Journyx Project Management Blog

Planning and Culture for the At-Home Project

The trend toward more at-home workers challenges and creates demand for project managers who can adapt their PM skills to this unique environment. As organizations move workers home to reap the facility cost savings and gain productivity and quality improvements, project managers must respond with techniques adapted to this unique work environment.

At-Home Work

Managing at-home workers requires new management, control, and leadership techniques whether the employee is performing work with:

Tangible output: data entry or document processing

Intangible output: programming, analysis, legal research, engineering.

When we cannot use a count of something like pages or keystrokes to set expectations and measure achievement, managers must use project management techniques specifically adapted to at-home work.

Download the entire PDF file at 4pm.com.

After the success of last year’s first-ever Journyx-sponsored scholarship we decided that it would be good to do it again. So we’re delighted to announce the 2008 “Journyx Excellence In Project Accounting Philosophy” Essay Scholarship. This year the scholarship is open to undergraduates as well as MA, MS and PhD students. So if you know a young academic in need of $500 to be applied toward their tuition for the Fall 2008 semester be sure to let them know about this opportunity.

Read all the legalese and such at:
http://journyx.com/rss/company/scholarship.html

Check out last year’s winning essay at:
http://journyx.com/rss/company/sc07winner.html

Project management is certainly not “new”. The taming of fire, invention of the wheel… the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Panama Canal, Empire State Building… These and many more examples stand as ample evidence that project management is an integral part of mankind’s development and evolution. Stated another way, initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing of projects seems to be “hard wired” into the human psyche. And somehow, at least up until around the early 1980’s, these projects were all done without benefit of the PMBOK Guide, PRINCE2 or any certifications…

Look forward by looking back at:
http://journyx.com/rss/redir/pmwt-pmna.html

Journyx CEO Curt Finch has finally gone and done it. He’s taken all the knowledge locked up in that pretty little head of his and put it on paper. That’s right, Curt has written a book and we’re all so proud of him that we just had to share the news with you.

All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy - Valuing Time as a Business Resource distills decades of research and thought on time tracking and profitability. In it you will learn:

• Why people dislike tracking time and what to do about it
• How to negotiate with vendors of time tracking software
• How to comply with government regulations
• How to improve project estimates, profitability and management
• How to automate payroll and billing

To go along with the book there is a supplemental website where you can read reviews and learn more about the book. You’ll also find links to Curt’s other writings and even a short quiz to help you understand where your own business stands with regard to estimating and managing projects, meeting compliance regulations, understanding costs and other key business processes. Heck, the site even has a link to let you buy the book straight from Amazon for a mere $16.99 US.

Rise above the noise and confusion at:
http://timetrackingbook.com/

For a company that manufactures products that protect the flow of materials, Flowserve was having a tough time pumping standardized technologies and business processes throughout its 300 global locations. The culmination of a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company, based in Irving, Texas, found itself saddled with a whopping 68 ERP systems, scattered data center structures, and fragmented voice and data networks.

Faced with mounting operational and regulatory pressures, Linda Jojo, Flowserve’s CIO, knew it was time to simplify the company’s entire IT infrastructure - an endeavor that would bring about sweeping changes across an enterprise spanning more than 56 countries. How she accomplished this task helped the company earn a 2007 CIO 100 Award. Applying IT in innovative ways at the enterprise level is certainly no small feat. Implementation headaches, configuration nightmares and employee backlash are only a handful of obstacles that are bound to arise. And for companies such as Flowserve that choose to forgo a piecemeal approach in favor of a complete IT overhaul, the challenges can seem insurmountable…

Turn the keys at:
http://journyx.com/rss/redir/cio-3keys.html

• How can I use my credit card statements to create my expense reports?
• How can I group my Journyx Timesheet expenses together for transfer into vendor bills in QuickBooks?

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

In our area of the East Coast of the U.S., as well as in other spots around the globe, summer’s heat took its toll, leaving parched lawns, shriveled fruit, and pathetic-looking new plantings from the spring. The blazing sun has taken its toll with weeks of 90+ temperatures and zero precipitation. Almost every summer has a period like this in our area, and each year, people inevitably throw around the “D” word—Drought. As I studied my dying new bushes and paltry tomato crop, I was able to reflect back five years and remember a true drought. It was a stretch of dry weather that lasted for almost a year, rather than weeks, slaughtering all but the hardiest of plants. The Random House Dictionary definition for “drought” is interesting—

1. a period of dry weather, esp. a long one that is injurious to crops.
2. an extended shortage.

