Professional-PM Project Management - Managing Scope & Change

Multitasking Overhead - Costly Context Switches

root — Thu, 09 Oct 2003 00:03:38 +0200

We all do it, but it's pricey: Context switching demands more time and energy than you think. Is there a more efficient way to handle competing projects than swapping brains? Checkout SD mags article Multitasking Overhead ...

Collaboration for Eclipse - NOT!

root — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 21:21:55 +0200

AT-Project - collaboration from Atreides Technologies shall become a collaborative software whose features should enable you to improve productivity traceability and reliability in your project with sharing information, planning activities, track development bugs, record time spent on tasks, help you to fill in your time sheet, and many features more.

What I found after some hours of their website-outage was sort of a "Wollmilchsau" (=all inclusive wonder-magic all-you can-eat) program that shall be implemented over the next 6-8 months according to the roadmap ...

If you checkout the screenshots currently available you see that a lot of the feature-list (as they explained) is not yet available - not even as a GUI fake... that makes this tool a very nice dream with the realistic body of an eclipse-integrated defect/task-management tool (usermanagement and task-handling is already there...)

Of course an overall collaboration feature "for distributed manipulation of shared objects" sounds nice - they want to implement a JMS server based communication ... as well a Laptop functionality (offline mode) and especially the integrated Requirements management would work out great ... conjunctive...

Today there is not even a little readme explaining the installation, neither for configuration or little "hello-world"-sample... I am afraid, but I am not willing to tweak around with such incomplete releases... I don't expect Wizards or something, but a 10-lines how-to is a minimum in my opinion - don't you agree?

When I look at the milestone plan I must agree that this project is not really of interest for the the next 3-4 months for me... and really essential features like Requirements Management shall be implemented even later... - well let's say we have it next summer...

Don' t get me wrong, I find the approach to have many project-management tools integrated nice, even if I doubt the maturity of the release - even in next summer - compared to - hum - hand-tailored Excels, full-fledged commercial software, well anything - just the set of various tools (and may they be dumb) we work with today... but they work somehow... and this tool doesn't (yet)... good luck french guys at Atreides - you attack a very interesting market competing with Rational, IBM, MS and even more specialized companies.

Oh - and maybe you take a look at CodeBeamer that should provide a little bit more for a little bit more money - I just discovered their homepage... at least they have some nice screenshots and probably their needed collaboration server ready - I don't think the implementation and testing took only 3 months!

New to Management? Demand more feedback!

root — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 10:40:51 +0200

Paul Glen writes in Nurture the New Project Manager - Computerworld that of course the first months in transition to the (project) management (and probably all new roles in new organizations) are hard and full of confusion and exhaustion. This of course is true when your surrounding fields is sub-optimal biased on you. He notes that the first months needs patient supervisors and constant mentoring by somebody that is aware of these needs - that includes the boss aswell as subordinates or new colleagues.

I guess it can become a big problem a) theres nobody mentoring (correctly) or b) the "newbie" (even an old-school PM can be a newbie in a new organization) is not open for feedback or not actively asks for it (if the boss is also not aware of it). I have seen project-managers telling me "what do you have to say - I am more experienced and your comments mean nothing to me"...

But in my own leader career the situations I hated most were to talk to those "charming" folks not daring or wanting to give "real" feedback instead of non-personal, anonymous chitchat. I know that feedback needs the correct setting, and so I found myself often in efforts to create these 4-eye, somewhat quiet situations for demanding concrete personal feedbacks and "safe" comments by colleagues and subordinates. I suppose not being able to be belonged for a comment helps sometimes to open mouth and mind - especially for the "big" one. Anyhow best of all situations were of course individual performance-evaluation talks I held with my subordinates and apprentices were I got most interesting and candind feedback for my person - every word counts and is safely stored in the back of my mind. I know telling the boss not only easy and positives is harder than to do so, but it helps a lot and is the basis for professional and personal development aswell as for the relationship itself.

