Just a heads up that I’m attending the virtual PMXPO 2008 right now.  It is much cooler than I thought it would be.  It’s just like being at a conference without all the hassles of travel and that annyoing thing called walking between sessions and booths!

Right now I’m listening to the keynote speaker and there are several more sessions coming throughout the day.  I don’t think it’s too late to sign up so just go to http://events.unisfair.com/rt/pmexpo and sign up now.  I’ll have more details on what I liked about it later.

In case you missed it, registration for OpenWorld 2008 - the premiere event for anything related to Oracle each year - is now open.  I happened to be at our HQ the last couple of weeks and got to scout out a possible location for our annual Projects party, typically held on the Tuesday night of OOW.

I can’t say where the location is of course, but I wanted to leave you with a little taste of what the view COULD look like if we go with this spot.

On the Baseline site recently there was an article posted about the recurring theme of IT projects running chronically late.  The title of the article is 8 Ways to Save Your Next Project.

Here I’m taking that article and giving it an Oracle spin!

1. Get your head out of the software

Most project managers spend too much time in their project-planning applications and not enough time doing the briefing and communicating for which they are solely responsible. You should be spending the bulk of your time talking to and corresponding with project constituents – your team, the stakeholders, vendors, consultants and key end-users. The “soft” skill of communication is integral to project success.

Oracle Spin: Totally agree!  Our Project Collaboration module pushes the task of tracking progress and creating issues and managing documents and deliverables to your team members.  Why have the PM have to ask for status updates and then enter those when it’s best done if the hands of the task owners?

 2. Plan and define as much as possible—but don’t go overboard

A key component of project management is the thorough and meticulous planning of every aspect of a project, but a perfectionist could spend all his or her time in the planning stage. There’s no way to anticipate every variable so at some point, you have to pull the trigger.

Project managers are increasingly using rapid project deployments and iterative models that have been successful in the software development world. These models are based on the principle that in some ways it’s better to start the project and see what you’re up against.

Oracle Spin: Our project creation templates take the pain out of making new projects!  Why create a project from scratch when you already know 80% of what you want it to look like because you’re doing the same thing over and over?  From pre-defined templates with most of your relevant information included, to actually choosing a past project to copy from to build your new project, we’ve got you covered when it comes to saving time setting up your details.

3. Manage scope creep—for real

Like a turkey on Thanksgiving, you can rely on the fact that the project you think you’re heading for may bare only a passing resemblance to the one you end up with. With the increasing complexity of data centers and the Pandora’s box of surprises once you get under the hood, it’s advisable to game out and document the potential sources of scope creep. For instance, the team may want to take a different approach than planned, management may want to change, add or expand the deliverables or you may uncover a technical aspect you didn’t know existed.

Oracle Spin: Our Change and Issue management feature helps you keep on top of those constant changes that occur in your projects and even lets you see the impact of accepting a change request before you approve it!

4. Don’t be lazy with risk management

If you need 200 servers delivered at the same time for a worldwide mail server upgrade, it’s not enough to know what the risk is if the vendor doesn’t deliver. It’s time to manage the risk by deciding ahead of time that, as reliable as your vendor has been in the past, there’s little margin for error. Going with two or three vendors might be more complicated but in the end, it may save your project if only 20 severs aren’t delivered on time instead of 200.

Oracle Spin: Nothing to spin here since we believe Risk Management is something every good PM will do - in this scenario it’s a business decision that just might make sense for the given project.  If you want, you can model several different versions of a budget under various costing scenarios by different vendors so you can see what cost impact that redundancy will have.

5. Get a grip on expectations

Ask vendors and consultants for the best, most likely and worst-case scenarios and then use your own resources to calculate the aggregated risk so you can determine the probable outcome.

There are risk management software applications that can help you do the job. There’s no way to guarantee that a project won’t be delayed or go over budget, but taking off the rose-colored glasses will reduce the likelihood of extreme variances.

Oracle Spin: Check out one of our newest acquisitions called Crystal Ball - this best of breed predictive modelling software suite of analytical tools includes Monte Carlo simulation, optimization, and forecasting.

6. Govern with strength

Even with all the good work you did up front, problems and roadblocks will surely arise. Don’t blow it when it comes to actually addressing the problems. To the degree you can, refer to the approaches you documented and discussed with your team. If planned properly, your team should be able to tackle the problems early on before they become major hindrances.

Depending on the event, governance may include gaining approval from management to sign off on project changes that effect the project budget or time frame beyond a certain point. For example, if changing direction means the project will cost 10 percent more and take 10 percent longer, it may be time to bring senior stakeholders into the loop.

Oracle Spin: Again I refer to our Issue and Change Management features of our product which will help you assess the impact of unplanned project bumps.  If you’ve tracked an Issue (and if you’re using Project Collaboration, any team member can create an Issue!) and now it’s time has come, you can easily roll it over into a change request and route it for approval.

If you need enterprise strength Governance, check out our complete solution here!

