Journyx Project Management Blog

It may be time for some organizations to rethink organizational concepts, relationships and structures for managing major programs and projects. In recent weeks, I have become familiar with a global program involving teams of administrative, diplomatic, financial, legal, program, project and technical participants, for projects being planned and deployed on a global basis. At the same time, I have studied some recent thinking in the US Department of Defense (DoD) related to “system-of-systems” and “Network-based” counter-terrorism approaches. It has now occurred to me that these DoD concepts are applicable in the program and project management world. Once again, the PM world can use some ideas originating among military thought leaders.

The Growing Importance of Networks – and Network Thinking

Most of us now have global networks of professional colleagues, co-workers and friends. We belong to professional organizations, or sub-networks of those associations. We network on the basis of personal or professional interests, technical matters or projects. The scope, reach and importance of such networks have been growing significantly in recent years, based on the worldwide web and the globalization of economies and communications technologies. Each person in any such network also belongs to other networks, such as on a program or project, that might include another team or teams working on different activities, tasks, or sub-projects.

Read more at PM Forum.

Summer is practically upon us in the northern hemisphere, so my mind has naturally been wandering to picnics, parties and celebrations of every kind. I don’t need a very big reason to throw a party. It’s genetic. Finding six matching wine glasses in my kitchen cabinet is reason enough.

Projects are also fertile territory for all manner of festivities. For example, if you live long enough you’ll eventually complete a project successfully. When the customer is delighted beyond words, when the I’s have been dotted, the T’s crossed, and the seemingly endless task list is dwindling to mere trifles, it’s time to celebrate. What’s the best way for you and your team to mark such an accomplishment? How should the tireless souls who made it possible be recognized and appreciated? I have a few ideas.

Congratulations! On to the Next Impossible Project.

Don’t ruin the fleeting bliss of a successful project completion by “celebrating” it all wrong. Before I start with the Do’s of celebration, let me clearly spell out the Don’ts.

While there are many ways to celebrate project success, the one I am least fond of is assigning the team to the next demanding project. The reward for doing a great job shouldn’t be to get stuck with the next gnarly task. After the death march, at least hold a wake. Take some time, spend a few bucks, have a little shindig. The next project can wait another 24 hours!

Read more at ProjectConnections.

The nature of IT demands clarity, and that’s particularly important in requests for proposals.

Unfortunately, in today’s hurried world, few people take the time to make specifications clear. But fuzzy requirements create misunderstandings. They cost time, money, effort and sometimes political capital. Although it usually takes longer to make a document crystal-clear, the additional time and effort are good investments.

RFPs are expensive to produce and review, but clarity will save you money. Without it, you’ll find yourself going back to each bidder with new or different specifications — an expensive and time-consuming exercise. Moreover, RFPs that are unclear generally result in poorly defined service requirements and produce suboptimal results. They increase costs unnecessarily and contribute to disasters down the road. Save money by being clear the first time.

Case in point: In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbital Mission spacecraft was lost as a result of unclear specifications. NASA’s investigation of the mishap found that the root cause of the failure was that Mission Control’s software used English units of measure, while the spacecraft software used the metric system. Over the course of the nine-month mission, the spacecraft’s course had been periodically adjusted by thrusters. By the time the spacecraft reached Mars, it was approximately 170 kilometers closer to the surface than planned. Unfortunately, the difference wasn’t noticed until after the spacecraft was lost.

RFPs that are unclear typically cause one or more of the following problems:

Low bids. Unclear requirements may cause some bidders to submit low-priced minimal bids. These providers accept very low margins on the initial requirements but plan to make profits on the inevitable change orders.

Read more at ComputerWorld.

Martha Zeigler has high expectations for herself at work. So high that she routinely stays late at the office so she can toil uninterrupted by phones and coworkers.

Zeigler also has high expectations for herself at home. She wants to spend time with her husband, keep in close touch with her mother, serve her community.

