Project management and other news from your pals at Journyx
{ Monthly Archives }
Get these great tips and more at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/tips/
In the masterful 1953 trilogy More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon writes about a bunch of mostly very young misfits, all handicapped one way or another, who band together to become something new, mystical and unbelievably powerful. Society’s rejects, incapable of functioning on their own, these disabled misfits ‘blesh’ (a word invented by Sturgeon combining blend and mesh) into a Gestalt: a single, integrated whole. One of them explains: ‘The I is all of us.’
As the publisher’s blurb puts it: ‘Separately, they are talented freaks. Together they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race.’
Don’t you wish your project teams could do that? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find a way to get all your ‘talented freaks’ to ‘blesh’?
Free your inner misfit at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/cio-human.html
Accountlink, the Timesheet/QuickBooks integration, has been updated recently. This new version, v5.66, provides support for QuickBooks 2007/7.0 as well as U.K. versions of QuickBooks.
Existing Accountlink users in need of the latest version can contact Support at: support@journyx.com
Not using Accountlink and would like to? Contact the Journyx Sales Team at: sales@journyx.com
Learn more about Accountlink at: http://www.journyx.com/rss/support/quickbooks.html
Maybe you have experienced this phenomenon. You are at a company and they have a PM methodology, they are using the forms, there may even be people with Project Manager titles, but the benefits and results that come from project management are not there. I suggest that organizations like this are suffering from “Cargo Cult Project Management.” I doubt I can trademark that, so feel free to use it as your own. Let me indulge in a little history for those who may not be familiar with the term…
Join the cult at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/pmtool-cargo.html
In case you hadn’t heard, Journyx has officially launched the Journyx P5 Protocol – a proprietary process that enables customers to achieve per-person, per-project profitability.
The P5 Protocol uses Journyx technological solutions to help companies identify profit opportunities along the per-person/per-project continuum, as well as gather and analyze time and project management data. This information is then used to increase productivity, aid hiring and retention, and improve the quality of work while positively impacting profitability.
The P5 process guides companies through a series of steps toward improving profitability, with companies first identifying where they currently are on the continuum:
Once companies determine where they currently are on the continuum, they can begin to improve their per-person, per-project profitability by using time-tracking data to identify profit opportunities.
“Journyx is driven to provide our customers with significant value at every point along the way because we believe your business and your money are too valuable to use difficult, over-priced enterprise software,” said Journyx CEO Curt Finch. “The Journyx P5 Protocol allows customers to see where they are, where they need to go, and understand how to get there.”
Get on the road to Project Nirvana at: http://journyx.com/rss/products/p5.html
When Yogi Berra was managing the New York Yankees, the parallels between his job and that of a project manager were obvious. But I like to think that his earlier position — as a 15-time all-star and three-time MVP catcher — also has a lot in common with mine. Think about what a great catcher like Berra does:
* Positions himself between the team and the power figure (umpire/customer).
* Stands up for the team when there’s a bad call.
* Faces his team (literally) and watches them execute throughout the game.
* Mostly plays defense.
* Guides the pitcher but lets him call the shots.
Read more at: Computerworld
Your office hates you.
Sorry to break the news to you this way, but it’s about time you found out.
Thankfully, there’s reason to hope. In fact, there’s 101 reasons. And for those of you who are the haters rather than the hated, feel free to suggest these tips to your boss. Better yet, just send him a link and we’ll tell him for you…
DON’T…
1. Make your employees come in on their days off even when you know there is no real work to be done.
2. Call them when they are on vacation, not unless the office has burned down, in which case the call is moot anyway.
3. Be biased, play favorites or show partisanship when dealing with your subordinates.
4. Hog your employees’ limelight, or more specifically, take credit for ideas that are not yours.
5. Monitor every aspect of your employees’ work. Peering over their shoulders every few minutes, or worse, hooking up hidden nanny cameras to spy on them in your absence is as good as wearing a sandwich board saying “Hate me, I deserve it”. Remember, just as a watched pot never boils, an over-supervised employee’s creativity and productivity are stifled.
