Jul
02
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
July 2, 2008
I’ve been a Mac guy since the 80’s. My PC friends and I have been bantering over the differences for low these many years.
Like the debate over Mac and PC, there’s a lot of discussion in the project management community about Waterfall and Agile project management methods.
“Hi, I’m a PC, er… Waterfall.”
“Hi, I’m Agile.”
“So PC or Mac, what kind of project manager are you?” asks Bob Tame in a recent article for Projects@Work. “Hopefully, you recognize there is value in being both.”
Tame confesses to using a Mac, and earning his Scrum Master Certification earlier this year.
Click HERE to read the entire article and read more about which approach you should take into account for the unique characteristics of your projects.
Jul
02
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
July 2, 2008
High school juniors in Philadelphia are getting a jump-start on their careers. The School District of Philadelphia, DeVry University, Inc., the PMI Delaware Valley Chapter, and the Project Management Institute (PMI) Educational Foundation are underwriting a pilot program to teach students project management practices.
The “Philadelphia PM Project” will give students a solid introduction to project management. “In addition to the pilot course this summer,” says Cassandra W. Jones, Ed.D., interim chief academic officer for the School District of Philadelphia, “We will have pilots at Philadelphia high schools in the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009.”
Click HERE to read more about this exciting new program.
Jul
01
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
July 1, 2008
Imagine sitting atop several million pounds of thrust waiting to be launched into space—thinking about all the people, processes, and technology you were relying on to get you into orbit. That’s just what astronaut Andrew Allen says he did in the quiet moments just before launch.
In a brief InformationWeek article by Larry Greenemeier, he recaps Allen’s keynote at an InformationWeek Spring Conference held a couple of years ago. “You think about everyone who touched your vehicle,” said Allen. “You can’t help but think about all the things that could go wrong.”
Allen manages over 4,000 contractors for NASA and has some understanding of project management from both ends of the rocket. Project success comes down to preparation and managing risks, whether you’re launching the shuttle into space or managing a new software launch.
To read more of Allen’s comments, click HERE.
Jun
30
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 30, 2008
Chad Dickerson, CTO for InfoWorld, suggests that although new and ever more powerful tools help project managers work more effectively, “…good project management has very little to do with technology and everything to do with people working together efficiently and purposefully toward a common goal…”
“I have heard variations on the theme that a particular technology, or a not-yet-released piece of software, will be the magic ‘silver bullet’ for holes in a project,” says Dickerson. “The silver-bullet approach almost never works … Remember that technology is often like fire—it provides heat, but it can also burn.”
Click HERE to read Dickerson’s column, What Does It All Mean.
Jun
27
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 27, 2008
“One-size-fits-all project management approaches usually work about as well as on-size-fits-all shoes,” says Amy Schwab of Projects@Work. “For those that fit, they work wonderfully well. For those with bigger, smaller, wider, or differently conformed feet, the experience ranges from slightly uncomfortable to horribly painful.”
Schwab continues, “Too many project management methods—from waterfall to new agile methods—advertise themselves as the one-size-fits-all solution to an organization’s project challenges.”
To successfully manage projects, it’s important to size up your organization to better understand what methods will work the best for you. Schwab suggests the following three interrelated elements of a project’s success:
1- The person managing the project
2- The project itself
3- The organization doing the project
Schwab describes how to evaluate these three areas to ensure that you fit the project management methodology that best fits your organization.
To read the article, click HERE
Jun
26
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 26, 2008
“OK, so your project is in trouble and likely to become a statistic for project failure unless some immediate action is taken,” says Projects@Work’s Bruce Beer. “No amount of wishful thinking, praying to the PMI gods, or bashing your head against the nearest brick wall can turn the clock back. You have to begin the project recovery process.”
We all know that failing, or struggling projects are a fact of life; in fact every project manager is going to have his share of struggling projects. In his article Project Triage, Bruce Beer suggests that incorporating the principles of medical triage might help resuscitate a project gasping for breath.
“Remember the TV series M*A*S*H?” asks Beer. “Whenever they had an influx of injuries, the first thing they did was ‘triage,’ which is the process of prioritizing sick or injured people for treatment according to the seriousness of the condition or injury.”
