Journyx Project Management Blog

As even the greenest of project managers knows, without individual accountability and responsibility, projects will tend to flounder. However, those individuals who know from experience to stay rooted in accountability will achieve success.

Like individual projects, the success of an organization’s culture also stems from accountability. Regardless of his or her title–Chief Project Officer, program manager, or project management office director–this individual drives and is accountable for the organization’s project management culture.

The word “individual” is key, because accountability is the responsibility of one person and should remain so; when it’s shared, something as complex as culture grows even more fraught with potential pitfalls.

Read more at: http://www.chiefprojectofficer.com/article/177

November 15, 2005 marks the one year anniversary for compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which requires internal controls over the creation of financial reports.

In the past year or more, companies have approached compliance with Section 404 as a project, but have not leveraged this to improve business efficiencies, reduce risk and improve effectiveness. In many cases, companies have implemented manual methods, which have led to significant costs.

SOX compliance overall is costing businesses millions of dollars. A March 2005 survey by Financial Executives International shows that first year SOX 404 compliance costs averaged $4.36 million per company, and large companies with more than $5 billion in revenues spent more than $10 millions per company.

Read more at: http://www.s-ox.com/Feature/detail.cfm?ArticleID=1331

The project management paradigm has been shifting in recent years away from a top down view of how projects are managed toward a more collaborative model. And, in many cases, task interdependence and member distribution across time, space, and technology make high degrees of collaboration necessary to accomplish project work.

Adequate and timely sharing of information and knowledge in all directions, proactive change management, and process monitoring are some of the important factors required for successful project collaboration. Today, many vendors offer solutions that promote inter-member communication in distributed (”virtual”) projects where contributors may lack (or may not need) face-to-face interactions. See reference 1 for a detailed discussion of collaborative project management architectures.

Read more at:
http://projectmagazine.com/pages/indv6i2/collaberative-project-management.php

Most go/kill decisions on projects are typically done in a random fashion— either by a best guess “shot in the dark” approach or an across-the-board budget cut. How often have we heard, “We need to cut everything by (fill in the blank) percent!”? At the end of the day, those who negotiate best or scream the loudest for those dollars keep their programs going—regardless of whether it helps or hurts the organization’s overall strategic direction. Those on the losing end are left scrambling at the last minute to right-size or cut their programs to make ends meet. These hastily applied fixes can diminish intellectual property and institutional knowledge, not to mention morale. Because money doesn’t grow on trees, how can organizations effectively prioritize projects? And can “kill” decisions be made to minimize pain to the organization as a whole?

As budgets get tight, and everyone is subjected to doing more with less, organizations will need to adapt more rigor and objectivity in their program go/kill decisions. In this light, the three main questions senior leadership should ask before killing, cutting, or adding funding to a program are…

Read more at: http://www.chiefprojectofficer.com/article/165

Dear Bob …

HELP!!! They’ve just put me in charge of a software project. The only problem is, I don’t know anything about project management and don’t have time to learn.

What I need from you is the answer to the question, if I don’t know anything else about project management, what are the three ideas I absolutely have to understand?

- Grasping at straws

Read the response at:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/lewis/archives/2005/11/project_managem.html

As the year comes to a close, and budget cycles with it, there’s never been a better time to upgrade to Timesheet 7.0. Why not start off the new year with the enhanced features and functionality of the best version of Timesheet ever? And, as some of you may have already heard, the price of Timesheet will be going up in January. So upgrading now (or making your initial purchase, for those of you who aren’t already benefitting from the market-leading time and expense tracking solution) means that you’ll get our lowest price on Timesheet *and* that you’ll be able to take advantage of all that it has to offer without any impact on next year’s budget.

For further details and for more information about upgrading to (or purchasing new) Timesheet 7.0, contact your Journyx Sales Rep today. As they say on TV, operators are standing by!

Learn all about the features and improvements in Timesheet 7.0 at our website:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/products/timesheet/70features.html

It’s the holiday season, and that means it’s time to dust off the old (roasting) chestnuts. So while you’re digging all the ornaments and decorations out of your closets, with all those carols and jingles (and jingles based on carols) stuck in your head, why not take a minute to (re)read that beloved Xmas classic, Journyx and Santa: A Case Study. Like many holiday traditions, it’s a bit musty (it dates back to 2002). But it was prepared especially for your enjoyment by one of our very own misfit toys. And that should count for something, shouldn’t it?

Find out how Timesheet proved to Santa that sometimes a previously successful project isn’t always what it used to be at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/santa.html

There are three types of project managers. The first type is the “accidental” project manager. Usually, this project manager comes up through the ranks. For instance, a strong programmer becomes the project manager on a development project. Or a strong network technician becomes the project manager on a large network upgrade. These people understand the types of projects that they are managing, they can build a workflow and they can assign work to other team members. However, they don’t have a lot of project management discipline.

The second type of project manager understands that successful project management requires you to manage issues, scope, communication, risk, etc. The question is whether you are a strong enough project manager to understand that project management discipline needs to be proactive. The proactive project manager, the third type, is someone who has made the mental transition to apply his or her discipline on a proactive and ongoing basis. Look at the following examples of how this works…

Get proactive at:
http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/zduk-proactive.html

Journyx CEO Curt Finch ponders both the easy way and the hard way to manage project risk in this article at Chief Project Officer. It turns out that the easy way will work for a lot of people, and probably even for you, as long as you’re not building bridges in the Congo.

Take the easy way out at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/cpo-finch-easy.html

How high is your Cost of Quality? The answer might surprise you. Yes, it includes reviews, the QA infrastructure, and preparing tests - those are your “Appraisal Costs.”

But how high are your “Failure Costs” - the cost of defects?

Your engineers spend time in diagnosis and rework, development schedules slip, support costs climb, and your company’s and products’ reputations sink. These Failure Costs, which are the more significant Cost of Quality, are beyond your direct control. But you can gain control over them indirectly, by investing in Appraisal Costs that minimize Failure Costs, reducing your total Cost of Quality and making it more predictable…

Start saving at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/projmag-costquality.html