The Practicing IT Project Manager

New project management articles published on the web during the week of June 20 –26, 2011. We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to! Recommended:

• Aaron Smith shares some techniques for resolving workplace conflict, from “The Exchange,” by Steven Dinkin, Barbara Filner, and Lisa Maxwell.
• J. LeRoy Ward posted a string of ten short videos on the top trends in project management. Each 3 – 4 minutes long, all safe for work.
• Craig Brown argues that estimates are not necessary for many activities that are called projects, but may actually be operations, in disguise. I agree.
• Peter Saddington looks at the arguments for not estimating stories in Agile, and he is not convinced. Of course, neither am I.
• Derek Huether presents the case for organizing around teams (a projectized organization) rather than the more common matrixed organization.
• Mark Muallaly looks at the apprentice / journeyman / master model for career development, and opines on what it takes to reach the Master Project Manager level.
• Project management isn’t surgery, but Ty Kiisel argues that maybe heart surgeons can learn a thing or two from project managers.
• Elizabeth Harrin reviews Lin Grensing-Pohpal’s book on managing off-site staff.
• Bruce Benson recounts the tale of the new CEO who sent an Email blast to every employee, asking for their opinions. And then replied to all 2,0000 responses.
• Terrell Russell posted a request on LinkedIn for “lessons learned” from past projects, and Josh Nankivel replied with a whole list of them.
• Sondre Bjørnebekk shares her idea for a “visual risk log” and provides a link to download the Excel worksheet she used to create it. Very, very cool!
• Dr. Lynda Bourne writes about improving the quality and effectiveness of project communications with proper document design techniques.
• Bas de Baar continues using his “adventure travel” metaphor for projects, with an exploration of setting up a temporary comfort zone, where the team will feel safe enough to take valuable risks. In a tent. But, what kind of tent? Ask the team!
• Duncan Haughey shares ten very appropriate quotes that just might make you a better project manager. Or at least, more erudite.
• Dr. David Rico looks at how software development contract models have evolved with the introduction of Agile project management.
• Chuck Morton disputes the statistics quoted in the Standish Group Chaos reports. All successful projects resemble one another, but all failed projects fail in their own way …

Enjoy!

It’s easy to argue that a software development effort benefits from a product-oriented framework like Scrum. It’s more difficult to argue that software development can be entirely separate from an implementation project that involves business process re-engineering, data conversion, and other activities that benefit from a critical path approach. While the software product may continue to evolve long after the rest of the implementation “temporary endeavor” has concluded, we still have to deal with the management problem of delivering value from multiple activity streams at a single point in time.

I’ve spent the last three weeks getting up to speed on Workday’s human capital management software as a service (SaaS) offering, and it’s been fascinating. The people behind Workday are mostly PeopleSoft alumni who followed founder Dave Duffield after he managed the sale of the company to Oracle. Dave and his closest advisors decided to round up as many sharp, experienced people as they could, and apply the lessons learned from two decades of evolving an ERP solution based on an n-tier client-server model to a SaaS model. They also embraced object-oriented structures instead of table-oriented data models, open source tools and infrastructure, Java, Scrum, and other Agile methods. Because they wanted to sell a service, rather than software, they focused on configurability rather than customization, and techniques for upgrading all systems more or less at once, “in situ,” rather than supporting multiple versions as customers gradually got around to applying patches. They also made information security a primary competency, core value, and cultural imperative.

Along the way, they created a completely different kind of user experience. There are no hierarchical menus to traverse; you just use the search engine to find the object, business process, report, or tool you’re looking for. Every object has a “Related Action” icon next to it that lets you view or operate on it. Navigating object hierarchies is visual, obvious, and constrained by role and user-based security. Rather than an after-thought, configurable role-based business process workflows are central to implementation. Just about every action and update is a workflow. Although the toolset for integrating data flows with other applications is comprehensive and sophisticated, there are no bolt-ons; even the report writer is core functionality. Performance is astonishing; nearly everything is in memory, so you largely omit the overhead associated with passing SQL queries to an underlying RDBMS. I heard some truly amazing claims for payroll processing times, based on their ability to massively scale as needed.

Of course, the company is less than five years old, so the product is still evolving, but they release a new version every four months. Over a three-week period, every “tenant” (the term they use, rather than “instance”) is upgraded to the new release. The feature set is crowd-sourced – customers get to vote on what features get priority. Workday’s “partner eco-system” gets access to nearly every bit of information that their employees see, apart from development work in progress. Indeed, much of the information posted on their community collaboration sites is developed by partners. Collaboration is a core value, but Workday retains control over the user experience, even in implementation. A comprehensive methodology and supporting tools are mandated, along with delivery quality assurance controls and reviews. As a result, implementation projects are highly structured, transitions from one phase to the next tightly controlled, timelines are relatively short, and results are highly predictable. And once the tenant goes into production, there are well-defined management processes for turning on additional modules in future phases. Consequently, Agile product development methods can continue to deliver additional value, in parallel with a critical path, waterfall delivery model for implementation.

Is this the future of delivering the benefits of enterprise application software? Well, to paraphrase a line from “No Country for Old Men,” if it ain’t, it’ll do until the future gets here.

New project management articles published on the web during the week of June 13 –19, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Garry Booker is applying Agile principles to managing the purchase and re-fitting of two airplanes.  He makes some interesting points on the “how” and “why.”
• John Hamm presents seven leadership mistakes (and remedies) that need to be addressed in order to get a team back into the “winning” mindset.
• Derek Huether and Sameer Bendre are using Agile techniques to create their blog posts on the PMI Agile Community of Practice.
• Elizabeth Harrin interviews Jovia Nierenberg, COO of Experience in Software, the company behind Webplanner and Project Kickstart.  And yes, she’s only 23 years old.
• Shim Marom sees Gen Y workers like Jovia as “perfectly engineered to adopt Agile.”
• Jen Periera reports from the 2011 Symantec Government Symposium, where Colin Powell argued that cyber security should be a shared responsibility between government and the private sector.
• Andrew Makar reflects on five of his mentors and what they taught him.
• Samad Aidane interviews Donna Fitzgerald from her four presentations at the upcoming Gartner Program and Portfolio Management and IT Governance Summit.
• And Bas de Baar resurrects an interview from two years ago with Dave Logan, author of this week’s #1 New York Times best seller, “Tribal Leadership.”
• There’s been a lot of argument lately among the blogerati about the merits of certifications.  Craig Curran-Morton gives an excellent defense of the PMP.
• Kerry Wills rants about project managers who don’t do the basics.  For example, “Keeping plans updated with the right dates, % complete, and owners.”  Egad …
• Todd Williams identifies the seven ‘tudes of decision making:  ineptitude, attitude, fortitude, altitude, aptitude, incertitude, and vicissitude.
• Lynda Bourne questions the value of some of our team rituals, like regularly scheduled meetings that don’t actually accomplish anything.
• Nik Gebhard argues that “the best methodology is freedom,” to continuously adapt your approach to the problems at hand.
• Mike Inman returns to blogging after a long absence, and invokes Yoda in talking about “will.”
• Craig Brown rants, “There is something very wrong when the solutions teams are becoming better informed about how business works, and better at developing and managing relationships than the BA community.”  Highly recommended.
• If you’ve been considering adding Kanban to your Agile toolset, Peter Saddington has a report from New Balance, where their staff is now so much more efficient than their Asian counterparts that it’s cheaper to make their shoes in Maine.

Enjoy!