How do you get the work done as a PM?

When I was a novice project manager, I often wished that I could carry a baseball bat to the office, swing it and let people know about it's existence just in case they don't deliver on their commitments. Or, perhaps, settle such issues with a one-on-one confrontation in the parking lot. However, we all know that this not the way to gain people's commitments or to drive projects.

The only thing that you have at your disposal is the ability to effectively communicate with everyone including your clients, stakeholders, team members, executives and sub-contractors. Communication involves knowing when and how to use the different tools for communication including written, verbal and presentation skills.

In fact, the trick to getting work done is know first and foremost how to excel in communication skills. Outstanding project managers spend 70-80% of their project time and effort in some form of communication. They serve as nerve centres for projects by keeping communication channels open for collecting, analyzing, processing and disseminating needed information and decisions. They know how to delegate and provide the discipline, environment and motivation most importantly empower the team members to get the work done. I will soon write more on how we can empower our team members.

When to Release your Software?

A major problem for directors, managers, product managers and quality assurance personnel is to decide when the software is 'reliable enough' to be released to the market. Such decisions are primarily made subjectively or by probablistic methods rather than using quantitative means and decision theory to objectively measure and make informed release time decisions.

Last week, I was in Edmonton at the CIPS ICE Conference giving a talk on this topic and was surprised to find out how many organizations struggle with this decision.

(http://www.iceconference.com/program2007_Monday.aspx)

I presented a multi-dimensional defect prioritization and release model/methodology which sets priorities on defects based on project constraints, stakeholder opinions, risk of not fixing a defect and analysis of defect types, arrival patterns and collection mechanisms.

The methodology presents various release options based on target reliability levels, acceptable level of risk, effort spent on testing and time to market. I got a lot of feedback from the audience and a lot of questions about the case studies I presented.

One of the biggest challenges of implementing this teachnique in an organization is leadership perception and their buy-in. The technique also uses Rough Set Analysis to conduct root cause analysis and the audience was very interested in pattern generation.

I had especially struggled with this area when building this methodology. All the standard techniques for defect root cause analysis such as IBM's ODC, HP Defect Classification and IEEE Classification require complete and consistent data, but the data which I had to generate patterns from was incomplete and inconsistent. Rough Set Analysis is definitely best suited for such situations and led to eye-opening results.

Currently, I am working on a paper to get this work published, but will definitely push ahead aggressively to find situations where "when to release" decisions become tricky to make.

Aligning Projects with Corporate Strategy Presentation

First of all, I would like to apologize to all the readers of this blog for not being able to write something for a little while as I was traveling most of the time. At my PMI presentation last month about "Aligning project with corporate strategy using Balanced Score Cards", I got a lot of very interesting questions from the audience. Some of the questions were around stakeholder consensus, balancing of priorities, changing needs of business and actual implementation of Balanced Scorecards.

These questions definitely stimulate my mind in understanding the concerns other organizations may have in implementing Balanced Score Cards.

I would also like to thank Navneet Bhushan, a great mentor of mine for sharing an interesting WIPRO white paper on "Value of IT", where he has used AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) to obtain relative weights on criteria defined in an organization's Balanced Score Card. I will post more on this topic soon.... Here is the link to my presentation:

http://www.pmisac.com/data/uploads/Presentations/2007_10_25_AligningAndPrioritizing.ppt

Which Projects best align with my corporate strategy?

This month I will be presenting at the PMI dinner in the PMI Southern Alberta Chapter Dinner Meeting on October 25-th. It is a great topic and probably of interest to most PMOs and to executives who plan strategy.

The title is: "Aligning & prioritizing projects with the corporate strategy using Balanced ScoreCards".


I personally got very interested in this topic when I was reading the CIO Insight Research Study on Project Management, 2004. The study highlights some very interesting points as mentioned below:

1. 53% of the CIO's say that their project prioritization is politically driven;
2. Only 68% agree that all the necessary business and IT stakeholders are involved in setting IT project priorities;
3. Only 40% of the CIOs say that their companies use a portfolio management approach;

This is when time I started questioning myself on how best can you align your projects with corporate strategy so that the project portfolios can be driven and managed by the needs of the organization..... This was also the time when I actually understood how a true business case is created by using a company's real financial data like working cost of capital and market debt to equity ratio. There was definitely a need to measure projects and question if it was worth doing a project.

At that time, I had recently learned about Balanced Score Cards from an assignment at an Airlines company in Canada and also created some models using Mathematical Optimization under the guidance of my Master's thesis supervisor. The combination of these two led to the creation of the approach which I plan to present.

I was implementing this at Siemens last year and got a great opportunity to understand various types of businesses Siemens is involved in. I wish to share this experience with all of you.

I will post my presentation here on the blog as well and an the Excel Sheet where I built the model.

