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Work Risks to Your Advantage

Brad Egeland — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:35:58 +0000

I literally came up with this one in the shower last night. Not the concept…I’ve knowingly or unknowingly been doing this for years. But the idea for the article. I was thinking of the article entitled “When Project Management is Fun” and the concept of how keeping things edgy keeps people focused, energized, etc. That’s when it hit me. Risk is challenging. Risk is energizing. Fighting risk keeps a team cohesive. And it keeps a customer and vendor working in unison. Work it to your advantage.

It’s Never Easy

Everybody likes an easy, successful project and nobody likes and easy, successful project. No huge, visible, challenging project is every going to be easy and perfectly, swimmingly successful. Ever. If someone tells you their big project is running smoothly and perfectly then they are lying. When you tie together a group of opinionated, highly skilled individuals who also have other responsibilities than the ones you give them AND you add a customer with high expectations and large expenditures AND you sprinkle in an enterprise-wide solution with somewhat vague requirements (because requirements ALWAYS have some degree of vagueness to them), there’s no way it’s going to go perfectly or smoothly.

It may be successful….highly successful, but it will always take a good deal of effort to get there and you’ll have to fight your share of adversity along the way. And make your management know it…because you and your team might as well get the recognition for it at the end of the engagement. Let them know it wasn’t easy…let them know it was tough. Tell the CEO if you can.

Work the Risks

So, knowing that your large project is not going to go through the motions without risks and issues coming into the picture, focus a decent amount of effort on identifying and managing those issues and risks and make the entire project team own them…both the delivery side and the customer side. Ownership breeds caring…which breeds focus…which breeds productivity and responsibility and accountability. Your delivery team needs to be more than the resources who act on the tasks their assigned from the schedule.

You know how your workday seems more satisfying and goes faster when there is some degree of non-monotonous activities going on? Things that are out of the norm. Wrenches thrown in here and there…fires to fight. The same goes for the project. Don’t get me wrong, if I have 5 or 6 projects I’m leading at once, I’d prefer to not have multiple fires to fight on each project at the same time. I wouldn’t even mind if 3-4 of those projects were easy ones. But having fires around – and unmitigated risks can become huge fires – then things can never get boring. Let me clarify…I’m not saying one should let those risks and issues become big fires. But the challenge of identifying, assigning, managing and mitigating those risks and issues breeds creativity and brings a team together like nothing else. You don’t have to actually face the adversity…but knowing it’s out there if you don’t work together and do something about it brings a team together on a common goal and can make for a very enjoyable…and successful project.

Summary

The idea is to stay a step or 10 ahead of the risks and issues on the project. Identify them early with your team and with the customer. Assign them to individuals or groups of individuals. Come up with strategies to mitigate those risks if they should actually occur. And keep managing them and holding people accountable to them throughout the engagement. Those risks and issues hold the highest likelihood of derailing your project and making you unsuccessful. So manage them well and manage them carefully. And delegate….delegate often and well.

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Book Review: Project Governance

Brad Egeland — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:32:34 +0000

The July 2009 book review from Project Management Tipoffs (brought to you by Arras People) covers Ralf Muller’s book entitled, “Project Governance.”

The concept of the book is that without a governance structure, an organization runs the risk of conflicts and inconsistencies between the various means of achieving organizational goals, the processes and resources, causing costly inefficiencies that impact negatively on both smooth running and bottom line profitability. Please read on…

Project Governance

A night to read and some real practical solutions to implementing governance in your organisation – either at portfolio, programme or project level. “Project Governance” from Ralf Muller is a little misleading as it doesn’t just cover project level governance. Starting at the corporate level, with academic theory, the book soon moves onto programme and project governance taking into account different organisational models. Is your organisation a “Flexible Economist Paradigm”? Or in others words has your organisation established project management as a core competence, with professional project managers? Governance within this environment will follow a different path to that of a “Conformist Paradigm” organisation where project management is performed by technical experts as an on-the-side task.

