Yearly Archive2020

PMO Audit

Is Your Project Management Office in Order?

Utilize this 15 question document to audit your PMO

10 Things Stakeholders in Business Wish You Knew

 “For [a product] to surprise me, it must have satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.” Paul Graham, Made in USA

·He was promoted to a Four Star General in 1989 and was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.

·He directed the deployment of the Panama Invasion in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

·He was honored with the Bronze Star, The Purple Heart, and was decorated with the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.

Who is General Colin Powell?

Colin Powell is an expert at managing expectations. Although he is known as one of the nation’s most influential black military leaders, the national security advisor to Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State during the George W. Bush administration from 2001 – 2005, and the Founding Chairman of America’s Promise, General Powell is astonishingly skilled at stakeholder management which he developed throughout his distinguished career.

Think of the different political, social, and personal agendas he has had to manage from various stakeholders to successfully execute consistently on events that have had global consequences.

General Powell was born in New York City in 1937 of Jamaican descent and was the youngest child born of Maud Arial and Luther Theophilus Powell. What’s amazing to me about General Powell was that he graduated from Morris High School with mediocre grades and started his college life at City College in New York City. Yet after discovering and joining ROTC, he developed a disciplined and continuous improvement focus that changed his life forever.

As stated in the book Soldier; the Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung, “Colin found he liked leading others and had a talent for the delicate balancing act required to win the respect and affection of those he led while demanding their performance. He started a mental list of leadership qualities: A leader had to set an example and keep up standards. If he wanted his troops to drill an extra hour, he had to show he could do it with them.” He learned early in his military career that managing stakeholders’ expectations was more about leadership and setting the right example.

10 Things Every Stakeholder Wish You Knew: But Won’t Tell You.

What keeps them up at night

The key role of any program or project manager is to learn the hidden agendas and expectations of your main stakeholders. People only initiate programs or projects to move away from pain or to go towards gain. Your job is to learn which direction the stakeholders are going, and then ask them this question, “If you have the perfect solution to this issue, what would it look like and what would it allow you to do that you cannot do today?” A great resource to learn more about this line of thinking is the book Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa. 

1. Understand their requirements and expectations from their perspective.

Requirements need to be collected and documented using best practices and standard documentation processes that are reviewed and approved by the key stakeholders. Whether you are developing software, building a house, or constructing a highway, requirements need to be recorded from the users of the solution perspective. A great site to learn more about requirements is:  Leading Answers 

2. Their preferred method of communication and that you would tailor/target communications to their style and be consistent.

Real communication is how your message is perceived, not only by what you document or say. Brain Tracy in a post called “Making Strong Connections” states, “In communicating well with another person, time is the critical factor. The value of a relationship can increase for both you and the other person depending on the amount of time that you invest.” http://www.briantracy.com/blog/general/making-strong-connections . I would also add that we should ask our stakeholders how they would like to be communicated with and how frequent they would like to receive those communications.

3. That you understand their personal stake in the project’s outcome and that the outcome will produce the benefits you promised.

Do you know how the success or failure of the program or project will personally impact your key stakeholders? Are their conflicting desires between key stakeholders (i.e. someone wants the project to succeed while someone else really wants the project to fail)?

4. That you will involve them in the key decision-making process.

Key stakeholders in business want and need to be involved in making key decisions. Can you imagine Colin Powell not keeping other generals or the President informed about key decisions and still being successful in his missions? Stakeholder involvement is a major key to being successful at executing for results.

5. That you would speak their language using terms they understand.

Learning to speak the language of your business stakeholders is a critical success factor for gaining their buy-in and support. Most highly skilled experts are cursed with the ignorance of knowledge. We have become so comfortable with the gobbledygook technical terminology of our profession that we fail to remember how difficult it was for us to speak that language and now that we have mastered it, we cannot remember what it was like not knowing it. Our stakeholders will be more impressed and influenced when we speak their language and present our ideas in terms that they understand and are comfortable with.

6. That you communicate their role and responsibility clearly and understand what role they really want to play.

Do your stakeholders know who’s on first and what they are supposed to do while they are there? One of the keys to building a great project team is when everyone on the team understands their roles. Managing projects are more like managing a baseball or football team. Each player has a position and the team will win games if everyone plays their best within their position. A great resource for document roles and responsibility can be found on the blog “The Critical Path”. By clicking on the link, you will gain access to a free project team organization worksheet that contains a RACI chart. A RACI chart helps you define the roles, but also who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed on the project regarding any major tasks.

