PPM Perspectives

Innovation by Design

2008-11-18T11:27:20-08:00

In an interview article with Tim Brown, CEO at Ideo, I came across a statement that caused me to stop reading and sit back in my chair. The interview question was about the process of innovation within an organization:

"Tim Brown: Even though companies want everyone to be thinking about innovation all the time, the reality is that everybody’s got other roles to play. So innovation is not a continuous activity; it’s a project-based activity. If you don’t have a process for choosing projects, starting projects, doing projects, and ending projects, you will never get very good at innovation. Projects need some form—you call them something; you run them in a certain way; you fund them in a certain way. That sounds simple, but, actually, a good process for getting projects going and done is often not obvious to companies."

Let me just spend a few more characters here and repeat one phrase: "innovation is not a continuous activity; it’s a project-based activity."

The quick background on Ideo is that they do new ideas. These guys noodle on everything from medicine delivery techniques to consumer products to childhood education. They are an idea laboratory. Their product is the new idea. They "create impact through design."

One might be tempted to look at this kind of innovation as a mysterious creative process, a process that cannot be clearly identified and that it is imbued with inscrutable shades of genius and black magic. Perhaps even a toad leg or two.

A confession: reading this statement felt like victory. When I started working on ways to create transparency in the project life cycle, I knew that one of the biggest objections would be the fear of stifling innovation. My response was always that we only stifle innovation in a transparent environment if we are not committed to invest in innovation in the first place. If innovation has to happen via secrecy and subterfuge, then what kind of organizations are we running?

As I have said "The future state of an organization is controlled by the people who lead it, and that future state is orchestrated via projects."

I'll let Tim Brown have the last word on why this stuff matters: "In the end, all businesses exist to serve some kind of human purpose. If you can’t somehow frame what you do in terms of having an impact on the world, I don’t see how you can have a very effective business."

by Demian Entrekin at ITToolbox

Dogmatic Slumbers

2008-11-10T12:50:54-08:00

I was talking to one of IBM's Chief Engineer's, Landon Miller, about the religious wars that seem to flare up around "how to develop good software." I don't write often about software design and development methodologies, but if your projects require you to design and build your own software applications, then the relevance of this entry to your project leads should be straightforward.

The crux of our discussion was around the dogmatic battles between traditional software development models and agile approaches. The crux of the debate tends to revolve around the weaknesses of each approach. Rarely do the debates revolve around the strengths of each model.

In the traditional approach, the emphasis is on "documentation." In the agile approach, the emphasis falls on "working code."

The problem, say the agile zealots, with the traditional approach is that the teams get caught in a never-ending process of requirements gathering and paperwork and you end up creating a fantasy target that the team can't hit.

The problem, say the traditionalists, with the agile approach is that you just start coding and you have no fundamental architecture that will scale as your needs grow. You end up with spaghetti that has to be thrown away.

This "us and them" difference may seem a bit simplistic, but it's not all that far off from many conversations that I have found myself caught up in. You try to explain the value of documentation to an agile zealot and you are branded as quaint but dotty. You try to explain the value of agile to a traditionalist, and you are branded as a dangerous cowboy. I often find myself dancing in the DMZ of this one.

For once, right up front in our conversation, Landon and I both said that "this is a false choice." The best solution is a blend of both. Now, what he means by a blend and what I mean by a blend might not sync up when we hit the white board, but here's the point. The religious discussion is pointless and distracting.

Good leaders use the best of both (and whatever else they can use) to create a methodology that works. Even agile methodologies need to be written down and followed. Inculcate your teams in your methodology. Remain open-minded and change the approach as you go, but don't get caught in a pointless discussion that's based on dogmatic positions.

by Demian Entrekin

Tough Calls

2008-10-28T14:38:09-07:00

There's just no getting around it. Right now, many of us need to focus our energies on making tough decisions. But it's not just about making tough decisions, it's about making the right decisions under tough conditions. If we can make solid decisions, even if the conditions have grown tougher and tighter, then perhaps they won't be quite so tough.

Some of us will continue to sermonize about process and visibility, which is all well and good, but we still need to make the tough calls. Do we fund this program and not that one? Do we shut this project down? Do we put that new product development project on hold or simply kill it?

With these thoughts running around in my addled brain, I was reading an article on Washington politics, and one quote in particular struck me. The article was about the role of the vice president, but the thrust of the quote was really about the flow of information. Walter Mondale points out that "the biggest single problem of our recent administration has been the failure of the President to be exposed to independent analysis not conditioned by what it is thought he wants to hear or often what others want him to hear."

Putting political positions aside, Modale's point is central to making decisions under tough conditions. In fact, I'd say that this perspective applies to making decisions under any conditions. The question of "independent analysis" goes to the heart of how organizations function or fail to function.

