A Nine-Step Process to Requirements Definition

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Until a few years ago, the requirements definition process was only briefly discussed in books that addressed project management, systems engineering, and software engineering. Many texts assume that the requirements are a given and show the requirement definition process as a single step on a waterfall chart. Most college curricula never even address the subject of requirements, much less the requirement definition process. Books devoted to requirement definition finally began to appear in the early 2000’s. Some outlined complex requirement definition processes, but more complex is not necessarily better. Most, if not all, of the benefits of a complex requirement definition process come from a few key steps. Overly complex processes use significantly more resources than simple ones do without significant incremental gain. Read more »

Book review: Confessions of a Public Speaker

Scott Berkun, author of the hugely popular project management book Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management, has written a new book.  Confessions of a Public Speaker is about Berkun’s life on the road as a speaker, and it is full of tips for people who have to give presentations.  OK, as a project manager you probably don’t find yourself in front of lecture halls full of people all hanging off your every word, but you will have to address groups of stakeholders, and your project team, or perhaps an internal conference where you give a corporate briefing on your project status.  This book will make you better at doing that.

Berkun does spend time writing about the practicalities of addressing conference-sized rooms – the use of remote controls, a countdown monitor, using all the features of PowerPoint to their best advantage – but there is a key message throughout the book, which is relevant even if you are addressing a group of just one person.  Think about what you are going to say.  He writes:

Even for many smart people working on a presentation, they’re so seduced by style that they lose the substance.  They worry about slide templates, images, movies, fonts, clothes, hair, and the rest, forgetting to do the harder and more important work of thinking deeply about what points they want to make… The problem with most bad presentations I see is not the speaking, the slides, the visuals, or any of the things people obsess about.  Instead, it’s the lack of thinking.

Whether you are on the podium at a project management conference or just in a meeting room talking to your project team at a kick off meeting, there is no excuse for not having done the prep.  What is the message you are trying to get across?  And if it is a ‘proper’ presentation, practise in advance.  Audiences, Berkun explains, don’t take kindly to speakers who don’t seem to know which order their slides come in, drop their notes, apologise for not knowing what they are talking about or any other behaviour which makes them look unpractised and sloppy.  If the speaker didn’t spend any time investing in doing this presentation, why should the audience invest time listening?

Berkun also explains coping strategies to deal with the multitude of problems that can hit a public speaker – hecklers, being late, feeling ill, losing your presentation on the way to the venue and so on.  He offers practical strategies around all these problems, and you get the feeling he has lived through them all himself.  He writes with an easy style that you will recognise from Making Things Happen – he’s personable and charismatic, which makes following (and remembering) his points easy.  After you’ve read Confessions you’ll want to see him speak in person.

The book ends with some great anecdotes from professional and non-professional speakers, talking about their worse public speaking engagement.  If you think you had a horrendous time, just be grateful you weren’t the law professor flown to Georgia to ‘attend’ a conference only to find out that he was the star attraction and expected to deliver a lecture on comparing three different national constitutions and explaining their significance to Georgia.  Or the guy who set the projector on fire.

Project managers often hide behind their desks or laptops.  But we should be out there, talking about our roles and our projects.  Confessions of a Public Speaker will help you do that, so next time you are asked to speak to a group, say yes, and enjoy it!

Book review: PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide

I recently got a copy of the 5th edition of PMP Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide, which is the partner text to the Review Guide and has been fully updated for the 4th edition of the PMBoK. Kim Heldman’s book is a weighty text, coming in at over 600 pages and with another two hours of audio on the included CD. It needs to be, as it covers the whole PMP syllabus in massive amounts of detail, with exam tips thrown in along the way.

I really like the way that Heldman writes, and she does a good job of describing the rather boring concepts that form the project management processes in a way that makes it interesting for the reader. Of course, you need to be at least vaguely interested in project management to find the book interesting, and it does help to be a PMP candidate, but it isn’t as dry as the Review Guide – this book is aimed at the beginner who needs to learn the concepts from scratch.

The book covers the basics of the project environment and the project charter before spending a fair amount of time discussing scope and requirements gathering. Chapters 4 and 5 cover scheduling and budgeting. With those out the way, Heldman goes on to write about risk management, resource planning, running a team, monitoring and controlling work and how to close down a project. There are also sections on procurement management and professional responsibility, which is a hot topic in the PMP exam.

Each section includes real world scenarios, exam hints and a final section on how the theory applies to the next project (or your current project, I suppose).

Heldman writes articulately about team management, which is unsurprising given that she says these topics are some of her favourites.

Although rewards and recognition help build a team, she writes, they can also kill morale if you don’t have an established method or criteria for handing them out. Track who is receiving awards throughout the project… Consider individual preferences and cultural differences when using rewards and recognitions. Some people don’t like to be recognized in front of a group; others thrive on it. Some people appreciate an honest thank-you with minimal fanfare, and others just won’t accept individual rewards as their culture doesn’t allow it. Keep this in mind when devising your reward system.

