Journyx Project Management Blog

WANTED: Experienced IT professionals with broad technical competency and working knowledge of both emerging technologies and legacy systems. Should have top-notch analytical and problem-solving prowess, excellent communication skills, and the ability to work well independently and as a member of a team. Must have experience in business process management, certification in project management and a solid understanding of enterprise architecture. Customer service attitude required. Vendor management background a plus.

It’s no longer a matter of debate: The nature of IT is evolving from technical support center to innovative business partner. And the mix of skills needed to staff the new IT department is changing as well. While technical proficiency is still important, CIOs are desperately seeking hires with project management expertise, enterprise and industry knowledge, and the business skills necessary for customer-facing roles. Forty-one percent of CIOs said they place greater emphasis today on a job candidate’s knowledge of business fundamentals than they did five years ago, according to a 2006 Robert Half Technology survey.

Read more at: CIO

• How can I automate handling of my employee’s requests to reset forgotten passwords?
• Can I set up an account for a new employee, including approvals and notifications, before the new hire is scheduled to start?

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

Companies that sell services to other businesses-data management, software development or IT consultancies, for example, often track time in order to automate invoicing, but they may be overlooking the other benefits these systems can provide. Real-time access to relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as ‘percent billable’ and ‘completed vs. estimated’ can give early warnings of project problems and lead your company to faster growth and more profitability. I would first like to explain what KPIs are, and then show you how to use some simple ones to improve your business that can be calculated from any time and data labor source.

What’s a KPI?

A key performance indicator is ‘key,’ which means that your KPI has to be one of a very few things that you are measuring which you believe will make a huge difference to your business long-term. In other words, a KPI measures progress toward a strategic goal. If you have 100 KPIs, then you’re not going to be able to use any of them to drive organizational behavior because your company doesn’t have 100 strategic goals. Ten KPIs can be effective, five KPIs are better, and one KPI is ideal.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a morally compelling vision: interracial peace and equality. Your business needs a morally compelling vision as well if you want to hire and maintain the best people. King had a strategy to achieve his vision: nonviolent protest. In his case, a KPI might have been something like ‘number of violent incidents per protester.’ He would have encouraged his organization to reduce that number over time, which would have effectively measured the organization’s success.

The closer you get to a morally compelling vision, a clear strategy and calculable KPIs, the more successful your company will be, all else being equal.

Turn the key at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/pmwt-kpi.html

I am, it seems, a neo-nomad. Or perhaps a digital bedouin, if you prefer something that makes the computing connection more obvious.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle recently reporter Dan Fost claims that a new generation of IT workers has grown up, people who turn a laptop, a wireless connection and a cafe into an office and work wherever they happen to be.

Since he covers the Bay Area, just north of Silicon Valley, his focus is on website developers, programmers and of course entrepreneurs pushing their Web 2.0 startups. He distinguishes them from traditional freelancers because of their close engagement with technology and use of the latest generation of web-based tools in their working lives.

Yet the name would seem to apply just as well outside the hothouse atmosphere of San Francisco, and I think it should be extended to cover a broader range of workers than just the high-tech startups because it refers to an attitude and a way of organising daily life rather than to any specific technology…

Sound familiar? You are not alone at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/bbc-nomad.html

In 1996, Curt Finch realized that simple time management could make or break a company. He’d seen something as simple as a timesheet help the small business he cofounded make millions and compete with much larger competitors. And since he’d “grown up” with open source, he was confident he could use it to create a timesheet application based on the software-as-a-service model.

Finch was looking for a new challenge after leaving The Kernel Group, and he had an idea. “We tracked our time very carefully and used that data to increase our prices,” Finch says. “It’s just mundane, boring data, but we used it to make millions of dollars through better estimation. We even ran off a competitor that didn’t have the same quality of data we had in order to bid projects carefully.” He thought that a subscription timesheet application would be a good foundation for a profitable business. That’s when he started working on Journyx. “The timesheet software was just going to be the first product,” Finch says. “Ten years later we’re still working on it. It’s one of those things that’s never quite finished.”

Journyx is a proprietary, patented Web-based application. It’s available in a self-hosted version that can run on virtually any operating system and hardware specification, or it can be hosted on Journyx’s own servers. Companies who use it can have their employees enter time and expense information from anywhere in the world, on any platform, using a Web browser. The application can also process the data and create reports that CFOs can use to show profit and loss trends associated with things like billable hours and expenses.

Read more about how we got here at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/itmj-saas.html

In a Web 2.0 world, IT is dramatically redefining business models. Whether providing new ways to reach customers, establishing radically new business-to-business relationships, cutting new-product time to market in half, or enhancing worker productivity and global collaboration, IT is the core enabler.