But lately, the director of finance for the Metropolitan Sewerage District in Asheville, N.C., is finding it hard to meet all her expectations. “I am just torn,” she says. “I can’t focus well. I’m operating out of guilt rather than desire. At home, I think about work; at work, I think I’m neglecting my husband and I haven’t called my mother in a week. It’s a feeling of being under pressure all the time.”

Sound familiar? The age-old struggle to be happy and successful at work and home, complicated by technology’s ability to let you straddle both realms simultaneously, is making Zeigler and others like her feel utterly depleted. “How do I determine when enough is enough?” she asks. “What usually gets squeezed out is the replenishment time for myself—including sleep!”

Zeigler wants to attain work/life balance, but this popular goal is an elusive one, in part because “balance” isn’t quite the right word. “It’s not about 50/50 play/work,” says Deborah Gilburg, a leadership development consultant in Holyoke, Mass. “It’s really about figuring out how to be sustainable so you can keep your energy flowing, keep yourself healthy in the long term.”

Here are some tips to help you become sustainable:

Ask yourself hard questions. Introspection takes guts. You need to determine how serious your problem is. Should you just wean yourself off evening e-mail, or should you consider a career change? Where are you going in life? What are your priorities? “Lots of creative thinking shows up when the priorities are clear,” says Joyce Wooldridge, a life coach based in Suffolk, Va. “Employers can’t be assumed to know what you want before you do. Neither can families.”

Read more at CIO.com.

Journyx – the leader in web-based time and expense solutions for project management, payroll, and invoice automation – today announced that Cognitive Technologies, Inc., a provider of high-performance project services, has selected Journyx Timesheet™ as a key component of its new Project Time Management (PTM) solution. PTM gives companies the tools, configurations, templates and processes needed to ensure that time tracking information flows easily and accurately between Microsoft Project® and the rest of the organization.

“Our customers needed to track both project and non-project related time. Many were resorting to double-entry, entering project time in Microsoft Project and non-project time in another system,” said Bruce McGraw, Senior Vice President of Cognitive Technologies. “This was not only inefficient; it was also a business risk – especially if the company had to pass any audits from DCAA, Sarbanes-Oxley or other requirements. They needed a way to enter time in one place and have the time data show up accurately wherever it was needed. We created PTM to solve that problem.”

PTM leverages the Journyx Projectlink™ integration between Journyx Timesheet and Microsoft Project. Journyx Timesheet, the leading web-based time and expense tracking solution, is used by companies worldwide to gather and analyze time data for maximizing profitability. Through Projectlink, Timesheet can synchronize project time data with Project Server, ensuring that time spent on project work is accurately represented for project management.

Read the entire press release at: http://www.journyx.com/press/pr20070619c.html

Journyx – the leader in web-based time and expense solutions for project management, payroll, and invoice automation – today announced that Forté Systems, Inc., a Microsoft® Premier Solution Provider of custom project management solutions, has become an authorized reseller of Journyx Timesheet™. Forté Systems can now give companies the ability to increase project productivity and ROI by providing an enterprise-wide, real-time view of labor costs.

“As a Microsoft Premier Solution Provider partner, we are experts in creating custom solutions to maximize project ROI,” said Alfred La Garde, President of Forté Systems. “We help our customers link all the right processes and data into their project management systems and practices. Time tracking is a critical process, since many companies track time both inside and outside of project work. Their time records are often audited, so they need to ensure both timeliness and accuracy of their project and non-project labor costs. We turned to Journyx, because their technology integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Project.”

Read the whole press release at: http://www.journyx.com/press/pr20070619f.html

Talk with most anyone and ask them what they think are the top issues in time management and you will get answers such as, “Having a well prepared “to do” list,” “Managing multiple priorities,” “Managing Meeting time,” “Handling the flood of paperwork and emails.” All are good responses but overlook the top four time management issues that, in combination with one another, can do more to keep you from having, doing or being what you want and deserve.

They are: ineffective relationships, a poor attitude, being flat out tired, and the weather.

