5 themes recruiters are looking for

Melanie Franklin, CEO of Maven Training, spoke about the market trends hitting project management at a breakfast event in London, UK, recently.

Franklin, who is the author of three books on the soft skills required for project management, spends a lot of time consulting on what organizations need to do in order to deliver better projects.  She’s in and out of board rooms and she hears what people want from project management professionals.  At the moment, these are the trending topics.

Organizations want:

• Knowledge and understanding of best practice
• Technical project management skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Specialist knowledge in a relevant industry sector
• PRINCE2 on your CV

She also said that there’s a wider trend away from ‘project management’ towards PPM, PPRM or P3.  If those acronyms don’t mean anything to you they are:

PPM:  project and programme management
PPRM:  project, programme and risk management
P3:  project, programme and portfolio management.

At interview you should be able to talk knowledgeably about the fact that PPM is the delivery of organisational change and development capability, as opposed to project management which is ‘just’ getting something done.  At board level the discussions now are about programmes and portfolios, which translates as doing the right thing for the business, and not just doing projects for the sake of it.

Those weren’t the words Franklin used exactly, but she was clear that project delivery is about staying OTOBOS and programme delivery is about delivering an outcome or vision and a more strategic change or business transformation.  In summary, when she is hiring or advising people on hiring, she looks for various key skills as follows.

In a project manager:

• Delegation
• Planning
• Delivery on time
• Cost management
• Quality management
• Risk management
• Change management and managing the impact of those changes
• Requirements gathering
• How scope is presented and checked and how often.

In a programme manager:

• Benefits management and realization
• Stakeholder management
• Ability to manage uncertainty with innovation, problem solving skills and creativity
• Ability to manage problems without constantly referring them up.

For both jobs Franklin said she would look at how recent is the candidate’s investment in their knowledge.  For example, if you are going for a job as a project manager you are presenting yourself as an expert in project management.  So how true is this?  When did you last attend an event or networking evening, training course or seminar?  How is this reflected on your CV?  It doesn’t have to cost a lot (read this article for some ideas on things that you can do without corporate investment) but it does have to be recent.

So now you know what employers are looking for in terms of both wide trends and specific skills – good luck with the job hunting!

Startup Teams with HP on Cloud-Based Testing

I received my latest copy of InformationWeek recently and found this article interesting – especially since all discussions these days seem to center on either Cloud Computing or Agile Development.

Skytap is a startup that tabs themselves as the leading provider of cloud-based virtual labs that deliver 100% self-service provisioning of complex IT environments without any architectural changes. Cloud computing is poised to become the defining technology of the 21^st century and Skytap’s goal is to make serving up virtual machines over the internet as ubiquitous as delivering html to a browser. They are working to maximize efficiencies, minimize costs, eliminate unnecessary hardware, outsourcing, eco-efficient computing, and doing more with less.

I’ve worked many very large-scale government contracts where testing was a massive onsite effort involving additional hardware, software, and bodies in a compressed and stressful timeframe. Cloud-based testing would have made those experiences much more sane. And it was solely my responsibility at the time to make those tests happen and help ensure their success.

Likewise, my time in the gaming industry involved load testing for slot data management software. It’s necessary to test slot machines against large loads of usage – the last thing a very large casino gaming entity wants to happen is for their slot system to crash on a Saturday night due to heavy customer usage!

Without further ado, here is the article written by Charles Babcock for InformationWeek…

“Startup Skytap has cut a couple of powerful alliances for it’s cloud computing services, most recently joining forces with Hewlett-Packard to make it easier for companies to stress-test software against thousands of simulated end users without taxing their won data centers.

Skytap – named one of the InformationWeek Startup 50 in April, shortly after getting $7 million in venture funding – offers a Virtual Lab where developers try out applications by building test environments from its library of operating systems, databases, and middleware. Skytap already partners with Microsoft to enable Visual Studio Team System testing.

Skytap is providing HP’s LoadRunner testing tool to build test scenarios that push an application’s limits. The tests can be set up, managed, and torn down through HP’s Quality Center, which uses Skytap’s cloud computing resources to execute the actual test. The tests run as virtual workloads under VMware’s ESX Server.

Cloud computing is seen as a lower-cost way to offload workload spikes from the data center, and testing and quality assurance are likely prospects. Other cloud computing services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud also can be used for testing. Companies pay Skytap from $1,000 to $10,000 a month for cloud-based testing.”

CIOs with, without PPM software discuss IT project governance

Another interesting article that talks about IT project governance.

How do midsized organizations manage IT project governance, and how many use project and portfolio management (PPM) software in those efforts?

Recently we asked readers those questions in our first comprehensive survey of IT project governance and PPM. The findings: that IT governance is an informal process at many midsized organizations. About half of the midmarket companies responding reported having either an IT governance board or steering committee (36%) or a project management office (PMO) (22%) to help set priorities and align projects with business needs, according to the 236 respondents from organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees.

About 17% reported using PPM software, two-thirds of them for three years or less.

Yet interviews showed that it wasn’t the level of PPM maturity or use of PPM software that made a difference — the existence of a governance structure determined how successful an organization would be in terms of IT project efficiency, customer satisfaction and project completion.

IT governance without PPM software

For example, Exclusive Resorts LLC, a 200-employee luxury destination club that was founded in 2002, adheres to agile methodologies for software development, which promote frequent inspection and adaptation of code and requirements throughout the project management process. It does not use PPM software.

However, it does have a PMO that manages projects and a technology advisory committee of all C-level executives. That group meets once a month.

Read the entire story here..