Project Manager - Should You Really BE THE CHANGE?
Categories:
Decision Making
Categories: Decision Making
Situation: You've been thinking about the big picture. Over the last couple of years, I've listened to PMI's CEO, Greg Balestrero talk A LOT about sustainability at PMI Global Congresses and other venues. In fact, I believe it gets more air time than any other topic he speaks on. While I'm a big proponent of "getting more green" in everything we do, I've been surprised with the way that he connects it to project management and to our responsibilities as project managers. In his mind, it should be central to what we all do - not a "nice to have". Something he said in a recent press release caught my eye, summarizing his view on the topic."Integrating economic, social and environmental value into all portfolios, So I followed up and asked him a few questions at the PMI Global Congress in Orlando. Again, I know we should all do what we can as individuals to promote sustainability, However, can and should project management practitioners integrate economic, social, and environmental value into [their projects, programs and portfolios]? After a brief conversation, I believe I understand his perspective a bit better. I'll put it in my own words and see what you think. It's not: - that all projects need to focus on sustainability. - that you need to add cost to your projects to ensure they have a positive impact on sustainabilty. - that sustainability is something that should be considered ahead of the project requirements you already have to deal with. Here's my version of the case for making sustainabilty a key part of your project management approach As an ethical Project Manager, you need to think about longer term financial and environmental results and factor the benefits of sustainability into your ROI analysis and execution plans. If you consider sustainable approaches, materials, etc. for every single project. They may only make sense SOME of the time, but with your help, they will at least be considered. In this way you can ensure that sustainable approaches that make sense are used. Making sustainability part of what you do implies you must make it your business to learn about and introduce sustainable approaches to your work. If you don't, chances are that no one else will. For this reason, Project Manager - you need to be the change. The actions that you could take to make this happen include: - unearth potential sustainable approaches within the context of your project. - understand how specific sustainable approaches relate to the financial success of your project so that you can propose them as appropriate. - find out if a sustainable approach to your project could help your company from a PR perspective. What do you think? Is this something you have time for and feel is important? Should it be a key focus for PMI? Should it be a key personal focus for you? |
You Are SO HOT Right Now!
Situation: You need a little "pick me up". This morning, CNN Money announced the top 50 jobs in America - IT Project Manager was #5! How great is that? Give yourself a pat on the back for choosing a great profession to be a part of. |
New From PMI - Read an Article, Take a Quiz!
| Situation: You’re looking for new and interesting ways to earn PDUs PMI has created a new type of learning module that helps you learn about very specific areas within Project Management, testing your understanding of the material with a short quiz at the end of the exercise. Here are some examples of topics addressed. 
PMI Publication Quizzes are based on PMI-published articles and papers available at the PMI.org Marketplace. Customers purchase the quiz together with one or two related articles and papers. Credential holders will read the article(s) and then complete a short quiz to earn PDUs. PMI volunteers work in conjunction with the PMI Professional Development Group to create the quizzes. Recently we spoke with Brian Weiss, Vice President of Product Management at PMI to get a better understanding of what these quizzes are and how you can best use them as a part of your continuing PM education efforts.
Q. Who came up with the idea to create this offering? What was the impetus behind it? This idea, like many of the ideas that become products or services at PMI®, was introduced by one of our staff members. We encourage our employees to be diligent about creating opportunities that support our members and credential holders. Because we have nearly 500,000 members and credential holders in more than 185 countries around the world, we are always looking for new and creative ways to reach out to these individuals and support their continuing education. The Publications Quizzes program was designed to provide a convenient and affordable way for credential holders to earn the last few remaining Professional Development Units (PDUs) that are needed to maintain their credential. Q. Can you tell us a bit about where this fits within the spectrum of options that PMPs have to maintain their certification? When and how are these quizzes best utilized? The Publication Quizzes program complements our other PDU-generating programs. They can be used to augment the total PDUs needed to attain a credential – for PMP®, a total of 60 PDUs is needed and for our other credentials (excluding CAPM), a total of 30 PDUs is needed. If, for example, a credential holder realizes he needs a few more credits to reach his target PDUs, the PMI® Publication Quizzes provide him with an opportunity to conveniently earn those remaining credits. We also recognize there are members and credential holders in regions of the world without an abundance of Registered Education Providers from which they can earn PDUs. The PMI® Publications Quizzes program offers these individuals an easily accessible way to earn some of their required PDUs. Q. Does the availability of this offering change how PDUs will be recognized for self study? In other words, a PMP has historically been able to just invest time reading articles and earn PDUs that way (versus reading, then taking a quiz as they do here). Will that option continue to exist? Yes, the option to earn PDUs by reading a book or article will continue to exist. For those activities, the PDUs are recorded as Category 2 – Self Directed Learning (2-SDL). In this category, a maximum of 15 PDUs that can be earned per cycle. PDUs earned from Publication Quizzes are recorded as Category 3. In this category, no more than one third of the total credential requirements may be earned per cycle through Publication Quizzes. For example, PMP® credential holders can earn a maximum of 20 PDUs from PMI Publication Quizzes, while other credential holders can earn a maximum of 10 PDUs. Q. Does PMI plan to do the same thing with other media (beyond