Steer IT

Business value dials are used to align IT with customer (internal client) objectives in this framework for measuring the business value of information technology. ...

Via Intel Press: Measure Business Value of IT (PDF)

What does it take to be GREAT?

Obviously one must have technical project management capabilities. But that is NOT enough to be a GREAT project manager. To be called upon to lead the most important projects, one must also have backbone, leadership skills and the ability to think broadly as well as in detail.

1) Backbone – You have to be willing to take on a tough project and tell the TRUTH to people who may not want to hear it; people who are powerful and who influence your career and income.

2) Leadership – This covers a lot including timely decision-making under pressure. Your team members need to know that you have their back and you will stand up and say “they did a great job” when things are going well and “it is my fault” when something goes wrong. See also BACKBONE.

3) Broad and detailed thinking (the PMO Executive Council calls this "seeing the forest AND the trees") - there are some people who can think “big picture” and strategicially but have no tolerance for details; there are many people who can think in details but lose sight of the big picture; there are fewer people who can create a big picture that everyone can rally around as well as break that picture down into all of its pixels and then lead the effort to build it one pixel at a time. See also LEADERSHIP.

Note that none of these can really be tested in a multiple-choice exam. They often come as part of someone's "chemical make-up" or DNA. This is why, despite my PMP designation, when I am hiring PM's, I look for evidence of these characteristics as well as clear expertise in the use of solid project management practices. And as a manager of project managers, it is important to support and nurture these elements. If you do that, your team of PMs will be well on the way to being a GREAT success!

Resource Capacity: Where Have All My People Gone?

My friend and colleague Terry Doerscher, Chief Process Architect at Planview, has a superb blog called Enterprise Navigator, and recently posted an excerpt from his upcoming book, Taming Change with Portfolio Management, which he co-authored with Planview CEO Pat Durbin.

The excerpt talks about resource capacity planning and reveals a startling fact: For an average staff of 500 people, there's only enough capacity for about 12 medium sized projects at any given time! Thus it's no surprise when similar sized organizations flounder in their attempts to take on hundreds of projects.

Where does all this capacity go? For the answer, read on..

PS: This supports my longtime stance that many organizations suffer from a lack of strategic focus, and try to take on too many parallel initiatives as compared with their capacity to deliver. In essence, they plan to infinite capacity.

Project Milestones

Create good project milestones with bite-sized tasks and celebrate them routinely to create high-performance teams. ... Via Tom Peters: http://bit.ly/alY5fC

Cloud Email Project in LA

LA government moves to outsourced cloud-based email solution (Google's Gmail) and will demonstrate the effectiveness of the cloud in supporting an enterprise solution, while delivering tangible savings to the city. ...

... "Los Angeles is now slowly marching toward a full implementation of Gmail for the city work force. If successful, the project could open the floodgates for other governments that are awaiting a successful test case ... " ...

Via Government Technology: Cloud-Based E-Mail

CIO CFO Alignment

CIO CFO alignment can be built on a partnership of business value, metrics, and governance. ...

... "So engage the CFO on a shared set of requirements and implementation actions. Then follow up with outcomes that can be tracked to common measures ... " ...

Via Baseline: CIO-CFO Partnership

Stabilization Phase of Projects

Often, there is a short support period after a project phase is completed and the team moves on to the next phase as planned in the schedule. State of Georgia meets with some success by planning for the stabilization phase and slowing down the phases, as necessary, to bring the organization and process to a stable state prior to next-phase kickoff. ...

... "Still, Moore said the biggest challenge has been holding vendors back from launching new phases of the project before agency managers were ready." ...

Via Stateline: Making IT work in state government

Project Police

The project police use portfolio visibility to control the funding lever at the VA, if project performance degrades. ...

... "The new evaluation system temporarily stops projects that miss incremental, 6-month milestones to determine whether to spend more money rejuvenating them or permanently end them. " ...

Via Next Gov: VA IT Projects

The Open Innovation Bridge

Personal networking across organizational and enterprise boundaries enables open innovation to flourish.

Agile meets DCMA

An interesting debate at a program meeting last week - the DCMA 14 point analysis was being summarised for a group using Agile methodology. The sponsor for the program is a government agency and software development is being done by one of the well known large contracting companies. Major features of the required system are well described but not so for many of the details. For one of the phases, the contractor proposed using an Agile approach with month long sprint cycles. The government still has to use earned value methods for reporting project progress and demonstrating sound management to the Government Accountability Office.

So we have the Agile project plan which includes time-bound sprint cycles with a backlog list approach to scope of deliverables in each cycle. And on the other side is scoring the project for compliance with the 14 points.

For those who haven't come across them, the DCMA 14 points are a way of assessing the structure of a project, typically adversely scoring items like 'tasks without predecessors or successors' or 'delays between linked tasks'. The first attempt at putting together a project plan to represent sprint cycles strained the DCMA scores on leads and lags and date constraints. It will be interesting to see how the second attempt comes out.

Lean Partner Teams

The integration of enterprises through global sourcing strategies is a common occurrence today. As part of its sustainability strategy, Nike works with its partners in the value chain to drive principles to the team level and develop an empowered extended workforce. ...

... "Lean principles put the decision making closer to the worker through skill building, teamwork and understanding quality over quantity. HRM builds the factory’s managerial capacity and helps them value an empowered workforce. " ...

Via Nike: Sustainability Strategy

Social Media and Project Management: Elizabeth Harrin's Pioneering Research

I was speaking recently with Elizabeth Harrin of the amazing and award-winning blog "A Girl's Guide to Project Management." Elizabeth is a fellow member of PMI's New Media Council, and is working on a book on how social media changes the way we manage projects. This book is very timely, and much needed in the project management space.

Here's what Elizabeth has to say about it...

The aim of my new book, which is provisionally titled Social Media for Project Managers, is to look at how Web 2.0 tools like social media and enterprise collaboration software can make a positive difference for the running of projects. It's a very practical book, with guidelines on how you can implement this kind of technology on your projects.

There has been a lot written about how to use social media for marketing, but not a lot about how organisations can use the same principles to improve collaboration and team work within their company walls. This book aims to fill the gap.

Just scanning through the survey results has given me an interesting glimpse into how people are using social media and what for, in relation to a project environment. The survey closes at the end of the month, and I'll be sharing the results after that.

For those who want to take the survey, here's your last chance! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B6JVSY9