That differs from a “dry spell,” which gets its own definition:

1. a prolonged period of dry weather.
2. a period of little or no productivity or activity, low income, etc.

As two days of substantial rain draw to a close, I’m left with the impression that despite my fear and trepidation, we’re in the midst of a dry spell rather than a drought. What’s the distinction? A drought leaves you with real physical harm. A dry spell is a nuisance that makes you paranoid you’re heading for a drought. No one can truly sufficiently prepare for a drought. There are not enough rain barrels on the planet to cope with a shortage that lasts for major portions of a year or years. But there are enough rain barrels to get you through a dry spell.

This metaphor is appropriate when it comes to shortages on our projects. Those may include shortages of cash, of human resources, of political capital, of client goodwill, or of almost any project commodity. We suffer from regular encounters with dry spells, and, fearing droughts, react in pained dismay. Our challenge is distinguishing between the two both in terminology and in action.

As “the risk guy,” I’m a firm believer that we can do a better job of labeling these problems in order to steel ourselves appropriately for drought or dry spell, and be willing to make distinctions between the two. Specifically, it’s a function of warning those around us of current conditions and getting their interpretation of the signs in the environment. In order to brace ourselves appropriately, we need to establish the right environment and communicate the implications of changes to that environment.

Read more at ProjectConnections.

Although I was hired by YRC Worldwide nearly two years ago to create a strategy to drive innovation, I quickly realized that there was more work to do within IT than just creating a strategy. In the wake of the merger of Yellow Freight, Roadway and USF, the IT groups from our three companies operating in multiple locations had been merged into one unit but had yet to jell into a cohesive team. Adding to the stress from its change of identity, the group had to develop an application road map for the merged organization that would modernize and simplify the application portfolio. Only then would we be able to free up the resources needed to focus on innovation and driving growth. The IT transformation is the biggest change effort ever seen within IT, ultimately involving hundreds of people.

The size and scope of such a task requires change leadership from the CIO. I have to be actively involved, and it’s a tough balancing act. I’ve been spending between 20 to 30 percent of my time as the hands-on manager of our change initiatives during the past 18 months while at the same time fulfilling my strategic role.

Fortunately, change leadership is one of the C-level competencies that seems to be native to the IT profession, even in the middle-management ranks. There aren’t many disciplines that have experienced as much change during the past 20 years as IT. People who have worked in IT over time have benefited from rolling with a series of technology changes. That experience makes us less resistant to change.

Read more at CIO.com.

IT manager Vince Delperdang’s environmental science degree is well suited to the era of global warming — especially in light of a prediction by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that power consumption in data centers will double over the next four years unless companies become more energy efficient.

In a report issued to Congress this month, the EPA called on IT managers to adopt best practices for managing power usage, install new energy-saving technologies and make going green a priority. Otherwise, they will continue contributing to global emissions problems, the EPA said.

“IT is just a complete burden on the environment,” said Delperdang, who manages IT operations at O’Donnell/Atkins Co., a real estate brokerage firm in Irvine, Calif. The burden he speaks of also includes other aspects of IT, such as the solvents used in manufacturing and the mercury built into chips.

Delperdang’s combined interest in computers and the environment has sparked his interest in reducing IT’s power consumption. Unlike many data centers, his is metered so that he can measure how much energy different technologies use. When Delperdang moved off of four direct-attached storage systems to a storage-area network from Pillar Data Systems Inc., the meters enabled him to track power usage levels, so he knows he was able to triple storage capacity and add new servers without consuming more energy.

Read more at ComputerWorld.

Congratulations. You’ve just been appointed to manage a project. How do you get started? What steps do you do next? How do you maximize your chances for success? The project management steps below guide you through the process of managing any project, step by step.

Here’s How:

1. Define the Scope

The first, and most important, step in any project is defining the scope of the project. What is it you are supposed to accomplish by managing this project? What is the project objective? Equally important is defining what is not included in the scope of your project. If you don’t get enough definition from your boss, clarify the scope yourself and send it back upstairs for confirmation.

Read more at About.com.