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.

Best Practices for Mature Organizations

Eric Verzuh’s book “The Portable MBA in Project Management” discusses a study that was performed on 26 companies of varying sizes to determine whether implementing specific project management practices produced any actual project performance improvement.

Results from the study showed that companies with the best practice attributes I’ll describe next consistently scored better than their counterparts in four categories:

• Actual cost of projects as a percentage of budgeted cost was 6 percent better for best practice companies.
• Best practice companies had a 25 percent better rate of completing projects on budget.
• Best practice companies had a 29 percent better rate of completing projects on time.
• Actual hours as a percentage of budgeted hours was 15 percent lower for best practice companies.

The resulting data from the best practices study allows us to derive a profile of a mature project management organization. As we analyze the data, we find that the enablers and practices observed in the best practice companies can be isolated into a few core best practice attributes found in these companies.

These include:

1.  Formal project management structure: Best practices companies have some type of project management structure, whether a program management office, project management office, project support office, or project knowledge center. Of the best practice companies surveyed, 50% had a program management office. What differentiates the program management office from other project management office structures is its responsibility for the delivery of programs, as opposed to strictly an administrative support role. In addition, the program management office is generally responsible to a vice president or director level with program managers directly assigned to this office. Data indicated that the program management office has a higher success rate than other project management structures in percentage of projects completed on time and on budget.

Read more »

Is the Use of Open-Source Software a Project Risk?

I just pulled out my 12/15/09 issue of CIO magazine and saw an article that I had somehow missed the first time around.  I read it once and thought…”Ok, that sounds scary.”  Then I read it again and thought….”Ok, that sounds terrifying!”

The premise is that by using open-source software within your company, you could be opening yourself up to severe legal issues – with no ill intentions whatsoever.  Private companies have had acquisitions fail or have needed to be restructured at a significant loss of value during the due diligence process or they’ve had to cancel or postpone anticipated IPOs.

Apparently there are complex and restrictive licensing requirements in the open-source software niche that are somewhat ambiguous and definitely deserve the proper scrutiny.  Many widely used open-source licenses include requirements to make source code generally available, prohibit using the software for commercial purposes and fail to provide rights to transfer or assign it.

As an example, the GNU Operating System general public license requires as one of its provisions that a company’s products derived from its use then be licensed to all third parties.  What this means is that competitors can potentially examine, copy, and develop derivatives of what would otherwise be considered proprietary code developed by the company.  Ouch.  On the other side of the coin, there is usually no provision in the open-source license that guarantees that your company did not copy the protected works of others while utilizing it.

Read more »

February 2010 PMP Survey Results

First, I want to thank all of our readers who took the February PMP certification survey.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was very pleased with the number of responses and found the results interesting.

Certified or not?

Since this was basically a survey on PMP certification, I thought it might draw more certified PMPs to the site to take the survey.  I fully expected a majority of the responders to be PMP certified project managers.  I was somewhat surprised to see that a solid majority of the responses were from non-certified project managers.  60% of the survey responses were from non-certified PMs.

Passed on the first try?

45% of responders indicated that they have taken the exam by virtue of their ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to this question.  In all, 88% of our survey takers passed the PMP exam on their first try.  PMI statistics have shown that 72% of PMP test takers pass it on their first try.  Therefore, we definitely have an above average group of PMP readers on this site.

Read more »

Project management and the recession

Did you complete the Arras People 2010 Project Management Benchmark survey?  If so, your data has contributed to forming a picture of how the recession has affected the UK’s project and programme community over the last 18 months.

It’s the fifth annual survey that Arras have run, and that means they can set the results in a historical context, so we can see the evolving trends.  The headlines this year are:

• Programme and Project managers in the private sector have been hit harder than those in the public sector.
• Contractors were the hardest hit group: 42% saw their pay fall compared to only 14% of public sector full-timers.
• However, public sector workers are more nervous about the next phase of the economic cycle and the impact of the forthcoming general election.

Project and programme managers were also asked about their confidence for the coming year.  What did they predict for 2010? Read more »