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Straw Polls on gantthead
Situation: Staying "off the poll" is the least of your worries. Ever wonder what people think about a given PM topic? Now you can create a poll and find out! Of if you are just in a mood to express your opinion take an open poll and let everyone know you you feel. Here's a great example of a poll in progress: Q: When you are trying to create incentives to promote teamwork, what is the most important question you could ask yourself? I like to think people will use these for settling heated project management disputes, research for articles, and just to have fun. Remember, participating in polls increases your headcount - so vote early and vote often! |
Posted on: May 05, 2008 07:56 PM
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Questions - Defining Project Scope
Categories:
Advice
Categories: Advice
| Situation: You want to ask the right questions when defining your project scope.Last week I posted a set of questions from Project HEADWAY related to selecting and enrolling a sponsor. Here is a similar question set from the Plan stage of the process, Define Project Scope. What do you think? Are these the right questions to ask yourself and others during this task? To determine the scope of the project, ask yourself the following questions:
Ask your sponsor or a trusted colleague the same questions. Also, consider asking them:
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Posted on: April 24, 2008 01:18 PM
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Measuring ROI on your PPM investment
Categories:
PPM Software
Categories: PPM Software
Situation: You need metrics and approaches to measuring your investment in PPM software. In April 2007 HP worked with Gantry Group, a research and consulting firm specializing in technology ROI, to identify, examine, inventory and quantify the key ROI value drivers and areas of cost savings realized by companies who had deployed HP Project and Portfolio Management Center (HP PPM Center). The software is specifically designed to help companies govern and manage its priorities, processes and people related to the development and deployment of IT solutions. Gantry Group initiated the study by conducting interviews with 15 separate HP PPM Center customers, all executives who dealt with the HP PPM Center solution. The study then profiled the experiences of eight companies who have deployed HP PPM Center for at least one year to quantify the bottom-line business impact and organizational efficiencies the product delivers to IT organizations. Recently, I spoke with Ken Cheney, director of Hewlett-Packard’s Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software practice and asked him a few questions about his approach to justifying the investments that their team proposes every day. I think there are metrics and issues here that any buyer of any PPM software package would find useful in their selection process. Q. When measuring ROI on PPM Software investments, what do you include as costs? The HP PPM Center ROI Benchmark Study included the following as the financial expenditures that must be made in HP PPM Center to extract its benefits. Investment covers both upfront deployment costs as well as recurring lifecycle costs. Upfront Deployment Costs – this includes perpetual solution license fees, implementation costs, hardware infrastructure (e.g. servers, storage), and training. Recurring Lifecycle Costs – Internal and external IT staff costs, technical support, solution maintenance contracts, and follow-on training costs. We determined annual ROI using the equation as ROI = Tangible Benefits – Investment. Using a time-value-of-money approach, the Net Present Value ROI is calculated using a standard NPV formula that discounts the net cash flows by the cost of the capital. In this study, 10% was used. Q. What do you measure as part of return and how is the impact of the PPM tool segregated from the overall impact of larger IT efforts? The study measured both tangible and intangible benefits as defined by our initial value driver inventory research with 15 PPM customers to initiate the study parameters. The first phase of the study asked IT executive participants to relate the top problems that their organization’s grapple with today to the derived benefits that their organizations have experienced as the direct result of HP PPM Center deployment. The second phase of the study committed these tangible and intangible benefits to a ROI calculator. Discrete areas of value delivery were organized into sets of Tangible and Intangible benefits, as defined below: Tangible benefits: These can be tracked and connected to the bottom line financial impact. Tangible benefits include increased revenue, new business opportunities, and avoided/reduced costs. Only tangible benefits were used in computing ROI and payback horizon. The list of tangible benefits included: Reduced IT Budget Overruns Avoidance of IT Expense on Non-Strategic IT Projects Reduced IT Labor Expense Due to Change Request Reduction Reduced IT Labor Expense Due to Improved Staff Loading/Utilization Reduced IT Project Management Expense. Intangible benefits: These benefits CANNOT be tracked to the bottom line and are not included in the ROI calculations. (Example: productivity). While not included in the ROI calculations, these are important metrics that further support and drive the bottom-line impact o HP PPM Center. The list of intangible benefits included: Improved capture of Change Order Requests Improved Project Timeliness Increased Budget Accuracy Reduced IT Management Time Spent on Project Status Reporting Reduced Time to Generate IT Labor Capitalization Reports Increased Financial Sign-Off Process Efficiency or IT Project Approval Improved IT Project Capture in Demand Queue This ROI calculator was used to consistently profile the impact experience of eight customers. To determine the actual impact of HP PPM Center, Participants were instructed to consider all other factors that may be assisting in the value delivery from HP PPM Center. We then asked participants to determine the percentage HP PPM Center contributed to the overall benefit to adjust for other competing initiatives that might also contribute to the overall benefit. For example if a benefit of 1 million dollars was realized and the customer determined HP PPM Center contributed 60% to achieving this benefit, $600,000.00 would be the dollar benefit assigned to HP PPM Center. The overall benefit was then discounted by