1. Ineffective relationships. Probably more than 50% of your personal productivity success has to do with effective relationships with other people. Friends and allies will open doors for you that would take a considerable amount of your effort. They can give you words of encouragement that lift your spirits during down, unproductive times. They can teach you lessons that would take too much time otherwise to learn.

I’m not suggesting that one who does not have the good cooperation of other people cannot be productive. They can, but not as productive as those who enjoy positive, effective relationships with others.

Read more at PROJECTmagazine.

It’s amazing how often people ask us questions like: “How many tasks should this project have?” or “How much detail should I have in the project plan?”

The usual mistake PMs make is to lay out too many tasks; subdividing the major achievements into smaller and smaller subtasks until the work breakdown structure (WBS) is a “to do” list of one-hour chores. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that a project plan should detail everything everybody is going to do on the project. This springs from the screwy logic that a project manager’s job is to walk around with a checklist of 17,432 items and tick each item off as people complete them. This view is usually linked with another fallacy - namely, that the project plan should be a step-by-step procedure for doing everything in the project in case we have to do it again. If the PM is managing the wrong things, this may be handy because we increase the odds of having to do this project again.

Sponsors encourage these fallacies by marveling at monstrous project plans because they make it seem that the PM has “thought of everything.” Unfortunately, on significant cross-functional projects, there is absolutely no chance that the project manager will think of everything. The subject matter experts and specialists are the ones we must hold accountable for that.

The result of these fallacies is that PMs produce project plans with hundreds or even thousands of tasks. Many of them have durations of a few hours or a few days. Does this level of detail give us better control and lead to successful projects? In our view, a “to do” list approach does not give effective control, and it interferes with the achievement of a successful end result.

Download the entire PDF at 4PM.com.

Quality in software development projects doesn’t happen on its own. It also doesn’t occur after a small group of heroes rides in on white horses and waves its shiny swords to vanquish the problems. Quality happens only when careful planning is done, when the entire project team maintains a quality-conscious approach every step of the way, and when problems don’t escape from the phase in which they were introduced. A quality product is a team effort. It’s planned and predictable. It’s without heroes, and it’s faster and cheaper than a low-quality effort.

How can this be? Let’s look at some sample projects. The first is a normal, low-quality, late project. We’ll call it project “Hurry Up” (HU for short).

Project HU got a bit of a late start due to the ongoing maintenance issues of its predecessor project “Just Ship It” (JSI). JSI was handled by a project manager (PM) who felt it was more important to ship on time than to ship a high-quality product. So he did. This PM was rewarded for his ability to “pull it together,” “get it out the door” and “meet the schedule.” The JSI PM was given a bonus for meeting his schedule and is now vacationing in Tahiti while the team deals with the fallout of the numerous bugs and unhappy customers.

Lesson #1: Don’t reward for shipping on schedule. Anyone can ship garbage. Base rewards on quality metrics.

During the last month of the project, the JSI developers worked 80-hour weeks. One heroic fellow was recognized for working 120 hours in one week, stopping only for brief rests. He heroically repaired multiple interfaces between applications. Those interfaces had not been properly specified (there were no design documents), no integration testing was done (no time to do it), and the QA team fought quality issues throughout system test.

Read more at CIO.com.

At some point in every IT professional’s career, he realizes that the secret to having happy customers is not fulfilling their every wish and desire but keeping their expectations reasonable. Low expectations are the secret to satisfaction, if not happiness.

For many of us, this epiphany is accompanied by a harking back to the original Star Trek series, in which Scotty, the ship’s chief engineer, constantly under-promises and overdelivers. In every engineering crisis, he seemed to declare some deliverable impossible because of the constraints of time, resources or physics, only to deliver it immediately following the intervening commercials.

Although Scotty was great at managing expectations about the deliverables of his work, I don’t remember him managing expectations more broadly.

And so it is with us in IT. Our insights into the importance of managing expectations rarely seem to develop beyond that first realization. We seldom think past that to consider other expectations we should be managing and how to do so.

To manage expectations effectively, you need to pay attention to these four issues:

* Product

* Process

* Roles

* Relationships

Read more at ComputerWorld.