Journyx Project Management Blog

Spreadsheet errors can happen to the best of us. As a result, many public companies and government organizations are trying to wean themselves off their reliance on spreadsheets for complex and critical financial transactions.

Of course, to achieve such a goal, organizations need all the help they can get. Most businesses today rely on spreadsheets in some way. The multi-celled document is used heavily for finance and accounting, as well as supply chain, customer relationship and sales functions.

However, recent financial regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, have had a huge impact on how companies manage changes and controls in financial documents, such as spreadsheets. Because of their preponderance and the amount of digital fingertips that can touch these documents, spreadsheets have come under a lot of fire. In particular, companies lack the appropriate controls and repeatable processes to mitigate the risks.

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1. Fidelity’s “Minus Sign Mistake”

“There was a big flap recently over Fidelity’s Magellan fund estimating in November that they would make a $4.32/share distribution at the end of year, and then not doing so. A letter of explanation was sent to the shareholders…from J. Gary Burkhead, the President of Fidelity, including the following pertinent items: During the estimating process, a tax accountant is required to transcribe the net realized gain or loss from the fund’s financial records (which were correct at all times) to a separate spreadsheet, where additional calculations are performed. The error occurred when the accountant omitted the minus sign on a net capital loss of $1.3 billion and incorrectly treated it as a net capital gain on this separate spreadsheet. This meant that the dividend estimate spreadsheet was off by $2.6 billion…”

Read the rest at CIO.com, and for those of you who missed it, our CEO Curt Finch addressed this very subject here at the Project Management Blog earlier this month.

Happy Hallmark Card Day, everyone. Err…Hallmark Store Day? Err…That Day That Guys Don’t Get to Watch Sports Day? Yeah. That day. Every man reading this post knows to which day I’m referring, and every guy out there feels my pain. My little bit is the Grumpy IT Guy, so let me tell you a little about how that Most Annoying Day (okay, it’s not really, but it should be) has started to cost you more, and why they’re blaming it on technology and our guys.

I love my wife very much. Very much. I like to buy her roses. I really do. It makes everyone else in her office very jealous. I can call my local florist in the morning and have a couple dozen roses that last for a week delivered that very day on most days. Yeah, you know where this is going.

Being The Guy Who Does His Christmas Shopping on Christmas Eve, let’s just say it was the morning of February 13th, and there I was trying to send my girl the standard chocolates + roses thing. I had seen three different ads from three online vendors on television during sporting events espousing their abilities to send at the last minute and promising prices well below $92,145 for a dozen roses. Anything below $10,000 is okay on VD.

I booted my “trusty” PC that morning (I literally had to kick it to wake it up), blithely ignoring all the work ahead of me because, well, I’m in IT, and I don’t really like to do anything; I just want to surf the ‘net all day. I browse over to each of these sites, and surprise, surprise! The prices for the roses are just as advertised! Wow. Each of these sites had advertised 12-18 roses for between $25 and $50. Delivered. I’m in. Watch the love meter rise enormously for me as my wife gushes at the pretty flowers and makes everyone in her office jealous, again! Score.

Proceeding naively to checkout, I found my bill suddenly expanded to the $120 range. For $30 roses. Hmm. Opening my cart I wondered what other little goodies they shoved in without telling me anything. Nothing. Where were the fees? Delivery. Perturbed, I went to the second site. Same thing. Then the third. Guess what? $150.00 at the third.

Alright now guys, here’s the thing. You sell roses all the time. I guarantee on May 21st, there’s no extra delivery fee. I can guarantee it because I’ve done it before - on a normal Wednesday for Thursday delivery, you don’t hit me with a $35 “rush” charge. I’ll even accept the $5.00 VD fee, since you’re probably passing it on from the local delivery guys, but come on.

1. You sell flowers for delivery. It’s what you do. The prices did NOT go up. You’re just gouging me because you can.

2. Your online transaction fees did not go up from last week for today. I promise. So, we’re gonna call your $20.00 processing fee that wasn’t even included the last time I did this what it is, and guys, that smells remarkably like what comes out the south end of a north-facing Longhorn.

3. Your rush charge is completely ridiculous, and you know it. You’re pocketing all that money. I know because I called a few florists that I know who were way overbooked, and while they offered to squeeze me in, they wouldn’t take an offered bribe of $50.00 to put me higher on the list.

Stop blaming technology, stop charging me “transaction fees” for the lowest per-transaction cost-based system in the world (the Internet), and stop telling me that they might not be there on time because “the system is overloaded and being slow.”

-The Grumpy Journyx IT Guy

We grow ‘em big here in Texas. Honestly, it was the size of my forearm.