the percentage the assigned by the participant. Q. What were the attributes of the HP solution that aided in providing these returns? IT Demand Aggregation: HP PPM Center aggregates all IT demand and gives executives as well as the Project Management Office real-time visibility into the requests being made of IT. HP PPM center offers process control to enforce a consistent capture and evaluation of the IT demand queue. Each project request is accompanied by a business case which states the value expected from the project along with its risk level to the business. Visibility into complete resource allocations and overall IT portfolio: Gaining visibility into the IT portfolio, which includes current projects, proposed projects and retired projects, helps IT executives understand what their allocation mix is, where and what types of resources are applied, and how they might adjust the portfolio to improve the bottom-line. HP PPM Center also provides visibility into operational work which helps organizations gain a true picture of resource utilization and the interdependencies of operational and project work. Having this complete visibility is essential for IT to understand how the organization will meet business demand with what resources and in what timeframe. Workflow: An easy-to-configure workflow engine underlies each of the HP PPM Center modules, providing synergy that yields many process benefits. For example, automation of manual project management processes yielded significant time savings and efficiencies for our customers. In many cases, this directly attributed to the ability of project managers to do more with less, helping the organization to maintain the same number of project managers who could then take on more strategic work and/or handle more projects efficiently. Such automation also played a role in bringing projects in on a more timely basis. In addition to process automation, HP PPM Center offers process enforcement, which ensures that the Project Management Office can roll out consistent project methodologies across the organization. This is critical to ensuring that the day-to-day work captured can be relied upon by executives to make decisions about project health, project course corrections, and future initiatives. Robust security at the field level adds to the process enforcement by ensuring that only the right person can make a change. Auditability also plays a critical role in helping customers meet and sustain compliance efforts while driving down the cost of the effort. |
Posted on: April 22, 2008 11:38 AM
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What Matters When Defining Requirements?
Categories:
Requirements Management
Categories: Requirements Management
| Situation: You want to give your approach to requirements a little more thought. Is requirements definition your biggest challenge when defining success on your project? Or is that that one concern among many? JAMA software and Raven flow are conducting a survey related to requirements gathering that you may be interested in. At the very least, its a quick way to give some thought to what matters to you relative to requirements gathering. Here are some early results from John Simpson of JAMA ... Respondents are: 37% are Analysts, 24% Project Managers, 12% Product Development/Engineering, 6% Product Managers, 5% Exec Mngt 54% of respondents work for companies with $100 million annual revenue or more (25% are $1 billion +) so a good range of large and small companies The biggest requirements challenges were: 70% gaining a clear understanding of what our customers want 64% ensuring what’s being built is what was planned 63% documenting all the requirements The goals of their projects: 75% are for enhancing existing products 59% bringing new products to market 25% reducing costs of producing existing products 29% of them considered their companies “Risk Takers” when it comes to innovation, the largest camp was “Market Readers” at 36%, 16% were the “Low Cost Provider” 73% rely on customers and partners for new product ideas – so external collaboration is critical In terms of complexity, 39% of respondents on average had 500+ requirements for typical project, 22% have 1,000 or more requirements In terms of the burden of change management, over a third of respondents spend 25% or more of their time dealing with changes to requirements How they measure success: 87% customer satisfaction 52% quality/safety ratings 34% cost savings 32% revenue 25% speed to market (interesting in terms of positioning) And the one they personally cared the most about was “customer satisfaction” at 61% – I thought it was interesting that “revenue” wasn’t higher (it was only 6%) In terms of delivering projects on time and on budget: For over half of respondents, the project success rate is 40% or less; so they’re feeling the requirements pain The top reasons were: 74% scope creep 64% missed or poorly defined requirements 61% unrealistic schedules or expectations 51% team communication/collaboration an issue 44% Misunderstanding of what customers want 39% Issues w/ change management 29% Lack of executive support What they personally find most frustrating: Missed or poorly defined requirements was #1, unrealistic schedules #2, misunderstanding of the customer #3 The majority define “collaboration” as these 3 things: everyone is in sync on the latest version of the requirements(80%), all items in centralized place (72%), everyone has access (66%) No surprise, 80% currently use Word or Excel to define and communicate requirements; 31% currently use requirements definition software, 35% use a requirement management software, 40% using email On the list of tools they’d like to use in 2008 – 59% chose requirements modeling & visualization, 62% requirements collaboration & management In terms of processes: 37% are using a mix (so having tools built to handle various processes is probably a good thing) 26% traditional Waterfall 16% using RUP or some variation of it And despite all the attention around Agile these days, only 5% answered using some flavor of Agile process currently – was a bit surprise Agile wasn’t higher |
Posted on: April 16, 2008 10:34 PM
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Comments (6)
The Truth... well, ouch.
Categories:
Time Killers
Categories: Time Killers
| Situation: You could use a laugh. Here's a gantthead-appropriate quip from my favorite e-card site someecards.  |
Posted on: April 16, 2008 09:50 PM
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Comments (3)