Use Business Continuity to Your Advantage

In today’s economic environment, we’re seeing cutbacks and layoffs across the board.  And if you happen to be in an overhead position, well…count your blessings if you’re still employed in some companies.

Your company may have a disaster and recovery planning group in place.  Or they may  have just dismantled it through a cost-cutting measure.  Business Continuity groups like that are probably only safe these days in organizations that tend to do a lot of government contracting.  Often government contracts require a business continuity group and disaster and recovery plan to be in place and they’ll require you to prove your abilities to recover from a disaster – especially if you’ll be housing their sensitive data.  In these cases the business continuity group actually becomes a revenue generator – not overhead – so they’re not likely to be eliminated.

If you find yourself dealing a lot with outside customers and provide services like data or hosting to these customers – then the business continuity group is not only of value to you but they are also value to your customers and you now is when you need to leverage that with your customers.  And you can also utilize this group in new ways within your organization to help them to help you generate new income and/or realize new savings.

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Five Ways to Calm an Irate Project Customer

During the course of our projects, we often run into situations where our customer needs some massaging.  Issues come up, problems arise that are the fault of the delivery team, budget overruns happen, and schedules slip.  Rarely does a project team make it through an entire engagement without the customer being upset – often justifiably so – about something.

But what happens when the customer sees red?  I’m talking about the situations where the customer is more than a little concerned.  Just explaining the situation isn’t going to calm the customer like a normal bump in the project road would.  How do you handle this type of customer situation?  Hopefully, it doesn’t happen to you often, but when it does you definitely have moments when you may wish someone else was managing the project.

There’s no guaranteed formula for success with the customer in this situation – and depending on how bad it is you may find yourself at best with a canceled project and at worst looking for other employment.  But here are five suggested activities to undertake to try to keep the customer from blowing their top, taking their ball, and going home (with all of their cash, too)…. Read more »

Four Cases for Early Requirements Verification

Performing a verification assessment on your requirements during the actual requirement definition process is a key step in validating the requirements.  As I mentioned previously, verifiability is a key characteristic of a good requirement.

Assessing verification as you develop your requirements can provide four major benefits to your requirements and to your project or product:

• It improves requirement quality
• It ensures that your requirements support verification
• It provides a basis for estimating verification cost and schedule
• It reduces requirements verification costs

Let’s look at each of these statements in more depth…

Early attention to verification improves requirement quality.

Asking “how will we verify this requirement?” before you baseline a requirement is an important step in validating that requirement.  An unverifiable requirement is an unnecessary or bad requirement.  If you can’t verify it, you may not be able to design a product or solution that will meet it.  For example, how you do you verify “the product shall be safe?”   How will designers make it “safe?”  If you can’t verify a safety-related requirement, you may not be able to convince your customers to use the product.

Early verification assessments help to identify additional requirements needed to support verification.

Your product or solution may need features dedicated to support verification, especially tests and demos.  Extra connectors on the wiring harness to connect to test instrumentation or external power, extra data on a display or in a database to give you visibility into an internal process, an inspection portal, or a bracket to hold a part in a test fixture are examples of features that can make verification possible in some cases or reduce it’s costs dramatically in others.  Knowing these requirements before starting design avoids late rework of the solution or product to enable verification.  It will also reduce delays in product development while you await delivery of test support equipment or software, which could have been on a parallel development track if you’d known that you needed it earlier.

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The Project and Line Manager: Final Conflict

From the pmStudent community:

Get out your light sabers

by Thunderchild tm via Flickr (Creative Commons-licensed content for commercial use)

In a matrix organization, you are going to have at least two types of managers. Line (or functional) Managers and Project Managers. There are different types of organizational structures along a spectrum which companies can be highly projectized or highly functional. Along this continuum the project manager role and line manager roles change. Their roles are also highly dependent on the organizational culture. Read more »

Companies building Alaska natural gas pipeline prepare for open season

Sourced from the Canadian Press

CALGARY — Two companies planning to build a massive pipeline to transport natural gas from Alaska to southern markets are getting ready for the project’s next major step.

Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. (TSX:TRP) and Exxon Mobil Corp. of Irving, Texas (NYSE:XOM) said Friday they filed a plan to U.S. regulators for an open season, essentially an invitation for producers to commit to move their gas along a pipeline, which under one scenario would stretch more than 2,700 kilometres and cost up to US$41 billion.

The proposed pipeline would be the first to tie into natural gas fields on Alaska’s North Slope.

“The open season plan filing is an important step in the development of Alaska natural gas resources and we have worked diligently to advance the project,” stated TransCanada chief executive Hal Kvisle.

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