Subsea Project Manager – UK

Employer:Faststream

About the company

Faststream specialise in the recruitment of oil & gas professionals globally

Region:Europe

Location:UK

Deadline:16 December 2009

About the position

UK OFFICE – www.faststream.co.uk

Working as the Subsea Project Manager, you will be running several projects in diverse locations for a globally renowned leader in the provision of specialist maritime and engineering services to the Oil & Gas industry. You will be responsible for consulting directly with stakeholder clients and partners, typically oil majors and operators. You will lead project teams for the management of in-house engineering and site attendance and supervision during transportation and installation.

This is a very rare opportunity for a Subsea Project Engineer from an installation contractor background to take the step up to being a Subsea Project Manager. You will have a team of highly experienced Engineers and Mariners surrounding you but will assume full responsibility for project management and delivery.

This opportunity offers genuine career progression and an environment that will encourage you to quickly develop and progress personally and professionally. Financially, you will be rewarded with a salary in line with your experience paying up to £70k plus benefits.

Apply here..

Association for Project Management Award Winners 2009

APM members were back at the The Brewery in London again this year for the announcement of who won the Project Management Awards. APM is the largest independent professional body of its kind in Europe, so the awards carry industry prestige.

Programme of the year was picked up by Remploy for their Modernisation Programme, fighting off the Business Transformation Programme by Oxford City Council and competition from Establishing the Homes and Communities Agency and Tenant Services Authority, managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Remploy – which helps get disabled people into work – aims to increase the number of people it provides services to from 5,000 to 20,000 a year, over 5 years.  Phase one of the plan is now complete, saving millions already through consolidation.

The Sir Monty Finniston Award (for lifetime achievement and contribution to the profession) went to Tom Taylor, HonFAPM.

The Community Project of the Year award, sponsored by Project magazine, went to Clitheroe Castle, Turner & Townsend, for their restoration efforts including the conversion of the 18th Century Steward’s House. Turner & Townsend developed an innovative, sustainable and contemporary building that now forms the hub for the castle. There is also a new educational community area, converted from an old car park.

Turner & Townsend also picked up Project Management Company of the Year. They invest 1% of turnover in training and development, and promote coaching and mentoring within the organisation.  Their approach to communication was another reason why they were honoured in this way, with all team members managing communication up and down the project organisation structure.

Overseas Project of the Year went to The Poinsettia Project by BG Trinidad & Tobago Limited.  This was for the “Poinsettia” offshore gas production facility off the coast of Trinidad.  The company drew on local resources and local industry to support the work.

Michael Holme won Young Project Manager of the Year, for the work he has done on secondment to United Utilities.  He worked on a project – the first of its kind in the UK – to undertake the cleaning of 176km of water ring mains.

Kevin Bryson and Mike Ogden from Turner & Townsend, and Aled Edwards from Galliford Try were nominated for Project Manager of the Year.  Kevin took home the award for his ability to deliver projects across a wide range of sectors, including, regeneration, education and business.  He was also recognised for his ability to modify his management approach according to the make up of the project team and stakeholders – something all project managers should be able to do.

The awards wouldn’t have been able to get away without recognising the incredible impact that the 2012 Olympics are going to have on UK project management, and Project of the Year went to the PLUG Project, managed by the Olympic Delivery Authority.  This was the first Olympic Park preparation projects which involved removing overhead pylons and relocating power cables underground.  Maybe not the most glamorous of the Olympic projects, but one that has improved the East London skyline!

There were other prizes awarded on the night as well, including some for academic achievement in project management:

• The Geoffrey Trimble Award for best post-graduate dissertation went to Alexander Ritchie of Thales Aerospace and Newcastle University.
• The Herbert Walton Award for best doctoral academic research was awarded to Ron Basu from Henley Business School.
• The Brian Willis Award for the highest APMP exam mark was awarded to Rachel Bishop-Firth from Foster Wheeler.