What makes "independent analysis" so important? Why do we care? From my perspective, this reflects on the way we think about information. It argues that we need to try to look at our situation from all sides before we make a decision. It means we realize that we all have biases that impact our ability to make good judgments.

In my experience, strong leaders go out of their way to encourage a broad understanding of the situation. Tough conditions do not destroy their ability to foster "independent analysis." Leaders guard against confirming their own biases. Leaders gather good information from multiple perspectives. Leaders facilitate objective evaluation.

So now what?

We can A) sit around and wait for the choices to hit us, or we can B) start preparing to make good decisions.

Since "A" is not an option, how do we do "B"? Objective analysis of good information is not a bad way to start. And by the way, these kinds of choices can revitalize an organization if handled correctly.

Demian Entrekin at ITToolbox

IT Governance in a Tough Economy

2008-10-08T17:33:23-07:00

When survival is at stake, decision making tends to get clouded by knee-jerk reactions that often produce results opposite to what we want. "Retrench!" "Cut all new spending!"...
Maybe there is a way to say "No" that is better informed. I have seen good IT governance save many companies in 2000 and 2001 and I am seeing it re-surge again at this time of economic crisis.

"Cut IT spend by 10%." "Create a contingency plan for 20% less staff." "What are our non-critical projects?" These are the marching orders. But how do you do it? How can IT governance help?

CURRENT STATE

Not much can be done without a clear picture of what is actually going on. What projects are we doing? Who is working on them? Which projects are critical for growth and which for efficiency? What applications are we running? Is anybody using them? How much are we spending (people and money) to support them?

Old IT governance systems required huge amounts of detail to capture a snapshot of what is going on because they forced detailed resource information and allocation at the individual level. Now, on-demand IT governance solutions can do it quickly starting at the role level. You can have an 80% good-enough inventory done in a matter of 1-2 weeks.

I bet you are now thinking "OK, but I don't need an IT governance system, I can do it in a spreadsheet." Sure enough, and what happens in a month or next quarter when executives are asked to re-prioritize again? You are better off creating a sustainable IT governance system from the beginning.

SCENARIO COMPARISON

With a single version of the truth in hand, executives across departments can now make informed decisions and possibly find out that smart saying "No" leaves enough room to keep working on a critical investment for future growth and be ready to jump ahead of the competition when conditions improve.

Different scenarios can be modeled and compared against objectives and constraints in order to choose the best course of action and keep assessing those choices against changing conditions. Directing the right resources to the most critical priorities and ensuring their optimal utilization.

IT GOVERNANCE PROFICIENCY

IT governance often comes to the forefront in times of crisis, but the muscles developed by putting it in place are just as critical to navigate times of prosperity and growth. It's always all about priorities and smart use of resources. It's about the informed art of knowing what to say "No" to.

What are you being asked to say "No" to?

-- Alex Lobba

The New Stuff Machine

2008-08-15T09:58:45-07:00

New stuff arrives every day. This new stuff usually results from the determined efforts of a project team. In fact, a steady stream of new stuff comes from an army of project teams. But how often are we prepared for this new stuff? When we are not prepared, does that stop the new stuff from coming? Two letters: N O.

It comes and comes and keeps on coming. You see, one way to look at the project portfolio is that it is an extremely well-funded "new stuff machine."

I think that I have stumbled on a much better term that Project Portfolio. It's the "new stuff machine." I like this phrase for several reasons, but mostly I just like the word "stuff."

One question: "When we create new stuff, how well do we prepare the people who have to do something with it?" In my limited experience, we don't do this very well. The new stuff might be a new product, or a new upgrade, or a new collection of patches and fixes. Sometimes we call these things "enhancements." This is a great word since just about everyone wants to be enhanced.

But what about the poor suckers who have to handle the stead flow of "new stuff?" Who looks out for them? What do we do to ease their befuddlement?

I am as guilty as anyone else here. I want my "new stuff machine" to crank out more stuff faster and faster. I want more "enhancements" to hit the street. "More faster" I say in the meeting. "More faster" I whisper in the project managers' ears.

Here's what I think about this. We have to get better at anticipating the human impact of the New Stuff Machine (NSM) on a day-to-day basis. Do you monitor the downstream impact of your NSM? Do you think about the poor suckers who have to either catch or dodge what your NSM throws off?

I can promise you this: I am going to think a lot more about this from now on.

- Demian Entrekin

A CIO Perspective on PPM

2008-08-13T16:39:04-07:00

Interview with the CIO of a major brand - discussing the role of IT; why PPM; why Innotas; who uses PPM and why; results; and lessons learned. Unfortunately the PR department of the company this CIO works for does not allow their employees to be featured in interviews so I had to omit all direct references to them. Other than that, the content of the interview has not been changed.

What is your mission for IT at your company, and what role does PPM play in carrying out that mission?
IT’s mission is very straightforward: to execute business initiatives that produce profitability and revenue growth. You can see from this statement that our partnership with the business is a key to fulfilling our mission and this is where project portfolio management (PPM) comes in. With PPM we are able to manage our human capital, prioritize our project portfolio, and build partnership with the business. This gives us accountability, visibility, and credibility. And our business partners are fully engaged in prioritizing what we do.

Why have you selected Innotas for PPM?
I am focused on results and don’t have time for applications that take forever to implement and become a huge overhead. We looked for a solution that: a) gave us best of class capabilities while keeping thinks simple; b) business users would want to use, c) was readily available and rapidly implemented; and d) was inexpensive. Innotas met all these requirements.

What are the key categories of users for PPM in your organization and what is their focus in using it?
We have three main categories of users: executives, managers and team members.
- Executives: they track how projects and portfolios relevant to their business area are doing, and they look at trade-offs when making prioritization decisions.
- Managers: they track how their direct reports are executing on projects – the focus is on the projects they own, detailed tasks, and open issues.
- Team members: they track and execute tasks, milestones, requests, issues.

What are the results that you and your team have seen from PPM?
In terms of value, we have a better handle on delivering on-time and on-budget – these are the table-stakes of PPM. On a more intangible yet very strategic side, by having clear visibility over where time is spent and how it compares to our estimates, we are getting better at project and resource planning. This is huge because all the planning in the world is useless if the estimates are off. Visibility also gave us a realistic picture of how much we are spending on break-fix and maintenance, which helps us better plan on our resource capacity and commitments.

So, what lessons have you learned that you want to pass on to your peers who are embarking on the PPM voyage?
A huge factor in our success is that from day one we engaged our business partners in the program management office (PMO) process and in the selection of the PPM application. I cannot stress enough how important this is! And it has paid great dividends: having shared the decisions, everybody is vested in succeeding. With the data we now have available, priority decisions and trade-offs are so much easier to make.

Another big factor was making sure that we could get value with minimal data entry to start with, and knowing that if we want to, we can always add more and start tracking at a more granular level. For example, it’s helpful to be able to start tracking at the milestone level and later go to the task level. Some systems force you to be granular from the beginning.

How does this compare to your experiences with PPM?

--Alex Lobba

The quickest path to IT portfolio management

2008-08-08T16:45:26-07:00

Why IT organizations need portfolio management? Because change happens and adjusting priorities and assessing the impact of changes is critical to the business and cannot be done on a spreadsheet. The question is: how hard is it to put portfolio management in place?

Actually, it is fairly simple if you do not over-engineer it.Three steps build what you need to get started with portfolio management.

Project inventory
Step 1 is to get an inventory of the projects in flight. At least the bigger ones. By project here I mean an initiative that is building something new or adding something discretionary to existing systems. Nothing too fancy, just the basic info about business objectives, budget, type and amount of resources allocated, and status. Risk and other details can be added later. Without exception, companies discover that they have a lot more work in progress than they had expected. Good portfolio management software lets you create portfolios that roll-up project information by whatever criteria you want - business unit, geography, business objective...

Application inventory
But wait! Projects are only 20% of IT spend, the rest is maintaining existing applications and systems. So we better take an inventory of what major applications we are supporting and roughly how many resources and cost are allocated to each. Usually a big surprise here is how much of this maintenance spend is in fact not keep-the-lights-on type of work, but discretionary spend that should be treated as a project.
Remember the 80-20 rule here: 20% of the apps typically consume 80% of the resources, so do not worry about capturing every single application. Being able to roll-up all maintenance efforts into a cohesive picture for each major application and the departments they support is powerful by itself.

Project initiation / demand management
The third and final step is capturing demand into IT, standardizing the project initiation process and establishing common stage gates for reviews and approvals. How much is IT being asked to do? How much do we have resources and budget for? Don't worry about what happened in the past, start with the new project requests.

Portfolio prioritization

Now you are ready to put it all together in order to compare current project and application load against new demand. This allows you to make intelligent decisions on which initiatives are more important, what can be de-prioritized and what would be impacted. This is a powerful business conversation that you could not have with a spreadsheet that is obsolete the moment you push the save button...

What steps have you followed when implementing IT portfolio management? What has worked and not worked?

--Alex Lobba

Where do you start with PPM?

2008-08-02T13:19:10-07:00

Let's get practical. Leaving aside all the big discussions about objectives, alignment, executive sponsorship (don't get me wrong, these ARE important)...where do you start to get PPM done? Is there a pattern of implementation that is the most common across successful PPM implementations?