articles), such as webinars or podasts? We are always seeking opportunities to provide the best tools to our members and credential holders, and this program was designed with the ability to expand content and platforms used for the quizzes. We can include webinars and podcasts, but can also look to books, such as those in the PMI® Bookstore and content found on the PMI® Virtual Communities’ web pages. Q. According to the web site, just about anyone can take the quizzes (PMI members, non-member credential holders and non-credential holders). How do you envision non-credential holders using the quizzes? The over-arching purpose of the program is to provide an educational opportunity for practitioners to increase their knowledge of project management. As with any sound educational program, a testing of what was learned serves to reinforce learning and build confidence for the learner. Non-credential holders or those interested in obtaining their credentials are also permitted to use the quizzes to test and increase their knowledge. Q. Tell us a little about what’s next for PMI in terms of new offerings. As mentioned earlier, we continue to expand our offerings and provide additional member value. One major area of focus has been on developing our virtual learning offerings – ranging from beginners to advanced practitioners. In that vein, we recently launched the Virtual Communities Project (VCP) initiative, which provides an opportunity for members, and the greater project management community, to network and exchange knowledge and ideas. PMI’s virtual communities have search capability across PMI.org and feature blogs, forums and wikis, which are updated on a regular basis, to create the ultimate project management collaborative community. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback about this initiative and will continue to enrich and expand content within these communities. Through our global program SeminarsWorld®, we also provide an opportunity for our members to gain real-world experiences via live workshops. We will continue to add new programs in that arena, as well as create new courses for our eSeminarsWorld program. In the future, we will expand our offerings to include courses that feature simulation exercises and discussion threads, which offer yet another way to engage participants and increase learning and retention. #?-:nbsp; |
Better Resource Management = Better Forecasts?
| Situation: You’re looking to streamline resource management and schedule updates.
Q. Prior to Resource Workbench, what were the top three types of information users were asking for related to resources? What was most important to them? What pain were they feeling? While the priority varies from customer to customer, most of the organizations we work with struggle with three main issues around resources 1) What are my resources working on? For many customers, just getting the initial inventory of resource allocations to their projects and maintenance activities is the first step. This activity often highlights that in addition to having more projects in the portfolio than they thought they had, resources are also over-allocated to work on these projects. Once the picture of how resources are assigned across projects becomes clear, many of our customers realize that their project schedules are unrealistic (unless people really can work 120 hours a week). 2) Do I have the capacity to handle all of this planned work? As organizations go through periodic portfolio planning reviews and their annual planning process, the requests from their business users or customers invariably outpace the capacity of the organization. These customers need to compare high level forecasts for resource needs on upcoming projects to balance them against capacity of the organization. Usually, this just involves defining the types of resources needed (DBA, Developer, Analyst, etc), the timeframe, and the expected hours and/or FTEs. With this data for both projects and maintenance activities, customers can adjust the master schedule of their projects to align with their capacity, or they can augment specific roles in the organization to increase capacity before a gap is encountered. 3) How can I easily adjust forecasts? Many of our customers rely on team managers or a centralized resource management function to balance resource allocations against future work, both strategic projects and day-to-day maintenance activities. On a weekly or monthly basis, managers will adjust their forecasts (expected assignments) based on shifting business priorities or changes to project scope and/or schedules. These forecasts can then be compared to the actual hours and costs for the work to help in improved forecasting in future periods. In cases where the IT organization charges back work to the business, the accuracy of the forecasts is important for credibility – without chargebacks, the data is important to justify the headcount of IT.
While Innotas has always handled the first two cases well, it was a bit difficult for managers to quickly update forecasts. As with most PPM applications, the project or application was the central focus, which works great for project managers. For resource managers with resources working on multiple projects, this meant the manager was required to open up lots of projects, find the proper assignments, and adjust. This required lots of screens and lots of clicks. Our new Resource Workbench is designed for team or resource managers to give them a simple, single screen interface to see all of their resources and their assignments so that forecasts can be updated much like you would do when looking at a single spreadsheet. It also provides the resource managers with a simple way to find new work that needs to be assigned, whether it is coming in through a formal resource request or a more informal process. We expect this will make adjustments of forecasts for a typical resource manager at least 50% faster in Innotas. Our Bottom Up scheduling capability allows project managers who own their resources or know who will be working on the project to simply just assign those people to the project. Setup is straight-forward. Each resource has a role, and that role is used to build the summary at the project level for use with our Capacity and Demand screen. We provide a standard catalog of roles for IT organizations to start with, and of course they can configure that, or if they do not need the role information, they can simply use a single role across all resources. Configurable skills, competencies, years of experience, etc, are all supported as well for advanced searching and reporting, but it is not required. In the end, the level of setup required really depends on the complexity of the reporting that the customer wants to do.