8. That they need to be educated about your Methodology or PM processes.

Do you prefer to be sold a new car or to buy a new car? Most of us would prefer to buy the new car and to make the decision to buy the car the salesman educates you on during the entire buying process. We need to teach our stakeholders about our methodology and process to educate them so that they can buy into our processes. Stakeholders want to know how your processes and methodologies work in a simple understandable language.

9. That you understand their learning style and that you respect their limited time.

Are you aware of your stakeholders’ learning style? Do they really need to sit in a 1 or 2 day class to learn the new system or process you have implemented? Do they learn better by conducting role playing scenarios, typing at the keyboard, reading a case study, or attending a presentation? Some of the best advice I have ever received regarding training stakeholders was to ask the questions, “What should my students be able to do once they have attended my training or learning program?”

10. That their feedback is valued and that you will act on it.

Ken Blanchard is famous for the axiom “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Do your stakeholders see you as a champion for proactively eliciting their feedback? Companies and individuals who are consistently seeking feedback from their customers are on a path of continuous improvement. When was the last time you sought feedback from your customers?  

Share your ideas or thought! Do you have other ideas regarding what stakeholders wish we knew, but won’t tell us? Has this list of stakeholder concerns helped you to think differently?

Principles of Execution Key Concepts:

• General Colin Powell
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Stakeholder Management

What is an Operating Model

“The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems.” -S.L.A. Marshall

Establishing the correct level of process standardization and integration is a fundamental building block for identifying an organization’s strategic road map and target enterprise architecture. The strategic road map and reference architecture (current and target architecture) sets the stage for the development of the IT investment portfolio. These are critical tools for aligning the business and IT capability that will enable an organization to achieve its strategic intent and answers the question, “What are we attempting to accomplish?”

The critical need of organization's today is to align the IT strategy with the business strategy, establish the target enterprise architecture or desired IT capability, determine the right mix of IT assets (services, information, applications and infrastructure) and execute the IT project portfolio while optimizing the use of the organization's resources while remaining agile enough to response to market variability. The operating model provides the guidance necessary to reduction duplicative  services, contracts, solutions and commodity technologies (laptops, desktops, servers and data centers) while providing the blueprint for business transformation.

The operating model will also assist management with breaking down organizational silos and building a better alignment between the business's needs and the IT Service organization's delivery capabilities.

 So, what are the challenges with defining an organization’s Operating Model? What are the culture and implementation challenges of transforming an organizations Operating Model? “For Lenovo’s IT organization, charting how to support the new operating model was daunting. Inherited legacy IT systems had to be replaced by an enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) system that could foster standardized processes yet remain flexible enough to handle important variations in local markets. Rolling out a global IT system is an enormous challenge that many CIOs have taken on but few have managed to pull off,” according to a McKinsey interview with Xiaoyan Wang in an article titled, “The IT factor in a global business transformation: An interview with Lenovo’s CIO.”

For many organizations the requirement is to determine which operating model quadrant is positioned to support their desired process integration and standardization needs. According to Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David C. Robertson in the book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, “the operating model is a choice about what strategies are going to be supported.”

There are 4 types of operating model positions according to Ross, Weill and Robertson; they are:

• Diversification (Low process integration / low process standardization)
• Coordination (High process integration / low process standardization)
• Unification (High process integration / high process standardization)]
• Replication (Low process integration / high process standardization)

Microsoft SharePoint and Project Server solutions can enable organizations to move to the unification quadrant if high integration and standardization are required. These applications are designed to support a global integrated business process and for increasing visibility of the investments portfolio into a single web view.  They also support the elimination of overlapping processes, administration, and standardization of workflows to enable better governance compliance.

Project Server Project Inventory:

Project Governance Workflow:

Are you using SharePoint and Project Server to help enable your organization's current and target operating model? What are the benefits of conquering these challenges for your organization?

Additional Resources

• Operating Model Maturity Framework (http://www.operatingmodel.com/Index.html)

Reference

• Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David C. Robertson, page 26 
• http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_IT_factor_in_a_global_business_transformation_An_interview_with_Lenovos_CIO_2844

How Buffer Management Improves Project Performance

“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes

Variability is a fact of life!

