How stable is your stakeholder base?

What would happen if someone new came on board tomorrow?  Not necessarily a project team member, but a new executive?

It’s not that unusual.  Stakeholders at executive level change frequently.  From time to time the board will move responsibilities for certain initiatives around between themselves.  You might find that your project is now the responsibility of the marketing director instead of the sales director.  Or that something previously sponsored by finance is now sitting with the VP of Product Development.

Executive stakeholders can also change due to redundancy or through the post holder finding a new career opportunity.  On a long project, you should expect a certain degree of change.  And the more senior the stakeholder, the less notice you will get about the change. Read more »

What is Portfolio Management?

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.  “In a business management context, a portfolio allows you to group a set of common subjects, like products, projects, or resources, so they can be collectively managed.”

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, which has just been released by the OGC. Read more »

Ask the Experts: Rick Maurer

Seventy percent of all major changes in organizations fail – and that number hasn’t changed since researchers started examining success and failure rates some fifteen years ago. I spoke to Rick Maurer, a change management expert, speaker, and author of the new book Beyond the Wall of Resistance, Revised 2nd Edition: Why 70% of All Changes Still Fail–and What You Can Do About It, to find out more about why this happens with change projects.

Rick, why are people so resistant to change?

People resist in response to something. For example, they are given a project to do that doesn’t make sense to them, or they are afraid of the implication a project might have on them personally (I could lose my job or my position, etc.), or they don’t have trust and confidence in the people leading the project. Any of those reactions can cause resistance.

The good news is that people also support change in response to something. They understand what the project is all about. They like what they hear about it. And they trust the people leading the project to do their work well, to treat people fairly, and to follow through on commitments.

It’s a dance, and the project manager’s job is to try to create conditions that help members (themselves included) lean toward support rather than resistance. Read more »

The Project Quality Assurance Role

Quality Assurance is often seen as an integral function that monitors and coordinates the quality used within the project management life cycle by evaluating the processes and procedures. Quality control, on the other hand, can be seen as a focused area (such as software testing) that compares the product to the specification or plan, with a focus of detecting and remediating errors or anomalies.

Therefore, the Quality Assurance role is a critical factor in the success of the overall project as it is focused on key quality functions throughout an engagement. In his book “Project Management Nation,” Jason Charvat identifies the following key duties for the role of quality assurance throughout the project management life cycle.

The Role of QA on the Project

The person who is responsible for QA has many duties and responsibilities. The following section lists many of the things that a QA person would be expected to do.

• Participate in the change management process to assess the risk of putting fixes into the environment during acceptance testing.
• Assist the test team in isolating the source of discrepancies between expected and actual test results. If the error is in software design, thoroughly analyze the ramifications of any design changes. Design diagrams and structure charts before proceeding with corrections to code.
• Complete preparations for acceptance testing, including the establishment of the acceptance test environment. Unlike system testing, acceptance testing always takes place in the targeted environment. It is therefore extremely important to schedule computer resources well in advance.
• Check the simulated data to ensure that required test data have been produced.
• Obtain expected results from the acceptance test plan and review them for completeness.
• Calculate any missing expected results.
• Be certain that the introduction of new load modules is according to test configuration management procedures. When a new, corrected load module is received, first rerun tests that previously failed because of software errors. If these tests succeed, proceed with regression testing.
• Analyze and report test results. Evaluate test results as soon as possible after execution. Wherever possible, use automated tools in the analysis process. Record analysis procedures and keep all relevant materials. Remember that records and reports should give complete accounts of the procedures followed. If a test cannot be evaluated, note the fact and report the reasons for it.
• Compare all test results with expected results and note that all defects are documented, regardless of how minor they appear or whether they will be corrected.

Institute of Change Management: are you in it?

I got my login details this week for the Institute of Change Management; I was pleased that my membership has been approved.

To be honest, logging in to the Institute’s website as a member doesn’t give you much access to extra stuff.  There’s a forum, but the community is still growing so at the moment you don’t need to be a member to look round the website and see what it’s all about.

The good thing about signing up and becoming a member is that the Institute of Change Management (IoCM) is the only professional membership organisation in Europe dedicated to managers charged with organisational change.  Like us.  If your project doesn’t involve change then it’s not really a project.  The IoCM doesn’t focus on technology or construction or any other project management field: it’s about making change stick and leading the evolution of the change management profession through recognition of the particular skills and knowledge required by change management practitioners.  The idea is that the membership and community will grow, and the Institute will support individuals and organisations through educational programmes, expert consultancy, and access to the latest research and thinking.

The IoCM is based at the University of Brighton’s Business School and funded by the University’s Commercial Activation Fund.  It’s taken about four years research and development to get the Institute to this point.  It was the result of discussions with groups of alumni from the University’s MA Change Management Programme eager for their profession to be recognised on a national scale.  Given that there are only two other change management organisations in the world, they thought it was worth having a European-based organisation to champion and oversee the standards of change management.

The Institute launched in July last year, so in terms of professional bodies it is still new.  That explains why the website isn’t that developed in terms of resources for members. On top of that, it is free to join, so while they are building a membership base and interest the resources provided necessarily have to be relatively cheap, I’d imagine.

Still, there are huge benefits of being in an Institute like this at the ground level.  Members will be kept abreast of developments and as the membership group is smaller we’ll have the chance to network in a more effective way with the decision makers.  Change management itself isn’t new – Brighton’s MA course has been running for over ten years and is targeted at experienced managers wishing to further their skills.  That’s the kind of person that the IoCM will attract, so if that sounds like your kind of community, and you’re based in Europe, then sign up for membership now!