Do We Need Customer Participation on Projects?
Posted by Brad Egeland
Now don’t laugh – this is a serious question. There are projects or programs where the customer basically hands off their needs or requirements or whatever and they basically just “phone it in” for the rest of the project. I’ve been on those. They’re not bad – as the project manager you pretty much have free reign as long as you keep producing status reports and show that you’re on target.
But is this a good thing? Sure, we’d all appreciated it from time to time if our customer’s would stay out of our hair. It would make our jobs a lot easier if we could work on the project without phone calls, questions, and demands from the customer, right?
But what are the downsides? What could possibly happen on a project where the customer remains uninvolved throughout? Let’s look at some of the more obvious negatives:
Cost to the customer
A typical professional services organization is going to charge its customer – on average – close to $200 per resource hour. If no one is participating from the customer side, it’s going to take more delivery team hours to gather the necessary information, correct requirements, manage the project, and provide a final, workable solution. It wouldn’t be a one to one trade off on customer hours versus vendor hours, but customer hours would not be costing them $200/hour. Every hour the customer spends helping to manage the project with resource that is costing them, say, $50/hour, can actually result in a decent savings over the course of the engagement.
Requirements issues
If the customer throws their requirements over the wall to the vendor at the beginning of the project and offers little participation beyond that, you can be certain that the delivered solution is going to miss the mark on a few, if not many, real requirements. Much as we’d like to believe that requirements can be set in stone at the beginning of the project, that is almost never the case. Understandings and details change, customer grow to better understand their needs, and the delivery team arrives at a more thorough understanding of the true requirements through ongoing project discussions with the customer. If those things can’t happen, then the end solution is likely to not be what the customer and its end users need.
July 2010 PM Survey – The Project Schedule
Posted by Brad Egeland
It’s hard to believe it’s July already, but a new month means it’s time for a new survey. This month, I’d like to get a feel for what we use for project scheduling and how we use it.
The survey is available now through late July at this address:
www.bradegeland.com/july-2010-survey.html
So, for question #1 – I want to know what tool you’re using. There are a lot of tools out there so I’m just looking for the name. You don’t have to tell me if it’s web-based or not – I think we’ll get into more of that in the next month or so.
Questions #2 & #3 – let the readers know how close to the vest you keep the project schedule. Does just the project manager revise and distribute the schedule? Is it a collaborative effort with the project team – do you let others go in and revise task status on percent completes and effort estimates? And do you let the customer do anything but look at it? Are there ever any projects where you allow update capability for the customer? I’m assuming this is probably almost never, but who knows.
Question #4 – Do you use the project schedule to actually track project costs? Are the hourly rates of the project resources and costs for materials entered into the project schedule or do you track project costs through a different mechanism?
Cover Yourself – Insurance for IT Professionals
Posted by Brad Egeland
Throughout the years, time has consistently changed the way consumers buy and how businesses react to consumers buying habits. As a parallel evolution with providing faster, quantitative and quality based solutions, businesses have also consistently found more and more ways to incorporate technology and computers into their business plans.
This is not news, we all know this- However, the evolution of technology insurance is quickly becoming a vital part of our business plans and forms of security.
This is good-
As business owners we have to come to terms with expecting the unexpected. This means that if you have half a brain, you’d have yourself, your employees, property and entities covered with Liability, E & O policies, Workers comp, Property, Auto etc… These policies cover a lot, and can ease the fall of catastrophe, but with such a heavy dependence on technology to keep our businesses running, it was time for a more specialized kind of insurance policy.
Recently there has been a surge of technology-based/hybrid insurance policies that are created especially for the needs of technology dependent businesses and IT professionals (or contractors). These specialized policies take into consideration the kinds of liability risks from which IT professionals need to protect themselves and the business they’re working for as a whole. As where businesses were fighting to qualify for claims caused by technology derived errors, now the policies are designed specifically to understand the impact of claims from technology.
Consider the Facts:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that computer network, systems, and database administrators held about 961,200 (www.bls.gov, 2010) jobs and computer and information systems managers held about 293,000 jobs in 2008(www.bls.gov, 2010).
(this was two years ago!!!)
Upfront Project Management Involvement
Posted by Brad Egeland
I recently had the pleasant opportunity of having a discussion with several members of an organization who seem to be ‘getting it.’ And by getting it, they seem to understand that Sales has their definite purpose, but before everything is locked in place on an engagement, that Sales team really needs involvement from the delivery team to make sure this is all going to work. Sounds logical, right? Well, many organizations are making it a lot harder than it should be. I apologize if this sounds old to you since I’ve written about it before…but I hope you’ll stick with me and read on…
Sales is great, but….
Sales is obviously a key organization in any professional services company. Without sales, we’d have no projects to work on. However, many companies that I’ve worked with or for seem to think that there is a distinct line between Sales and the delivery part of the organization. You often hear, “Here, Sales closed this deal and now it’s your project – link up with Sales and get the handoff information so you can start the project.” Those words make me cringe. There are probably a long list of things that are wrong with that process, but I can give you three major ones right now:
#1 – Sales is primarily concerned with the sale
Sales is worried about making sales. After all, it is their job. And their salaries, commissions, and bonuses depend on it. If they didn’t make the sales, the rest of us in the professional services organization would have nothing to deliver on.
What’s wrong with this? Nothing really – but as I’ll discuss in #2 below, they aren’t Delivery and therefore are not in tune with what Delivery needs out of the Sales process.
What is Portfolio Management?
Posted by Elizabeth
You’ve mastered project management and program management. The next thing to get to grips with is portfolio management. “A Portfolio gets its name from a case used for carrying documents such as maps, photographs, or drawings,” write Pat Durbin and Terry Doerscher in their book Taming Change with Portfolio Management
Being able to group projects and programs together means you can then make decisions about them – decisions that can affect budgets or staffing levels for the work required, as well as which areas to focus effort on to meet the company’s strategic objectives.
Portfolio management is the way in which you manage and make decisions about groups of projects and programs. It’s a strategic role – but if you don’t think your project sponsors have got their heads around it, ask the PMO to get them a copy of An Executive Guide to Portfolio Management
