Journyx Project Management Blog

If you don’t count brand building exercises or overly-ceremonial extravaganzas, today is baseball’s opening day. Baseball, like your average project, produces a lot of data. Some of it important, some of it not. Sometimes little parts of that data matter tremendously to only a very few people. But baseball has mastered, over the last century, a way of displaying that information clearly, concisely and (amazingly) practically all-inclusively. I am speaking, of course, of that most humble of sports page filler, the box score.

The box score, which has evolved in fits and starts ever since the earliest days of baseball, it now an outstanding post-mortem of the previous days’ games. Or, as the geniuses at Baseball Prospectus put it:

Box scores now tell us nearly everything that occurs in a game. They tell us hot warm it was, the direction and speed of the wind, and how many people came out to the park. We can find out who the umpiring crew was. Baserunning blunders, substitution patterns, clutch hits, high-leverage relief appearances–it’s all in a good box score, along with groundballs, flyballs, balls, strikes, and pitch counts.

Project Management could use just such a miraculous little box of ink. A simple, yet detailed explanation of everything that happened in a project. With that sort of detail at hand, you could review your past projects and plan for the future - the way baseball teams know to pitch certain batters outside on a 3-2 count.

Journyx Timesheet might not squeeze the data into a perfect, 8 pt font column on page 3 of the sport section, but it can give you the data you need to know how to pitch that next hitter, or, rather, how to bid that next project.

And don’t think we’re not looking for ways to simplify that information further. We’ll get there, too. Just as sure as the amazing 100+ years of raw baseball data at Retrosheet.org can be analyzed better thanks to the efforts of the crew at Baseball-Reference.com.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a game on.

-Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

This is the first in our brand new series of customer testimonials. If you like what you see, check out the others at Journyx TV.

IT is turning greenish.

That’s right. Many technology leaders shrug their shoulders at the mention of climate change in conversation, or they pass on conference panels that use the “green” terminology. But in fact, according to exclusive CIO research, they are beginning to think green. Stricter government regulations, rising energy costs and the growing awareness that sustainability is a real business concern are pushing companies to strategize how they will meet future energy demands and calls for carbon emissions data. Green IT is making inroads in the data center; CIOs are also starting to realize that’s only the beginning. Fifty-four percent of IT leaders responding to a CIO magazine survey about Green IT report that their organizations have environmental sustainability goals­ for information technology. In other words, they are trying to reduce IT’s impact on the planet.

They are motivated almost equally by social responsibility and business benefits. Thirty-eight percent say they’re going green because it’s the right thing to do; 37 percent say doing the right thing for the planet also helps them reduce operational costs by, for example, cutting energy consumption. A handful—only 5 percent—see sustainable IT as a competitive advantage.

For IT departments, a focus on costs—and energy costs in particular—is a logical place to start. If you pay attention to the news, you know that addressing climate change depends on rethinking energy use. Electricity is “more and more part of my overall bill that I pay as a CIO,” says Patricia Lawicki, senior VP and CIO with Pacific Gas & Electric. Reducing the electric bill cuts costs and frees up funds for additional IT investments.

Read the rest at CIO.com.

Labor is often the highest expense in Government contracts; therefore a robust labor management system is a requirement for any contractor that serves the U.S. Government. Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) compliance can be met only through detailed labor and cost center tracking. Journyx Timesheet can automate the costly process of capturing and reporting contract-specific data, and provide critical supporting documentation for DCAA audits.

Timesheet accomplishes this in many ways, but now we’ve got an easy-to-use turnkey solution for your DCAA compliance needs - the DCAA Toolset for Timesheet. This suite of tools helps you to use your existing installation of Timesheet (7.6 or later) in a DCAA compliant manner by:

• Ensuring that your employees enter their time daily
• Providing easy-to-read printable timesheets
• Simplifying audit log examination
• Enforcing multiple critical data validation rules

The DCAA Toolset for Timesheet is available now for all Journyx customers, local install or hosted, for the insanely reasonable cost of $1000 (or just $55 per month for hosted customers).

Contact the Journyx Sales Team to purchase the DCAA Toolset: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/contactsales.html

Learn more about Timesheet and compliance issues at: http://journyx.com/rss/products/timesheet/compliance.html

Your IT department is taking on a complex project—a new application with lots of data integration challenges, a Web front-end, a new database-management system platform, dedicated servers in the data center, and field-office training during the roll-out, along with all the usual issues of change control, help-desk set-up and contracting for ongoing support-services. It looks like half the managers in IT are going to be involved, one way or another.

