The Practicing IT Project Manager

New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 21 – 27, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Dave Prior has noticed that some organizations have attention deficit disorder, and can’t let their Scrum teams complete a sprint without changing direction.  Result: frustration, and a lack of trust.
• Glen Alleman presents the three stages of project goat-ness: the “Goat Rope,” the “Goat !@#$,” and the “Goat Rodeo.”  Don’t you wish you worked in the defense industry?
• Elizabeth Harrin summarizes Elyse Nielson’s presentation from the PMI Global Congress in Dallas last month; subject, “Myths about Project Sponsorship.”
• Toni Bowers wants you to grade your job as a project manager – stress, compensation, etc.
• Peter Saddington adds one more artifact to the list: the ScrumMaster Daily Check List.
• Derek Huether addresses the question, “Is it healthy for Scrum teams to work in a bubble protected from the business around them?”
• Mark Balbes details four critical practices required for Agile to actually succeed – automated testing, continuous integration, test-driven development, and pair programming,
• Terry Bunio lists ten practices for estimating Agile projects, successfully.  Hmmm … actually, I think they might apply to non-Agile projects, too.
• Gary Hamilton, Gareth Byatt and Jeff Hodgkinson say that creating a PMO is a project in itself.  Or, maybe even a program.
• Mike Griffith shares the slide deck from his “Agile PMO” session, presented at the Calgary APLN meeting last week.
• Jordan Bortz asks, “Is Scrum just a series of mini waterfalls?”
• Brien Posey shares a list of ten drawbacks to working in IT.  Personal favorite: “People lie to you all the time.”
• Bruce Benson offers three metrics that tell a lot more about how the project is going than classics like earned value or burn-down charts.
• Chuck Morton invokes his inner eighth-grade English teacher in presenting the basics of creating a work breakdown structure.
• Joe McKendrick lists the 25 worst passwords of 2011, with perennial favorite “password” coming in at the top, and Fox Mulder coming in at ninth, with “trustno1.”

Enjoy!

It was a short week, with Thanksgiving, but I had time to think while stuck in traffic between Seattle and Portland.  Somewhere around Centralia (yes, that’s really what it’s called, and it really is about half-way), it occurred to me that I’ve been seeing some common themes lately.  Call them the three “ins;” indecision, inactivity, and indifference.  Each takes a toll on one or more tasks, adding delays and uncertainty, forcing re-work, or otherwise stretching the schedule.  Even if a task isn’t on the critical path, every delay has an impact on those tasks already in progress.  Resources get overloaded, alternatives become more limited.  Eventually, the schedule becomes unachievable.

Indecision is sometimes driven by uncertainty, but more often, it’s a failure to get the right people engaged.  My colleague, James Reed, likes to ask, “Do we have the right people in the room?”  There are three basic models for getting a decision: have the decision maker in the room, have the decision maker empower those who will be in the room, or have those who were in the room go to the decision maker, explain their perception of the issue, and try to get a decision based on a possibly less-than-complete understanding of the question at hand.  In other words, introducing uncertainty, where none needed to be found.  If you think a meeting with ten people sounds expensive, try holding that same meeting a second time, the following week, with an eleventh person who should have been there the first time.

Inactivity can have many causes, from absent team members to sudden demands from higher priority projects or operational situations.  Sometimes, it might be a failure to communicate, or missing information.  In any case, tasks don’t get started on time.  Tasks that aren’t started on time are going to finish late, unless you neglect another task in order to catch up, which simply daisy-chains the impact.  Of course, in the modern “lean” workplace, a worker who isn’t working on a task will be assigned a new one, and the next thing you know, you have a resource conflict where none needed to exist.

Indifference is probably the most frustrating, because it calls into question the sense of urgency being felt by others on the team.  I won’t try to tell you that everyone should be enamored of every project they work on, but all those Gallic shrugs eventually add up.  You have every right to not have a preference, one way or the other, but let’s try to avoid expressing it as indifference to the outcome.  Apathy is contagious, and antipathy will follow closely.

Every project has a critical path, and every task in the critical path has inputs and at least one output.  Keeping a project on schedule sometimes comes down to gathering those inputs, initiating the tasks, and driving to an output, all on time.  In other words, having the project manager act as a taskmaster.  It’s not the fun part of the job, but it’s the part we have to be willing to do from time to time, in order to keep everyone doing their parts.

New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 14 – 20, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Glen Alleman concludes his series on the five questions every PM must ask.  “How do we know we are making progress?”
• Sandy Farnan looks at the prospect of recovering troubled projects.
• Christopher Goldsbury looks at the U.S. Department of Defense track record on ERP implementations, and their recent claim that they are “going Agile.”
• Peter Saddington thinks it’s time to start documenting Agile success stories, and he’s calling for submissions of case studies.  Sounds like a potential E-book!
• Tom Mochal looks at the basic Scrum concepts of story points, team velocity, and team rhythm.
• Gordon McMahon has some pointers on writing better user stories.
• Jim Kinter argues that Scrum is not a methodology, but a world view, “relating to managerial interaction with those involved in production.”
• Bill Krebs looks at the human factors associates with using a globally distributed team using Agile techniques.
• Geoff Mattie reflects on the executive support required from Boeing executives to complete the 787 Dreamliner project, late and $10B over budget.  But still, a resounding success!
• Donna Fitzgerald looks at the notion of an enterprise project management office.  Not just for IT projects, but all projects across the entire enterprise.
• Elizabeth Harrin reviews Melanie Franklin’s new book, “Managing Business Transformation.”
• Mark McDonald asks IT leaders if they are stranding their project managers on an island.  Interesting blog from a Gartner researcher.
• Penny Pullan interviews Suzanne Robertson on the interaction between the project manager and the business analyst.
• Bruce McGraw continues his series on finding a content management system.
• Timm Esque and Michael Porter consider the level of trust required to succeed in high stakes projects.  “The more you attempt to centralize and “tighten” control, the less real control you will achieve.”
• Ted Hardy says we should learn to embrace constraints, and even seek them out.
• Brad Egeland looks at what’s involved in conducting a feasibility analysis, before beginning a project.  Hopefully, even before considering a proposed project for funding.
• Patrick Richard listens to a pitch of the Eppora project management tool set, and decides it violates the KISS principle.
• Bruce Benson says we should teach our daughters to play war games, so they learn the same collaboration and other real-world lessons as our sons.  Not to mention surviving the coming Zombie Apocalypse, eh, Bruce?
• Terry Bunio looks at managing Agile projects, and channels Jeff Foxworthy.  “You might be a project management redneck if …”

Enjoy!