It’s leap week. By which I mean the week that contains February 29th. We only get this extra February day once an olympiad and I’ve always felt that it really should be observed as a holiday. Every business should be closed this one day out of every four years. No furniture sales, no floral deliveries. Nothing outside of emergency medical care.

On this one special day, everyone should be allowed to focus on what they are most passionate about. Reading, playing guitar, restoring that classic car out in the garage, gardening. Whatever that one thing that you never have quite enough time for is, you should be allowed this one day to dedicate your time to it. It’s a pipe dream, to be sure. But wouldn’t it be nice?

Ah well. Dreams aside, I thought I’d make my first report on the great time boxing experiment. The first thing I have to admit is that I’m doing a terrible job of using any sort of official form or policy to enforce the time boxing. I’m just a little too informal by nature for that sort of thing, I’m afraid.

That said, the good news is that I’ve embraced the concept thoroughly and I’m making it work on a somewhat intuitive level. Case in point: Last Sunday my wife and I needed to get to the community garden to set her plot set up for planting (this is Texas, spring comes early). Neither of us really wanted to put down the Sunday Times, get up from the couch and go shovel… compost. But I knew that if we didn’t do it, then it simply wouldn’t get done. Worse, the window for it would slip by completely and we’d be terribly unhappy that we’d been lazy.

So we turned to the magic of time boxing. We agreed that we’d spend exactly one hour working at the garden. We’d get as much composting done as we could and then we’d walk away, at least for the day. And you know what? We got 80% of the plot covered, on top of some weeding and general cleanup. In the end we went over our hour by about 20 minutes, but that’s fine. In fact, that’s one of the hopes inherent in time boxing for tasks you just don’t want to do - that you’ll get into it and get even more done than you would have without that built-in limit. Sure, we didn’t finish the project, but we got a hell of a lot more done than we would have by simply not going. Or, frankly, than we would have if we hadn’t known that we were going to stop at a certain point. Believe me, I’m lazy enough about stuff like this that if we’d made ourselves go with the intent of working until we were done, I’d have dragged my feet for hours.

Now, imagine taking this approach to those annoying tasks at the office. You may not wind up with zucchinis as big as your forearm, but you’ll get stuff done. And that should help you have enough time for the things that you really want to do.

-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

Once a project is in motion, there are many things that can slow it down. Here are the most common project jams to watch for:

1. “Feature creep”
2. Project agreement changes
3. Poor team dynamics
4. Multi-tasking
5. Over-scheduling people’s time (for example, setting up a schedule where team members are working more than 60 hours per week for more than two weeks)
6. Inefficient business processes that the team must use to create their interim deliverables
7. Chaotic work environments

“Feature Creep”

This is the disease of “we can make it better.” There comes a time in every project when it’s time to silence the engineer in your head and finish the project. To make decisions about suggested feature changes, use what is called a change impact matrix. Also, freeze the design of the product or service, including the set of features, at a specified time in the project. The earlier this is done, the faster your project will move. Save your future feature ideas as upgrade possibilities for later versions of the product or service.

Read on at Developer.com.

The senior White House IT official, Karen Evans, said she believes software as a service (SaaS) can improve government IT projects and systems.

Evans made her remarks during a talk at the Saas/GOV 2008 conference. From InfoWorld:

“Our track record is clear — we are not very good at delivering our own software in the time frame set,” Evans said at the conference. “We’re also not very good at managing large projects.”

Some agencies haven’t embraced the service approach, often because they want hands-on control of software development, Evans said. But government agencies can’t afford to keep developing their own software without sharing with other agencies, she said.

“We can’t continue to maintain all of the things we have,” she added. “We have to start shutting down some of our legacy systems. We really have to move to a … service-oriented market.”

Read more at IT Project Failures.

Most businesses - especially the successful ones - love their customers.

And the more unfettered the market, the more that love becomes apparent.

Because in a truly free market, nobody ever gives you a dime unless you do a good deed for them.

The corollary to this statement is that if you’re running a business and people are giving you money, you must be doing something good for them. Your company must be serving a moral purpose.

Most CEOs don’t think about their companies in this way.

You company has a moral purpose. Figure out what it is. Write it down. Think about it. Expand the concept. Think about your business from that spiritual angle for a while. I promise you it will make a difference in your company over time.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

When several organizations are involved in a project, unique challenges arise for the project manager and team members, especially the need to influence without authority across functional areas, businesses, and geography. Geographical location and organizational boundaries affect the dynamics of any project, offering opportunities as well as challenges. The behavioral process described below evolved over years of experience, study, and teaching. Greater success comes not by doing pieces, but to the extent you apply all steps in the process.

