Journyx Project Management Blog

The lack of balance between work and personal life is getting worse.

It’s not that some people aren’t trying, but the workload and the inability to truly get away from work are driving more businesspeople to spend more time working and less at home and with family.

In a survey over a base of 2,000 senior executives and managers in hundreds of businesses, we found that less than 1 percent of them thought most people in business today were extremely balanced when it came to work and personal life.

Read more at:
http://www2.darwinmag.com/read/feature/may05152006_balance.cfm

More small-to-medium-size businesses are enjoying the flexibility of custom application development on top of commodity software that their enterprise counterparts have long since enjoyed.

When Capture Communications won the contract to design and develop a Web content system to support the local launch of the Absolut Cut mixed drink, a custom application was seen as the best fit.

Capture’s creative director Jean-Claude Abouchar said the company builds applications that require little training and support.

Abouchar said it’s better to have a customized solution across clients because a lot of content management system (CMS) functionality that’s needed may not be in the application. Code developed during the project remains the clients’ property, he said.

Read more at Computerworld

The first steps to becoming a really great manager are simply common sense; but common sense is not very common. This article suggests some common-sense ideas on the subject of great management.

The major problem when you start to manage is that you do not actually think about management issues because you do not recognize them. Put simply, things normally go wrong not because you are stupid but only because you have never thought about it. Management is about pausing to ask yourself the right questions so that your common sense can provide the answers.

When you gain managerial responsibility, your first option is the easy option: do what is expected of you. You are new at the job, so people will understand. You can learn (slowly) by your mistakes and probably you will try to devote as much time as possible to the rest of your work (which is what your were good at anyway). Those extra little “management” problems are just common sense, so try to deal with them when they come up.

Your second option is far more exciting: find an empty telephone box, put on a cape and bright-red underpants, and become a SuperManager.

When you become a manager, you gain control over your own work; not all of it, but some of it. You can change things. You can do things differently. You actually have the authority to make a huge impact upon the way in which your staff work. You can shape your own work environment.

In a large company, your options may be limited by the existing corporate culture - and my advice to you is to act like a crab: face directly into the main thrust of corporate policy, and make changes sideways. You do not want to fight the system, but rather to work better within it. In a small company, your options are possibly much wider (since custom is often less rigid) and the impact that you and your team has upon the company’s success is proportionately much greater. Thus once you start working well, this will be quickly recognized and nothing gains faster approval than success. But wherever you work, do not be put off by the surprise colleagues will show when you first get serious about managing well.

Read more at:
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art9.html

“If I were talking to a CEO or president, I’d tell him it’s insane to make any strategic decisions without the CIO at the table,” says Gerry McCartney, assistant dean of the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.

CEOs seem to agree. Over the past year or so, CEOs have been telling their IT chiefs that they need them on their team. They need them to drive the business and to be strategists.

This growing mandate for the CIO—supported by findings in the latest “State of the CIO” survey (see www2.cio.com/research)—is causing sleepless nights for CIOs who lack direct business experience. What does it mean to be strategic? How does a CIO know if he’s doing the right things well?

Read more at:
http://www.cio.com/archive/050106/forum.html

The inauguration of the Delivering Project Excellence Conference in June marked the return of QUALITY to the Project Management conference space. The event evaluations provided solid testimony that today’s Project Managers are hungry for transformational learning in the leadership, communications and professional skills areas, while also insisting on top flight presentations in these core competency interest areas: PMO, Project Performance, IT Governance, Six Sigma, Risk Management, Security, and Portfolio Management. The 2005 attendees voted with their evaluations indicating that 100% would return, for a similarly high-octane program, in June, 2006

Find out more at:
http://www.deliveringprojectexcellence.com/

Before describing the role and creation of a specification, we need to introduce and explain a fairly technical term: a numbty is a person whose brain is totally numb. In this context, numb means “deprived of feeling or the power of unassisted activity”; in general, a numbty needs the stimulation of an electric cattle prod to even get to the right office in the morning. Communication with numbties is severely hampered by the fact that although they think they know what they mean (which they do not), they seldom actually say it, and they never write it down. And the main employment of numbties world-wide is in creating project specifications. You must know this - and protect your team accordingly.

