The Project Change Order Request – Version 2

As promised – another version of the love-hate Change Order Request.  This is a cut/paste from a Word doc template that I would be happy to share.  The Word doc version looks much better, but this at least gives you an idea of the content that is being captured here for customer approval.

The main concept is to capture as much information about the proposed scope change as possible and estimate each task effort that it’s going to take to get there.  Once that effort and budget info is captured here, that information can easily be rolled into the project schedule to show your customer how the change order request is going to affect the overall project timeline.

I’ve been using this version – or at least some variation of it – for most of the past three years on projects and it’s served me very well.  The change order request is always a delicate subject for both the project manager and the customer so handling it carefully and in the greatest detail possible is critical to good decision-making and for on-going customer satisfaction since it usually results in the customer paying more on the project (but not always because even things that decrease the project scope and cost should be documented using this same process….it affects the project, too!).

Again, if you want a Word doc version of the template let me know.  And if you have a version you can share, I’d like to see it and share it with our PM Tips readers as well.

Book Review – The Green Guide for Business: The Ultimate Environment Handbook for Businesses of All Sizes

The September 2009 book review brought to you by Arras People covers Chris Goodall’s book entitled, “The Green Guide for Business: The Ultimate Environment Handbook for Businesses of All Sizes.”

The Review

Many authors simply have a comfort zone in which they can write most effectively. John Grisham = Courtroom Drama. Nick Hornby = 25-34 Male Angst. Dan Brown = Church Bating. Chris Goodall clearly is vying for the role of Go-To Guy on Being Green.

Recent titles Ten Technologies to Save the Planet and How to Live a Low-carbon Life: The Individual’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change have gained relevant Amazon ranking traction and solid reviews from the likes of New Scientist and environmentalist author Fred Pearce. Goodall’s Green Guide is an up-to-date, recession-conscious follow-up to these volumes, but this time clearly targeted for business executives in both large and small settings.

No stone is left unturned for the responsible eco-businessman to explore: paper ethics, driving practices, office energy use, greening computers and servers, even company travel plans are turned over. But like other works of Goodall, the ideas are not presented to the sceptical without acknowledging the beliefs that source their scepticism. Goodall is pure journalism in presentation of the issues: objective, objective, objective. One chief criticism he is likely to hear is that in presenting both sides of an issue, he leaves the matter open-ended. Now, for someone looking to make the decision on their own, this is objective and sound. For someone looking for answers (or a quick-fix solution), this is frustrating. It’s a tedious nit to pick, but that’s Nitpicking 101 with the modern self-help audience: if a reader only has so much time to be impressed, then Goodall has to deal with the impatient and demanding as well as the thought-provoked and deliberate.

The most intriguing and objective passage for me comes from Chapter 1, when Goodall admits it is important in preparing for green initiatives to prepare also for a world where the climate does not change:

It is conceivable that temperature rises could reverse and wind and rainfall patterns stabilise. No sensible company of public institution should deny this possibility. Perhaps, as some climate change sceptics say, the earth’s cloud cover will increase as hotter temperatures cause more evaporation; increased cloudiness might halt temperature change. No careful business-person should run a company on the basis that the future is easily predictable. It may be as dangerous to listen to the most frightened of the world’s scientists as it is to ignore them. The right approach is to try to maintain the most flexible organisation – one that can respond quickly to any environmental or policy changes.

Ultimately, the idea here is for you to come to The Green Guide open-minded and ready to explore and determine with thinking, not to cogitate and solve with immediacy. It implores you to think about things going on in your office. Sometimes the facts are alarming: though air conditioning is common primarily in larger offices, it accounts for nearly 15% of the electricity supplied to all UK non-residential buildings. Imagine how much it will account for if British summers actually get hotter?

But its in the all important A-to-B goods transport chapter where solutions truly begin to capture the heart of the business executive’s priorities. These days, companies are looking at a variety of ways to cut yearly fuel costs: petrol to diesel, smaller vehicles, LPG fuels, hybrids and electricity are all offered as better company options. Most glaring is the savings of a switch to electric fuel: Goodall reports on the change by Office Depot to electric-fuelled vehicles from diesel. The fuel consumption of an electric lorry over five years totalled a mere £2,600; for diesel, the total was a much more staggering £15,500. Maintenance costs also totalled over £3,100 in savings for electric lorry users over the same amount of time. For individuals who have already explored travel & fuel savings (inflating tires, maintaining lower speeds), even the obvious is given a platform. But this title refers to itself as a guidebook, and the obvious is what a guidebook should include anyway. You can’t punish a writer for living up to the potential of their title.

These and other figures will always get the discerning businessman’s attention, and Goodall is all too happy to oblige in The Green Guide.