7. Prepare for intervention

If your approaches are better in theory than in practice, it might be time to intervene with the project plan. Create an intervention plan before the project starts and communicate the plan to everyone directly and indirectly involved. The plan may include steps to take when adding resources, for assessing project-management practices and even changing the project leader.

Oracle Spin: Oracle Projects allows you to store and share documents with all of your team members to keep track of important items such as the Charter, Statement of Work, Risk and Compliance Procedures, templates etc.

8. Drive behavior to use the technology

Whatever you do, don’t rest on your laurels when the technical aspects of the project are completed. Creating a plan to ensure that people actually use the technology you just spent 18 months implementing will serve you well. If you and your organization want to see your expected return on investment, make sure you have a hand in educating and training users.

Oracle Spin: And if you want to see that your project ROI has been positive, be sure to use our Earned Value reports and calculations as you progress through the project.  So even if the end users decide they really didn’t need that whizz-bang new application that you built, at least you’ll make sure you were managing your project to expectations and within budget and you’ll have a great story as you’re looking for your next project to run!

Hear Oracle President Charles Phillips’ April 14 keynote from COLLABORATE08 as he reviews the path Oracle has taken and previews the road to come in the Applications Unlimited journey, with an update on Oracle’s strategy to enable business transformation with complete, open, and integrated enterprise software. Hear details on today’s available integrations, SOA integration, advances in Enteprise Performance Management, what’s new in Business Intelligence, Enterprise 2.0, and Oracle WebCenter.

Charles Phillips at Collab ‘08

A newly released whitepaper focuses on the common pitfalls that lead to project failures.  Written by our Director of PPM Product Marketing, Kazim Isfahani, the whitepaper entitled Why Projects Fail: Avoiding the Classic Pitfalls discusses the core reasons for project failure, and goes one step further by proposing recommendations for avoiding the risks and pitfalls.

This is a product agnostic look into whether project failures are considered normal these days given the high rates of failure, but also addresses six common reasons why projects are doomed to fail before they even start.

Mr. Isfahani will be speaking on Project Management Best Practices at Collaborate 08 in Denver this month.  See the time and a synopsis of that session below.

Hi all,

OAUG Collaborate is in Denver this year from April 13-17th.  I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that the Oracle Projects team will be there this year with a few presentations.

The first one is called Project Management Best Practices: Achieving Business Results and is on Tuesday April 15th at 1.45 pm.  The synopsis is:

This session will deliver key insight into the industry-leading practices companies have adopted in managing their project-driven organizations. These practices are based on the real-world experiences of thousands of customers of Oracle’s PPM solutions, across industries, managing and governing their project management office (PMO), and driving corporate change initiatives. The speakers will identify challenges and recommend best business practices to address the challenges, while providing guidance in making the critical decisions involved in implementing software solutions. Finally, the audience will learn how to address these challenges with Oracle’s PPM solutions.

The second session we’re presenting is called Managing the Project Portfolio: Delivering Balance, Alignment, and Optimization. This session is on Wednesday April 16th at 11 am. Here is the synopsis for that session:

Getting the most out of available resources and assets while ensuring that the “right” programs and projects are initiated is a critical business requirement across industry. This session will detail how Oracle’s Portfolio Analysis tool can help companies align their portfolios of projects and programs with their organizational objectives by taking advantage of standard criteria, weighted scoring and ranking, and what-if portfolio analyses.

Finally, our third session is titled Program Management with EBS Projects Integration to Microsoft Project Server and Primavera.  This session is also on Wednesday at 4.30 pm.  This is the abstract for that session:

Running a successful project management office requires both strategic management and tactical scheduling. Learn how Oracle and Impress Software are simplifying this challenge by integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Projects with Microsoft Project Server for project scheduling. Regardless of your industry, if you have wondered how to reconcile executives’ demands for analysis and project managers’ need for detail, make time to attend this session.

Hope to see you there!

Just read an interesting article over at PM World Today,called “Innovation and the Curse of Knowledge”.  It deals with the topic of how so many products are over-engineered because the people that design and build them are intimately familiar with so many of the features they jam in, they assume the end users will want them as well.  Using a TV remote as an example the author, R. Max Wideman, suggests many of the buttons are on there because the engineer knew what they did, but the typical user probably won’t have a clue.

The other interesting commentary in the article suggests that intimate knowledge of a product stifles innovation.  This is very true with engineers and product managers and really anyone that follows a typical business process over and over during their daily work routine.  I remember years back hearing Tom Peter’s make a comment that many companies lament when a person retires from say the AP department.  “There goes 25 years of experience out the door”, they’ll say.  Tom’s take on that was “No, there goes 1 years experience repeated 25 times!”  Everyone tends to fall into that trap where it’s often easier to just do things the way they’ve always been done than to continually push for innovative ways to improve the process or product.

We’re no stranger to this phenomena ourselves with our products.  We do hear from customers that some of our pages and processes are a little more cumbersome than they need be, and we love to listen to this feedback.  When we’re designing a page it’s easy to fall into the trap of putting multiple buttons and links on it so the users can do whatever they want, whenever they want and from wherever they want.  With ultimate flexibility though comes complexity and often confusion.