A specification is the definition of your project: a statement of the problem, not the solution. Normally, the specification contains errors, ambiguities, misunderstandings and enough rope to hang you and your entire team. Thus before you embark upon the the next six months of activity working on the wrong project, you must assume that a numbty was the chief author of the specification you received and you must read, worry, revise and ensure that everyone concerned with the project (from originator, through the workers, to the end-customer) is working with the same understanding. The outcome of this deliberation should be a written definition of what is required, by when; and this must be agreed by all involved. There are no short-cuts to this; if you fail to spend the time initially, it will cost you far more later on.

The agreement upon a written specification has several benefits:

Read more at:
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art8.html

This is the second in a series of articles that examines decision-making methods for the selection or rejection of individual projects throughout the project portfolio management process. These methods determine whether or not a given project (either proposed or in process) should be included in your next capital budget.

Capital budgeting is a multi-faceted activity that includes: the formulation and articulation of long-term goals; searching for new and profitable uses for investment funds; the proactive preparing of technical resources, marketing (of both the external or internal kind), and financial forecasts and estimates; the preparation of appropriation and control budgets and integration of these budgets in the firm’s information system; the economic evaluation of alternative projects; and the post-audit of performance of past projects.

Although all of these capital budgeting activities are important, this series narrowly examines only the following, albeit very-powerful, methodologies for selecting or rejecting projects…

Read more at:
http://www.developer.com/mgmt/article.php/3601061

This is the first in a series of articles that will examine some of the most commonly used decision-making methods for the selection or rejection of individual projects throughout the project portfolio management process. These methods determine whether or not a given project (either proposed or in process) should be included in your next capital budget. After a brief discussion of the economic theories upon which these individual methods are based, I’ll cite the rationales for (1) not relying on these theories alone and (2) using as well, and sometimes instead, practical rules of thumb in real-world decision making.

Although no specific background is assumed, a little prior knowledge of project management and corporate finance, including probability theory and statistics, will facilitate your reading of the articles. For those readers wanting or needing up-to-date tutorials on these subjects, the References provide pertinent information. In addition, the appendixes at the end of this article contain supplementary material for the reader interested in further insight into these topics. And, throughout this series, I’ll illustrate how commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) software tools can aid in the management of larger, more complex portfolios. In short, these articles will be about computer-assisted common sense.

Read more at:
http://www.developer.com/mgmt/article.php/3595036

If you feel you spend long days at the office and put in an excessive number of work hours a week, you have plenty of company. The good news is that it isn’t as bad as it was just a few years ago.

The majority of senior executives and managers now spend 10 hours or more in a typical workday, based on a new survey by NFI Research. For these business leaders, the 40-hour workweek is only a memory, with the majority working 51 hours or more a week.

In 2003, when we conducted this same survey, 70 percent of executives and managers were spending 10 hours or more a day, compared to 58 percent today. At that time, 65 percent were spending 51 or more hours a week at work, compared to 58 percent today.

Read more at:
http://www2.darwinmag.com/read/feature/apr06_hours.cfm

It’s easy to focus only on the technology planning of a merger or acquisition. But forgetting about staffing implications can be fatal. “From a conceptual level, you should start thinking about who the key players are who’d need to be involved in the merger integration process,” says Harold Schroeder, president of management consultancy Schroeder & Schroeder.

And considering that the integration often becomes a near-full-time occupation, who will take over for those staffers’ operational roles?

Schneider also suggests lining up your thoughts on your top-level executive team. “There will be some juggling for positions between the two companies, so you want to get all your ducks lined up,” he advises. “Who is the key talent, and what do they bring to the table, not only on an ongoing basis but during the transition?”

Read more at Computerworld.com