Journyx Project Management Blog

Fifteen years ago this November, version 1 of the Mosaic web browser launched a new era in communications, enabling an explosion of new ideas and new businesses with lofty stock valuations. A few years later, realism returned, and stock indices today are hardly moved from where they were in early 2000.

Markets moved up from 1945 to 1965, sideways until 1982, and up until 2000. Now we are engaged in another great sideways movement. It may continue for another decade and as esteemed businesses fail and congressmen pound their fists, it is natural to fear whether our economic system can long endure.

Yet in a larger sense, human advancement has never stopped for long since our emergence millennia ago. And as long as there are people dedicated to taking risk in anticipation of reward, progress must be near.

So let us all resolve not to succumb to fear of the financial and political storms around us, but to rededicate ourselves to the proposition that hard work with wise direction can succeed, because it is exactly that commitment which powers our global prosperity.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Senior management prizes one simple attribute: predictability. Whether they communicate this value clearly or not, predictability can be more important to your bosses than cost. Trust emerges from the intuitive belief that things are under control. Things are not under control if delivery cannot be predicted accurately.

Management is trained to deal with problems and make decisions, given accurate information. So it’s no wonder that deep frustration results when operating departments (including IT) uncover last-minute inaccuracies, leaving management with no ability to control the outcome. Imagine a manufacturing department that regularly encounters last-minute issues in production rates or quality.

Many IT departments measure status, quality, cost, effort, architectural reuse and a variety of other technical metrics, but most don’t measure predictability. They should, however. In fact, IT should adjust some of its key metrics and related behavior to encourage and enhance predictability.

Here are some ways IT can do that:

1. Create a culture of estimating and measuring.
Require all IT staff members to estimate the effort needed for all of their activities. Then measure actual results. In my experience, extreme variances will be common and should be discussed. But don’t yell at the junior programmer for being 200% over his estimate. Instead, use it as a learning experience. Help him understand what went wrong, and coach him to do better next time. Without this learning culture, programmers and project managers are encouraged to “sweep it under the rug,” which means that they learn nothing about predictability.

Read the entire article at ComputerWorld.

Journyx CEO Curt Finch has evolved into a regular bon vivant and speaker-about-town. In October alone he’ll be presenting on how Web2.0 affects project management at the Austin PMI Professional Development Day and taking part in the Austin InnoTech as a panelist discussing how the iPhone interacts with Enterprise-level companies.

So if you happen to be in Austin for either event, please join us as we listen, thoroughly engrossed and utterly rapt, as Curt dazzles the crowds with his delightful discourse.

• The PMI PDD takes place on Thursday, October 9, 2008 at the Renaissance
  Hotel in Austin.

• The Austin InnoTech is scheduled for Thursday, October 16, 2008 at the
  Austin Convention Center.

Extra! A limited number of free passes to Austin InnoTech are available to our readers. Just email Regional Sales Manager Sommer Howser, to claim yours.

We kid our CEO a lot on our blog. But we do it out of love and respect. Curt really is a pretty smart guy and he’s chock full o’ knowledge about time tracking, project management and crazy technology things like the aforementioned Web2.0 and what the future holds for businesses in the 21st Century. So rather than horde his pearls of wisdom we’ve decided to share him with you, our loyal readers.

To that end, we’re opening up the phone lines (metaphorically) to let you ask Curt for his thoughts on whatever’s on your mind. So drop us a line at askcurt@journyx.com and we’ll pose your questions to the big guy. Then, starting next month, we’ll share Curt’s answers to the most compelling questions from our readers.

Compliance is a tricky job even if all the data, devices and people are in the office. Introducing mobility to the equation makes the task significantly more complex. Amanda Finch, the CEO of ADV Group, says that the conversation between IT and the more financially-oriented parts of the organization often starts too late - after something bad has happened.

Listen to the podcast at: http://journyx.com/rss/redir/itfc-compliancepodcast.html

Learning is an active activity, and experience is only a great teacher if you invest the time and effort to learn from it. That means that you have to take time to ask yourself tough questions and wrestle with the answers. Then you have to change your behavior going forward.

Some great questions to ask in order to learn from your experiences are:

- What went wrong?
- What did I do wrong?
- Why did I decide to do that?
- What information did I not have (or did I ignore) that would have helped me make a better decision?

We have pre-digested information thrown at us all day every day. Learning from your own experience requires unplugging from the data flow and thinking your own thoughts. It requires a bit more effort, but offers greater rewards.

- Randy Miller, Journyx Director of Services

Hindsight is not 20/20. Hindsight is distorted by the effects and outcomes of the decisions we have made. It’s more like looking through the bottom of an empty shot glass (sometimes it is more like our fourth empty shot glass).

In order to really evaluate past decisions, you have to make a list of all of the things that you have learned since the decision. That information IS the shot glass. You have to properly define the distortion before you can correct for it.

The most vital question is not, “What should I have done differently?” The most vital question is, “What additional information from this list should I have figured out before I made that decision?” Just check off all of the information on your list that you feel you should have learned beforehand.

Now take each of the items you checked and devise a real plan for how you could have uncovered that information before making your decision. Could you have asked somebody? Could you have conducted an experiment?

Sometimes the answer is “no”. In those cases, you have learned that there was an “unknowable” that you should have planned a contingency for. You should therefore amend your decision-making process with a set of steps for how to identify these sorts of unknowns.

Sometimes the answer is “yes”. In those cases you have learned what you could have done differently in order to make a better decision. Amend your decision-making process to conduct experiments or ask the necessary questions before you make another big decision. That is how you learn from your mistakes.

- Randy Miller, Journyx Director of Services

September is back to school month. (At least it is in New York, where I’m from. Here in Texas, I believe the kiddies return in August. No matter.) Most of us in the working world can fondly recall the days when we had long breaks to celebrate Christmas, spring and summer, back before we were slaves to our cubes. These days, watching school buses drive by or sending our own kids out into the world, we can’t help but wonder: When did I get trapped inside a Dilbert cartoon?

Yet the office is a school of sorts. Few of us can say that we spend 40+ hours a week, 50 weeks a year, at this place without learning a thing or two. The trick is to keep an open mind about what you can learn from your employers, your colleagues and your customers. Even the people who irk you the most have something to teach you, if you are open enough to listen. Maybe you overhear that salesguy who beats you to the last spot in the garage each morning on the phone with a prospect, and are surprised to hear how understanding he is about their business problems. Or perhaps you notice that the woman in support who always drinks the last of the coffee without making more stays extremely late one night to make sure that a customer with a problem is taken care of.

Regardless of the lesson, the people in our lives are all capable of teaching us something we didn’t know before, and hard as it may be to believe, that does include the people we work with. Likewise, our own actions can help to shape others, whether we are aware of it or not. So keep an eye out to see what new things you can learn this year, and also, what you can teach.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator

By the time you read this, I will be gone. On vacation, that is. And while I’m gone, Journyx will fall apart without me. Flames will rise from the earth to engulf not just my department, nay, but the entire company. From Development to Sales to Support and, of course, Marketing, the wails of the lost souls will fill the building and no one will be even remotely capable of functioning. When I return, there will be disaster after disaster that I alone will be able to clean up. There will be mountains of work piled up on my desk. And everyone will hate me, cursing my name as they vow to drive the hard-won relaxation from my bones.

Does that sound like how you feel about taking a little time off? If so, then you really should talk to someone about your martyr complex. Because no matter how guilty we as Americans are inclined to feel about taking time off from work, we really ought to. And I’m not talking some kind of “I’ll be checking email and voice mail hourly” thing here. I’m talking about an honest-to-goodness “I am not available. Sorry. I’ll be back in a week (or two, if you’re bold)” vacating (or, vacation) of the office.

Now I understand that there are some professions where you can’t really go on vacation. Transplant surgeon and owner-operator of a one-person consultancy come to mind. But really, everyone else ought to be able to take a least a few days off every now and then and think about something other than the Henderson liver/account. So unless there’s literally no one else who can keep the fires burning (or if Mrs. Sydney’s kidney is depending on you) then do yourself - and likely everyone else around you - a big favor and take some time off before the summer ends and the mad press to squirrel away nuts before winter really takes hold.

Say it with me. “I will be out of the office for the next few days. Please contact one of my able-bodied and intelligent coworkers if you need assistance.” Good. I know that was hard. Now say it again, and try not to falter. You can do this.

And if you can’t, well, I’ll send you a postcard.

- Andrew Trent, Journyx Director of Web Content

Given the murky economic outlook, budgetary efficiency is an increasingly important part of every IT leader’s job. In fact, according to “The State of Enterprise IT Budgets: 2008,” a March report from Gartner Inc., 75% of enterprises say improving the efficiency of IT is a critical or high priority.

Think you have the budget covered? So did many others, who nonetheless found themselves explaining missteps that cost hundreds of thousands — even millions — of dollars.

Here are some of the things they learned not to do:

1. Always say yes. Acceding to constant demands can send the budget spiraling out of control, says Mike Gorsage, a partner and regional technology practice leader at Tatum LLC, an Atlanta-based executive services and consulting firm.

Gorsage cites the case of a hospital where the CIO worked under a directive to fulfill all requests. “The senior executives told IT if someone needs something, just get it done,” he says.

As a result, planned projects accounted for about 10% of the $100 million budget, while unplanned work sucked down a staggering 30%. And just over 60% went to maintenance. Best-practices models indicate that 70% should be spent on maintenance, 25% on planned projects and only 5% on unanticipated demands, Gorsage says.

The tipping point came when IT suffered a costly failure on a big project — a failure that stemmed from all those helter-skelter projects, Gorsage says.

“Finally, the CIO and senior management figured they had to put in strong governance, but it took six or seven months of pain to get that done,” Gorsage says. The new rigorous approval and planning process brought the hospital’s IT spending closer to that 75/25/5 split.

Read the rest at ComputerWorld.