Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

Somebody once said that politics is probably the most important part of the project management. In my relatively short 14 years professional life I have seen people promoted after making company loose more than 500k and on the other hand, people being fired after very successful implementations but failing to deliver their success to the management.

So how do we keep our friends close and our enemies closer? In my previous postings I talked about making everything visible. This is extremely important part of message delivery as well as reducing the chance of being set up during or after the project is done. I hate to sound paranoid but those are the brutal facts and rather than sticking our head in a pile of sand, we should face them and be prepared. On the other, more positive note, we are talking about approach that can bring more participants to our project and open it up for more acceptance and success.

I might be missing something, but I have not come across any structured suggested approach on how to do with that so here are my thoughts: one of the Key Project Artifacts is a Concern (see screenshot below). Concern can be opened by any member of the project team or any stakeholder and, in Project Ground rules is considered the only media where people can express their concerns or ideas regarding Project's agenda, objectives, goals, deliverable, schedule or any other critical component.

Concern can be further linked to a Risk or an Issue. It is being raised against a party - usually a Role in the Project or Group of participants, i.e. Consultant, Developer, PM, etc. It has top be either Dismissed or declared Valid. If declared Valid, a Risk should be associated to a Concern which will fall under your Risk Management (I will definitely address this in my further blogs). The following list some of the statuses you can use to manage Concerns: {Concept; Raised; Under Review; Valid; Dismissed; Deferred}. Those statuses can be managed thru a workflow, process driven (i.e. Ground Rule says that only PM can change the status) or managed thru field level security http://kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=1048&ProductSubNodeID=1049 in case your PMIS is SharePoint based.





See you next time

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

SharePoint PMIS - basic principles

In my previous blog i have mentioned some key principles that have to be used in successful Project Management Information system. Let us focus today on Visual.
On of the issues with any PM system is the enormous amount of information team members usually have to go thru. So what's usually happening, is that team members, for example, Developer would create a link to the page showing assigned tasks and will never even attempt to navigate anywhere else by that building a silo. This is kind off defeats the purpose of the PMIS. On one hand, you as a Project Manager, wants them to get to the information they want or need to work with, but on the other hand, you want to keep this team alive and abreast with the Project - its Issues, Challenges and Concerns, Scope Changes, Lessons Learned, Risks, etc.
There are probably multiple ways to do that. I prefer using the following approach (i would use SharePoint here as an example of PMIS hosting platform):
1. Have main project page containing only high level generic information. I will talk about it in details later but in a nutshell - Mission, Objectives, RACI Matrix, Milestones, Overall Project Health Status, Document Library with Detailed Project Schedule and Meeting Minutes and possibly - acute and urgent open Issues and useful Links. Team Members are asked to provide any feedback on any on of those Main-Page artifacts during the regular Stand Up Review Meetings (in case you are using SCRUM)
2. Left side navigation area (Quick Launch) would have Role or Phase or Deliver-based headers with links to dedicated pages with the relevant (time-based) content that you want team to use to view and report on personal tasks, for example, or anything else you would like your team members to work on; or Phase Delivery Checklists
Tip: you, as a PM, might want to change URLs once in a while at the first phase of building the team culture to assure that people are not necessarily saving the direct link to the "personal" page but using PMIS navigation. This is very important when working with large and geographically dispersed teams or multiple organizations with different cultures

Stay tuned...

Monday, June 8, 2009

SharePoint as a PM and BA Tool

There are couple of things I like about SharePoint:
1. It can really reduce the Total Cost of Ownership and make software delivery process much more lean by configuring a solution in "no time" for a user and work with the user community, which I find being more visual and analytical to finalize requirements
2. I came up with this term that helps me explaining the benefits of this platform to users: VETO which stands for Visual, Empowering, Transparent and Obvious. I use this for my PMIS (Project Management Information Systems) sites building up the main site page to show 80%-90% of the information Team Members are looking for when working on a project.
I will use my next blogs to give more examples and talk about the way you can make your Project be more successful simply by tuning up the message to users and make key Project Artifacts transparent and "named" identifying ownership
Stay tuned