Read more at: Project Management Source
When I joined Pacific Blue Cross in 2003 as VP of IT, the CEO and I agreed on two foundational principles: 1. Technology has no value by itself, and 2. Technology management must switch its focus from operational to business enabler. These principles may seem self-evident, but the truth is, when there’s a flurry of projects, all of them important to some aspect of the business, technology management can all too easily get swept away in putting out fires. This seemed to be what was happening at Pacific Blue Cross when I arrived. With nearly 2 million members covered, Pacific Blue Cross is the market leader in providing health-care and dental coverage to residents of British Columbia. Our subsidiary, Blue Cross Life, also offers life insurance and disability income protection.
While I understood my mission - turning the IT department into an enabler of business - the journey has been far from straightforward. It’s been a long road with many bends and even a few dead-ends. Even so, there’s no doubt we’re making progress. How did we do it?
Project Management to the Rescue
First and foremost, we began to align every project to Pacific Blue Cross’s Balanced Scorecard. The Scorecard shows and measures the organization’s performance from six perspectives: qualitative, quantitative, infrastructure, clients, people and community-related goals. Every project is now justified in terms of how it supports the goals described in the Scorecard. That keeps the company’s goals clearly in sight for all and shows how technology relates to and enables the business.
After assembling a list of all the projects we were working on, I introduced the project management office (PMO) function. This office oversees all projects of more than one month’s effort - from the business case to a post-implementation review. We fashioned this as a corporate-wide PMO, because all projects require disciplined management and almost all projects at Pacific Blue Cross have a technology component.
The business welcomed the PMO, since it gave it an overall view of all projects (in the planning, execution or close-out stages) as well as monthly updates on their status.
Read more at: CIO
Youth matters more than ever in IT, especially as the Web becomes more interactive and heads in directions where baby boomer IT managers may be ill-equipped to lead, Gartner Inc. analysts said at the firm’s Symposium/ITxpo conference here last week.
Teenagers and young adults are racing ahead of their elders in adopting new technologies and processes for collaborating, such as wikis and video sharing. And Gartner analysts said repeatedly that companies poised for future growth need to be clued in to the so-called consumerization of IT — a point driven home by Google Inc.’s agreement to acquire online video-sharing company YouTube Inc. for stock valued at $1.65 billion.
Two days after the Google-YouTube deal was announced, John Chambers, Cisco Systems Inc.’s president and CEO, said at the Gartner conference that he expects high-definition videoconferencing and unified data, voice and video communications for mobile devices to become key tools for enhancing productivity, improving contacts with customers and cutting costs.
Dennis Giokas, chief technology officer at Canada Health Infoway Inc. in Montreal, said he agrees that more-collaborative tools are needed. But he doesn’t see their introduction as necessarily being dependent on cultural changes that young people may lead. For Giokas, the new approaches being touted now raise the age-old problem of change management.
“There will always be, in my opinion, resistance to change — especially if people don’t see a business benefit,” he said.
Read more at: Computerworld
The way to get something done is — quoting the well-known Nike footwear ad — to “just do it.” Focus on the task and get it done. For those who work in organizations that rely on programs of projects — multi-project environments where resources are shared across a number of projects — there are usually a lot of things that need to get done. An environment of many projects typically generates many priorities for project resources and managers alike and can make that focus difficult to achieve.
Division of attention multiplies task and project lead-time…
In an effort to take advantage of valuable new opportunities, multi-project organizations, more often than not, tend to launch projects as soon as they are understood, concurrently with existing projects, simultaneously with other new efforts, and unfortunately too often, without sufficient regard to the capacity of the organization. A common result is that the responsibility for sorting out an array of conflicting priorities often falls to project resources and their managers. One concern coming from this situation is that the resultant locally set priorities may not be in synch with each other or, more importantly, with the global priorities of the larger organization. A common result of trying to deal with this tug-of-war of multiple priorities is the practice of multitasking — assigning resources to more than one significant task during a particular window of time — to try to move all the projects along.
In addition, many project teams rely on early starts of projects and their paths of tasks to try to assure and achieve timely project completion. These early starts — also driven partially by the desire to see “progress” on all open projects — often translate to additional pressure on resources to multitask between tasks and between projects. There is pressure to get started on a new task in the in-box, but we’re still working on another task. As a result, these practices of early starts and multitasking have been recognized as common practice in many organizations, and even institutionalized in project management software tools, which typically default to “ASAP” scheduling, and which offer “features” to apply “fractional resources” to tasks and to “split” tasks.
Read more at: Focused Performance