Prepare for Relationship-Building

Proactive leaders recognize that people make things happen, and getting to know their needs is vital to changing their behavior. Success in a cross-organizational project requires extra effort to develop relationships-first to get support from key people and then to get commitment to the project from each team member.

Starting with the premise that people generally have some choice regarding what project they work on, continually ask yourself, “How can I get people to work with me on this project?” The answers vary by individual. Make the effort to determine the answer to this question for each individual you want to work on your project. If you are able to answer the question, you gain a competitive advantage in attracting these individuals and eliciting their active involvement and cooperation on the project.

Read on at ProjectConnections.

In the beginning, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) gave the world Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 70, Service Organizations. An organization that has passed a SAS 70 audit has proven to an independent auditor that its control objectives and control activities, including controls over information technology, meet the requirements of SAS 70. Of particular note here is that SAS 70 requirements cover controls and safeguards for hosted and processed data belonging to customers.

Further, the requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 make SAS 70 audit reports even more important to the process of reporting on the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting.

For you, me, and everyone else you know who isn’t an accountant, SAS 70 is a mouthful and then some. And we’re only bringing it up because, like Brussels sprouts, it’s good for you. And us. You see, Journyx passed a SAS 70 Audit back in January and we wanted you to know.

If you are part of a publicly-traded company whose future might just include a little tango to the Sarbanes-Oxley tune, you’re likely just relieved to hear that Journyx is SAS 70 certified and would like to move on to some other topic, like puppies, root canals, or a post-modern deconstruction of Crime And Punishment. But if you’re not in that type of company, you’re probably wondering why this matters to you. The answer is simple.

Fundamentally, passing this audit means that Journyx is safe to do business with. It means we don’t hire felons. It means we treat your company’s private data (credit cards, employee information, you name it) with extreme, even fanatical, care. It means that we have a documented software development process that includes version controls and excludes dubious code from Sneaky Pete’s Internet Script Shack. It means our hiring, firing, accounting, IT and other processes are strong enough and proven enough that accountants are okay with them. Seriously, actual accountants. And accountants are notoriously picky (sorry, Dad).

Oh, passing this audit also means that, if you’re using Timesheet SaaS, you don’t have to worry about proving that your time and expense solution is SOX compliant. So if you wind up facing a Sarbanes-Oxley audit you simply point to the fact that Journyx passed its audit and move on to other areas.

So, let’s summarize. Journyx passed a SAS 70 audit. This is great news no matter who you are. It means Journyx is a company you can trust. We always were. It’s just that now we’ve got the paperwork to prove it.

You can also find out more about Timesheet and compliance issues on the Journyx website.

More often than not, a project manager has to influence without authority. It’s been said we use only 10-20% of our mental capacity; I posit that we also use only a small portion of our influence capacity, maybe only 10%. If you could double your influence capacity, improving your capabilities by 10%, imagine the impact!

More gets accomplished, less stress, partners cooperate instead of resist, work is more fun - these are a few potential benefits. You can tame the naturally occurring chaos, not by making it go away, but by looking for patterns in human behavior and by applying a systematic set of process steps that lead to higher probability of project success. Because you apply this approach to more activities and improve your overall return on investments by treating everything as a project, you find yourself asking the same question, ‘What is not a project?’

Fire up your influence at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/pmworld-notaproject.html

You’ve already implemented Timesheet to help you understand your business better. With it, you’ve got a clearer picture your projects. Moreover, you’ve improved your efficiency, billing, and payroll and kicked your compliance reporting up a notch or three. But are you 100% confident in the data your employees are entering? Are you certain your folks are giving you the real data you require to improve these processes?

Journyx understands that uncertainty. And that’s why we’re introducing two new services for Timesheet: the End User Data Validation Tool and the ProUpdate Reconfig. These two enhancements to Timesheet will help you realize all of the available benefits of automated project and resource time data collection.

End User Data Validation Tool
(including up to 8 hours of dedicated consultant time)

• Up to 2 hour examination of end-user data entry processes
• Data Validation Tool and two hours of training
• Custom-written guide to configuration changes to make data entry easier
• Up to 3 hours of assistance with configuration changes

ProUpdate Reconfiguration Services
(15 total hours of dedicated consultant time)

• Review of existing business practices and Timesheet system configuration
• Assessment of current system needs and data goals
• Recommendation and reconfiguration of Timesheet to satisfy current needs/goals
• Training on updated system configuration for up to 4 primary users

For the duration of the first Quarter, each of these packages is available for a mere $2250, which you can even break out into six low monthly payments of $375, if your budget requires.

Contact the Journyx Sales Team if you have any questions on the availability of these services or would like additional information.