4 Key PPM Strategy Tips
Situation: You’re rethinking your overall PM strategy Do you ever have trouble with:
Q. To a lot of folks alignment is an exercise in wording goals to make them sound strategic. What specific techniques do you use to find the right metrics to define each projects success? Can you describe the most important one in detail? The single most important technique to enable project success is whether a meaningful postmortem is conducted and acted upon. If you’re failing to do that, it doesn’t matter what your goals are, or how strategically aligned your portfolio is, without the capacity to improve and refine over time any system will inevitably become obsolete. Postmortems can help an organization converge on appropriate strategic goals too. For example, as you mention a project manager can artfully word goals in a business case to make them appear strategic, but a robust postmortem process acts as a safeguard to expose that: “If there is no feedback loop, then there is little incentive for estimates to be as accurate they can be, since no process is making sure they that are.”
Q. Is achieving competitive advantage usually more about success metrics for individual projects or having the right mix of projects? Why is that? Competitive advantage is about the right mix of projects. For example, if your organization wants to drive competitive advantage through superior customer service, then the project mix must reflect customer-centric investments. The reason many organizations can’t get to sustainable competitive advantage is because they don’t have a sufficiently broad and imaginative list of projects in the first place. This is a point I emphasize in the book: “Putting in an effective process for capturing ideas provides an opportunity for organizations to leverage a resource they already have, already pay for, but fail to capture the full benefit of—namely, employee creativity.” Once an organization has a long list of potential projects, and a good sense of their strategic goals, then selecting the right projects enables competitive advantage. Having the right metrics matter too, but metrics at the project level alone will only drive robust execution, which is necessary but not sufficient for competitive advantage. Q. There are a lot of PPM competency assessments out there. What makes the one in your book particularly effective? Give us the single most important question you could ask someone to judge their individual competence. With competency assessments it is relatively easy to ask the right questions. As you mention there are many frameworks out there, and I do add to that list, but the challenge is less about the right framework, and more about finding the right people to ask and generating excitement and energy for change, one case study I conducted with a financial services company emphasizes this: “Bringing project managers together and exposing them to the latest research and ideas in project management can quickly spark innovation and a lead to a lot of “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?” conversations among project managers, especially in organizations with smart, entrepreneurial employees. From that point, it is possible to start to discuss tools and processes for realizing these ambitions.”
Q. A holistic work management system is the holy Grail for most companies. Beyond the system level stuff, how do you make granular tracking work without micromanaging? Today we’re far from having the all the information we need to micro-manage. So much data isn’t tracked, this is discussed in the book’s final chapter: “All projects are work, but not all work is a project. This means that portfolio management systems are hampered because they cannot see all work within the organization.”
Even where the system is in place, non-compliance can be a deal-breaker, no one wants to fill in a timesheet, especially when they are trying to get out the door on a Friday. The resulting stale or misleading information can make even the most sophisticated system worthless. We need to integrate work tracking into tools people like to use, such as personal information management systems to make the process less painful. That way we can broaden the scope of what is tracked, make the data more accurate and get closer to full picture of what the organization is doing, beyond the limited notion of projects. Work management is about lowering the barriers to collecting information and surfacing only what’s useful, once we’ve done that we can discuss the right way to leverage that information and avoid micro management. |
Is SaaS PPM Right for Your Large Business?