So what is governance and why would you want to know more about this area of project management? Governance is defined in the book as:

“Governance provides a framework for ethical decision making and managerial action within an organisation that is based on transparency, accountability and defined roles”

This book covers everything from portfolio management, sponsors & steering groups, strategic and tactical project management offices, programme management, in fact it brings together a lot of areas and topics already within the public domain. There are two sections that are particularly worthy of note; a governance framework for project management and how much governance is enough? The framework provides a three step process which enables an organisation to increase its PPM governance. Within each step there are three areas; what can be done, what should be done and what is done. Step 1, includes basic training and methodology use (it talks about the adoption of methodologies such as PRINCE2), introducing steering committees (ensuring what is learnt is adopted and put into use) and the use of audits and reviews to ensure the “what is done” or learnt has translated to successful project delivery. A simple framework which covers the different levels of organisational maturity has been conveyed well in this book and would be a welcome addition to any programme office manager, portfolio manager or organisational change specialist’s bookshelf. That said, this is also a book aimed at the project manager, especially their role within project governance but also programme level, portfolio level and ultimately how their delivery impacts the corporation as a whole.

Knowing when there is enough governance – appropriate to your organisation and the programmes and projects it delivers – is also covered. A simple approach which focuses on the relationship between project manager and steering group and the roles & responsibilities of each may be useful insight for any project manager. Like much in project management, communication is the key for effective governance at each level of the organisation and Muller’s book goes a long way to showing how to utilise effective communication to achieve a integrated governance model.

More information and review text about Mr. Muller’s book, as well ordering information, is available at Gower Publishing.

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Taking Steps Toward Better Resource Management

Brad Egeland — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:07:59 +0000

This post is basically the intended “Part 2” that I never got around to back in February when I published “Project Management and Startups: Resource Allocation and Usage – Part 1.”

In all of my years of Project Management one of the most frustrating parts has been managing resources. It’s hard enough managing resources on your own project or projects, but the bigger issue is that usually those resources are working on another project as well. And here I’m only talking about the ‘people resources.’ These are the living, breathing resources that can tell you what they’re doing and the other projects they’re working on for other PMs. At least when you hear it verbalized like that, you can do so compartmentalizing in your head of what they have going on, what their current priorities are, and what their general availability is to perform next week’s critical task for you on Project ‘Y’.

When you’re dealing with equipment resources, then you’ve brought into view an entirely different variable…and problem…that makes resource management an even more difficult task. Equipment resources can speak for themselves, don’t understand what critical tasks you have assigned to them and certainly can’t work harder and faster to make it seem like they’re doing two tasks at once. In fact, equipment resources can never multi-task.

Case Study – Privately Owned Las Vegas Company

A couple of years ago I connected with a Las Vegas company that is sort of in the entertainment industry. They supply mechanical automation and control equipment to the theatrical, themed attractions, motion pictures, and touring production markets. So there were two things different for me about this type of project management consulting work….

It wasn’t a typical IT project – in fact it really wasn’t IT at all. The PMs were not your typical PMs…they were more like project administrators or even gate keepers. Operations had accountability to the CEO for the projects. The PMs did not really ‘own’ the projects like we would think of PMs owning projects.
It had a strange cool factor. Their equipment was used for shows I had been to on the strip, movie stunts I had watched in theatres, and theme park rides I had been on.

At any rate, it definitely forced me to change some of my thought processes as I tried to build processes around what they were trying to do project-wise and for resource management. They lacked project templates, that’s for sure, and I helped them build those by first reviewing their open projects, then understanding the project flows, and finally understanding what a ‘typical’ project usually consists of.

The Issue

The bigger issue – and the real reason they called me in – was to help them figure out how to manage their resources. The great sales guy up front was the CEO and he was good at making sales…which meant he was also good at over-committing resources. They had a great reputation of supplying a great product on time and when show and movie releases depend on it your reputation can sink fast if you don’t deliver.

This may seem simple to some of the readers here, but it was news to them. First we inventoried all of their resources – people and equipment. As you can imagine, with this type of operation most of their resources were equipment. Both the equipment for the productions and the equipment to make the equipment for the productions had to be managed – since they actually made most of their own equipment in-house.

The Solution

To do this, I utilized MS Project – as I had done for their other projects and future projects as we crammed them into the templates I had created for them. I then loaded all resources, with cost rates, codes, etc. into a separate MS Project schedule to be utilized as a shared resource pool. We then linked all current projects to this pool meaning that the projects themselves did not have resources loaded – they were tracked in the separate shared resource pool MS Project file.

It worked great and it gave the PMs, the Operations Manager, and the CEO excellent insight into where their resource commitments were today and two months down the road as they were looking to had more customers and projects.

