Lost in Chaos

Gastronomie

2009-07-15T15:34:21+04:00

Aujourd'hui, j'ai goûté au Koshari, le "plat national Egyptien": Des oignons émincés, brunis dans de l'huile bouillante; de l'ail pilé frit; des macaronis très cuits; des lentilles brunes; du riz; et de la sauce tomate poivrée et pimentée. Le tout servi avec une poignée de pois chiche. Je ne peux pas vraiment dire que c'est mauvais, mais c'est bourratif, et le piment camoufle toute autre saveur.

Mais que répondre à quelqu'un venant de ce pays où le Koshari est un des sommets de la gastronomie, lorsqu'il me demande "et en France, c'est quoi votre plat national ?", et comment décrire la richesse culinaire de nos Terroirs ?

Bleu, Blanc, Rouge

2009-07-14T12:59:16+04:00

Top 5 Rules for effective Risk Management

2009-07-04T18:21:26+04:00

Manage your risks or they will manage you
Risk management is not a passive process, you need to be on top of it.
Commit your Top Management
Show them the savings, quicker time-to-market, reputation increase and get their support.
Say "NO" to the blame culture
Share your risks with your boss, your customers, your suppliers, your colleagues, with everyone around you.
Review risks outside the lines of business
Have an independant Risk Review Committee who also defines and adjusts risk appetite at enterprise level.
Learn from your mistakes
Do not reinvent the wheel, use lessons learned and previous risk logs on similar areas

Pyramids

2009-07-01T12:03:09+04:00

I was actually seeing this bigger, nicer, cleaner. This was such a big disappointment...

The Genie in a bottle

2009-06-11T10:57:25+04:00

A Project Manager, his cost engineer and his project scheduler are walking to lunch when they find an antique oil lamp. They rub it and a Genie comes out. The Genie says, 'I'll give each of you just one wish.'

'Me first! Me first!' says the cost engineer. 'I want to be in the Bahamas, driving a speedboat, without a care in the world.' Puff! She's gone.

‘Me next! Me next!’ says the project scheduler. ‘I want to be in Hawaii, relaxing on the beach with my personal masseuse, an endless supply of Pina Coladas and the love of my life.’ Puff! He’s gone.

'OK, you're up,' the Genie says to the project manager. The project manager says, 'I want those two back in the office after lunch.'

Gartner 2009 PPM Magic Quadrant

2009-06-09T20:04:14+04:00

Gartner just released their PPM Magic Quadrant for this year (if you want to compare to last year's PPM Magic Quadrant). Not many changes in the Leaders quadrant (Microsoft EPM is still there, so are CA Clarity; HP PPM; Compuware; and Planview (when I attended the 2007 Gartner Summit, I was clearly not impressed by this product, seeing it for the second year in the leader quadrant comes as a surprise to me); and Oracle who recently acquired Primavera); apart from Daptiv drops out to the visionaries quadrant (Tim, what happened?). This year's trend indicates that the global situation has had an impact on the PPM market (personnel lay-off; curtailing of product development; travel expenses associated with on-site PPM systems deployment; etc), and vendors are being challenged to reduce their pricing due to very low to no 2009 PPM budgets. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) might be the way to go.

Project reporting

2009-06-06T07:36:06+04:00

Stacey Douglas published a very good post about communication management, and more specifically about "how much detail is enough for project reporting".

To make the long story short, there is an appropriate level of reporting coming from your PMO: if your project reporting does not dig deep enough, your organization will struggle by always asking for more; and so will it be if your project reporting goes too deep into the details, dragging everyone away from actually performing the work to be done. Déjà-vu? Of course, it happens all over the place.

There are no easy answers to this problem, and I believe it goes through skilled PMO leaders who know how to gather reporting requirements; and building trust between them and the business leader. Any suggestion about tools and techniques to succeed in this field?