Bamboo Solutions Adds Microsoft Office Project Integration

Sourced from the .Net developers Journal

Bamboo Solutions has released the latest version of Project Management Central (“PM Central”). The newly enhanced SharePoint Project Management application includes robust resource management capabilities and bi-directional synch with Microsoft Office Project. PM Central enables project managers to design and manage project schedules with Microsoft Project, but publish and share this data with team members in SharePoint. PM Central synchronizes and maintains critical project data such as tasks and dependencies between the two applications. Simple yet powerful Resource Management tools in the new product further enhance user’s ability to manage projects across the organization.

PM Central provides dynamic, interactive workspaces to project teams, enhancing the rich native collaborative capabilities of the SharePoint platform. As the latest addition to Bamboo’s comprehensive portfolio of products for SharePoint, PM Central is a full-featured yet simple-to-deploy application that works on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), bringing essential Project Management capabilities to the broadest spectrum of SharePoint users.

Key features of the new release include:

• Schedule by Resource – Allow users to display resource or resources’ schedule.
• Integration with Microsoft Project – Import and export tasks to/from Microsoft Project.
• Enhanced Status Indicators – Provide additional indicators for individual task’s status related to budget and schedule.
• Enhanced Reporting – Resource Task Timeline, Resource Availability, Resource Work by Project.
• Allocation & Capacity Planning – View resource capacities and allocate resources to projects from an enterprise resource pool.

Defining Implementation Success or Failure

Sometimes indentifying whether your project or implementation was a success or failure is not as straightforward as just looking at the metrics involved with project management. It’s not always about on time and on budget. And it may not entirely be about customer satisfaction either.

In Henry Lucas’ book “Information Technology for Management” he defines first what an Implementation is and then looks at some of the possible criteria for determing that implementation’s relative success or failure factors.

What Is Implementation?

Implementation is part of the process of designing a system and is a component of change. We develop a new information system to change existing information processing procedures and often to change the organization itself. Implementation refers to the design team’s strategy and actions for seeing that a system is successful and makes a contribution to the organization.

Our definition stresses the long-term nature of implementation. It is part of a process that begins with the very first idea for a system and the changes it will bring. Implementation terminates when the system is successfully integrated withthe operations of the organization. We expect most of implementation to be concerned with behavioral phenomena since people are expected to change their information processing activities. Implementation becomes more important and difficult as systems design becomes more radical. If a firm undertakes a maj or reengineering project, it should make major changes in tasks to reduce costs and improve productivity in the organization.

Success or Failure

How do we know that we have successfully implemented a system? Researchers do not agree on an absolute indicator for successful implementation. One appealing approach is a cost/benefit study. In this evaluation, one totals the costs of developing a system and compares them with the dollar benefits resulting from the system.

In theory, this sounds like a good indicator of success, but in practice it is difficult to provide meaningful estimates. Obtaining the cost side of the ratio is not too much of a problem if adequate records are kept during system development. However, an evaluation of the benefits of an information system has eluded most analysts. There are a number of categories into which we might classify the benefits or value provided by an application of technology. These categories include:

• Infrastructure
• Required applications
• Applications where technology was the only solution
• Applications providing a direct return
• Applications with indirect returns
• Technology initiatives that are a competitive necessity
• Strategic applications
• Transformational information technology

For only a few of these categories are we likely to be able to demonstrate a direct financial return, which makes it difficult to perform a cost/benefit analysis to determine the “success” of a system.

As an alternative, we can choose among several indicators of successful implementation for an individual application, depending on the type of system involved. In many instances, use of a system is voluntary. A manager or other user receives a report but does not have to use the information on it or even read the report. Systems that provide interactive retrieval of information from a database also can often be classified as voluntary. The use of such a system is frequently at the discretion of the user. A manager with a personal computer in his or her office is not required to use it. For the type of system in which use is voluntary, we shall adopt high levels of use as a sign of successful implementation. We can measure use by interviews with users, through questionnaires, or in some instances, by building a monitor into the system to record actual use.