Other Possibilities

There are other solutions and I priced doing the whole MS Project Server and MS Project Professional combination for full collaboration. They’re a profitable shop, but something like that was more than they needed at the time. And web-based tools like ProjectOffice.net can offer good, cheap collaboration among PMs and personnel, but that wasn’t on my radar at that point in time either.

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With OS Project, Is Google Over-extending Itself?

Arjun Thomas — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:21:02 +0000

As reported by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service.

Google’s decision to build a PC operating system could be a master stroke or a colossal blunder, depending on whether the company has the resources that such an ambitious and long-term undertaking will require.

Google plays in a variety of extremely competitive markets, serving a broad scope of demanding customers and partners. Although developing an operating system could yield big rewards, it could also distract the company and make it more vulnerable to rivals.

Of chief concern is Google’s continued reliance on a single type of advertising for most of its revenue, despite efforts over the years to diversify its business.

Google still makes most of its money from search pay-per-click text ads, a market that it dominates but where loyalty from consumers and marketers is thin, making the company vulnerable to the development by a rival of a significant technology breakthrough.

In short, if someone built a better search mousetrap — as Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com and a host of smaller players are trying hard to do — Google would suffer a sudden drop in search usage and consequently advertising, crippling its finances.

Google’s attempts to build alternative revenue streams from display advertising remain nascent, despite the costly acquisitions of ad services provider DoubleClick and video-sharing leader YouTube, two properties Google considers key to this effort.

Bold initiatives to provide print ads to newspapers and spots to radio stations both failed. The company continues its attempts to build a TV advertising business.

Google executives are the first to admit that the company dominates the Internet search market because it toils long and hard every day to continually improve its engine technology.

Yet, not content with waging battle every day in search, Google also provides enterprise search and business collaboration software, competing against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Autonomy, and trying to win over business managers, IT managers and CIOs.

Read the entire story here.

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Project Management Jobs

Arjun Thomas — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:36:29 +0000

Project Management-Oman-Construction

Location: South Island
Salary: Negotiable
Company: Globester Recruitment
Sector: Building services
Job role: Project manager
Job type: Permanent

The client is a leader in the construction and engineering industries in Oman. With 30 years experience in this sector.

The company have an urgent requirement for a Project Manager to join their team in Oman. The successful candidate will have experience and knowledge of the Middle East construction sector.

The Requirements
o The candidate need to have a civil engineering degree
o At least 10 years experience in roads ,bridges and pipelines
o Strong ability to successfully manage, delegate and motivate others
o Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
o Good technical skills
o Fluency in English is required

This is an urgent requirement and to be considered for this position applicants should fulfill the above client requirements to be considered.

If you are suit this role and possess the relevant skills and experience please forward your CV for review to the email address provided. You will be contacted by a representative from Globester Recruitment to discuss before your application is sent to the client.

Please register your interest by emailing your CV to the email address provided (matt@globesterrecruitment.com) .

For all national and international vacancies, please log on to www.globesterjobs.com

Project Quality Manager

Location: Oman
Salary: £65000 – £85000 per annum + Car + Housing + Flights
Company: Digby Morris
Sector: Oil / Gas / Power
Job role: Civil engineer
Job type: Permanent

The Company

Digby Morris’ client has been providing a comprehensive range of professional services to the power industry for over 100 years. They focus on long term partnerships with their customers to develop and execute effective solutions to a diverse range of energy challenges facing the industry such as meeting growing energy demand, maximizing performance of existing assets, and reducing carbon footprint.

Their capabilities and experience cover the full spectrum of professional services from pre-feasibility and environmental delivered through Select to full scope project delivery and support of operations, including operations and maintenance of the asset via their ‘improve offering’.

They optimize their customer’s investments across the entire asset life cycle, from detailed engineering, through vendor quality assurance, construction management to start-up and operations. They pride themselves on a culture characterized by flexibility, capability and partnering. They can act as the prime contractor or work as a member of a joint venture to deliver the most effective service to meet their customers’ needs.

Purpose of the Job

To effectively manage the Quality Assurance / Quality Control resources required to safely execute and handover the Harweel project on schedule, to quality specifications and budget in a way that fulfils PDO’s policy of sustained mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders and the environment.