Good news, the answer is yes! Regardless of what your main objectives are, there are common building blocks that you just need to put in place in order to get value out of any PPM system. It all boils down to: people, priorities, and execution.

PEOPLE

This is always the biggest cost in IT projects. Good old resource management. Not much can be done until we have a good picture of what roles and resources we have, what they are working on, what their capacity and allocation are. This need not be down to the level of individual tasks. You can even start with just roles and percentage of time across projects (yes, a simple project inventory is also required.) Later you can add individuals for each role and track at a more granular level if you really want to.

PRIORITIES

Having an idea of what we are working on and what resources we have available, we are now ready to do a couple of things: decide which new demand we should work on, and validate that projects in flight are still worth pursuing. In order to do that we need to implement work requests for initiating projects and other work items (so we can track demand and compare apples to apples), and we also need a portfolio view to balance the overall mix of work in progress and new proposed work.

EXECUTION

In the end it's all about delivering results, completing projects and doing them on time and on budget. So it may be tempting to want to start with managing project scheduling and execution, but what's the point of having a fabulous project schedule without the resources to get it done; or worse, focusing on an initiative that the business does not deem as critical? Not a good idea to put the cart in front of the horse... Project managers and team members will be a lot happier when they get to work on what really matters and executives will appreciate the business impact of PPM.

What has been your experience in implementing PPM? Where have you focused first?

--Alex Lobba

Resource management vs. resource scheduling

2008-07-23T18:38:37-07:00

Human resources are the biggest expense in IT. So it's no wonder resource management is getting a lot of attention. Earlier today I asked Paul Ewry, an Innotas' consultants with years of PPM experience, what is the typical way in which he has seen companies determine if they have the resources they need for a project? He laughed: "Funny you should ask, in over 80% of the meetings in which I have asked that question, after a few moments of silence, somebody licks their finger and sticks it up in the air, followed by nervous laughter from everybody." I'd love to hear other examples. But there has to be a better way.

Unfortunately traditional project management solutions have created the perception that in order to manage resources (capacity and allocation) you need to first create detailed project schedules and assign resources to specific tasks. What a pain! No wonder people fall back to the finger licking method.

So step one is making a clear distinction between resource management and resource scheduling. Resource and portfolio managers do not need a detailed work breakdown structure to figure out how many Java developers are needed for a project and who is available. Of course project manager may want a detailed project plan to track progress and ensure completion, but that's project scheduling, not resource management.

Now back to resource management. Here are the best practices that Paul told me he recommends:

Manage resource demand at the role level (DBA's, Java programmers...) comparing capacity to allocations.
Allocate resources at the project level by role in the planning phase.
When a project becomes active you can allocate specific resources - going from role to individual names (you don't even have to do this, but it helps).
Track actual time (or percentage of time) against projects (if you want you can get more granular and go to a phase or task level).
Compare allocations to actuals to make sure you are on track and to gather trends that will help you refine the planning process for new projects.

OK, that sounds a lot better than licking a finger or building detailed work breakdown structures.

What do you think? I really want to know how you are managing resources and what has worked or not worked for you, so please send me your comments.

--Alex Lobba

Gantt Charts

2008-07-21T12:19:26-07:00

I’ve been looking at Gantt chart functions and have been going round and round on whether Gantts need to be interactive or not, and if so how interactive. The main benefit provided by a Gantt chart is that it gives the people involved with a project an easily understandable visual representation of the project’s tasks over a timeline. It can be particularly useful when planning the project because you can see where the tasks fall on the calendar and you can see how the tasks relate to each other.

At a minimum a Gantt chart shows the task titles, start date and target date (planned completion date) in a calendar/timeline view. Other information that can be displayed are dependencies between tasks, resources assigned to the tasks, budgets, actuals and additional dates. I’m sure that there are other data elements that a project manager or project stakeholder might want to see in this view, and adding that data should be relatively easy to do. Of course, the end user should have the ability to choose which data is shown on the chart and in what format.

The question is, ”is this enough?” Does the chart have to be interactive? When I say interactive, I’m referring to the ability to update the tasks from the chart itself. I’m quite sure that interactivity is a nice feature to have, but is it something that is a core function that you have to have? If task management functions such as date changes are simple and powerful, does the chart need to support management functions also, or can it simply be a presentation view?

What are your experiences with Gantt charts? Do you primarily use them as a presentation medium for yourself or others? Do you make changes from the chart? Would you if you could? Would you be satisfied if you couldn’t make changes from the chart, but you could make changes easily and quickly from the task list itself? If you do need to make changes from the chart, which changes are must haves and which are nice to haves?

Geoff Roland