June PM Survey: Managing the Project – Part 2

Part 2 of the June PM survey is now available.  This 2^nd part of the monthly survey again deals with concepts associated with the ongoing management of the project.

The survey is now active and ready for your participation at:

http://www.bradegeland.com/june-survey-part-2.html

In this 2^nd part of the survey, we’ll be looking at the following topics:

Definition of project success

For this question, I’m looking for how either you or your organization primarily defines project success.  Is it on time project delivery, on budget project delivery, or customer satisfaction?  And for those of you who feel it’s something other than those three options, there is a write-in ‘other’ response area available.

Percentage of successful projects delivered

This one will definitely a best-guess scenario because I doubt that anyone has compiled hard numbers on this plus it’s somewhat subjective as to what one would call a ‘successful’ project.  I’m trying to get an idea of where our readership stands in regards to successful vs. failed projects.  Recent studies – as I’ve reported here in recent articles – place the percentage of failed projects between 62% and 75%.  It will be interesting to see where PM Tips readers fall in that spectrum.

Percentage of project revenue from change orders

Change orders are always a love – hate thing.  For the PM and team, they are a great way to increase project revenue and executive management loves them.  However, it’s often difficult and even uncomfortable for the project manager to present the customer with change orders – unless they are the result of direct customer requests.  Also, change orders are a necessary tool to bridge the gap between the originally defined requirements and what reality fleshes out over the course of the engagement.

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Interop 2010 Coming to a City Near You

Interop 2010, which boasts that it is the ‘IT industry’s leading event’ and the ‘leadingbusiness technology event,’ has four yearly stops and kicks off the Interop year with it’s annual stop in Las Vegas.  Other stops for Interop are: Tokyo, Mumbai, and New York.

The Las Vegas conference, in my stomping grounds, will be held at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center April 25-29 featuring approximately 10,000 attendees and more than 400 leading exhibitors from the information technology industry.

Thankfully, due to having written hundreds of articles on project management, business technology, and small business topics in the past couple of years, it looks like I’ll be able to get a free media pass into the Las Vegas stop on the Interop tour.  That’s huge because the price of a full pass is $3100 when purchased in advance.

According to the brochure, here’s what Interop is about…

“Learn about all the latest IT solutions, get up to speed on important trends and learn how to leverage new technologies as the economy rebounds.  Interop brings all the important It innovations together in one place to help you identify technology must-haves to drive down costs while improving collaboration and communication.”

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March Survey – Remote Project Management

If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time you’ll know that I’m somewhat passionate about remote project management and green or sustainable project management practices.  And I believe that one supports the other.

For my March survey – or at least March survey #1 (there may be more) – I’d like to get an indication on where our readership stands on remote project management.  How many of you out there are independent or involved in an organization that supports the management of projects in a primarily remote situation.

And for those of you who are, or have been, involved in the remote management of projects, I’d like to hear what you liked best or least about them.  The capabilities of my website right now still limit my surveying options, but I’ve put up what I think are common pluses and minuses with remote or virtual project management in a team environment.

Please take the survey – it’s completely anonymous and it’s brief … only five questions.  But I think the results could be very interesting.  I’ll close this survey down in 10-15 days and then do a follow-up article on PM Tips analyzing the results.

Please go to this address to complete the survey…

http://www.bradegeland.com/march-survey.html

If any of you survey takers have feedback or something you’d like to add after taking the survey, please feel free to comment on this article or email me at Brad.Egeland@pmtips.net.

Thank you in advance for taking this survey.  Your participation is greatly appreciated by me and everyone at PM Tips and Seavus – the creators of Project Planner and Project Viewer.

Data Security and the Cloud it Rode in on….

A couple of days ago my inbox filled me with intrigue when I saw the email from InformationWeek containing a link to one of their latest articles. The title: “7 Cloud Computing Myths Busted” by Serdar Yegulalp.

Since I’ve written a few articles on cloud computing and I’ve been interviewed for a couple others, I considered this “must” reading. Indeed, it is a very good article. Here, I particularly wanted to talk about Serdar’s myth #2 – Cloud computing is the end of privacy as we know it. This is something we all should be concerned with and – from the looks of data security concerns articles and discussions going around – we are…even if we are often not doing anything more than talking about it.

Cloud Computing and Data Privacy

So, is cloud computing really the end of privacy? Storing data and running apps in the cloud – meaning the apps are being run off of someone else’s server somewhere and your data is being stored somewhere that you likely will never see – doesn’t sound very secure on the surface, does it? Does that make you feel comfortable? No? It shouldn’t. But it isn’t the end of the world and the same prudence with data security that we take when handling data and apps within our own environment should be in place to secure your data outside our environment – it just requires some extra attention and policy adjustments on our part and possibly some extra verbiage in a contract that with the cloud provider of choice.