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Quality Manager (QC)

Arjun Thomas — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:45:01 +0000

Location: Surrey
Salary: £40,000 to £50,000 depending on experience, qualifications and skills
Company: Converge Recruitment
Sector: Building services
Job role: Other construction roles
Job type: Permanent

Defence Services Project Quality Manager

Location: Surrey

Salary: £40,000 to £50,000 depending on experience, qualifications and skills

Benefits: The client offers a competitive salary and a comprehensive range of lifestyle benefits, including a flexible work schedule.They are also committed to the development of their employees and actively support career progression through their training and appraisal programs.

The Client

When you become part of the team, your opportunities are endless. As a leading global engineering, construction and services company, they support the energy, petrochemicals, government services and civil infrastructure sectors on six continents. Serving their customers through six diverse business segments – Government & Infrastructure, Services, Upstream, Technology, Downstream and Ventures – they offer challenging assignments on some of the world’s largest and most complex projects. Their clients value them because they know They Deliver.

With more than 50,000 employees around the world, they deliver top-quality service and performance in engineering, construction, operations and maintenance, logistics and project management services to clients who entrust them with their most vital projects.

Apply here.

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8 key budgeting tips for your management team

Arjun Thomas — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:40:57 +0000

An interesting article written by Gene Siciliano I came across.

Most companies with sales under $10 million, and some much larger, don’t use budgets to help them meet profit goals. CEOs and operating owners reason the effort to learn how to build, and then use, a workable budget is just too much. They seem to feel it’s more frustrating than just hoping the numbers will all work out, if they only sell enough widgets or services or whatever.

There is no need to quote business failure rates among companies in this size range, nor the steady stream of survey findings that say lack of good management practices is usually to blame when a company falls short of its potential. Instead, it would be more productive to follow some tips to make budgeting easier. Even if you’ve never done it before, or at least never done it successfully.

The overriding principle: Profit planning, or budgeting, is far and away the most effective way to consistently meet profit targets and avoid costly surprises. It helps you invest your resources to best advantage, based on careful consideration rather than the urgency to make a move “today.”

CEOs or business owners need to decide it’s time to begin controlling the bottom line with some of the same tools they use to control the top line, especially since these days the bottom line is more controllable than the top line.

Here are 8 tips for your consideration:

1) Take the time, take the team. A budget is not the forecast you put together on the weekend to impress your banker. It must be the result of coordinated input and effort by you and your top management team. That makes it a project that requires some time and thought, just like any other important project your company takes on.

2) It takes a little practice, like any new tool. Regardless of how tough it may be to estimate the future, your forecasting accuracy will improve, and you’ll be better able to control the results, if you actively use a budget. Practice does make (almost) perfect.

Read the rest here..

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CAT, CMCS tie up to boost project monitoring

Arjun Thomas — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:59:59 +0000

The Contracting and Trading (CAT) Group has entered into a partnership with Collaboration, Management & Control Solutions (CMCS) to help enhance project monitoring and control processes throughout its Middle East and global operations.

CAT is a leading general contractor providing integrated procurement and construction services in the Middle East, African and European regions.

The partnership, which seeks to meet the highly demanding nature of complex construction, infrastructure and oil & gas projects of CAT Group, is a strategic move that complements the predicted 33 per cent growth in the oil & gas sector by the end of 2009.

Under the terms of the agreement, CMCS will help provide vital project management software like Hard Dollar Cost Estimation, Control and Management, Primavera Project Portfolio Management and Primavera Contract Management for CAT Group projects that commonly utilize heavy machinery, diverse multiple resources and run over a long period.

Implementation of the different software will be complemented by special training sessions, licensed accreditations, and consultancy services to be administered chiefly in CAT Group’s headquarters in Beirut and its other branches spread across the globe.

The company is currently ranked 95 in Engineering News Record’s (ENR) international list of top 100 contractors.

Read the story here..

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What is PESTLE?

Elizabeth — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:01:27 +0000

Last week I mentioned PESTLE analysis as a way of foreseeing any potential pitfalls that might affect your project. But what is PESTLE? You might know it as PEST – with just two more letters added on.

PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental.

It’s a way of prompting thinking about the external environment. It’s normally used to look at an entire organization or department, but it is perfectly feasible to use PESTLE on a project as well. In fact, it is a good way of ensuring you have captured all potential risks and issues. External factors can also be a source of constraints, especially in the legal arena, so it can help at all stages of writing the project initiation document.