This project needs world-class teamwork and project management, both in the proposal or feasibility study phase and the implementation phase. But based on past experience, applications developers don’t seem to be up to the challenge. Sure, they’re great engineers and can do their own parochial share of the project. But they don’t seem able to pull all the pieces together and manage the entire project. Too often at your company, teams haven’t formed or haven’t worked well, and IT struggles to deliver large projects like this one.

Uncover the secret at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/cio-projectteams.html

Journyx will be exhibiting at the PMI Clearlake/Galveston Chapter Meeting on Thursday, April 24th from 3:00 pm to 8:00 pm. Stop by our booth and say hello. Our friendly Journyx reps will be delighted to regale you with their mind-blowing insight into how Journyx can help you achieve per-person, per-project profitability.

Learn more about this and other Journyx events and appearances at: http://journyx.com/rss/events/

In project management, we are often called upon to take on the role of prognosticators, as well as the role of seers of our own environment. And we are asked to cope with change. What better place to start than with the ancient Book of Changes? (You can check out an online version at http://www.cfcl.com/ching/). If you read a selection or two, you will find yourself wondering, “What the heck does THAT mean?” The idea behind understanding it is to create your personal interpretation. That’s the whole point. That’s what the Book of Changes is largely about.

How does this relate to project management? Well, for one, project management is about nothing so much as it’s about change. As you study the I Ching, you begin to understand that it thrives on a simple dichotomy of thought. There is what is. There is what isn’t. And there is merit in both. Part of the thinking here is that it’s important to pay homage and reverence to both sets of conditions. Even as we create something new, there is a need to explore and retain that of value from the old.

Explore the East at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/pcon-tao.html

• How can I report on time entered in other systems in Journyx Timesheet?
• I like to choose my project/task before I start timing my work, but my Stopwatch forces me to choose the time entry details after I have completed the work. What can I do?

Get these and other useful tidbits at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/tips/

The Project Management industry is changing; we are moving away from the days of the boardroom meetings and group gatherings, to the virtual team world. Full and part time employees work each week from a home (Home office employees) or a remote office (corporate or remote office, in another town or state) 100% of the time. This is still a relatively new direction but more and more companies are starting to offer this kind of work arrangement for their employees. The question is; how effective is it?

How does a Project Manager (PM) handle a virtual team? What are the challenges and issues he/she faces on projects? Can a PM be effective with a team spread out across the country, and in some cases the world? Can they really bring a team together and be successful?

Virtual Team Members present the following challenges:

Lack of Accountability

Out of site, out of mind! When a team member does not have a PM around to make sure a task is completed, sometimes tasks do not get finished.

Missed meetings/deadlines

Sometimes team members don’t show up to meetings or miss deadlines on their assigned tasks. There are also times, due to other priorities, team members will miss multiple project meetings leaving the PM not knowing what is happening with their piece of the project.

Lack of communication

Sometimes team members do not communicate enough with the PM and/or the rest of the project team. This lack of dialog will become an issue when something goes wrong and you are unable to solicit any help from that team member.

Read the rest at PROJECTmagazine.

Once upon a time there was a company that had a goal of increasing sales.

The leadership team said in a very authoritative voice, “This year we will increase sales by 40%. That is our objective.”

The people were dismayed. They said, “You pulled that number out of your … thin air.”

The leadership team answered, “Yes we did - now let’s see how we can actually achieve it. What can we do to make things better?”

And everyone puzzled over these things together.

“Well, we’ll have to increase leads by this amount or lead quality by that amount or some combination of the two. Is there a way to do a little of the former and a lot of the latter and keep it within our budget?”

“What if we have a new product? How much can that generate? What if we go back to existing customers and try to increase their usage of our product?”

They came up with estimates and discovered that they probably couldn’t increase sales more than 30% given the budget restraints they were under. Yet the process caused them to invent new ideas for improving operations without increasing costs, such as increasing lead quality and value delivered (and therefore revenue per customer).

Besides, 30% is a good number.

They went out and did all those things. Some worked and some didn’t and they increased sales by 27%. Not everything was completed on schedule and sometimes people got grumpy, but nobody was bored that year.

And 27% was still a good performance - one to be proud of.

Everyone got raises and lived happily ever after. The next year they were larger and more powerful and able to help more customers than ever before.

And so it went.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO