Journyx Project Management Blog

Five years ago, almost half of AG Edwards’s IT projects were late and over budget. Now it boasts an 88 percent project success rate. How did it do that? By galvanizing IT, reinventing its PMO, and relying on a standard framework to track projects and create accountability.

Reader ROI

• Eight steps for improving project management
• Transforming the culture
• Reinventing the project management office

John Parker had no illusions about the considerable challenges awaiting him as CTO of AG Edwards. The management team had painted a clear picture during his job interviews in late 2001. IT costs were too high. Projects dragged on for years, if they were completed at all. Some had derailed so dramatically that the St Louis-based retail brokerage firm had to write them off. Poor project management was taking a toll on the bottom line.

The executives told Parker they needed a CTO who could overhaul the IT department and ensure that a planned five-year, $US196 million migration of a mission-critical mainframe system would proceed smoothly. They simply couldn’t afford to have a project of that magnitude follow IT’s usual MO, where systems developed in isolation - sometimes over the course of years - often failed to meet the company’s requirements once delivered. It just couldn’t happen.

Read more at: http://cio.idg.com.au/index.php/id;421113260;fp;16;fpid;0

Part of the process of successfully deploying project management in an organization is to standardize the terminology. That way, when one person talks about risks, scope, issues, requirements, and other project management concerns, everyone else knows what he or she is referring to. PM guru Tom Mochal put together this glossary of common terms used in project management to help you start the standardization process in your organization.

Read more at: http://downloads.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=236923&tag=fdlead2

• How can I use approval email notifications to remind employees to enter their time?
• How can I use approval email notifications & reports to keep supervisors updated on employee time entry compliance?

Get these great tips and more at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/support/tips/

Want to complete a project successfully?

Then you’d better have success at the start. That means getting requirements right, and there are as many ways to do that as there are business analysts charged with getting it done.

But impatience, miscommunication, misunderstandings and overlooked users can produce requirements that aren’t clear or complete. ‘You want to have as little ambiguity as possible, because ambiguity creates defects,’ says Andrew Ari Clibanoff, a senior business analyst at GSI Commerce Inc., a King of Prussia, Pa.-based provider of e-commerce services.

Those defects can be costly. Ellen Gottesdiener, principal consultant at EBG Consulting in Carmel, Ind., and author of ‘The Software Requirements Memory Jogger’ (Goal QPC Inc., 2005), says that roughly one-third of the budget for a typical project goes to fixing defects that originated in faulty requirements.

The following tips will help you avoid becoming part of that depressing statistic…

Start understanding your users at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/cworld-userswant.html

Journyx has identified a potentially serious issue with versions of Timesheet prior to the current releases (7.1 and 5.6m3). The issue is related to scheduled emails & reports in Timesheet and clock resetting related to the switch from Daylight Savings Time back to Standard Time.

But, like the good soldiers that we are, we’ve got a fix for you months before you’d be affected by this. So follow the link to learn exactly what you need to do to make sure your Timesheet installation keeps on ticking without burying you under a pile of approvals emails and scheduled reports.

Check the time at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/support/tsdst.html

Journyx recently stumbled across a very cool tool for Windows called TimeSnapper and we thought our newsletter readers might be interested in it. TimeSnapper is an Automatic Screenshot Journal that runs in the background of your Windows PS, taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds all week long.

With TimeSnapper you can play back your week just like a movie. You can play it at any speed you like, and jump in at any time you like. When it’s time to fill out your timesheet, TimeSnapper is a savior. There’s no need to tear your hair out trying to remember where all the time went. Just look back in time with TimeSnapper and just like that your problem is solved.

Check TimeSnapper out at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/redir/timesnapper.html

Accountlink and Projectlink - the Timesheet/QuickBooks and Timesheet/Microsoft Project integrations - have both been updated recently and are now available to Journyx customers. So if you’re with one of the many organizations that’s making good time on the road to profitability by using Timesheet to feed your critical business infrastructure, be sure to get in touch with Journyx to get your hands on the latest versions of these powerful tools.

Existing Accountlink and Projectlink users in need of the latest patches can contact Support at: support@journyx.com

Not using Accountlink or Projectlink and would like to? Contact the Journyx Sales Team at: sales@journyx.com

You can also find out more about Projectlink at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/support/msproject.html

And learn more about Accountlink at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/support/quickbooks.html

If you asked Kevin Smith three years ago what it’s like to have your outsourcer acquired by another company, he might have said, “No problem.” Today, however, he’s got a different tale to tell. That’s because Smith, information systems director at Spyder Active Sports Inc. in Boulder, Colo., has had the experience not once, but twice. And while the first transition couldn’t have gone more smoothly, the second ended in disarray.

It all started six years ago, when the outerwear designer and manufacturer outsourced its J.D. Edwards ERP system to application service provider (ASP) Prentice Technologies Inc. Three years later, when Prentice was bought by Fortrust Solutions, a data center management firm that wanted to move into the ASP arena, the handoff went fine. “It was all well managed,” Smith says.

Then, in mid-2004, Fortrust sold its ASP business to a software-as-a-service provider in California. The transition itself went smoothly enough, but over the next year and a half, service levels dropped off, and gradually, nearly all the original Fortrust staffers left the firm, Smith says. “Several times, I asked their management, ‘Are you guys serious about this line of business? Because it doesn’t appear that way to me,’” he says. “On several occasions, I even offered to pay more for better service, but they never took me up on it.”

Read more at: Computerworld

Software Developers are a tough audience. Why, I’d be willing to bet that even the likes of Jerry Seinfeld would tuck tail and take off from a roomful of programmers.

Take Java, for example. For years, Sun has been kicked around for not open sourcing Java (see www.catb.org/~esr/writings/let-java-go.html). So when Sun’s Rich Green made a public commitment to open source Java, you’d think the griping would pause for a second or two. And it did—for a second or two. At issue was that Green didn’t hand over the Java source code Johnny-on-the-spot, instead promising to do so in the future. “It is not a question of ‘whether,’” he said, “but it is a question of ‘how.’” So the announcement was really an announcement of an upcoming announcement.

I can live with that, but I’m more patient than, say, Richard Stallman, who saw Sun’s contribution to the free software/open-source community as “absolutely nothing” (www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/1154233). Well, Sun has open sourced Solaris, its Java Studio Creator and NetBeans Enterprise Pack tools, Java System Portal Server, BPEL Engine (from Java CAPS), a JMS-based message queue, and its Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT). Open Source Java will come, and Green and CEO Jonathan Schwartz will figure out how to make that happen.

Read more at: http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/189401981

“Quiet reflective time” was the phrase the speaker used to describe what he needed to do his work most effectively. So valuable was this time that he blocked out days at a time on his schedule months in advance. The speaker was none other than Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. Collins explains that he might have meetings during these reflective days, but he purposely kept his schedule loose so he would have time to think, research and write. John Maxwell writes about making time for thinking and reflecting in his book, Thinking for a Change, in which he advises creating physical space, a chair, a room, a garden, someplace where you can go and gain perspective on the topic. Such advice is not reserved strictly for management gurus. The late Skip LeFauve, president of Saturn Corporation and high-ranking executive at General Motors, advised busy people to schedule time for reflection on their calendars, much like Collins does.
Making time for reflection

Reflection is a topic that I speak and teach in the course of my consulting, but it is something that I probably do not do enough of in my own daily life. Recently I had the opportunity to reflect on reflection at a leadership conference sponsored by the Wharton School. This conference, an annual event created by Michael Useem a decade ago, brings together men and women from diverse fields to speak and listen to topics related to leadership. What Mike and codirector Evan Wittenberg have created is a confluence of leadership thought that merges the life and work experiences of leaders in the corporate, government, military and other social sector worlds. Participants become engulfed in a potpourri of stories and lessons that provide perspective on our world as well as insights into how to effect positive change. It also reminded me that reflection need not be a passive process; it is active and engaging. Here are some insights that resonated with me.

Read more at: http://www2.darwinmag.com/read/feature/baldoni_06272006.cfm