Journyx Project Management Blog

Journyx is just plain delighted to announce that ProjectXecute has been named a “Best Of Breed” Project and Portfolio Management solution by the smart folks at Business Finance Magazine.

As Business Finance Magazine puts it, PPM solutions like ProjectXecute are “about getting your house in order — whether you’re talking at the corporate level or the IT level — so that… you’re not spending your time, people, and money on operational things just to keep up with business flow, but you’re actually streamlined so that when the business opportunities arise, you can go after them.”

So if you’re looking to improve your PPM, take a look at ProjectXecute. It’s Best of Breed, after all.

The same old Gantt charts, the same old status meetings… aren’t you sick of it? Don’t you want a new and improved way of approaching projects? Here are some ways to inject life into your processes and make them more effective.

Connect Microsoft Project to Actuals

Gantt charts are pretty, but altogether useless if you don’t know some important facts, such as:

• Who is available to do the work? Do they have the right skills?
• Are these estimates and deadlines realistic?
• Has the team member completed this task or is he still working on it?
• Have we spent 30% of the budget and only completed 15% of the work?

Integrating MS Project with a resource management solution provides this information. Don’t just look at a picture of how you want the project to be. Get a view of how it really is, so you can step in and fix things when necessary.

Replace Status Meetings with Instant Status Views

No one wants to take time from their busy schedule to sit around and discuss what they are working on, how much is left, and how it is going. They just don’t. Yet this is necessary data for the project manager, so how can you compromise? Resource management solutions provide project dashboards based on team member time tracked against tasks, so the project manager can log in and see project status within minutes. Saving all of your people an hour a week means more productivity and higher morale. You should try it.

- April Boland, Journyx Communications Coordinator

Here is a short blast from the past with some of the information on resource management we’ve published in the last few months.

1. Power to the People
A post from your friends here at the Journyx Project Management Blog on why it is important to give the people (in this case, project team members) a voice.

2. Anticipating and Resolving Resource Overloads
A ProjectTimes article giving readers advice on how to deal with too many projects and too few people.

3. Do You Know What Projects Your Staff is Working On?
A guest post from Bruce McGraw at Cognitive Technologies on how the integration of tools, processes and people can make projects more successful.

About the Role of Project Manager in Encouraging Efficiency Processes

The Challenge of a Project Manager

The basic role of a project manager is to reach the project objectives while maintaining the given resources. There are two main methods for maintaining the resources:

* To prevent resource deviations in advance
* To react correctly to local deviations – in a way that will not affect the overall project resources

In this article I will present an additional strategy: utilizing the potential for improving processes during the project itself. I will present characteristics which require attention prior to intervention (aim of which is improving the project), examples for improving processes as well as the principles that are required in this regard.

Read the rest at PM World Today.

Our partner, Cognitive Technologies, is sponsoring a research study on the resource management tools and processes organizations currently utilize and the challenges they face. The study will also highlight how management practices vary by organization size, type, and industry, and analyze any gaps that may exist between the beliefs and expectations of project managers and upper-level executives.

To ensure this much needed research is viable, a large, diverse response pool is needed. Would you like to take part? The survey should take less than 10 minutes to complete, and all participants will receive a complimentary digital copy of
the final findings report.

Take the survey now.

10. Adopt practices for exploring a variety of perspectives.
We think we see what we see, but we don’t. We really see what we think. Remember the blind men and the elephant. Make it your habit to inquire what others see. You’ll see more together.

9. Stay close to your customer.
Clients’ concerns evolve over the life of a project. Take advantage of that to over-deliver. Stay in a conversation with your client to adjust what you are doing.

8. Take care of your project team.
We’ve come to accept that the customer comes first…the customer is always right. We can’t take care of the customer if we first aren’t taking care of our project team. It’s a challenge. While there are some things we can do for the whole team, it comes down to taking care of each team member as the individual that he or she is. And to make it more difficult, then we must bring their various interests into coherence.

Read the rest at Reforming Project Management.

Event 360 is the nation’s leading designer and director of fundraising, advocacy and awareness events for nonprofits. “Our customers rely on us to run their events seamlessly and help them increase fundraising, so they can focus on accomplishing their mission,” says Jim Grohman, VP of Consulting Services. “ProjectXecute helps us to be more organized and more efficient when managing these events. It provides instant visibility into project labor costs, work completed and remaining work. This solution is really going to help us take our business to the next level.”

Read more about ProjectXecute and Event 360 in the latest Journyx Press Release.

“You can have it fast, good, or cheap – pick any two.”