Costs and ROI of Project blogs (K-Logs)

root — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 01:06:17 +0200

Phil Wolff pointed me to some mind-twisting numbers about a Klognet (aka set of trackbacking Project Blogs!) concering Costs, ROI and Benefits compared to portals - that John Robb created based on a ROI evaluation guideline that he downloaded at Plumtree Software - a corporate portal software vendor.

blogs can replace portals except for Application Access/Frontend
Costs: $142 vs. $807 per desktop (Costs 82% less)

Benefits: $1,658 vs. $1,886 per desktop (Delivers 88% of the value)

ROI: 1,170% vs. 240% (or 4.9 times the ROI)

[Listening to: Euro Temptations 1 - DJ Inphinity - (1:18:19)]

read all details here...

Project Weblog plans arise

root — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 22:54:54 +0200

Project Communication is a common problem. One current practice at bodyleasing or project companies are project diaries... I guess a lot of consulting dudes have to do that anyway to document their billable hours in a more or less good manner.

Of course a weblog - reachable from everywhere - is a proper solution nowadays... and it's more than the personal diary one might keep on his notebook access application or similar...

Piz came across with the fab idea I guess yesterday...
Navigating Business with Technology by Kimberly Black talked about it last week and what I found then
Halma Comber proposed a project weblog specification as "P-Log" back awhile.
There's even already a RDF vocabulary for meta-data description of a project although at the moment this seems much to technical compared to the soft-goals I have in mind for a project blog.
Another nice idea: CVS Blogger - Bill has the similar idea to document - well project wide I guess - all the major changes (code interfaces would be a fine idea) / fixes that various coders perform, great achievments, etc... in a blog... for some reason Bill thinks he needs a direct CVS to blog-integration while there are Viewcvs.cgi and other tools for querying CVS... and of course you could run CVS directly in a perl-shell script with Brad Choate's plugin...

I wonder if there is anyone out there already using a project blog in his life project... - additional to defect databases, task-lists, etc...

Read on for my inspirations and comments on Hal's specification... comments / feedback warmly welcome!

My comments on Hal's specification of a p-log - often from an MT implementation point-of-view, but also some basic requirement comments...

The functions:

Sections are like categories I guess - no need for something special if we use MT
Workflow implies several functionalities:
- user, roles and rights management - that's not typically in Blog implementations
- process definitions - configuration for states and the workflows on a Per-Project basis
( anyhow we want to use the same repository for all project blogs of a company, won't we? so we can increase the communication outside the project aswell... and if senior management has time for reading detailled project blogs - well - why shouldn't they?
- to make it shorter - I do not think that defect / task-tracking can be done WITH a blog-tool, but more integrated with the blog-tool... don't forget that the workflow of a project is typically already handled by an existing process and we are not starting at ground-zero normally...
Categories was my understandig for various sections - did you mean - graphical sections for various info, so just a page-layout??
Comments = OK
Ratings is a great thing - we used it for a type of knowlegde management tool (KM tool) I built 2 yrs ago using Oracle Text (Intermedia) and the usage increased massively because we also created competition by publishing a rating with a rank of all users who contributed...
Permalink = OK
Trackback - sure, btw: why doesn't your blog have one??
Files - uploading stuff to my MT blog works fine - that's sufficient so far, or?
Images aswell
Blogrolling - why not install something like Active PHP Bookmarks at http://bookmarks.cemper.com for the whole project or company? - the hairball g problem would still persist
Search is a basic function for a blog - again: I guess yours would deserve an upgrade :-)
Subscription services are sort of important for especially outside-people from the company or in hot phases... after all people usually read their mails, but to the frequent other virutal info-sources when it's hot on the project? Anyhow - that's a culture problem - I was on a death-march project with a nerd-projectmanager refusing to read/answer his mails... I would have fired him the first month... ok... back now... Subscriptions at least for normal content could be implemented in normal office software e.g. via RSS to NNTP-converters... or are there RSS to e-Mail converters out there?
Notifications is a feature of MT I have not tested so far... good plan :-)