If this book was smaller and lighter I would seriously consider carrying it around with me, but unfortunately that isn’t practical. However, the entire book is available as a .pdf file on the CD, so you could print off a couple of pages to review on the train, or carry the thing around with you on your laptop if you wanted to study while you are on the road.

Overall, if you are after an interesting, comprehensive book and CD package to help you study for the PMP exam, this is it.

Book review: PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Review Guide

PMP Project Management Professional Exam Review Guide has a practical, descriptive title – and it’s a practical, descriptive book.  Kim Heldman and Vanina Mangano have written this book specifically for those project managers aiming to sit their PMP exam.  It’s structured logically, taking you through the project lifecycle.

The book starts with a review of the foundations of a project: all the basics about what constitutes a project and the project environment.  Then it gets into the detail of what PMPs need to know to manage a project from start to finish.  It covers Initiating, has a large section on Planning, followed by Executing, Monitoring and Controlling and Closing.  Finally, the book ends with an interesting section on social and professional responsibility – something all project managers, regardless of whether they choose the PMI accreditation route or not, should be interested in.

Each chapter finishes with review questions so that you can test yourself against what you have learned.  I also liked the ‘Exam Essentials’ boxes that are scattered throughout the text and highlight key pointers essential for exam success.

Overall, the book is graphically very interesting and the authors use a lot of diagrams, graphs and charts to make learning the PMP syllabus more appealing.  However, a lot of the book is made up of lists, especially inputs and outputs of processes.  This is because the book is essentially a review guide, not a comprehensive study tool by itself.  It is a partner text to the Sybex PMP: Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide, which is twice as fat.  As a result, the Review Guide covers the topics in exactly that – review format.  It’s not the most comprehensive of texts, but it is concise, which is perfect if you don’t want to carry your copy of PMBoK or the Study Guide around with you all the time.

It’s difficult to read the Review Guide from start to finish, and it probably wasn’t designed to be used that way.  This is perhaps why it has a fabulous index.  It’s not a habit of mine to praise the index in books, but I did find this one really good!

Overall,  my experience of this book is that it is solid but dry, and the review questions at the end of each chapter are the only place where you’ll find any reference to scenarios or real life.  The bulk of the text focuses squarely on getting a candidate through the exam, and it wiill certainly help do that.  It also comes with a CD, which is another learning aid.

If you are studying for the PMP exam and need a handy reference guide to the key processes, this could be a good book for you.  However, if you want to learn how to manage a project and put those skills to work in the real world, don’t start with this book.  It is good, but only for the right audience – and that’s prospective PMP candidates.

Should You Equip the PMO with Netbooks?

Let me answer that right now…NO. However, are they bad? Again, NO. Now that I’ve gotten my feelings off my chest on this, let’s dive in a little further.

Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly approve of netbooks. I’ve purchased two of them in the past four months. They’re great in the right situations and some of those can be PM-related.

First, I feel that there are some misperceptions with netbooks that most people have and need to overcome – I was included in this group at one time:

• The screen is too small. It’s not. It’s small, but unless you’re working heavily on graphics, the size is a plus rather than a minus. I’ve grown tired of the large, widescreen laptops. I’m much happier on my 13” Macbook than I ever was on my cumbersome 15.4” Gateway and I’ve used one of our home netbooks to surf, write a document, etc. and had no problems at all with it’s screen size. Granted, it’s of the 10” variety, not one of the 8” netbooks.
• The CD/DVD drive is critical. I can’t tell you when I last used a CD/DVD drive unless it was to load a CD into iTunes (which I almost never use anyway). I purchase software online and download so I know it’s possible to live without those drives. But, if you must have one, you can purchase an external one and some of the models at Costco actually come with the external drive included. The CD/DVD drive is no longer a necessity…it’s a ‘nice-to-have’ and an ‘almost-never-used’ extra.
• The processing power won’t be there. I don’t see it. I bought two of the the Asus Eee PC netbook. It has the Intel Atom processor which operates at 1.60 GHz and the netbook comes with 1 Gb of DDR2 RAM. Now, they aren’t being used on Photoshop, but for high school and college work and for low-end photo editing, writing, some video editing, etc. the netbooks have done everything we’ve asked of them.
• They are more fragile than a regular notebook. Again, not true or at least I don’t see it. In fact, because they are smaller and easier to carry around, dropping them or hitting on something as you walk by is far less likely. My 15 yr old daughter has gone through two phones in that time period by her netbook doesn’t have a scratch on it and she takes it everywhere.

So at this point, I seem to be a netbook proponent. And I guess I am. However, is it a good idea to equip your entire PMO workforce with netbooks and send them out into the world? I’m not likely to agree with that.

I think it may be a decent concept to have some around for checking out by PMs for travel or if your company has that much money to spend, give each PM one to make traveling easier. But I do not think the netbook is ready to be someone’s only work machine. It’s a good add-on if you have the money to spend, but it’s not ready to be a primary machine. I wouldn’t equip my whole family with netbooks as a replacement for all laptops (and I’d NEVER give up my Macbook), so I know I would not condone making this standard fare for all of your PMO’s workforce.