Whether your project is behind schedule, over budget, under resourced, or facing poor quality deliverables, here’s a simple triage that might help save the patient.
1- Evaluate the overall condition of the project
2- Prioritize and tackle the most serious problems first
3- Determine if the project can be saved
4- Decide if you need to cut your losses and move on rather than waste time on fruitless intervention
To read Bruce Beer’s complete article, click HERE.
Jun
25
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 25, 2008
“With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the pace at which formally disparate parts of the organization must integrate has picked up,” says Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin in her article titled Inside the Sarbox: The Future of Project Management.
Cabanis-Brewin suggests that CEOs and financial officers can no longer claim they didn’t know what was going on in their organizations when risky projects, accounting irregularities, and shady deals end up on the front pages of newspapers.
Project managers have wanted more executive-level involvement for years. It looks like Sarbox is forcing the issue. “Project mangers will have all the executive attention they can stand … and then some,” says Cabanis-Brewin. “It’s a classic case of getting what you wished for.”
Managing Risk and Knowing What’s Going On
To effectively manage risk, managers and executives need to know what’s going on within individual projects in their portfolio. Start digging into your projects and you will find that one enterprise issue is connected to another. Cabanis-Brewin asserts that, “The integrative skills that are the souls of project management have never been more needed by organizations; the pressure to perform them effectively never more intense.”
Are you seeing this in your organization? What do you think?
To read the entire article by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin, click HERE.
Jun
24
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 24, 2008
Project management is bigger than the software, the analysts, and the white papers. In a recent article on www.developer.com, Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin talks about three reasons that the rank-and-file of project management should not only welcome but embrace project and portfolio management (PPM) initiatives.
1- PPM brings realism to the organization’s planning process. Decision makers consider a lot of very worthwhile projects. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have the unlimited resources that would be required to do them all. Effective PPM allows organizations to evaluate and prioritize projects based upon the resources available and how well they align with corporate strategy and financial goals.
2- PPM brings rationality in the allocation of resources, both human and financial. A successful PPM process helps organizations maximize their resources to get the most done with the capabilities they have. Establishing budgets (for both dollars and human resources) is an important part of the process. Cabanis-Brewin says, “For some companies the scarcest resource isn’t money but project managers. A critical factor in project selection becomes: Do we have a PM who can manage it?”
3- PPM brings visibility to project work and project people. It’s very important to know who’s working on what and how they’re doing. PPM software must allow executives and project managers to drill into every project and view project status in real time. “The recent trend toward improved resource tracking and leveling functionality in PM software is a great boon to the portfolio manager,” says Cabanis-Brewin.
To read the complete article, click HERE.
Jun
23
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 23, 2008
According to Jonathan Feldman of InformationWeek, there are 10 steps to effective PPM:
1- Enlist other disciplines to be part of the PPM team
2- Steal good ideas from others rather than creating from scratch, but customize
3- Teach IT staff that it’s OK to shoot bad projects and move on
4- Use business language to articulate capacity planning, prioritization, and trade-off decisions
5- Identify the process that works with your organization before purchasing software
6- Measure work capacity
7- Build visibility of metrics
8- Enlist support at all levels of the organization
9- Evaluate and track small projects using less-formal methods
10- Treat violations of PPM rules as violations of company policy
Of course, making a list of rules and actually applying them to business processes are two different things. To read all of Mr. Feldman’s article, click HERE.
Jun
20
Posted by Ty Kiisel on
June 20, 2008
According to Bob Lewis of InfoWorld, “Following good project management practices—the right steps in the right order—is a darn good idea, but it’s insufficient. Effective project management isn’t a cookbook exercise. You can’t just follow the recipe and be sure the cookies will come out tasty.”
Lewis suggests that in most organizations, project management is a bridge position between staff and management. Hence, once a project manager has proven him or herself as a capable manager, they’re moved up the organization chart. He suggests this handicaps many projects because project management is filled with inexperienced managers without the background to get the most out of PPM best practices.
“Create a project management career path,” says Lewis. “Stop worrying about employing project management methodologies and start worrying about employing strong project managers.”
Does this ring true in your organization? What do you think?
To read the InfoWorld article, click HERE.
Subscribe to RSS Feed