| Situation: You’re exploring Portfolio Management (PPM) software options. You’ve done your homework and come to the conclusion that there are essentially two options: on-premise PowerSteering Software provides SaaS PPM software for large enterprises, and their model has been gaining a lot of traction recently. We recently spoke with their CEO, Stephen Sharp, and asked him a few questions about the benefits and pitfalls of this approach. Here is what he had to say. Q. Most SaaS options appear to be designed for smaller companies or departments. PowerSteering is unusual in that its SaaS offering is targeted at larger organizations. How does PowerSteering tailor its software to the needs of global enterprises with diverse businesses, functions and workflow? The need for PPM flexibility is critical when you consider that the project lifecycle of a software development project may be quite different as compared to a new product launch which might require a strict stage-gate process. And to truly manage all work holistically, a PPM system must adapt to non-project work like routine IT help desk inquiries as well as the management of critical corporate assets like IT applications. When all is said and done, work is work! A popular misconception is that SaaS is limited to early-stage PPM deployments, departmental project management needs, or small to mid market companies because the software isn’t scalable or adaptable enough. While this may be true for some SaaS vendors, PowerSteering’s enterprise class, highly configurable software is used by global organizations with thousands of users who need the software to accommodate different businesses, workflow, roles, project methodologies, and reporting needs. And PowerSteering can also be configured to manage application portfolios and other non-project assets. PowerSteering is unique in offering the best of both worlds: enterprise-class software with comprehensive and fully configurable PPM capabilities, along with the benefits of SaaS, including lower total cost of ownership, faster deployment, and better user adoption. Q. We’ve seen a lot of organizations who have more than one enterprise class PPM product in place. Is that ever a challenge? How do you work with that sort of situation when it arises? It’s quite common for large companies to have a traditional IT PPM system that’s used for timesheets or cost management, but still need a more flexible SaaS option to address project and portfolio management needs outside of IT. As a result, we made sure that PowerSteering supports non-technical, business users and seamlessly integrates with in-house systems to provide our customers with a single view of their consolidated project and portfolio metrics. Q. You do a lot of work with companies who use PPM to manage project portfolios outside IT including Process Improvement, New Product Development and even Merger Integration which means you deal with more complexity and integration issues than most. How does PowerSteering adapt to these situations? We’re able to easily adapt our software to manage a variety of project portfolios that may use very different project prioritization models, project management methodologies, and cost/ benefit tracking metrics. For example, an IT customer like Clorox is focused on capturing demand, aligning it with business strategies and resourcing it efficiently. On the other hand, the Department of Defense is intent on consistent reporting of project financial benefits across the enterprise and the ability to successfully identify and replicate effective projects. Q. In your demo, you talk about enabling executives to make value judgments about projects and how strategic organizational efforts are being addressed. Can you give us an example of how this has worked at one of your clients? What specific metrics do you look at that others might not? A newly-appointed Corporate CIO of a diversified, global manufacturing conglomerate inherited a $500M IT budget, along with 29 divisional CIO’s who each had their own portfolios, priorities and budgets. The new CIO had no idea where or how effectively the IT budget was being spent. In just 3 weeks, he was able to create a project inventory across the global portfolio to assess the current status, projected ROI and budget of each active item. A week later he cancelled 20% of the active projects and re-deployed the resources to more important priorities. Each of the cancelled projects were either not aligned with the current strategy, targeted at systems to be retired, redundant with other projects, or so far off track that they needed to be The evaluation metrics included a priority score that measured multiple dimensions including the level of strategic fit, the probability of success, the financial value, the current status and the percent complete. Q. Do you see a point in the near future, where it’s all SaaS? Why or why not? Absolutely! On-premise installed software isn’t really sustainable in the long-term when you consider how many implementations still fail to meet ROI objectives, are expensive and time-consuming to deploy and maintain, and impede user adoption. We’re eager to offer companies a practical enterprise alternative to outdated, inefficient and costly installed software. #?-:nbsp; |
Is Wiki-based Collaboration the Answer?
Situation: Your collaboration tools just aren't cutting it. The range of SaaS tools out there has expanded way beyond BaseCamp knock-offs to tools that approach projects from a variety of angles. Each tool has its own heritage that’s reflective of what the vendor believes is important. One interesting tool that I’ve looked at recently is PBworks, formerly known as PBwiki. Their approach is very collaborative in nature and less structured than most. By providing easy ways for you to define your own structure, they hope to provide tools you can make fit your work style, versus having to adapt your work to rules imposed by the tool.We recently spoke with Chris Yeh of PBworks, who told us a bit about their approach to collaboration and managing knowledge. Here’s what he said. Q. You guys firmly believe that wikis provide a better collaboration platform than folder-based file sharing or email. Can you tell us a bit about why that is? (provide examples if possible) Wiki-based collaboration provides several major benefits that file sharing and email simply can’t. First, let’s deal with file sharing. The issue with file sharing is that it’s difficult to understand how a document has evolved over time. At best, you might be able to view different versions of the file from some archive. With a wiki, revision and change management are an integral part of how you work; all revisions are stored, you can see the history of changes with a single click, you can compare any two revisions, and you can always revert back to a prior version. This kind of flexibility gives people the freedom to be more creative; you can take more risks because the revision history is there as a safety