Tools for Distributed Teams
Categories:
Agile
Categories: Agile
| It's rare to find project teams that are collocated anymore, including agile teams. People are increasingly working from home, remote locations or overseas. Traditional communication tools like teleconference or e-mail are often insufficient due to a lack of a sense of presence. But a new generation of tools offers better possibilities for teamwork. These new tools aim to provide effective communication and help remote agile teams by simulating a visual environment. 2-D: Tools such as Sococo show the layout of an office floor and represent people by dots. Each team member gets an office. When people visit each other in the same room, voice, audio as well as text messages are limited to that room to indicate who is speaking with whom. They can also share screens easily. 2.5-D: Some tools show static 3-D representations of a space. The pictures do not move, but participants feel like they are at a live event. They can navigate to rooms to attend events of interest and gather with people of similar interest in chat rooms. Unisfair and On24 are examples of this, and have been used effectively for trade shows. 3-D: The next class of tools uses an avatar of each team member in a 3-D space. But many have different features that allow different uses. Most use a stereo sound that fades with distance to highlight who is speaking by reducing the volume of their voice according to distance. Venuegen is designed to get people running quickly and to show body language through common gestures. A variety of settings can be chosen, ranging from an office, war-room, classroom or trade floor. Each contains screens to show presentations, web pages, documents, video and images. Teleplace extends this model by allowing team members to post notes on the wall, display documents, and also to co-edit spreadsheets simultaneously in 3-D breakout rooms. This platform is popular with government teams for training and simulation. Teleplace and graphically rich environments based on the Unity3d toolkit allow importing of professionally created models and settings. 3-D programmable: some platforms allow users to create custom objects with easier modeling tools, or even script interactive behavior. Opensim based environments are popular with universities, and platforms such as the Unity3d toolkit support more advanced programming. No matter which tool agile teams use, many of these platforms create engaging venues for training and collaboration. Seeing visual representations of yourself, others, documents and data allows new ways to erase the distance between today's dispersed teams. Pictured: A sample screenshot from the Sococo tool. The views expressed within the PMI Voices on Project Management blog are contributed from external sources and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of PMI. |
Beyond Superficial Networking
Categories:
Career Development
Categories: Career Development
| In a previous post, I wrote about sincere questions as the most powerful tool for learning about a person. Oftentimes, we stop asking questions too soon. After a few superficial inquiries, we don't start seeing the affinities, so we don't dig deeper. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. Think in terms of layers. The most superficial questions are in the first layer: Where are you from? Where do you work? Where do you live? First-layer questions aren't usually enough to help you find the leads to uncover a real likeness. It's the follow-up questions that allow you to penetrate the next layer. I've found that if you can "mine" a line of questioning down about six layers deep, you will surely strike gold. If you ask someone where they're from, for example, and they say, "Little Rock, Arkansas, USA," you might think, "I have never been there, so we have nothing in common." You might then move on to another superficial question or end the conversation completely. Or, you could reply, "Isn't former U.S. president Bill Clinton from Little Rock?" This might induce a response like, "Actually, he moved there after he became attorney general, but I recently saw him speak at the PMI® Global Congress." Ah ha! You've struck gold. Now you can ask more questions. "You were at the PMI congress? So was I. What did you think of former President Clinton as a speaker? Did you see any other presentations you liked?" By eliciting the simple fact that this person had been at congress, you opened up many more possibilities for deeper questioning. Any of these could be a potential source of further questions. Try it. With practice, you'll start to notice a spectacular phenomenon. You will become quite skilled at sensing where the "gold" lies. And you'll begin to discover you have affinities with practically everybody. |
Making the Right Call
| Making decisions is a central part of any project management role, but some decisions are tougher to make than others. Problems have one right answer that can be reached by analyzing the information you have. Dilemmas don't have one right answer. Any solution will be at least partially wrong, unfair or harmful to some stakeholders. But not making a decision will be harmful to all stakeholders. The challenge is to minimize the damage and, occasionally, to optimize the benefit. Mysteries are often hidden within too much information. Understanding them is closely aligned to the ideas contained in complexity theory and risk management. Accepting your inability to know the answer to a mystery is critical: Make the best decision based on the limited information available while staying prepared for surprises. Puzzles can often be resolved through measurement and research. Gather the right information and skills, and you reduce a puzzle to a problem and can then calculate the optimum answer. If there's insufficient time to gather and analyze all of the necessary information, though, you may be forced to deal with the decision as a mystery, When confronted with a difficult decision, recognize the differences between the types of possible decisions and then use the best approach to reach your conclusion. Many issues around decision making stem from a false hope that we just need a little more information to reduce a complex decision to a problem with just one right answer. Yet in many cases, this is just not possible. All project managers make decisions. The difference between good project managers and great ones is the percentage of decisions they get right. |
Lessons Learned: The Key to Project Success
Categories:
Teams
Categories: Teams
| What lessons do we learn from projects? What do we look for from the lessons, both as individuals and organizations? What value do lessons learned deliver in future projects? Lessons that we choose to learn from our projects are based on the purpose that is set for the project. Purpose is the key. In the project postmortem review, we need to focus on what was or wasn't met as a goal. What worked or didn't work in the use of the methodology and resources? What worked and didn't work within the project team and its members? To understand what can be improved on a project, it's essential to always look at the original goal or objective, the initial assumptions and the project management plan. Looking solely at the end result with a narrow view of the cause-and-effect elements can lead to a long report with no actionable improvements to positively impact the organization's future. A lessons-learned review is effective based on the questions asked about the project results, the purpose for the postmortem and the implementation of the review findings into the organization. An effectual review could be the key factor to the success of future projects and organizational improvements. How do you successfully use a lessons-learned review? |
PMOs Aren't Just for Project Managers
Categories:
PMO
Categories: PMO
| The project management office (PMO) is one of the fastest-growing concepts in project management today, but it's not the only answer. The PMO was born to aid the project manager. Surely then, the PMO (and, as a direct result, you) would benefit if there were a parallel organization for the technical managers, consultants, architects, design specialists, gurus of the world of application configuration and so on. The PMO is not and should not be an isolated body talking only to the project managers. It should be one of many business units leading the delivery of company strategy. Align the PMO to a single technical body, no matter what it is, and then align the two through a common process or methodology. Think about your own in-house project methodology for a moment. Is it just for project managers or does it extend to integrate the technical tasks? Does it recognize the non-project management roles and responsibilities? Does it involve the technical deliveries and control mechanisms? It should. If you have a common method, have you trained each team in a way that they both respect and understand each other's skills and duties? Have you done so in a way that ensures that the highest level of communication? You should. When your business assesses the value, benefit and simply whether a new project should go ahead at all, it won't just be the project manager's view that gets the budget approved, will it? So align the technical gurus and the project gurus as one to ensure that the lowest risk and highest ROI projects are commissioned. Perhaps the future is the perfect pairing of a PMO with a TMO -- a technical management office. It may be that the TMO is formed as a separate entity but closely works alongside the existing PMO -- or even that the PMO embraces and includes the TMO function. The specifics of how a PMO or TMO relationship would take shape depend on what's best for your own organization, but perhaps it is the future. What do you think? |
