The Money Files

Does your project or program have a resource management strategy (RMS)? While they are mainly used in program management, you can also find an RMS useful in a project environment. This is especially the case if your project is not affiliated to a program and you have to work it out how to handle resources yourself.

An RMS sets out how the project or program will get and manage the resources it needs to achieve the change required – after all, projects are about delivering change and you need resources to do that. “Resources” is not just an unfriendly word to describe people. Resources can be:

• Money;
• Buildings;
• Equipment;
• Technology;
• Services, and of course;
• People.

The people element can include temporary staff, permanent staff, contractors or part-time employees.
 
An RMS helps you manage the approach to using these. Not convinced? Here are 7 reasons why you need a resource management strategy.
 
1. It describes how the human resources requirements will be managed. This includes internal and external resources. How will you keep their line manager informed? Will they be part of a matrix organisation and if so how will this work in practice? Will you have the people reporting directly to you instead?
 
2. It describes how you will manage the transfer of knowledge and skills back to operations when the project has finished. This part of the RMS can be an input into the training and communications strategies.
 
3. It defines the dispute resolution process for when resource conflicts happen. And they will! Having this documented in advance will help you deal with issues as they arise. You will already have plans for how to fix problems, for example, when resources are called on to business as usual work or other projects. Who will arbitrate? Will it be the program manager or a board member? Can you solve conflicts yourself or do you need someone else to look at the overall priorities of the project portfolio?
 
4. It sets out how you will resource business as usual activity when you are using project staff for your project. The company still needs to operate, even when project resourcing demands are high. The RMS acts as a prompt for discussions with line managers. You can use it as a basis to ensure that they have plans in place for when they need to resource the ongoing commitments for their departments.

5. It defines an approval process for getting people and money.Don’t underestimate this! It really does help to know in advance about how to get resources for your project. It will save a lot of time and negotiation if you have already talked to the process owners and other people involved and already have this written down.
 
6. It defines the accounting and financial reporting procedures for the project. An RMS can also be used to determine how you will get financial resources, how you will spend it and how you will monitor it.

7. It defines the procurement strategy. You might not need an entire procurement strategy for your project or program, so you may find that this section of the RMS just references your corporate procurement process. This explains how you go about buying things and what arrangements or contracts need to be in place.

Remember that resources are not just people! A resource management strategy can help you be a helicopter project manager and see the big picture for all the resource needs on your project or program.

Have you used one or got any tips? Let us know in the comments.

What would your project sponsor think if you leaked sensitive company information or financial data to a third party?

Maybe you think that you'll never have to answer that question because you subscribe to the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, or because your personal ethical boundaries mean that you would never give away company secrets under any circumstances.

OK. But what if I told you that employees at Google, Barclays and the Pentagon all leaked sensitive information without knowing about it?

According to a new guide from document collaboration software firm Workshare, metadata in documents can give away company secrets.

What's metadata? It's all that stuff Microsoft puts into your document: comments, the version history, and corrections made through the 'track changes' feature. Metadata is automatically added to Microsoft Office documents whenever a document is created, edited or saved. If you use collaboration features such as opting to record your changes in PowerPoint so that you can send them back to the document's original author, then all that is stored as metadata too.

Document properties often store the name and organisation of the author. If you repurpose a PID, for example, to use for another client, be careful about what detail is stored in the properties that could give away who else you work with.

The Workshare report details several widely publicised, high profile cases in which metadata has landed organisations in hot water. For example:

• Google let slip financial forecasting information which was hidden in a PowerPoint document which was circulated to the Wall Street community.
• Barclays accidentally shared contract information in hidden columns in an Excel spreadsheet when it submitted a bid to buy assets from Lehman Brothers.
• The Pentagon leaked information about the death of a U.S. agent in a PDF document with hidden information.

Even if you aren't dealing with multimillion dollar deals or sensitive financial models you should still be careful about what you could be unwittingly sharing. Circulating financial information about your project could be commercially damaging even if it is a small project. Worse, the company could end up in legal hot water with fines to pay if sensitive data is leaked. No project manager wants to be the one who got the company sued.

So should you stop using track changes? Of course not. Metadata is useful for identifying, indexing and managing documents. Track changes makes editing project documents that have several rounds of revisions possible. Just be careful about what you send outside the organisation.

The report does recommend that you make an effort to strip out comments and revisions before you send documents to people outside the company.

Here are some tips for your documents:

• Remove the names of reviewers and the comments they have entered into the document or revisions they have made.
• Check document headers or footers in every section to ensure logos are removed.
• Remove hidden text.
• Delete hidden columns and worksheets in Excel; don't just hide them.
• Delete macros in the document.
• Turn off 'fast save' in Word as this only stores revisions which allows readers with some text editors to see how the document has evolved including anything that was deleted.

In short, be smart about what you circulate to avoid exposing your company's financial data or other secrets when you share documents.

You can read the whole report here: www.workshare.com/collateral/misc/Dangers_of_Document_Metadata.pdf

Accounting cycles rarely match up with project lifecycles and that is a fundamental difficulty for project-based organisations and project teams. It is particularly difficult at times like now when project managers have to deal with their Finance departments working on half-year forecasts. 