net. Wikis also allow true co-authoring, rather than simply passing redlines back and forth. When a group of people works on a document, the asynchronous edits are notoriously difficult to re-integrate. Usually, whoever is responsible ends up having to read through several different drafts and manually integrate comments and suggestions. With a wiki page, everyone is always working on a current version that reflects everyone else’s edits. This decentralized approach saves a ton of time. One of our customers is Deloitte Digital, which uses us for creating new business plans. Their CEO, Peter Williams, reports that using PBworks lets them cut down the time they spent on editing final reports by 90%. With email, the issues are slightly different. The problem with email is that it’s so easy to lose the context of the conversation. Most emails are not self-contained; to understand them, you have to read the entire conversation to pull out the nuggets of information that are actually relevant. A wiki page provides a centralized, authoritative record; it is largely self-contained, and once you read it, you can make a decision or draw a conclusion. Another PBworks customer is Capgemini, the consulting firm. They were able to use PBworks to cut down project-related emails by 90% on one of their marketing projects. Q. You seem to specialize in certain industries, like creative, legal and financial services. Is there something special about the ways that people work and collaborate in those industries that make your approach a fit? We focus on use cases where individual users have to deal with multiple projects and initiatives, and where communications need to cross geographic or corporate boundaries. We’ve designed our product so that not only can you use hosted wiki pages to collaborate, you can also get a personalized dashboard of activity, tasks, and milestones across all of your different projects. For example, while designers and lawyers may seem very different, the challenges they face at work are very similar: They are staffed on multiple projects for multiple clients, and they have to keep track of a lot of tasks and information. Both lawyers and agencies end up using PBworks in a very similar way to manage their client projects: They create new workspaces for each new project or case (using our workspace templates), they collaborate with a project team to get things done, and they track their progress using a personalized dashboard. Whether you’re building informercial websites like Livemercial, or prosecuting a personal injury case like McConnell & Sneed, the collaboration process is very similar. Q. Every toolset has implementation challenges. What are yours and what approaches do you use to get around them? One of the big challenges with adopting a broad collaboration platform like PBworks is that there are so many possibilities. Even I don’t know all of the capabilities of the product, and with our engineering team adding new functionality all the time, sometimes people aren’t sure where to begin. That’s why we put such a heavy emphasis on certain specific solution-focused product editions, like Project Edition for project leaders or Legal Edition for lawyers. This allows us to do things like build usage-specific templates, instructional videos, and case studies. We also back up our product with some of the best service in the business. You can contact our support team via email, and get a response from a real human being in hours, sometimes even in minutes. And if you need help getting started, we offer a $100 custom trial package which gets you professional services to customize our product and provide a one-on-one training session. Q. A big part of project management is having a high-level view of what’s going on. There’s no gantt chart view, task dependencies, etc. in PBworks. Is that intentional or are those features to be added later? It’s intentional. We’re big fans of rapid iteration and innovation, so our general approach is to launch a simple, usable product, and build up from there based on feedback from real users. For example, PBworks started off as PBwiki, a bare-bones hosted wiki. It didn’t even offer user accounts. But over time, it’s evolved into a full hosted collaboration suite, complete with document management, basic project management, and even a mobile edition for iPhones and Blackberries. After we launched Project Edition, we immediately began hearing feedback on issues like task dependencies and measuring resource load. We’re working on such features, and many more. It’s also the case that we heard from a number of project managers who thought that the level of detail and customization was just right. Let’s face it; many projects are not complex enough to warrant a full project management solution, yet are more complicated than a simple to-do list can handle. PBworks is great for those ad hoc projects that make up most of our work lives. Q. What do you feel the biggest challenge in collaboration today (beyond what you’ve addressed in PBworks) and what is your organization doing to address it going forward? The biggest challenge in collaboration today is encouraging the end user to make online collaboration an integral part of their daily work. Tools that require users to abandon old but comfortable ways of working, or that require double entry, aren’t going to work out in the long run. I think that collaboration has a lot to learn from the bottom-up usability of social media tools like Twitter. These informal and unstructured tools are a great way to handle the initial phases of brainstorming, when you don’t even know the objective of your proto-project. We’re looking very closely at these tools and how our customers use them so that we can integrate their lessons into our products. Ultimately, collaboration is about bringing together, people, processes, and production. Collaboration vendors won’t be successful unless their products can bring together all three of those elements. |
Positive ROI from a Project Management Conference?
| Situation: You're on the hunt for great PM learning deals. The bright spots in this economy are coming in the form of great deals from leading providers. Two weeks ago, I told you about ESI’s awesome $500K scholarship program for unemployed PMs where they are giving away enough training to get hundreds of folks certified at zero cost. This week I’d like to call your attention to the MS Project Conference
Think of it this way. If you are planning to upgrade your MS Project software anyway, you might as well buy it here and improve your skills for free. However you think about it, it’s a great deal. In the interest of disclosure, Microsoft is one of our advertisers and we are sponsoring this conference. However, this is (of course) something I’d write about either way. |
What's Your Requirements Architecture Mean to You?
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Situation: You want to understand how organizational influences impact your work. |
