The Practicing IT Project Manager

New project management articles published on the web during the week of January 16 through 22, 2012.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Amy Showalter shares some tips on developing a “team of influencers” to help you sell your ideas.
• Mike Griffiths has an update on the slowly evolving PMBOK Guide – Fifth Edition.  The good news is, the exposure draft will be open for comments on February 17.
• Cornelius Fichtner tells you how to earn PDU’s by writing about project management.  And yes, I’m always looking for guest posters!
• Elizabeth Harrin interviews Susanne Madsen on the power of questioning in coaching project teams, and reviews Susanne’s new book, The Project Management Coaching Workbook.
• Glen Alleman watches the Denver Broncos lose (miserably) and gains some insight into the notion of “self-organizing teams.”
• Jessica Levy argues that athletes make good project managers.  Even the Broncos?
• Hajar Hamid has some thoughts on how we can empower our project team members.
• Samad Aidane posted seven(!) interviews on his site, “Guerrilla Project Management,” this week.  I’m not even going to try to make a recommendation – choose for yourself!
• Patrick Richard is making his New Year’s resolutions a few weeks into January, and they’re all about catching up on project management knowledge.  Scheduling, maybe …
• Bruce McGraw has a checklist for project managers who need to travel.  And yeah, I’m heading to the airport after I post this …
• John Paczkowski says the “bring your own device” philosophy will drive the enterprise to spend $19 billion on Apple hardware in 2012.  Wow!
• Patrick Thibodeau reports on Gartner Group’s assessment of the top ten tech priorities of CIO’s, based on their annual survey.
• Jason Hiner interviews leading geek pundits (his term) at CES 2012 for their observations on cool products and important trends.  Several videos, all safe for work.
• Shim Marom has some thoughts about project management in the real world.  You know: the one with the bureaucrats.
• Ty Kiisel reviews ten famous failures, and offers nine symptoms to spot them in advance.
• Peter Saddington interviews Agile coach Brian Bozzuto on AgileGames2012, “a wholly interactive conference” scheduled for April 19-21 in Cambridge, MA.
• Tatyana Yanush looks at how the project manager fits in when implementing Scrum.
• Derek Huether shares a video from Joe Justice and Team WikiSpeed, who have applied Agile, Lean, and Scrum to develop a road-legal commuter car that will get over 100 miles per gallon.  Ten minutes, safe for work.  And it looks like the car is, too.

Enjoy!

Over the years, I’ve listened to a lot of project managers argue that you don’t need in-depth business or industry knowledge in order to successfully manage projects.  However, I don’t recall ever seeing anyone who was not a project manager making that argument.  If you take a look at requisitions on any of the internet job sites, I think you’ll see that just about all of them stipulate experience in a particular problem domain or line of business.  If there’s a software company that’s looking for someone with experience managing civil engineering projects, I’d bet that they’re developing software for that target audience and want a subject matter expert, rather than someone to manage their software development project.

Just this week Michelle Symonds posted her thoughts on the subject, and asked the critical question: “[D]o project managers who have reached their current role [based on their experience in the business area or industry] have any greater success than a formally trained professional?”  Unfortunately, she doesn’t try to answer it – she simply states that “[I]t can actually be a disadvantage to get too involved in the detail of individual tasks and activities.”  I won’t disagree, but I will point out that “uninvolved” is rarely acceptable to those sponsoring the project, or the stakeholders, or the project team.

Try walking onto a construction site and announce that you’re qualified to manage construction of this mixed-use tower because you’ve successfully led software development projects.  You know a lot about team building, and risk management, and planning and managing tasks, and dealing with stakeholders.  Or go into a pharmaceutical firm and tell them you can shepherd their new drug through clinical trials and on to production, because you’ve previously built roads and bridges.  Or tell the folks at Microsoft that you can manage development of the next version of Windows because you led development of a very successful new recreational vehicle for Winnebago.

Projects are about the products that they deliver, and what they mean to the people who will benefit (or not) from those products.  You can’t deliver a significant product in a business or technical domain unless you understand enough about that domain to communicate with the stakeholders.  That includes the external regulatory authorities who will drive many of the tasks and deliverables.  That also includes the “downstream” stakeholders, such as the people in manufacturing, or support, or marketing, or maintenance, or any number of functional areas.  Sure, you can probably learn all that stuff, but the subject matter experts can learn to manage projects; they’ve done so for as long as people have been organizing to conduct “temporary endeavors.”  And they can probably learn it more quickly than someone who’s managed the build-out of a network of cellular telephone towers can learn what’s needed to replace a payroll system.

Note that this phenomenon isn’t limited to project managers.  For some reason, former pizza company CEO Herman Cain decided he had the experience needed to be President of the United States.  He didn’t make it through the interview process.

New project management articles published on the web during the week of January 9 through 15, 2012.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Andy Jordan shares his project leader New Year’s resolutions.
• J. LeRoy Ward and ESI present the top ten project management trends for 2012.  #9: Client-centric project management will outpace the “triple constraint.”
• Elizabeth Harrin interviews team coaching expert Phil Hayes.
• Bruce McGraw is applying insights from cognitive science to influencing decision making.
• The PMI Agile Community of Practice is presenting a webinar on January 27, “Does Risk Management have a place in the Agile Lifecycle?”  Ummm … yes?
• Peter Saddington is asked about hybrids – Scragilefall, fragile, scrummerfall, wagile, scrumban, kanfall, etc – and has to explain the humor in the terminology.
• Jordan Bortz thinks Agile “mashups” might be a good thing.  You and Peter should talk!
• Bruce Benson thinks there are two critical steps to developing useful project management metrics.
• Bill Krebs has developed four metrics that he finds useful in spotting teams headed for schedule slippage: juggle, plan leak, execution leak, and jelly.  Not just for Agile!
• Derek Huether thinks PMI registered education providers should give discounts to PMI chapter members.  To prime the pump, he’s offering a discount on his PMI-ACP course.
• Joel Bancroft-Connors reflects on his new responsibilities, as one of the first PMI Agile Certified Practitioners, while Hogarth the gorilla quotes Winston Churchill.
• Kiron Bondale articulates the rights and responsibilities of project managers.
• James Grinnell articulates the Servant Leadership paradigm, with quotes from both Robert Greenleaf and Lao Tzu.
• Kerry Wills lists the common characteristics of the leaders that he admires the most.
• Aaron Smith has some thoughts on what your relationships with your team members should look like.
• Bert Heymans has been counting up the cost of turnover.  Key metric: the “truck number,” which is the cost of a team member being run over by a truck.
• Lynda Bourne on governance: “Most of the risks and rewards associated with a project or program are determined long before the project manager is appointed.”
• Glen Alleman insists there is a hierarchy for applying the various requirements that define “done.”
• Bart Gerardi has a new book out, “”No Drama Project Management: Avoiding Predictable Problems for Project Success.”
• Sam Palani reflects on technical debt – where it comes from, and why we should consider it as a risk.
• Lucy Clay reports that the UK Project Management National Occupational Standard (PMNOS), which will “describe the competences required in the occupational area of project management,” is asking interested parties to complete a survey.
• Samad Aidane interviews Steve Bell on lean IT, and why it matters.  Just 36 minutes, safe for work.

Enjoy!