What is half-year forecasting?

Half-year forecasting is the process that Finance departments use to look at what the company/division/department has spent so far through the year. They compare this to what was budgeted, and use these numbers to predict what the full year financial forecast is likely to be. Sound familiar? It’s similar to processes used in Earned Value. 

Half-year forecasting is simply a method of finding out if the company is on track to hit its financial targets. If the organisation has spent a lot more money than planned (or a lot less), it is likely that the overall budgets have not been set effectively. Half-year forecasting is the opportunity to review the figures and make changes to the budgets to ensure the company hits its targets.

When do you do half-year forecasting?

Er… at the half-way point through the year. It is only half-year forecasting time now if your financial year runs from January to December. Some companies have financial years that run from January to December and cover the same time period as a calendar year. Some companies don't.

If your company doesn't have a financial year that coincides with a calendar year the other options are:

• A financial year that coincides with the tax year, and starts and ends in April.
• A financial year that ends in July.
• Some other arrangement.

If your company falls into the ‘some other arrangement’ box, you might be able to find someone to explain to you why your company manages its financial year the way it does, but frankly it doesn’t much matter when the year starts and ends as long as you know. In many cases the reasons why your financial year runs the way it does will be lost in the mist of times.

How does this affect my projects?

Your project could be at any point in its lifecycle at the point that half-year forecasting is taking place. During the forecasting process, the company is looking at how much it has spent and what it has left to spend from the budget for the remainder of the year. You may get asked to provide project budget information to feed into this forecasting process.

What, even my small project?

No, maybe not small projects. Half-year forecasting tends to deal with company profits and so the numbers are quite big. If your small project has a tiny budget then it probably won’t have an impact on the figures. Forecasting is more likely to affect a big projects running over many years or programmes.

What do I have to do?

If you use Earned Value then sending the Finance team the EV figures may be all that they need. If you don't use EV, then compare what you have spent to what you have forecast for the project. Providing the Finance department with the estimate to complete will also be useful for them as they can use this to refine the forecast for the entire company for the remainder of the year.

If the Finance department are interested in your project budget numbers to the half-year forecasting process then they will ask you for input. The only other point I’d make is that sometimes these requests can come at the last moment, so make sure your budget tracking is up to date!

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Math (or maths, as we'd call it over here) is essential to managing projects. You need to know how to construct a budget, use the data from time-tracking software and calculate lag and lead times for project tasks. And don't get me started on Earned Value.

But many of us find math tricky. Laura Laing, in her book Math for Grownups, tries to put that right.

"Remember, it's only a tool...It's a language that describes how our world fits together," she writes. "Math enables us to make predictions and quick decisions. Math helps us feel powerful and confident."

Trying to remember how to calculate ratios can be hard when school was the last time you got out your scientific calculator. Laing writes:

"It's completely understandable if you struggle with some basic math facts...When you understand why arithmetic works, you can make up for most any math fact that you've forgotten."

Her book aims to explain why math works, to give you both the skills and the confidence you need to tackle everyday math problems. And if you can't work it out yourself after reading this book, she recommends heading to the internet to find the formula that you need. This is not a book about making things harder than they need to be just to prove you can do long division in your head; there is no shame in using a calculator.

Math for Grownups is a book about changing your attitude to math. It covers skills like estimating and fractions, and explains them in the context of real world examples like using discount coupons in the supermarket. That doesn't make it a basic text.  Before you are 50 pages in to the book Laing is explaining negative exponents. The book has a useful appendix listing formulae and a glossary of math and financial terms.

Math for Grownups is also about reclaiming numbers for yourself. Math is not there to constrain you. The underlying message throughout the book is that math is your friend. Should you buy that snazzy new ice cream maker? Math will help you work out if you can afford it but even if you can't, the choice is still yours.  "Just remember that you-not the numbers on the page-make the final decisions," writes Laing.

Throughout the book Laing presents simple tricks to make equations and calculations easier. Key to this is her philosophy about estimating. She introduces tips like dropping the fractions off numbers, doing the math with whole numbers and then adding the parts back on again. Doing math that gets you an answer that is good enough is all that is required. She writes:

"All through your math education, you were taught precise was to solve problems. And you may have come away from that experience thinking that math depends on that degree of precision.

Sure, math is an exact science, but you get to decide when you need a precise answer and when an estimate will do. The key is thoughtful estimation. Make sure that you're not cutting so many corners...that you end up with an estimate that is either too small or too large.

And when you get your solution, ask yourself this question: Is it reasonable?"

There are a lot of real-world examples from buying a car to scaling recipes to deal with a glut of tomatoes from the garden. There is nothing specific about work-related math like project budgets although Chapter 8 deals with household budgets. That section also looks at salary negotiations and now to calculate how much that raise is really worth if it pushes you into a higher tax bracket.

Laing gives readers the tools they need to get more confident with managing numbers. One way to do this is to practise in situations where the future of your project is not at stake, like calculating grams of fat on food labels, or working out how much each family owes when renting a holiday villa with friends.

Laing encourages us to have a relationship with numbers that puts us back in control. If you feel like you struggle with calculating ratios and fractions or percent (for example when working out contingency budgets) then this is a confidence-boosting book.