Journyx Project Management Blog

Working for some leaders is as painful as taking a full dose of poison. Their behavior is so bad it is toxic to their organizations. You know the type: More of a despot than a leader, he pits employees against each other and paralyzes the organization with fear.

Sometime during your career you may have encountered such a toxic leader, or maybe you see signs now of one emerging in your company (hopefully you aren’t one yourself). Here’s how to spot one, how to protect yourself and your team from his venom, and how to nip an emerging toxic leader in the bud.

Read more at:
http://www.cio.com/archive/041506/leadership.html

“What’s my job?”

That’s a question that many managers ask themselves, usually not out loud though for fear of looking like a fool. Nonetheless the question is a real one. It has been my experience in working with many companies in many different industries that employees are often uninformed about their roles and responsibilities. Yes, employees know their job specifics and often perform as well as they can. What they lack is context, that is, “Why am I doing what I am doing and how does it affect the organization?” Employees who are so uninformed are not dull headed lackeys; they are bright, energetic people whose management has not bothered to explain their value to the organization.

Expectations lost in the details
For example, employees in purchasing are constantly asked to implement a host of new parameters to conform to new rules and regulations, some spawned by the Sarbannes Oxley Act of 2002. Employees go by the rules, but they end up following procedures that feel more like trapdoors and blind alleys than an updated process. When suppliers complain, purchasing agents are powerless to make adjustments and do a poor job of communicating why. Suppliers end up frustrated and angry, and purchasers feel betrayed by a system they have been hired to implement. The net result is that the company loses experienced suppliers and alienates the very employees whose job it is to ensure conformity with established standards.

Read more at:
http://www.cio.com/weighin/column.html?CID=19525

Having worked in IT services for several decades, I’ve conducted many types of outsourcing projects for clients, from Y2K updates to transition teams that take over ownership of a company’s IT department and its assets. On every outsourcing project I’ve participated in, the client has committed one or more of the following 10 antipatterns, causing delayed completion dates, increased costs and scope creep. If you’re eager to bumble your next outsourcing effort, here’s how to get on the fast track to failure.

Antipattern 1. The Big Whim
Don’t evaluate the business case for outsourcing.

An April 2005 study by Deloitte Consulting found that almost 50 percent of respondents didn’t formally evaluate the business case for outsourcing. A methodology should include your strategic reasons for outsourcing (such as improving business focus, gaining access to novel capabilities, accelerating reengineering efforts, or sharing or transferring risks). It should also cover your business reasons for outsourcing (such as reducing operating costs, making capital funds available or accessing resources not available internally).

Read more at:
http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/s=821/sdm0510e/

Earned value management is based on several figures that are used to calculate a project’s progress. You can measure in dollars or time.

Read more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/project/story/0,10801,110065,00.html

You’ve doubtless already discovered your inbox won’t stay at zero — and it shouldn’t. As I said yesterday, this is a process, not some miraculous one-time event like a tonsillectomy or a Jandek concert. And you can’t just wave a magic wand every couple weeks and make it all go away. Why not use the august occasion of your newly empty inbox as the chance to start mending your ways going forward?

As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).

Read more at:
http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/04/better-practices/

Using document templates is one of those really, really good practices that most organizations hold in high regard. From architecture specifications to use case descriptions, templates abound, promising freedom from the waste of reinventing the wheel by ensuring that every specification has exactly the same information. However, templates aren’t entirely risk-free: Any good practice, even template use, can be abused, scuttling your project in sinister, subtle ways.

Read more at:
http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/s=821/sdm0511e/

One of the most difficult tasks project managers and business analysts face is obtaining customer requirements. Even when business customers and business analysts work in the same building, misunderstandings are bound to arise. It’s a challenge to ask the right questions, get the right people involved and document unambiguous requirements, regardless of the backgrounds of those participating. When the project includes multicultural stakeholders, and particularly when those stakeholders work in geographically dispersed areas and form a virtual team, the job becomes much harder.

Some of the challenges facing project managers and business analysts aren’t unique to multicultural projects. However, personal agendas and conflicts about roles, priorities and availability worsen the situation. In addition, recent studies have shown that almost half of the typical project budget is spent reworking defects in requirements. While there are many underlying reasons for this rework, dealing with a group of multicultural business customers and/or project team members can create significant hurdles.

Read more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/project/story/0,10801,109625,00.html

Stanley “Stash” Jarocki is used to getting plenty of attention. Once the VP of IT security at Morgan Stanley, Jarocki knows what it’s like to manage a staff of dozens at a Fortune 50 company that spends millions of dollars on technology. When he called a vendor, the vendor answered. Quickly. “I’d pick up the phone, and the company—service provider, hardware provider, software provider—would be in the door tomorrow, today,” Jarocki says.

But that was then. Jarocki has had to change his tactics and expectations now that he works in one of the trickiest spots in security: right in the middle. He is senior VP and information security officer of New York City–based Bessemer Trust, a privately held wealth management company with $40 billion in assets and just 600 employees. When it comes to infosec, analysts say, working at this size company can be the worst of both worlds.

“The companies are often big enough to be targets, but not necessarily big enough to have the staff and the budget to do security well,” says John Pescatore, a vice president at the analyst firm Gartner. “They often don’t have strong IT discipline, and that causes all sorts of security problems. But they’re big enough to be targets of cybercrime—somebody saying, Let me go after this plumbing supply company. It’s not so big, but maybe I can find a credit card file.” What’s more, midsize organizations may face the same bevy of regulators as big companies.

But the little guys—that is, companies with revenue between $100 million and $1 billion—are being forced into getting better at security. And the best among them have tips about managing security on a budget that even CISOs with gargantuan budgets could learn from. Here are three ways they’re doing more with less.

Read more at:
http://www.csoonline.com/read/030106/more_with_less.html

Our story takes place at Epsilon (not the company’s real name), a highly successful vendor of telecom billing systems. Fresh from a dot-com CTO experience, we arrive as consultants. Our task? To evaluate Epsilon’s software development team, analyze deficiencies with the legacy products and set goals for their replacement.

We’re closing the first iteration, and overall, the team is satisfied with our progress. A preliminary postmortem suggests that we’ve reached the objectives we’d set out six weeks earlier. We run the full system test suite, and after fixing several problems, know that we now possess a stable version of the system. Our developers are happy about the refactoring of the billing engine. After some teething problems, our automated build and smoke tests are running. Only one sour note sounds: The new standard interface for interprocess communications threatens to become an overly designed subsystem.

Everything’s going swimmingly, so we begin preparing for our next iteration. Unfortunately, our contentment tempts the project management gods to hurl a thunderbolt at us.

Read more at:
http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/s=821/sdm0510h/

As IT executives seek to transform their operations into true corporate assets that can help grow the business at their companies, many are finding that first they must impose much tighter controls over their often vast and unwieldy portfolios of technology projects.

Numerous speakers and other attendees at Computerworld’s seventh annual Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference here last week said they are moving quickly to put in place new portfolio management policies and tools. The goal is to ensure that their IT staffs are doing work that meets business priorities and can generate the highest possible return on investment.

Read more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/project/story/0,10801,109468,00.html