Equipping Your Mobile Project Staff – Part 1

I’ve made no secret in this forum for my support of remote work. It’s efficient, cost effective, green, and – IMO – better allows for project manager to effectively manage multiple projects consisting of a geographically diverse resource pool.

However, I’m really just talking about home base when discussing virtual or remote PM work. It’s still understood and expected that PMs are onsite with the customer when needed – especially to kickoff the project or to kickoff particular phases like design, development, testing, etc.

I’ve worked with and for companies where the PM did most of the traveling. Often times, however, the business analysts are the bigger bridge between PM and the technical solution and therefore spend more time traveling. It depends on the customer, the delivery organization, and the specific needs of the project, but usually there is at least one member of the delivery team that ends up doing a decent amount of traveling.

With information based on an article found in InformationWeek in late 2008, I’d like to discuss five ways to best prepare your project road warriors in your organization to be as productive as possible when traveling for work and trying to juggle those various project responsibilities. For Part 1, we’ll cover IP Telephony and Disk/Data Encryption.

IP Telephony

Enterprise IP telephony has gone from fad to necessity in a relatively short period of time. Voice over IP is one of the few areas in IT where the up-front capital expenditure can be quickly paid back with savings over traditional telecom operating expenses. These potential savings are much greater if you have a large contingent of workers overseas who need to stay connected or home-based office staff. It can be particularly beneficial to PMOs with a sizeable portfolio of projects and project personnel dispersed across the US and/or globally.

Cisco and Avaya are top providers I the unified communications and VoIP space, and both have impressive arrays of products designed for the road and the home office. On the home front, Cisco’s Unified IP Phone 7985G should satisfy even the most discerning executive. For video conferencing – which may allow further cost-saving measures by making some of the later-phase kickoff sessions entirely remote – the 7985G has an 8-inch LCD and built-in camera capable of providing 768 Kbps of IP video yielding 30 frames per second using H.263. The built-in two-port, 802.1Q-capable, 10/100-Mb switch allows for seamless quality of service and provides for convenient connectivity to a networked printer at the home office.

Avaya is releasing the IP 9670G Executive Touch Screen phone, which provides full touch screen access to all standard voice-mail system functions, as well as a standard suite of applications. For something more portable, Avaya offers the 3641 IP Wireless Phone resembling a traditional cordless telephone – however it connects to 802.11 a/b/g wireless networks.

Disk/Data Encryption

Preventing data leakage is quickly becoming a top priority for IT, and there’s no better place to start than with staffers who are taking your most sensitive material outside the corporate walls. In today’s world, much of the workforce is leaving the office with a $300 piece of mobile equipment in hand that has access to possibly $300M in valuable corporate and customer data. It needs to be protected…no question.

If you own a copy of Windows Vista Enterprise or Ultimate, you already own an out-of-the-box system for full disk encryption via BitLocker. However, for true enterprise-ready encryption and data leakage protection, look to products from companies such as GuardianEdge Technologies, Mobile Armor, and Seagate Technology. GuardianEdge allows you to encrypt the local hard drive and prevent leaks of data via external devices, keyloggers, screen captures, smartphones, and more.

Disk/data encryption won’t safeguard you against every possible leak, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction of protecting your valuable company and customer data.

In Part 2, will consider the following:

• Virtual Desktops
• Remote Office in a Box
• Printing and Power

What is PESTLE?

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.

Knowledge Managment News

A heretical view of knowledge management

For a long time, I have felt that there are multiple, significant problems in how the information technology industry has branded and sold knowledge management.

First, given that we barely know how to reliably produce information, I felt it was arrogant to assume we knew how to reliably produce knowledge. Second, knowledge representation as a field has been going on since Aristotle and is still undergoing widespread change and innovation (as described in my April 6 column). Thus, for industry to claim to have products to solve that problem seems a bit disingenuous.

Finally, what the knowledge management industry has latched onto — probably because of its limited success in this area — are collaborative applications such as Web portals, blogging, discussion groups and wikis as the mainstays of knowledge management. The idea is that logging and sharing experience, in any medium, equate to capturing and managing the knowledge of your organization. But although informal discussions can contain knowledge, it is equally likely that they do not — and there’s the rub.

Read the entire article here.

Chiarelli urges support for knowledge management tools

Federal knowledge officers need to keep championing the practical value of systems that help users make better decisions, not just process greater amounts of information, said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff.

He also warned against giving in to bureaucratic barriers that stand in the way of getting critical operational information into the hands of those who need it.

“What I’ve found as a leader who’s stepped up in the Army [is that] the higher you get, the more people want to deny you t information you really need,” Chiarelli told a gathering of public-sector professionals at the 10th annual Knowledge Management conference April 28.

Read the entire article here.