Tag Archives: responsibilities

Any Recommendations for Project Management Software?

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One issue I have always had with most software project tool is load balancing between planning and implementing stages. The issue we need to plan the type of skill level with load balancing to project expected levels and types staffing per roles needed. Said another way, we use staffing by categories to forecast staffing by role needed – so we can consider roles needed in combination with learning level requirements. Consider, the skill level within a defined role of a given person changes very significantly between six, twelve, eighteen, and 24 months but is fairly constant from 2 years to 5 years. Thus, if your resources are limited to people with less than 2 years more training and supervision will be required with the six months level requiring the most. This same grading of level of experience applies equal to company knowledge (acculturation effect) level of experience, another significant forecasting issue that can increase funding levels. And so-on and so-on .
However, when we assign an actual person, they may fill more than one of these forecasted roles and they are usually over loaded (how about 120 for a 40 hour work week). Obviously you can’t avoid this overload skewing. It can be mitigated as long as it does overly skew monthly, quarterly or yearly manhour planning. Once the initial planning with overall WBS has been iterated a couple of times a guesstimate of actually staffing levels can be used, But this doesn’t guarantee the actual persons wanted can be acquired so recasting using a scheme such as PA1, PA2, etc can be used to possibly reduce the eventual skewing of actual person/role versus manhours forecasting. Also, one would like the system to keep this staff forecasting by role for comparison against actual staffing. More fun stuff…

LinkedIn: The Project Manager Network – #1 Group for Project Managers
Topic: Any recommendations for a project management software?

How can a PM Effectively Overcome a Project Handed to Them in the Red?

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Eugene M Murray’s First Response on Linked
First, remember what a sunken cost represents – that is, funds that have already been spent. Many of my clients unconsciously seemed to assume that some how the completion of the project would not only earn the original expected benefits but recapture this sunken cost already lost!

Mike Ellison has very good advice. For several projects, I just started by implementing what is call a positive, forward looking weekly management reports process. The whole notion takes some explaining so I will just give the expected result. Have people report what they have completed for the last 2 weeks and report what they are expecting to complete this week and forecast the next week (submitted on Friday). Have your lower level project leads review these reports in a staff meeting on Tuesday morning (why – another long explanation). The basic result is to emphasis completion and thus success – personal success at every level.

1 – This keeps things moving
2 – Starts to develop an attitude of personal participation in the completion process
3 – Keeps the focus on positive, forward looking behavior while you minimize the “protect your a__” attitude that is usually a present hold over from the past (another type of sunken cost).

While this process is ongoing, review these weekly reports and ask that each groups manager summarize what their people expect to accomplish and how that aligns with their major business goals. Yes, your are asking them to repeat somethings but this simply re-enforces how their completion focus aligns with what their people are doing – more simplistically if you can’t write it down – you probably can’t do it. (If this process becomes a bit repetitious – you are making good turn-around progress by increasing the amount of work they are doing while reducing your time so that you can move on. Enjoy this, the real work with the big payoff is coming!)

Concurrently, review the risk factors in conjunction with major tasks – many times there are immediate results reported in the weekly reports that you can capitalize to make forward jumps in the completion process. Also, this gives you a fast chance to put your energy into supporting the best positive, forward looking near completion results. (Again, they increase their completions while you decrease you time so that you can move on.)

That usually take care of the first three weeks. Week 4 – you should start by partitioning the project into major business benefits forecasting so that you can make a positive, forward looking projection of how to bring the whole project to its final completion; the partition help with proper scoping of the project. This is called a re-targeting process – a heuristic estimate so that you can start realign completion work (now that you have gain more people’s participation) for completing the project.

This process was used to bring early success to the IT development of the Toyota Motors, USA National Part System in just one year. Revenues at start was $85 million and 3 years later revenues were up to about $500 million – but basically the IT goals where completed in the last year and the system accommodated the greater increase in business. The 4th year produced even more completions.

LinkedIn: The Project Manager Network – #1 Group for Project Managers
Topic: How can a PM effectively overcome a project handed to them in the red?

(SEM+BI)+SOA(SECURITY+)+SEO Framework Issues

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Should BI teams be more focused on the business side of things or should they have technical IT expertise?

i4Aid/Internet4Aid RESPONSE:

Ajay Sharma • There is no one answer to this question. BI teams have multiple roles – some of which fit in the business side while others in IT. PMO role is required to manage and deliver to the timelines and comitments from various groups involved in a typical BI project. While business owns the functionality and final outcome of the project, IT should own the infrastrucutre, maintenence, licensing, operational aspects of the BI project. There is general accusation that IT slows down teh project and cant keep pace with the agility required by the business. This is a true statement but can be addressed by carefully designing BI project teams. There are various models that can be implemented based on organization’s structure and culture.

i4Aid • My quick response is that Ajay Sharma presented the appropriate basics including his notion about the integration aspects. Briefly, BI should fill out management policies and provide the first break-down levels for the functional processes but not more than 5 levels of detail. Then IT should review and integrate these processes into their IT framework before doing more levels of detail – it is a kind of first scope and impact estimations as they adjust and balance conceptualization and implementation. Then review and balance with both parties – do this before before specifying any more detail processes and procedures and agree on any high level the risk factors. Then do a rough estimate of project timeline.

We did this on the Toyota Motors, USA National Parts System development and it remained fairly scoped for 1-2 years of our development process such that IBM adopted most of this high-level approach.

I will be entering this in my blog: i4Aid.WordPress.com