I don’t know who created this phrase but it riddles project management literature. ‘Good,’ in this case, has often been split into two components: functionality and quality. So you can have a bicycle with the functionality of being a 10 speed, but it breaks a lot, or you can have a one gear bicycle that never breaks. Which is better? It depends on what you need – your requirements.

People tend to think that the more resources you throw at the project, the better the outcome. And yet, no matter how many bricklayers you add to a project, they’ll never be able to do what a neurosurgeon can do. This gives the lie to the fast/cheap dichotomy. It can actually turn out to be slow and poorly done if you have the wrong people working on it.

I think it’s easy in business to get suckered into the latest concepts from a Harvard Business Review article, or the latest thing from Gartner, or some fancy features in some fancy software product that looks really slick. But really, most companies don’t do the basics very well. Shouldn’t you get the basics nailed down before you move on to the rocket science?

Many companies don’t know their costs on a per-person or per-project basis. They don’t know who will be working on what next month. They don’t know who’s 200% allocated and who’s not really working all that hard. The project management 101 stuff is not getting done, and it’s hurting the organization. Fixing some of these problems takes an investment in process.

If you want to choose intelligently between fast, good and cheap, you probably need to get your basics nailed down first.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

There’s one project leadership challenge that I dread above all others: talking with a team member who is underperforming relative to the needs of the project and/or the unrealistically high standards of excellence that I hold for myself and others. It’s not that I’m conflict averse. In fact, there are times when I flat out enjoy a roiling argument or a self-righteous rant. In those cases, I don’t bloody well care what the other party thinks of me, nor whether the relationship will be in tatters as a result. Hey, sometimes I’m even purposely torturing the poor bugger! But when it’s a friend, colleague, or team member with whom I’d like to have some kind of continuing civility, maybe even a productive working relationship, it can be downright paralyzing. “What if I screw it up?” I muse to myself. “What if I inappropriately blurt out my frustrations with their perceived ineptness?” I ruminate. If they are critical to the success of the project, and rather difficult to replace in a pinch, I wonder “What if they tell me to get stuffed, scream that they never want to see my ugly puss again, or simply spend the remainder of the project seething quietly, hostility oozing from every pore, while deftly undermining every important aspect of the project within their grasp?” It’s enough to stop me dead in my tracks just around the bend from their office, or freeze my index finger poised just above the bright green ‘call’ button on my brand new iPhone.
“Good Enough” Performance

In some ways, if someone is doing a truly abysmal job, it’s a no-brainer. The sense of obligation most competent project leaders feel to deliver results usually outweighs the importance they place on preserving any one particular relationship. After all, truly scrappy project leaders are used to going up against wayward suppliers, tardy action item owners, and unreasonable executives in order to meet commitments. If they’re undeniably awful, then you simply must take action. If you don’t, the rest of the team becomes demoralized, and then you have two problems to solve!

Marginal performance problems are a bit trickier because it’s too easy to cling to hope that things will improve on their own. If someone’s performance is arguably adequate, there are all kinds of ways to talk yourself out of having what can be a rather delicate and dangerous conversation about what’s bugging you. Wouldn’t it be better to settle for mediocre results and have everyone get along? Ah, yes … let’s all join hands and sing “Kumbaya” or “We Are the World” while the project goes to hell in a hand basket.

Read more at ProjectConnections.

The Concept of a Project Resource

In the context of project management, a resource is any entity that contributes to the accomplishment of project activities. Most project resources perform work and include such entities as personnel, equipment and contractors. However, the concept of a resource (and the techniques of resource management presented in this article) can also be applied to entities that do not perform work, but which must be available in order for work to be performed. Examples include materials, cash, and workspace. This article focuses on the resource that is of greatest concern to most organizations – personnel. In a project management system, personnel resources may be identified as individuals by name or as functional groups, such as computer programmers.

The Purpose of Resource Planning

After a detailed schedule has been developed for a project, a nagging question remains to be answered: Will the resources required to execute the project according to schedule be available when needed? In the process of developing each project schedule, the average availability of resources should have been taken into consideration when activity durations were estimated. However, this estimating process does not guarantee that the total workload on any given resource (person or functional group) from all projects and non-project assignments will not exceed the availability of that resource during any future period. When resource overloads occur, personnel are subjected to unnecessary stress, and project activities fall behind schedule. The quality of the deliverables produced is also likely to suffer. Thus, the purpose of resource planning is to anticipate resource overloads, so that they can be resolved for the benefit of both the people and the projects.

Read more at ProjectTimes. Free registration required.