Journyx Project Management Blog

Cloud computing has become incredibly popular in recent years, and its popularity is only going to grow. In fact, Journyx CEO Curt Finch & Resource Manager April Boland recently published an article in Accounting Software 411 Insider on the future of cloud computing and why businesses simply can’t ignore it.

PM World Today is also sounding the call with a new paper, “Cloud Computing Meets Project Management.” The authors, Raj Asava and Hussein Mzee, argue that cloud computing is beneficial for project managers, but must be guided by tried and tested PM principles:

From lost time to inconsistency, the lack of process & tools for managing projects will mean poor performance and an inability to harvest the true benefits of the cloud. The key to successful project management in the cloud era is to maintain the standardized project management framework that embeds best practices into how one manages projects, inside and outside the cloud.

The authors suggest that you harness the power of the cloud without forfeiting the processes that you’ve found successful in the past. This makes a lot of sense, though as project management continues to be influenced by the cloud’s innovation, perhaps methodology will be influenced as well.

Journyx CEO Curt Finch has written about how the end of the recession means more projects coming into play, yet in his article he acknowledges that you have to be careful on how you spend your money. Lisa Anderson, blogger at Project Times, confirms this idea, writing that project planning is becoming increasingly important as executives fear “spending precious cash.” She lists the keys to success as follows:

1. Executive Commitment and Involvement
2. Effective Questioning
3. A Rigorous Focus on the Critical Path

Do you agree?

A friend of mine who works at a successful design firm once told me about their timekeeping process. Every employee is required to fill out their timesheets and submit them to an administrator, who then has to reformat them and manually enter them into their financial software system. These administrators – being only human, after all – frequently make mistakes and errors which then affect the quality of the data for project and budget tracking. Not to mention the fact that this company is essentially paying people to do double data entry, when the employees have already entered the data themselves. Many of the employees believe, and rightly so, that this is an inefficient way to track time.

Aren’t business solutions like time tracking systems supposed to work for you, and not the other way around? It seems like so many companies today are spending countless hours of resource time on re-entering data into multiple systems, emailing it to interested parties, and other menial tasks that, quite frankly, are better left automated. Sadly, they often do not realize that the initial cost of such a system is nothing compared to the ROI it brings in terms of less margin of error and quicker processes (such as billing, for example). Not to mention the fact that it is likely cheaper than the cost of 1, 2 or more employees to do this kind of work.

Which of your processes can be simplified and automated for better efficiency and higher return on investment? Now, when times and tough and budgets are tight, might be a good time to learn.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator

Many organisations have embarked on wild cost cutting programmes to counter the threat of the current financial crisis.

But unless these measures are carefully planned they will at best limit their readiness for the upturn and at worst jeopardise the very survival for which they strive.

There are three key steps to survival that could help get through the recession and to be fit and ready to take advantage of the upturn – when it comes!

1. Change the rhetoric
2. Choose the right investments and the right cost cutting measures
3. Excel at execution

These actions are aimed at changing the mental attitude from a negative to a positive position, choosing the most effective investments to implement the company’s strategy and delivering this strategy as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Download the PDF at PM World Today.

One of the biggest areas of failure in project management is task estimation. Typically, when a project manager wants to scope the project, he or she will walk down to Joe the developer’s office and ask, “How long will it take you to write a user entry screen in Java that has these 5 fields on it?” Joe replies, “Uh, 3 days.”

Yet if nobody tracks their time, there is no way to calibrate that answer. Perhaps Joe the developer is the best at estimating task timelines, but what if he is just guessing? What if he consistently over-estimates by around 30% and no one realizes?

This type of problem is easily remedied by having all employees track time to tasks and projects. Pretty soon, everyone will have a clear idea of how long certain tasks take to complete, with hard data to back it up. This takes the pressure off of Joe the developer, and gives the project manager confidence in his or her timelines.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Check out a new podcast interview with Journyx CEO Curt Finch over at the Employee Benefit Adviser’s Audio Arena. In the interview, Curt discusses relevant issues like how companies can cut costs during a recession without losing valuable people and projects, and how time tracking helps both individuals and businesses of all sizes.

“Metrics” is a popular word these days. It seems that every project manager and everyone working on a project needs them, so what are they? Well, it turns out that “Metrics” are nothing more than “A theory or system of measurement” and isn’t that what we are supposed to have been doing on projects all along? How else can we know how we are doing, where we are at, and how we are going to get the rest of the way to where we want to be?