For systems whose use is mandatory, such as a production control system or a computer that provides stock market quotations for a broker, we shall employ the user’s evaluation of the system as a measure of success. For example, onecan examine user satisfaction, although it will probably be necessary to measure several facets of satisfaction, such as quality of service, timeliness and accuracy of information, and quality of the schedule for operations. An evaluation might also involve a panel of information processing experts reviewing the design and operation of the system. We should also note that managers might well consider a system to be successful if it accomplishes its objectives. However, to accomplish its objectives, a system must be used. We would also hope that one objective of a system would be extensive use and a high degree of user satisfaction.

Finally, though it is difficult to do, we can try to estimate the impact of a system on individuals and the organization. How has a system affected personal productivity and output quality? Can the organization point to added sales or increased revenues from a competitive application? Can we show that IT has had an impact on performance, either for individuals or the organization?

Breaking the Project Management Triangle

An interesting article by Niel Nickolaisen on computer world

My first real IT job was as the manager of a large, put-the-business-at-risk systems project. In this new role, I thought the project management triangle was my best friend. At the beginning of the project, I would calmly sit down with my project customer, draw a triangle with Cost, Time, and Scope at the corners and explain the interplay among these three project constraints. My explanation went something like this:

“For any project, these three constraints are interdependent. If you decide that you want to increase the project scope, we will need to increase the time / cost combination. If you decide you need to shrink the timeline, we will need to reduce the scope or increase the cost (or both).”

I depended on my project management triangle best friend to back me up when my project customer increased the scope, decreased the budget, or reduced the timeline.

However, in practice, the project management triangle failed me. It seemed that my project customers usually forgot all about the triangle when they started to change their minds. They wanted it all! They wanted to increase the scope but hold to the time and budget constant. Or, they wanted to reduce the cost but keep the scope and timeline the same. When I tried to remind my customers about the project management triangle I had drawn for them, they nodded their heads but then assured me that they had every confidence in me and my team that we could pull off the latest project miracle.

So, being good soldiers, my team and I would embark on a death march to deliver that latest project miracle. Sometimes we succeeded. Sometimes, we failed. Whether success or failure, I soon realized that I needed to do something differently before my team and I burned-out from being project heroes.

Breaking the Triangle: A Case Study

Not wanting to repeat or exacerbate my recent experience, I started by doing honest reflection on recent death march successes and failures. As I thought through the common issues with the specific project triangles, the light went on. Rather than focusing on the interplay among scope, time, and budget, I needed to change the way we defined and managed scope! Rather than managing the project triangle, I needed to break the triangle! Let me give you an example:

In one particularly brutal death march project, we were implementing a new supply chain, inventory management, and procurement system for a specialty retailer. I had several project customers but the real driver behind the project was the Vice President of Operations. The company had, over the years, defined some very unique business rules. In particular, the company had developed, and supported in its highly customized legacy systems, a unique way of handling drop shipments. When the retailer needed to replenish its stores it would place a separate order, on a separate purchase order, for each of its retail stores. The supplier would then ship the separate order to the appropriate store. The supplier would then send an invoice for each of the purchase orders it received (one for each separate store). The retailer would then process a payable for each of multiple invoices it received from the supplier.

Now, the standard way for a retailer to handle drop shipments is to create a single purchase order – but a purchase order with multiple ship-to locations. The supplier then fills the order and ships the ordered products and quantities to the appropriate ship-to locations. Finally, the supplier sends one invoice to the retailer and the retailer pays for the entire order with a single payment.

The “requirement” from the Vice President of Operations was for us to replicate the retailer’s unique drop shipping business rules when we designed, built, and implemented the new system. As you might expect, meeting this requirement required significant customizations to not just the procurement system but also the accounts payable system. From a project management triangle perspective, this requirement was a stake in the ground of the “scope” corner. With this corner fixed, we would have to adjust the time and budget to compensate. But, what value would we generate with this customization? Would making this customization win us new customers? Would this unique way of handling drop shipments help us keep customers? Would our customers even know what business rules we used to replenish our stores? It seemed to me that all this customization accomplished was putting our project timeline and budget at risk. At first, I relied on the project management triangle to explain the impact that scope had on time and money. But, as in almost every other case, my customer wanted it all. The project management triangle failed me. But, how could I, in the future, help people make more wise scope decisions?

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