These days, however, less than 30% of corporate initiatives come in on time, on budget and on spec. The rest either fail outright or are significantly disappointing. So while much has been done to improve new processes, tools, techniques and governance concepts in the past 20 years, there is surprisingly little progress to show for it.

This point was dramatically emphasized recently by a major study called ‘Silence Fails: The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution.’

‘Silence Fails’ was conducted by The Concours Group and VitalSmarts LC to identify the causes of IT project failure. This worldwide study involved more than 1,000 executives and project management professionals representing a cross-section of major corporations. It included analysis of more than 2,200 projects. The Procter & Gamble Co. was one of 40 companies participating. Our goal was to determine how we could take our project management competency to the next level…

Make some noise at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/cworld-itsilence.html

Research shows clearly that businesses that feature a systematic portfolio management process, regardless of the specific approach, out-perform the rest. Having some portfolio management approach in place seems to be even more important than the details of which tools and metrics one chooses.

However, businesses’ whose portfolios are selected by relying heavily on financial tools as the dominant portfolio selection model sometimes fare worse than those that rely heavily on other kinds of tools, because financial tools can yield an unbalanced portfolio of lower-value projects and projects that lack strategic alignment. By contrast, strategic methods, correctly applied, do produce a strategically aligned and balanced portfolio.

It is ironic that the most rigorous techniques—the various financial tools—yield the worst results, not so much because the methods are flawed but simply because reliable financial data are often missing at the very point in a project where the key project selection decisions are made. Often, reliable financial data (expected sales, pricing, margins, and costs) are difficult to estimate in many cases because the project team simply has not done its homework or makes highly optimistic projections in order to secure support for its project. (See References 1-3)

The portfolio management solution discussed here is an objective process that enforces a rational rather than emotional (or political) approach to portfolio selection, helping to ensure that the selected investments are aligned with the organization’s strategic priorities and will maximize return on investment.

Read more at: Developer.com

There’s an excellent book by David Ropiek and George Gray called “Risk,” which explores the perceptions and realities of what we should and shouldn’t worry about. Of course, the overwhelming conclusion is that our fears are misplaced, and we should really worry about our broccoli intake, not snakes, spiders and plane crashes. But we’re human, and snakes, spiders and plane crashes are viscerally more frightening than heart disease.

This got me thinking about the outsourcing debate. The natural instinct is to fear outsourcing. After all, outsourcing is the export of business processes. And if you believe the pundits, this is nothing short of pure evil — the “giant sucking sound” and the wholesale export of jobs. Like snakes, spiders and plane crashes, this is scary stuff.

But should outsourcing be feared?

Read more at: Enterprise Networks & Servers

It’s starting to feel like 1999 all over again for Alan Boehme, the year the dotcom/digital economy hit its high-water mark and the IT job market peaked. On the one hand, that’s a good thing. “IT is in vogue again,” says Boehme, CIO of Juniper Networks. “It is not just for cost-cutting. It’s seen as key to growth.”

On the other hand, it’s a nightmare. Growing on average by 12 percent year over year, the $2 billion company’s appetite for business-enabling IT systems is insatiable. And so is Boehme’s need for IT staff. His hiring activity picked up about 30 percent last year, when he had 60 open positions. The market for tech talent is increasingly competitive, says Boehme, particularly where he sits in Silicon Valley.

Boehme’s experience is borne out by the numbers. Nearly two-thirds of CIOs who had staffing forecasts projected an increase in headcount, according to Gartner’s 2006 “IT Market Compensation Study.” Of those, almost 19 percent anticipated an uptick of 10 percent or more, compared with 5.2 percent in 2004 and 17.9 percent in 2005. Overall employment in the tech sector has increased since the second quarter of 2005 and is now at its highest level in four years, nearly matching prerecession IT employment highs, according to Forrester Research. A tightening labor market may be good for technology workers, but it’s a challenge for CIOs.

Read more at: CIO

CIO Steve Olive isn’t handing out any gold stars to IT for providing good PC support or networking service at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems. Consistently reliable and excellent IT service should be a given, he says.

What businesses need and IT should be providing are innovative solutions to business challenges. That means creatively applying technology to produce goods more efficiently and at a lower cost, to sell and service more of them, and to do so at the highest possible profit margins.

It also means using IT to create new products and services and even whole new business models, says Darryl Lemecha, CIO at Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. Because technology is embedded in just about everything a company does, “technology strategy and business strategy are now one,” he says.

Kathleen McNulty, CIO at The Schwan Food Co. in Marshall, Minn., puts it this way: “It’s not about IT automating the business anymore. It’s about innovating it, improving it.”

So, forget about IT supporting the business. IT leaders are focused on reinventing the business, starting with the IT organization.

Read more at: Computerworld