But today, that’s no longer sufficient – people want to know the results of those measurements post-project so they can determine how successful the project was. That’s a diplomatic way of expressing the thought “How good a job did you do on the project” and usually framed in terms of: “Was it on time and within budget?” With a little more forethought that might be extended to “And to specifications, requirements, (you name it), and customer satisfaction?” Never mind the problems, (er, risk events), you encountered, the questioner probably would not have done any better, because at this point they are asking the wrong questions!

What they should be asking is how successful is the product? And that can only be measured after the project is completed, perhaps long after, and typically measured by those who promoted the project in the first place. But the definition of “success” itself is a vague term, so let’s be more specific: “Did we obtain expected value or even best value?” That question should take you back to the justification in the project’s Business Case (your project does have a Business Case justification, doesn’t it?) and the Project Charter that shows how that justification is to be achieved.

Read more at MaxWideman.com.

And now for a variation on our regularly scheduled “Mondays with Curt,” here is a link to the Student Operated Press, where Judyth Piazza had a chat with our fearless leader.

The two discussed issues like project accounting and time management, as well as some of Curt’s philosophies on business, technology and leadership.

*If you missed it, check out part one of A New Attitude for a New Year.

Increasing percentages of rich country workforces are moving from farming and manufacturing to knowledge work, which creates broad opportunities and challenges for their citizens. As property has moved from the physical realm to the intellectual one, serious issues of applicability of property rights to knowledge work have arisen. Strong protection of property rights is at the foundation of the prosperity begat by market systems, but intellectual property is harder to protect and arguably should be less protected. As a result of this historic shift to knowledge work as the engine of economic growth, the U.S. patent office has endured changes to its workflow from a trickle to a flood over the last century (including a few by yours truly – http://www.journyx.com/company/patents.html)

Another problem faced by companies in the new knowledge world is understanding their costs. This is easy for farmers and has been solved for manufacturers, but most knowledge worker companies still have no idea of their costs of production in any real sense. Software companies, for example, produce products at unknown costs. Drug research is done in a vacuum of cost understanding and engineering firms have no idea which customers are profitable and which are not. Effective time tracking and project management practices can help you solve that problem.

Additionally, the world economic system has become increasingly characterized by international trade in manufactured goods (e.g. computers), commodities (e.g. oil) and services (e.g. call centers). This specialization on a global basis has created a situation where your competitors are increasingly less likely to be close to home, and this makes understanding of per-product, per-project and per-customer profitability all the more important. Some of your customers will be more profitable than others. Without knowing your costs, however, you cannot know which ones are which. This is why we invented a process for taking you down the path to per-person, per-project profitability.

The disinflationary pressures begat of hundreds of millions of people from China and behind the iron curtain being thrown upon the international labor pool have nearly run their course. Wages are rising fast in India and China and soon many of the benefits of globalization will be wrung out of the system. The low hanging fruit will be gone. When that happens, governments will find it increasingly difficult to keep inflationary pressures and recessions at bay. We will be returning to an economic era where deeply understanding your costs will be paramount. Companies that gain a deep understanding of their costs will lead the market and others who do not will fail or, at best, limp along in a torpor.

You don’t have to stay in the dark. We can help.

This new year I beseech you to make a commitment to start working towards gaining a deep understanding of the costs of production of your knowledge workers.

It is more like an exercise program than a shot in the arm and its benefits are similarly long term. We are here to help you accomplish it.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

In 1945, Germany was separated into two countries with two economies. The east was based on central planning and government ownership of property and the west was based on a chaotic market system and private ownership of property. In the west, individual rights were protected, especially property rights. In the east, however, this was not the case. In most other respects, the two Germanies were not very different – they had similar religions, genetic makeups and cultures. It was as close to a scientific test as you can ever get in the real world of how different economic organizational systems perform over time – in this case, over 4 decades.

Due to a lack of data exiting East Germany, we could only estimate economic activity in that region during that time. Most estimates placed it at about 60% of the west’s productivity in the late 1980s.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and we were finally able to peer into the true inner workings of the economy behind the iron curtain, we found that our estimates of economic activity in East Germany were substantially higher than the reality turned out to be. East Germany was an economic ruin.

As the conclusions of this experiment sank into the minds of well-meaning people around the world, the concept of cental planning in economies fell quickly into disrepute. Today it can be easy to forget that in the early 1970s in America, price controls were in effect under the Nixon administration. The U.S. – the bastion of market driven economics – was experimenting disastrously with central planning.

Today central planning is only seriously practiced in North Korea, Cuba, and most recently Venezuela, and their economies are suffering as a result. The rest of the world – most notably China, which contains ¼ of the world’s population – has embraced chaotic market systems as the best way to enhance the human condition and enrich populations.

As a result, hundreds of millions of people worldwide have been lifted out of poverty. You can check out the statistics in GapMinder’s online tool for exploring population data.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO