PM Network

In this, the final blog post for me in 2018, I’ll acquaint current and potential readers of PM Network^® with the magazine’s Edge section.

Edge contains a collection of quick-reading, newsy articles that will update you about interesting projects, trends and potential opportunities. In December’s PM Network, the section begins with a heartwarming profile of a water park in Texas, USA that was built so everyone, including those with disabilities, can enjoy the facility. The team behind the water park tweaked the design based on stakeholder feedback.

Next is a brief article that testifies to the power of disruptive technology. The article reports that Dubai is now requiring 25 percent of new buildings must be 3D printed within the next seven years. The reasoning behind the mandate is to reduce human construction labor by 70 percent in a place where heat makes it difficult, and to cut building material cost by up to 90 percent.

Digital transformation is part of the next story, as well. Oil companies will use technology to help them profit from drilling small or very remote wells.

Next story…same story. Restaurants are using more and more robots to not just serve food but cook and prepare it as well. Robots are ideal for repetitive tasks—a recent analysis pinned 73 percent of food service and accommodation industry workers now perform could be automated.

Flipping the page, the Edge reader learns that despite a recent collapse of a prefabricated overpass that made big headlines, the modular building method is still quite popular in the construction industry.

Edge then focuses on a growing area of the economy (and result of a growing economy), the increasing challenge of properly disposing electrical and electronic waste. Projects are bringing electronics recycling plants to several parts of the world as a means to solve this challenge.

New York City certainly has a growing economy. It also has a subway system in massive disrepair. Projects to overhaul the system are being planned, but funding has not been found.

In between these two final Edge items is a short report about the perils of failed IT integration. This was pinned as the cause of suspected money laundering at a branch of Danske Bank A/S. The branch relied on its own IT platform rather than using the bank’s IT platform, resulting in questionable transactions not being flagged.

As you can see, Edge covers a world of interesting projects and project-related news. We invite you to follow Edge (and the rest of the content of PM Network) in the new year. Look for our annual Jobs Report in January!

At the recently completed PMO Symposium^®, the winner of the 2018 PMO of the Year Award was announced. You may wonder what were the award-winning traits of the winner. The December PM Network^® spells out why the project management office for Australian telecom Telstra was selected for this honor.

Turning back the hands of time, back in 2012 Telstra did a capital project audit and found out that nearly a third of the company’s strategic project investments were not meeting goals. So the company launched a PMO that year, focused on strategic planning and delivery. Since the founding, the PMO has provided structure and oversight to all major capital projects. The C-suite enthusiastically backs the efforts of the PMO, which has a full-time staff of 24 who oversee more than 1,800 project managers and 1,265 projects worldwide.

The PMO comes with power. Executive leaders within the PMO can hold business unit leaders accountable for delivering their projects’ benefits—and can influence shutdowns of projects that don’t deliver. They can also issue a “strong recommendation for change.”

Telstra leaders say the PMO’s biggest success has been bringing discipline to the company’s capital spend. The company has the largest capital expenditure budget in Australia. Discipline is grounded by a focus on key performance indicators.

Another benefit of the company’s PMO is its success in forging a culture of project excellence through talent development and training. Sponsors and key stakeholders are not overlooked—there is training for them as well.

Do you know of a PMO that deserves this honor and recognition? Be sure to nominate that PMO for the 2019 PMO of the Year Award.

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA was a dark place in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina paid an unwelcome visit. About 40,000 military families were affected when the hurricane damaged the Veterans Affairs (VA) medical facility. The damage was so bad, the hospital had to be totally replaced.

The US$1 billion project, which wrapped up this year, was selected as the 2018 PMI^® Project of the Year. The use of sound project management principles made this success possible. Scope changes were limited to those necessary to deliver better patient care. The team took advantage of lessons-learned databases from previous VA projects. Better upfront planning ensured realistic timeline goals and helped foster a culture of good communication and problem solving.

The project team went the extra mile to secure buy-in of stakeholders: veterans, families and the community. The latter group had grown weary of delays in rebuilding their city after Katrina; this project offered hope.

Extra care was taken to mitigate risks connected with any future hurricanes. For example, heating and cooling systems and mission-critical equipment were placed on higher floors and floodgates were incorporated in lower floors so elevators wouldn’t flood. Windows were designed to withstand winds of up to 130 miles (210 kilometers) per hour.

The project was delivered on time and came in about 14 percent under budget. The facility has an increased reach now, serving more than 70,000 military veterans and employing 2,263 staff, up from 1,600 before Katrina.

Get more details in the cover story of November PM Network. And be sure to check out the behind-the-scenes video.

OK, the robots have not totally taken over all hiring functions, but there’s a fairly good chance that automation could play a role in winnowing down a stack of résumés to an initial cut.

What do you do? A little strategy is called for here.

As Lindsay Scott says in her “Career Q&A” column in this month’s PM Network^®, today’s CVs must contain details that match the job requirements.

This means customization. Make sure your résumé emphasizes the same keywords as the job description.

“Take the first five roles and responsibilities the job posting mentions and tweak your profile, key achievements or recent experience to reference those requirements,” Ms. Scott says in her column. Then take your two most recent projects and use hard metrics such as budget and benefits delivered to complement the descriptions of your achievements with numbers.

Ms. Scott says the whole process of customizing should take 10 minutes each time you apply for a new job, and less than that in time. The approach also will screen openings for you to show if your experience truly aligns with those openings. If your CV doesn’t support each of the job’s top requirements, it’s time to move on to the next opportunity.

Check in with “Career Q&A” every other month in PM Network. Lindsay Scott will help you check all the right boxes to keep your career in growth mode.

What has your experience been with résumé customization?

Are you managing an automation project? Better get ready to up your risk management game. Whether it is robotic manufacturing or analysis of large amounts of data, project managers must be extra careful about errors that might be magnified in deployment.

One of the severest consequences of an automation problem happened in Britain when an algorithm failure in an automated health service system prevented women from receiving a digital reminder to schedule their mammograms. Some 450,000 patients in England missed breast-cancer screenings.

The cover story in October PM Network^® will tell you how to anticipate the worst in automation projects. It also goes into what happens when you don’t take care to thoroughly plan, test and execute. Project managers quoted in the article recommend sitting with workers who perform tasks that will be automated to check whether their actions align with what was previously documented.

Leaving something out is a big, big risk. A telecom project team failed to fully integrate the operations and business support systems, resulting in customers receiving services but not getting billed for them. Uh-oh. A 20 percent budget increase was needed to fix the problem.

Testing is key to identifying unknown risks and ensuring effective deployments. The testing phase must be well-planned and comprehensive. But project teams need to balance the testing need with the reality of potential post-deployment problems. Having good data and documentation will help mitigate those risks and ensure the automation project delivers long-term benefits.

Finally, do not ignore the human risk. That refers to team members and other workers losing their jobs as a result of automation.

What is your experience with automation projects and the associated risks?