Here are some PESTLE questions to ask yourself when you are planning your project:

Political

Who is your project sponsor and what is their power and influence reach in the organisation?
How is the project sponsor viewed by other areas of the business?
What third parties are involved?
Who are the other key stakeholders and how do they fit into the organisation?

Economic

What is your project budget and is it likely to be cut half-way through the project?
How do you get things paid?
Can you sign expenditure off yourself?
What is your project sponsor’s approach to budgetary tolerance?
What are the financial calculations required for a robust business case (IRR, ROI etc) and is your project constantly being reviewed against them?
What is the procedure for financial accountability of benefits?

Sociological

What is the group that your project will impact?
What are the training needs of that group?
What is the make up and morale of your project team?

Technological

How will you manage scope changes when new developments arise?
What technology do you need to support your team’s ways of working?
What technology are you deploying as part of the project and how will this be done?
What are the technical constraints you need to work within?

Legal

What health and safety regulations do you need to follow?
What other legislation do you need to follow?
What other regulatory frameworks do you need to work within?
What are the information governance and data protection elements that you need to safeguard during the project, including any test data used during testing?

Environmental

Is your project management ‘green’ (not printing out emails etc)?
What is the environmental impact of your project and how, if at all, do you intend to address that?

Read more about PESTLE and its development here.

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The Future of Project Management

Brad Egeland — Sat, 23 May 2009 22:51:41 +0000

It’s 2009…do you know what Project Management is doing for your company? What will PM look like in 2010, 2015, 2020? I’m not trying to write another ‘1984’ here, but what will it be like? Will everyone have to have PMP certification to even send in an application? Will every organization have a PMO? Or will none of them have a PMO? Let’s see what we can predict for the not too distant future in a few hundred words…

Certification

PMI is a great organization and PMP certification gives a stamp of approval to a PM who has acquired educational credits, led projects for the required number of hours and passed a test. But it doesn’t measure your skills in actually running a project and your success in customer satisfaction, etc.

It is my belief – and you can bash me if you want – that hiring companies place too much emphasis on this certification. I have nearly 18 years of PM experience, yet no PMP certification. I was going to get it around 2004 as it was part of a hiring agreement that I would get a $10k bonus upon obtaining certification. That bonus was important to me, but the PMP certification really wasn’t as I was very busy and preparing for the test was not something I felt I could spend my time on right then. But, for the bonus, I was going to do it, of course. Then the company closed down and so did my motivation to get the certification.

I’m probably biased because I don’t have the certification, but I think too much emphasis is placed on it by hiring companies…I think it trendy to put it in the job requirements. In the next 5-10 years, I think a push for this type of certification will only increase, not decrease. That said, if there are any of you hiring managers and CIOs out there who need a very experienced PM and don’t care about the paper certificate, you know how to contact me.

PMOs

Will PMOs be the norm in 5-10 years? Will they be necessary? I think so. A well-run, well-organized, well-stocked, and well-documented PMO can definitely help an organization as long as that organization is large enough to need a PMO. Smaller IT shops running mostly internal projects can probably just get by with a few project managers and some documented processes. And these PMs would need to be stationed within each business unit, not a centralized unit.

However, if the organization is large enough with enough project activity going on, then a centralized PMO with a proven leader at the helm is essential. It helps ensure that someone is fighting for the following:

PM training for PMO resources
Common, repeatable processes and documentation
Project prioritization (project portfolio review)
Project resource assignments

These are essential to ongoing project success in larger companies. I believe, therefore, that the PMO will see an increase of installations within larger organizations that are experiencing a significant amount of project activity. The current economy, of course, will play a big role in the growth of PMO activity, so we’ll wait and see how quickly this happens.

Greener PM

I still stand by my stance that remote and paperless project management is and should be the trend of the future. In running my projects mostly remotely over the past three years I have decreased my own carbon footprint enormously. I produce almost no paper for my projects relying on electronic documents and communication methods to very successfully manage my projects. I’m not driving to the office very often so I’m not adding to pollution and wasting resources that way either. And by not requiring a physical onsite workspace, I’m not taking up space and resources needed by positions that are required to be onsite (HR, accounting, finance, maintenance, etc.).

This won’t work in small organizations where all resources are already in one building. But with larger organizations, they’re likely already dealing with a very distributed workforce anyway…so remote project management is just another step in that direction.

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