ProjectOffice.net: Getting Started – Part 1

As with any new piece of software or online tool, I highly recommend taking the tour that is usually offered through the online option or reading the user guide that comes with the software. 

Yeah right!  I never do that…I jump right in and use the software and that is what I did initially with ProjectOffice.net…finding it pretty easy to get up and running.  However, for the purposes of us learning together – because I have A LOT to learn about ProjectOffice.net, I’m going to go back and start with the tour that is offered…and I highly recommend that any new users do the same.

Dashboard

I will say this – on first glance, the Dashboard offered by ProjectOffice.net is pretty impressive.  I’ve been working with IWMS (Integrated Workplace Management System) companies and software for the past 3 years and all are web-based and all offer full-featured dashboards that are configurable to make it as easy as possible for each specific user to see what interests them most and helps them perform their job functions. 

The Dashboard offered by ProjectOffice.net is no different.  One section shows all of your projects with links to your team and your tasks.  Recent changes to your projects and tasks are highlighted in another section.  Your individual assigned tasks for an upcoming time period are listed in another section.  Remaining Dashboard sections provide the user with a Quick Add feature, License info, a user To-Do List and a Calendar function.

Next Up

In the coming ‘Getting Started’ articles I will cover what I’m learning from the tour and getting setup with using ProjectOffice.net.  You and I both know that starting to use the software is faster than this because it is the nature for most of us to just jump right in…and you can do that with ProjectOffice.net. I already have.  I’ve tested its import / export compatibility with MS Project and it is compatible.  But I want both of us to have a more in-depth knowledge of the software so we’ll go through it more methodically.

And so you know…I’m a lifetime Windows user who just converted to a Macbook (but I still have a Windows XP machine).  I’ll be using it on both and giving you both perspectives.  If you have any questions or thoughts, please comment here or email me at brad@bradegeland.com.  Thank you.

The Value of the Project Management Office – a Study

CA recently published results of their survey on the value of the Project Management Office.  The study contained some very interesting results.

The survey, conducted by Pole to Pole Communications on behalf of CA, was conducted during November and December 2008.  The respondents numbered 249 from 14 different European countries:  Austria, Benelux, The Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Norway, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UAE, and the UK.

You can view the entire report here.  Here are some highlights of the survey: 

• The PMO is gaining increased responsibility, influence and acceptance within the business as a strategic enabler of business change
• Organizations with a centrally managed PMO experience perceive it as a strategic asset when it comes to business decision-making
• Using the Gartner PPM Maturity Model1 as a guide, the survey found that companies with a centrally managed PMO display a consistently higher level of PPM maturity in terms of people, PPM processes, technology, and financial management. A more mature and sophisticated PPM discipline helps those organizations derive business value from their investments more quickly
• Most organizations lack a single system of record (a centrally managed PPM system). Instead they rely on spreadsheets, Microsoft Project plans and disparate siloed systems, resulting in significant efforts to produce regular reports and differing views on the status of project commitments
• Respondents with a centrally managed PPM system perceive themselves as more valued and accepted by their business customers. This helps streamline and enhance project execution while simultaneously delivering greater value from IT investments
• The value of the PMO is measured in terms of basic cost control, resource utilization and optimization.  Respondents do not currently see the need to measure project success in terms of ROI and benefits delivered
• Using the four dimensions of Gartner’s PPM Maturity Model (see over) as a guide, the majority of respondents gave themselves low maturity ratings based on the four dimensions (People, PPM Processes, Technology, and Financial Management)

In terms of some cold-hard percentages:

• 45% of respondents stated that they have a centralized PMO in place in their organization
• In contrast, 27% responded that they either had multiple PMOs reporting to different functions within the business or that they had no PMO function
• 86% of organizations that have a centralized PMO view it as a strategic asset when it comes to business decision-making
• Almost three quarters (72%) of organizations with a centrally managed PMO ‘feel valued’ within their organization
• 28% of respondents stated that their PMO was deployed more than 5 years ago; 5% have had a PMO in place for 4 years; 8% for 3 years; 36% have used a PMO for 1-2 years
• 43% stated their PMO comprised between 1-3 staff; 33% have 4-7 staff; and 25% reported having more than 7 people in their PMO
• 20% operate a centrally managed PPM solution; 17% utilize spreadsheets; 12% use a home-grown PM system; and 21% utilize MS Project

I find the numbers interesting, but not surprising.  It still seems that most organizations are not far along in the maturity process for their PMO.  In my personal experience, it seems that some organizations never get it right and keep trying to re-invent the PMO.  One organization I worked for in the late 90’s and early 2000’s is on their third iteration of a Project Management Office.  They form, dismantle, do something different, and then re-create the PMO all over again.

This survey is very interesting and I again encourage you to read the full report.

When Your Management Lets You Down

Who We Depend On

Our management staff is our support structure, right?  That’s how it’s supposed to be.  The PMO Director assigns us the projects, mentors the PMs, and probably manages some projects himself.  Our CIO ensures that technology is in place for us to utilize on projects.  His/her staff ensures that benchmarks have been run so that we can present meaningful material to customers upon request. 

Our Development Manager ensures us and our organization that the application developers are hired, available, trained and staffed well enough to support the needs of our projects.  And the Technical Support Manager or Customer Service Manager – whatever it’s called in your organization and it may be two separate people – ensure us that the support structure is in place for post-deployment follow-on support for our very valued customers…just like we’ve promised the customer all project long.