Mr. Yegulalp states: “What makes cloud computing such a fierce target for privacy advocates is not only the newness of the technology, since every freshly minted technology is a possible privacy suspect. It’s also the fact that cloud computing, on the face of it, can cause a huge degree of aggregation across multiple IT spheres. When you have many disparate things suddenly all under one roof, it translates into “single point of failure” and “all your eggs in one basket.” It’s not your data anymore, either; it’s someone else’s, and whatever happens will happen on his watch. There’s a chance that provisions about your data security aren’t even in the contract you signed.”

He is dead on with that insight. Afterall, most data leaks and theft happen within organizations as inside jobs, so the paranoia we’re all feeling is somewhat justified. And when you start storing your data on someone else’s system, you might not have the law on your side if expectations of privacy become a legal issue.

Our providers of cloud services must be proactive about their handling of data security, it must be built into the contracts you sign and you should be able to expect them to go above and beyond the call of data to make you feel comfortable about the safety of your data. And if you don’t have that comfort level, then move on to the next provider. But it’s up to you to see to it that the cloud services provider you are using is looking after your data. It’s not impossible to ensure this, it’s not impossible for them to maintain the safety of your data…it just takes prudent IT practices and forward-thinking policies.

One example – Mozy, the online backup service provider – addresses security/privacy concerns by allowing customers to provide their own high-grade encryption keys. The backed up data then cannot be read by anyone else – including Mozy. If you leave the service, the key goes with you rendering your left behind data useless to anyone else.

Summary

Cloud computing doesn’t mean the end of solid data security and privacy. It just means – as is the case with just about any new technology – that we will all need to be more aware of what we’re doing, adjust our practices and expectations accordingly and implement new policies that will help to secure our data in these cloud environments and help our cloud service providers to do the same.

IT Leaders Struggle with Bringing Social Networking into Formalized PM Processes

The July 20, 2009 issue of InformationWeek brings us an article by John Soat on how IT leaders are wrestling to bring informal collaboration into rigorous processes such as global project management and product development. I’ve included a portion of that article – including a discussion on how one company is using IWMS vendor Skire’s Unifier product to managing their project, collaboration and communication needs.

I’ve personally worked with several people at Skire during an evaluation of their product and found this article very interesting. Please read on….

The Right Place for Social Networking?

Nevsun Resources is a mining company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and its biggest project is developing mines in Eritrea, a small country on the east coast of Africa. Using a browser-based, software-as-a-service project management tool, logistics clerks, engineers, and project managers are sharing documents, cost outlines, and project schedules across continents, giving CFO Peter Hardie in North America what he calls a “real-time review” of the project in a fairly remote area of Africa. “The spectrum of people using it is broad, and that’s what we were hoping we would get out of the system,” Hardie says.

The system – called Unifier, from the vendor Skire – lets Hardie “bridge the time and distance gaps that exist between the project principals in Vancouver, Eritrea, and South Africa,” he says. It helps Nevsun control costs and track expenditures down to the invoice level.

Social networking norms increasingly are creeping into formal project planning and product development tools and processes. And at many companies, the rules both formal and informal for how to use those social computing tools often aren’t written down. Nevsun’s system let’s people comment and ask questions about a record or specific aspect of the project. But there’s always a way to opt out of the collaboration flow. Asked if he uses the ad hoc communication capability in the Unifier system, Hardie says: “Me, personally? No.” Instead, if he’s reviewing specific costs and has a question, he’ll simply pick up the phone and call somebody.

As almost all business becomes global in nature and business processes increasingly are managed online, companies continue to push the limits of technology created to manage projects and teams across time zones and geographies. The goal is to communicate more effectively, work more closely with partners, leverage ephemeral information sources, and ultimately get as close as possible to the feel of what’s really going on.

Nevsun’s experience with Skire is just one cross-continent example. In product development, vendors such as Dassault Systemes, Siemens, and others are plowing Web 2.0 capabilities into their product life-cycle management platforms, adding collaboration and complexity.

Running alongside these formal platforms is the aggressive use of Internet-centric social networking platforms and tools – wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence awareness, peer reviews, search – to foster internal teamwork and tap into wider communities of knowledge. Yet IT teams are wrestling with how these tools function in concert with collaboration technology, such as document management, project management, and product development systems. Are they adjuncts, integral parts, or even replacements for tried-and-true software?

Plenty of CIOs also are wary of the data integration, security, and productivity issues raised by the introduction of social networking technology in the enterprise, especially when tied to a process as critical as developing a new product or completing a project. Yet some of embraced the dynamic nature of social computing and turned it to their advantage.

Four Challenges to Ad Hoc Collaboration

Creating Norms. When you have a wiki and formal project or product development software, what conversations happen where? One idea: If it’s tied to a process step, keep it in the formal tool. If it’s about improving that process, go to the wiki.

Breaking Convention. Product development is a high-stakes process. Injecting social networking conventions adds risks. Yet it could be vital to global teams that innovate ideas as well as execute.

Finding Insights. Done wrong, wikis can create islands of insights that the right people will never find.

Conquering Fear. Subject experts might be wary of sharing hard-earned insights, since they see that as their value.