The first image in this post is from an actual project that I managed using Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and the ProChain add-on. This was also my first time using Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) instead of the normal critical path methodology that is common in the market today.

The greatest benefit I received from using CCPM as my project management methodology is visibility into how I use slack or buffer on my project. I also incorporated a specific planning process that ensured that I include the full scope of work from my project’s charter, WBS and project team; this is called Network Building. My project team benefited by gaining insight into the critical integration points that could cause major delays in executing the initiative. Although we hoped for the best and planned for the worst, we experienced a tremendous amount of variability (the worst scenario) which we all know is a fact of life. Here are some of the challenges that we encountered:

• Delays with on boarding my vendor and consultants
• Our hardware vendor placed the wrong order and could not deliver the required hardware until 2 weeks after I needed the solution.
• A member of the consulting teams family needed to relocate because of the floods in the Midwest which pulled him off the project for 2 weeks.
• We experienced scope creep and code development delays and issues. We missed 2 critical deadlines because of code or configuration issues.
• My brother, who was 5 years older than I, passed away.
• Another team member got married and went on a 2 week honeymoon.

All of these challenges created the buffer image at the top of this post. What saved us from total disaster? We used the processes and procedures that are core to any key CCPM project. Each task has only two estimates:

1. Highly Probable (Estimate C)      
2. Aggressive But Possible (Estimate B)

1. The project buffer is calculated by removing the slack or buffer from each individual task and aggregating it into the project buffer.
2. We watched and managed the project buffer like a HAWK!

 What’s the point?

1. Task variability is protected by an aggregated buffer. The project buffer is divided into three sections so that the project team can measure when to relax, when to plan and when to act on our plan to recover the project.

1. Buffer Management provides better visibility into how the project team will us the slack or buffer in the project. In critical path management, project slack is distributed within each task which normally is used by the project team to accomplish other tasks until the current task has to be delivered, this is called student syndrome. This usually results in a misuse of the project’s buffer because the buffer is not visible at the project level but only within each task.

Your Attitude Makes the Difference: Kindness with Competence

“It’s not what you do once in a while; it’s what you do day in and day out that makes the difference.” Jenny Craig

He was known for making a difference. One of his favorite sayings was “Digging for gold is more important than the gold itself; that's why I say let's play two.” 

Who was Ernie Banks?

Banks, born in 1931 as the oldest son of 12 children, grew up in Dallas, TX. His father worked in the cotton fields earning $10 a day. Ernie was a keen observer during his early childhood, watching and learning from the older kids as they played baseball. Banks quickly learned as a young man that he could make everyone around him smile and a lot more comfortable by how he managed his attitude. He focused his energy on his circle of influence instead of his areas of concern, which he had no control over.

What did developing his competence while growing his grateful and positive attitude achieve for Ernie?

·He was signed by the Chicago Cubs when he was 22 years old.

·He hit a home-run his first time at bat in the major leagues.

·He was the first Negro player on the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

·He was the ninth player in the history of the game to reach 500 home runs and ended his career with 512.

·He won two MVP awards, one in 1958 and the other in 1959

·He was chosen to be on the National League All Star team for 11 years.

·He was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977

    What can we learn from Ernie Banks?

1.    Take responsibility for your attitude — create your own weather. (To learn more about taking charge of your attitude, read John Maxwell's book, “The Difference Maker: Making Your Attitude Your Greatest Asset.”)

2.    Set the tempo; be a trend-setter.

3.    Be loyal to your friends, family members, colleagues, and organization. (Ernie remained with the Chicago Cubs for 19 seasons.)

4.    Focus on your circle of influence and not your areas of concern over which you have no control.

5.    Take responsibility for your education and learning goals.

6.    Learn to excel despite the political or social pressures or obstacles you'll face.

7.    Strive to stay humble and grateful; no one is a self-made person.

a.    (Ernie Banks understood he was blessed; between games he would walk through the poor neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago to remind himself of other people's lives.)

8.    Give back and mentor someone less fortunate. (Ernie visited and supported little league teams in Illinois.)

Are you taking responsibility for your attitude and competence development?

One of the key attributes of being a high-performing project manager is taking ownership and responsibility for your project's outcome. Leaders take responsibility for both their results and outcome.

Aligning Strategy With Culture

Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” The goal of strategy and culture alignment is to keep the organization working together like a well-oiled machine that’s ready for a cross-country excursion. What changes does your organization need to make to align its strategy, culture, and talent?