Maturity Model of an IT organization and outsourcing

The business-IT alignment challenge is moving into a new territory according to Mckinsey survey released in May 2007 entitled, The next frontier in IT strategy: A Mckinsey Survey.

According to Mckinsey, IT organizations naturally pass through three stages as they evolve toward reaching their full potential: Support, Business Collaboration and Innovation.

The first stage is to support the business via mastery of the basics of IT service delivery in a cost-effective and consistent manner. The next stage of the Mckinsey maturity model requires mastery of 'business collaboration'. Mckinsey states that 'collaboration' means that IT is pro-actively engaged in working with the business rather than responding reactively to events and crises as they occur.

Mckinsey reports that significant stage-two progress has been made in the past few years. 83% of of the 72 senior IT executives surveyed reported that they believe that they have mastered stage 2: business-IT collaboration.

The next Mckinsey stage is mastery of 'innovation' . That is, IT must help business identify new technologies that will help them drive corporate innovation to enable distinctive business processes to effectively compete.

It is very interesting find these results, but in my experience a lot of IT shops within organizations are stuck at stage 1 and just able to provide support and not business collaboration or innovation. Very often, we see re-orgs within the IT shops or the top management wanting to outsource all of IT because business looses faith in IT. Even though the goal maybe to reduce IT costs, but are they really reduced by outsourcing? Definitely not, but what these companies do obtain is more predictable and trustable IT shop (from a delivery standpoint).

'Innovation' is what some of the big outsourcing vendors are pitching. They claim to add strategic value through IT and a lot of organizations are buying into that. Does that mean that the inhouse IT shops have failed to do so? We will have to wait and see...

Customer Requirements - How do we understand them?

Project Managers and Leadership

The other day, I was sitting at Starbucks and reading a book by Ram Charan, the renowned CEO consultant on leadership. The more I ponder on it, the more I believe is the need for great leadership from project managers to get things done.

Failing to getting things executed can kill big innovations. I was reading the case study of Xerox and how the CEO Richard Thoman was fired for not being able to execute on some of the innovative ideas which he had brought to Xerox.

I do not mean to give a big leadership lecture here, but I was surprised to read that: the CEO complained that he was not allowed to select his own management. That happens a lot with us project managers too. Sometimes, we just have to work with whatever resources we have to get things done. Being able to work with people of different personalities creates diversity in team and promotes challenge and thought. Being able to consolidate the differences between the team members and creating a shared mental model is one of the biggest tasks of project managers.

Earning respect is another challenge, so you have to be knowledgeable enough to be able to help out the team members. The best approach is act as a service provider to your team rather than someone trying to manage them. By Service provider, I mean someone who provides umbrella to the team when its raining and clears stones and pebbles from the path when the team is moving forward. Empower the team! I would write another blog on strategies to empower the team.

These are some of the things which Ram Charan recommends for CEOs to do at a higher level. I am not saying that as project managers we are like CEOs or trying to act like one, but there are certainly leadership traits which we can learn. As project managers, I would recommend my fellow colleagues to be more of leaders rather than managers. By doing that, project management actually provides strategic advantage to the organization. Below is an interesting comparison between leaders and managers:

LEADER

1. Focusses on what and why

2. Innovates

3. Focusses on people

4. Inspires Trust

5. Has a long range view

6. Has eyes on horizon

7. Originates

8. Challenges Status quo

9. Does the Right thing

MANAGER

1. Focusses on when and how

2. Administrates

3. Focussess on systems and structures

4. Relies on Control

5. Has a short-range view

6. Has eyes on bottomline

7. Initiates

8. Accepts Status quo

9. Does things right

Is Project Management an Art?

The more project managers I meet, the more I find out that project management has a huge artistic side to it.

Despite having common body of knowledge such as PMBOK, are 2 project managers alike? Or the way in which they execute projects alike? Certainly not!

Like an artist leaves his distinct style on his work, I believe every project manager like an artist also has a distinct style in managing a project.

The human side is definitely very important, but is it just art? or let me reword it, is art just enough?

From my meagre experience, I have seen that there are two approaches to project management:

The Art of project management relies on human intuition, communication and capabilities to negotiate between conflicting objectives and priorities. These are critical skills for any project manager.

However, the artistic skills can be greatly enhanced by using science. The science of project management deeply complements the art side.

By science of project management, I mean usage of exisiting scientific, cognitive and mathematical techniques in an innovative fashion to improve decision making process, balancing priorities process, measurement and reporting process, conflict management process and so on for a project manager.

This is what the book I am writing is about. In any situation, how can a project manager leverage the science and combine it with his artistic style to excel as a project manager. This level of understanding helps a project manager to go beyond his typical role and add strategic value and advantage to the organization.

Beginning of the journey

With the beginning of this blog, I intend to make progress on my book on "Art and Science of Software Project Management". I intend to use this blog as a means to discuss and promote ideas with the readers.