Not Always in Our Best Interests

With all these people looking out for our projects and the resources on our projects, how can anything go wrong?  I’ll tell you how…they aren’t always looking out for our projects’ best interest.  It isn’t necessarily their fault – it’s often budgetary issues or shortage of good personnel.  Either way, it doesn’t make matters any better.  I had a request for a personnel resource that was critical to upcoming tasks on one of my projects – it had been submitted to my executive management for more than a month before I received the resource I needed. 

Imagine the impact to the project timeline as well as the uncomfortable conversations I had to have with my customer as to why I didn’t have the resource available for the tasks.  Not only is it a bad spot to be in as the Project Manager, but customer confidence starts to sink as they realize that either your organization doesn’t have enough skilled available resources to properly staff projects, your organization doesn’t value them highly enough as a customer high, or both!

More Examples of Frustrations

One project a couple of years ago – a very important project with the company’s first customer in the airline industry – required me to take a team onsite to do some rapid work on some issues we were experiencing on the implementation.  We spent two weeks onsite, but keep in mind I had four other projects I was running at the same time. 

Even though things were going well onsite, I was constantly being pushed by my management to avoid all other meetings and focus solely on this customer.  However, they were not willing to provide any short-term PM coverage for my other projects meaning I’d just be leaving them out in the cold in terms of status calls, project schedules and status reports. 

As the Project Manager leading those engagements, there’s no way I could abide by that so I did my best to limit my involvement on the other projects while still overseeing the calls and delivery of information to the customer.  Otherwise, I’d have four other customers claiming they weren’t being considered important enough.

I’ve also encountered budgetary issues with a customer when the PMO Director refused to let me share the information in a timely enough manner to have any chance of correcting the issue and saving the project.  I’ve ranted about this one in a past article, but it still grinds my gears because that was a project that could have been saved. 

And I’ve heard from colleagues about the horror stories of companies downsizing in the middle of projects causing them to lose valuable resources at the worst possible time.  Onboarding in the middle of a project is never easy – and neither is explaining to your customer exactly why you lost the resource.  I sometimes seriously doubt that much thought is given as to what these decisions or poor actions cause a Project Manager to go through with their customers.

A Simple Request…

If any of you have had similar experiences of lack of support from their management infrastructure leading to realized or potential project problems, I’d like to hear from you.  I’ll understand if you make it anonymous, but it would be interesting to hear your horror stories.

Knowledge Managment News

A heretical view of knowledge management

For a long time, I have felt that there are multiple, significant problems in how the information technology industry has branded and sold knowledge management.

First, given that we barely know how to reliably produce information, I felt it was arrogant to assume we knew how to reliably produce knowledge. Second, knowledge representation as a field has been going on since Aristotle and is still undergoing widespread change and innovation (as described in my April 6 column). Thus, for industry to claim to have products to solve that problem seems a bit disingenuous.

Finally, what the knowledge management industry has latched onto — probably because of its limited success in this area — are collaborative applications such as Web portals, blogging, discussion groups and wikis as the mainstays of knowledge management. The idea is that logging and sharing experience, in any medium, equate to capturing and managing the knowledge of your organization. But although informal discussions can contain knowledge, it is equally likely that they do not — and there’s the rub.

Read the entire article here.

Chiarelli urges support for knowledge management tools

Federal knowledge officers need to keep championing the practical value of systems that help users make better decisions, not just process greater amounts of information, said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff.

He also warned against giving in to bureaucratic barriers that stand in the way of getting critical operational information into the hands of those who need it.

“What I’ve found as a leader who’s stepped up in the Army [is that] the higher you get, the more people want to deny you t information you really need,” Chiarelli told a gathering of public-sector professionals at the 10th annual Knowledge Management conference April 28.

Read the entire article here.

The Process Innovation Challenge

Doing things better and in less time seems to be a standard requirement of most clients in long term maintenance engagements.

The thought process here is – you’ve spent the past year figuring out what we do and how we do it so now you need to to it little bit better – and this story continue year in and year out.

So while the organization at large agrees to this in principle ( i.e: the wordy contracts and service level agreements ) its’ up the Project Manager to actually make good on this promise.

The challenge now is to fine tune existing processes and this is where your team comes in. The more heads you put together to figure out a better way of doing things the better your results are going to be ( well most of the time anyway ).

In one such project they set up something called the innovation challenge. Here, employees were asked to suggest process changes that could improve the efficiency of the system and in some extreme cases suggest which processes could be retired.

This serves two purposes, your team can now speak up about changes they feel need to be made or archaic and impractical process that need to be done away with, and the fact that if their change is accepted they get the recognition of helping to achieve a few goals.

You can do this both informally or formally, you might need to put together a panel that evaluates these suggestions before any of them are put into place. Let’s face it, changing an organization process is not the simplest thing to do!

The benefits of doing this correctly:

• Improvement to the processes within the project and hopefully within the organization as well
• Will lead to meeting and in some cases exceeding the service level agreements in the project
• An increased understanding of the process in the organization by your team.
• Motivation by your team as they are contributing to something larger than the project and the recognition that comes with getting it right.
• Appreciation from the client.