Sections - or I guess better: categories

the Story is often lost in the end - good to write it down...
Role description, staffing, responsibilities in addition to hopefully existing role-descriptions like Project Manager, Designer, Developer, etc...
Key Project Assessments.... huh!?! - do you mean some sort of Risk Management as it should be standard in high profile project methodologies? or more a task list ?
a common project-calendar is probably not the issue of a P-Log - maybe an integration with some other tool might be nice - but you will always hear: "why shall I maintain more than one calendar?" and I agree.. there can be only one! and if it's outlook, ok - why not find a way to get this data out of it automatically... But in fact the idea to present events and important milestones from the project plan is a good issue... - I guess the new MS Project Suite with it's collaboration features could do so - otherwise extract it via ODBC+perl somehow...
Issue Tracking (Defects, Tasks,etc...) shall not be topic of this "softer" tool as these are real hard-facts of the projects...
Agreements:::: woahh... are you talking about Requirements Management as you need it in these details for every software project that shall not be doomed to fail or explode in costs and schedule? I think this needs more focussed explanation...
Project Deliverables: you are right if you mean configuration management - management of all deliverables in a version management or similar... but I don't think it fits in here... even if each project needs it... there are too many existing solutions for that - again the integration buzzword could maybe do it...
Metrics and Measures... how should the existing project tracking & controlling & measurement be integrated in the blog? hand-type-in by the PM - to just publish it for the senior management or do you mean a more sophisticated metrics-calculation in the P-Log?
Project Documents... hmmm - sources? build-results? quality standard guidelines? how does this differ from the deliverables?

The additional sections are sort of a more detailled part breaking down above sections... comments later...

Conclusion:

What I noticed after these comments are written is that Hal (like me) started to dream of the wonder-project management (and -planning/-execution/-controlling/-reporting) all-in-one tool a project manager could dream of... yes sir! I want that - or give me two of them... :-)

Unfortunately these massive functionality can and shall not all be handled alone by a project weblog. After all we (or I) are seeking to improve the soft factors of our projects - introduce more history, stories and storytellers... new people joining the project shall be able to dive into these stories... Good projects always had stories while worse sanctioned stories and storytellers...

Hal - please comment on these so far - and maybe - trackback-enable your blog ;-)

Christoph

Forrester: Project management offices on the rise, but effectiveness dubious

root — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 15:59:43 +0200

Forrester: Project management offices on the rise, but effectiveness dubious Nearly one-fifth of all new project implementations are over three months late. Despite PMO use is up from 53% last year. Project management offices need to spend more time tracking individual IT projects and less time generating reports for senior management to be more effective, according to a new Forrester report. An older computerworld article talks about how to Maximize ROI With a Project Office and how PMOs measure up to the bottom line of a company... most important from my point-of-view:

Eliminate project redundancies
Standardize the delivery process
Assess ROI and perform additional project controlling

update: Piz says McConnel introduces that concept in here... but I didnt find it so far...

update2: read more about PMOs in Max's project management blog

Eliminate Multi-Tasking to Speed Project Completion

root — Wed, 09 Jul 2003 00:58:03 +0200

Reforming Project Management Theory and Practice by Hal Macomber has a nice tip about
to eliminate Multi-Tasking to Speed Project Completion :-)

I guess I'am also the guy of reading 5 books in parallel ... and enjoy it to lay down a book when it starts to stress my mind or other interests I want to read about... typically the parallel books have different conjuctive topics...

But the comparison is great to keep in mind for the next project plan / team meeting...

Start your milestones on wednesday...

root — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:35:43 +0200

In What's Wrong With Wednesdays? Johana Rothmann gives some great ideas to NOT start/stop project actions on mondays or fridays.

Her major argument is "overtime" that extends into weekends - which of course might become true.

My other ideas about that is of course the "blue monday" or "friday@home" syndrom - aswell as general jour-fixes and team-meetings to be kept on mon/fri days. In abroad projects you will for sure also NOT have people present for 5 days a week (even if there are some special blinded projectmanagers without any idea about "soft"-facts of their staff & their families)...

nice to read that column anyway... expect future comments on Johanna from me...

future starts now...

root — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 15:51:20 +0200

future starts now... well this obvious idea by Bob tells you in some nice examples what everybody of us should already know... the current success is the result of past skill gambling...
those of you sitting around and waiting to receive the next contract for a new amazing dBase or Oracle7 project should not wonder about not being hired...

Livelong learning is not a future goal, but a current essential requirement for your work attitude...

and don't expect anybody to pay you for getting the real essential technical knowhow in a course, that's your own duty - get some good books...

Prepare now to be the IT manager of the future

Professional-PM Project Management - Managing Scope &amp; Change