Q. Beyond the tool, how does this information change the way that Project Managers interact with their Sponsors, Team, and Stakeholders? How does it affect the PPM view of things? The biggest change for project managers is that they will have more up to date data to report on when it comes to resource forecasts and comparisons against actuals because resource managers can realistically update the data more frequently. For many of our customers, this will also mean that the PM can “offload” the task of updating forecasts to the resource managers – many times, the project managers do the data entry. Q. What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned about managing resources during this process? At the surface, it appears that customers manage resources in many different ways, but once you drill into the details, the use cases are all very similar. The main differences I see in IT organizations come down to whether or not they utilize a centralized resource manager for shared services resources.
Q. What’s the next set of functionality you plan to implement related to resource management and why? Following on the heels of the resource workbench will be some interactive functionality for looking at different options for the portfolio against capacity. We will allow portfolio managers to compare a set of options (projects and maintenance activities) against their capacity to determine which mix provides the best value and will fit within capacity. |
How Do You Deal With Quality?
| Situation: You’re grappling with quality issues. Managing quality seems to be that hard to manage “blob” in the middle of the triple constraint. It’s difficult to get a handle on and often takes a back seat to better defined success measures. Joseph Phillips, PMP, Project+, is the Director of Education for Project Seminars. He has deep PM expertise, a lot of experience as a trainer and has contributed to over 35 books on technology, careers, and Project Management. Much of his work has focused on project quality, so we asked for his input on a few common challenges that PMs face every day. Q. Often quality is ill defined up front and is only defined later once it becomes a clear problem. During which project phase have you typically seen quality become an issue and what are the triggers that bring attention to quality problems? Quality can’t be achieved unless the project manager and project team know what’s expected of them. Quality is an esoteric value that must be defined in no uncertain terms in order for it to be realized. Planning for quality is where most projects fail when it comes to quality – they either don’t define quality in enough detail or set unreasonable, unachievable goals for quality. Quality becomes most noticeable when it’s missing; when deliverables aren’t acceptable, full or errors, or the project is hounded with corrective actions you can bet there’s quality problems brewing. Q. What is your favorite technique for defining quality measures? The best technique for defining quality centers on accurate requirements gathering. The project team, project manager, and the business analyst should work with the project team through interviews, focus groups, and iterations of requirements definition to specify what quality is to be within the project. Once the requirements have been defined the stakeholders should sign off on the requirements to confirm that the customers, management, the project manager, and the project team are all in agreement on what’s expected as a result of the project. Q. How do you set quality levels appropriately? (make them “just enough”) Are there any rules of thumb or techniques you can use here? Sometimes fast and good is better than slow and perfect. The purpose of the project deliverables should guide the expectations of quality. In my experience, stakeholders often confuse grade and quality. Low grade can be high quality – as long as the grade completely satisfies the purpose of the project. You can fly from New York to San Francisco in first class or coach; that’s grade. Quality is the fulfillment of the expectations, the requirements, and delivery on the promises of flying from New York to San Francisco. Q. What’s the relationship between quality measures, sponsors, and stakeholders? What matters most and why? It’s really about setting expectations, requirements, and cost-benefits realizations. The project sponsor, customers, or project champion may be closest to the vision of what’s expected as quality, for the project deliverable, and the cost they’re willing to pay to realize those deliverables. If the project manager and the project team don’t inherit the same vision or understand the quality expectations for the project deliverables then there’ll be a quality variance and issues, risks, and claims can sprout up in the project. Quality must be aligned with expectations, costs, and feasibility of accomplish the project goals in a reasonable time and for a reasonable cost. Q. How do you make quality measures real and important to the team? What’s a good way to get people focused on quality when they have a hundred other distractions? In my opinion, the project team is supposed to do their work accurately and correctly. I don’t like the idea that the project manager should bribe the project team to do their jobs. Project team members are given responsibilities and the project manager should expect them to do what’s right – and what’s right is to deliver their assignments with accuracy and to the prescribed level of quality. Having said that, I am a huge proponent of rewards and recognitions – when the project team does a good job they should be recognized for their contributions. If a project team generates a windfall or saves millions in costs for an organization I think it’s great that the project team should be rewarded. Q. What’s been your most difficult quality challenge and how did you resolve it? A few years back I took over a failing project. The stakeholders were fuming at the bloated costs, late schedule, and lack of deliverables. The project team was lacking the skills to create the planned deliverables, and the project scope was vague, sloppy, and conflicting. Communication was the first order of business in this mess. We elaborated and defined the project scope, sliced out non-value added deliverables to maintain costs, and defined exactly what was expected of the project – what the first project manager should have done. It wasn’t an easy, happy approach, but it’s what needed to be done – someone needed to take charge. Once we had a clearly-defined project scope quality became a non-issue as satisfying the project scope means satisfying project quality. While this project ultimately costs more due to training, the added contractors, and the reduced size of the project scope, I still count the project as a success. Q. What are the top three most important things to remember when managing quality on a project? First, the devil’s in the details; what means fast, good, or reliable to you won’t mean the same thing to the project customers. Exactness in the project requirements must be defined as part of the project planning. Second, the relationship of cost-benefits often shifts the perception of what’s needed and than in turn shapes the expected quality of the project. Finally, change in inevitable in most projects; when change happens, planned or unplanned changes, quality is affected because you’re not within the defined project scope. |