The Chaos Report 2009

2009-06-04T08:41:39+04:00

The Standish Group has just released their 2009 Chaos Report, and things are not looking good, despite the growing trend of PMOs in companies. For the record, the Chaos Report collects and analyzes the success rate for projects in the IT industry. Below is the chart for 2009:

Some people argue that they are only measuring time, budget and scope (thus leaving out quality, risk and customer satisfaction, half of the "triple constraint"), but two things I have to say here: first of all, this is still the best benchmark for IT project management; and at least they measure the same since 1994, so we have something to compare:

Successful means on-time, on-budget, and with all features and functions as defined in the initial scope; challenged means late, over budget, and/or with less features and functions than defined in the initial scope; failed means cancelled prior to completion, or delivered but never used.

What it tells me is that we are not doing good. Seeing a marked decrease in project success rates when building a PMO is a leading trend in the industry for the past 12 months worries me somewhere. What is this the symptom of? Lack of organizational maturity? Lack of skilled and trained project management staff? Something else?

The Risk Management Plan

2009-05-22T10:16:19+04:00

The Risk Management Plan is the key element of the Risk Management Process. It defines the Risk Process for the project, including Methodology, Roles and Responsibilities, Timing, Thresholds, Reporting, monitoring and review formats and procedures. You can find several templates on the net (like this one from PMHut), but what is really important is how you will use it, and how well it suits your own risk management processes. Amongst all criteria for judging the maturity of such a document, the two the most important in my eyes are the ability to manage threats as well as opportunities, and the ability to efficiently respond to a risk becomes an issue.

What is the risk? Why might it occur? How likely is it to occur? How bad or good might it be? Does it matter to the project? What can we do about it? When should we act? Who is responsible for the risk? Who is responsible for the response? These are all questions that should find answers in the Risk Register (part of the Risk Management Plan). This document must be reviewed and updated regularly, since new risks might arise during the lifetime of the project, and risks might realize, becoming issues, needing responses that might trigger new risks, etc.

In my Risk Register, I typically have 13 columns:

The RiskID, which is the unique identification for a risk, used by everyone to refer to that specific risk.
The ProjectID, which is the unique identification for the project within the corporate portfolio. If a risk is likely to happen in several project, it needs to be documented with several RiskIDs.
The Risk Category helps predefining responses or owners. It also serves for reporting purposes, thus helping on the predetermination front for future projects.
The Date Raised serves to track the evolution of the risk profile of a project. The more stable the risk register, the lower the risk profile of a project.
The Risk Owner has the ultimate responsibility to monitor the risk, and to raise the occurence of the risk to the Risk Manager. This needs to be documented in the Roles and Reponsibilities section of the Risk Management Plan.
The Risk Description is ... well ... the description of the risk.
The Impact is the result of the Risk Qualitative Analysis process. This field will usually have three possible values (low/medium/high), or if you want to more precisely rank your risks, five possible values (very low/low/medium/high/very high).
The Probability is the result of the Risk Quantitative Analysis process. This field will have similar values as the Impact (i.e. 3 or 5 possible values).
The Priority is a calculated field (which is why I usually use an Excel spreadsheet for my risk registers, unless I have access to an Enterprise Project Management software. It is a combination of Probability and Impact, and you can live without it, it just allows a quicker filtering on those who need your attention.
The Response Description is ... well ... the description of the response to the risk.
The Response Type is one of the following: Avoidance, Trnsfer, Mitigation, Acceptance. This will also help monitoring the efficiency of the risk management processes.
The Response Owner has the ultimate responsibility to act in the event of a risk realized. It can be someone else as the Risk Owner, and it needs to be documented in the Roles and Responsibilities section of the Risk Management Plan.
The Realized Date is the date when a Risk has triggered. This is the moment when a RiskID leaves the Risk Register to enter the Issue Log to continue being monitored in this document.

I understand this might look a little cumbersome, but in most situations, it can be the difference between saving a project and pulling the plug...

The ideal size for a team

2009-03-30T08:24:06+04:00

I stumbled upon an article from Ken Thompson, The maximum team size for effective working, based on The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes from Christopher Allen. While Christopher's post talks about groups in general (online gaming, social networking, etc), Ken tries to be more specific to the work environment. In short, he says: "Your teams are too big: break them up". He is right, there is an ideal size for effective teamwork. Too small teams lack resources and are unstable; while too big teams split into factions and need more individual attention than possible due to lack of time available to maintain relationships. He says the ideal team size for optimal teamwork is 5 to 9 individuals, which I tend to agree roughly. What do you think?