Our goal is always to improve upon our processes and streamline whatever we can.  We want to make a typical process much easier to complete - less pages, less clicks, less time - while at the same time offering the ability to branch out when the non-typical process is called for.  So gathering that feedback from our customers is critical to the process of learning what is it that people use versus what’s superfluous on a page.  That’s the kind of experience you can’t gather from someone working 15 years with the same product.

With apologies to Justin Timberlake, I read with interest an article in CIO Insight today about a blogosphere debate over the merits of ’sexiness’ in enterprise software.

It seems that Bill Gates started the maelstrom by insinuating consumer technologies got more than their fair share of press coverage versus the enterprise offerings.   Thus a blog dispute was born by some heavyweights about whether or not enterprise software needs to be friendly, let alone sexy.  I have trouble with both of those terms since they’re pretty nebulous.

When they say friendly I guess they mean intuitive, logical and allows the end user to complete their tasks in minimal clicks.  Or does it mean providing context sensitive information so the user is presented what they need to know or task specific help at the time they’re following through a business process?  Maybe it’s all of the above.  But ’sexy’?  What is that in relation to enterprise software?

The author of the CIO article tries to define it later on when he states ‘Usability is a measure of sexiness…’  I can live with that although I think usability is also an overused term.  If end users tell me they want better usability and provide no more details, then I’d have a hard time guessing what specifically they want.  Faster processing?  Different colors?  Less clicks?  Or perhaps more options to drill down into information?  Any of those items could fall under usability.

Finally, I find it very ironic that CIO Insight is covering this topic on sexy software when they themselves have one of the ugliest websites around.  They have more junk all over their page than I certainly prefer and a lot of it is advertising.  Also, where can readers leave comments and see what other readers have posted to spur some lively debates on the topic?  Oh yeah, you can email their editors and they’ll be sure to get back to you. 

 Not very sexy if you ask me.

Here is the headline of a recent CIOinsight.com article: “Collaboration: The $588 Billion Problem.  The tag-line reads “E-mail, instant messaging, and blog reading are costing the economy billions in lost productivity, new research finds.”   The report from Basex further states that information overload is the “Problem of the Year” for 2008.

Doom and gloom baby, that always sells reports.  They know CIO’s will snap up that research and be able to kill all those little pet projects people are working on under the guise of ‘lost productivity enablers.’

Do you really think that the new collaboration tools we use everyday are costing us that kind of money in lost productivity?  I don’t think it’s very useful to say what is lost in productivity without also netting it out against what is gained.  Who wants to go back to a time before there was IM, blogs, wikis, etc.  Let’s look at some of the assumptions in the article.

The costs that authors Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes computed claims that interruptions from phone calls, e-mails and instant messages eat up 28 percent of a knowledge worker’s work day, resulting in 28 billion hours of lost productivity a year.   Now my issue with this statement is what do they think is the alternative?  How many knowledge workers could even complete their job without interacting with co-workers?  Is it unreasonable to think that about one quarter of your work day is spent answering and requesting information from co-workers?  I don’t think so. 

Imagine there were no collaborative tools and you had to talk to co-workers the old-fashioned way; you had to actually get up and go to their desk or pick up the phone.  Is that not a disruption of their time?  If you decided to go see them later and put off what you were working on in the meantime, then wouldn’t that also be considered lost productivity on your part?  If you could get the answer you need in a relatively short time-frame by pinging someone with an IM or email it may be a disruption on your co-workers part, but it also vastly increases your productivity by keeping you progressing your task.  Even better you might find what you need posted on an internal wiki, which means you’ve leveraged the effort someone took to publish that information and no one gets distracted and your work gets done with minimal detours.

One point they make that I will wholeheartedly support is the plea to not send out a reply all when your only comment is “Thanks!”.  I’ll add my favorite pet peeve to their list - stop with the reply all when you’re just pointing out “Why are you emailing this d-list?  You’ve got the wrong group!” 

Information overload isn’t a new problem.  It’s been talked about for years now but we also have to remember that we have a lot better tools to manage the vast amounts of data we need to keep tabs on.  First of all, search technology has advanced to the point that finding information buried in all of your emails and files is as simple as running a web-search.  Other collaborative tools like wikis and tagging help keep information much more accessible as well.  Remember when all your project files were stored in folders on the server but you had to remember which of the hundreds of folders it was in?  “Now were those functional specs stored under the folders by phase of the project, or by the author, or was it placed in that miscellaneous FDD folder?”  Probably yes to all three of those options because everyone did it their own way either deliberately or by accident.  Now even if someone misfiles a document it’s not lost or subject to a 15 minute hide and seek game to retrieve it.

After reading this article and all of the suggested behaviour changes they feel are contributing to this so called ‘lost productivity’ I can’t help but feel like this article is more about how to communicate effectively using collaborative tools and not so much about how we’re losing billions of dollars in productivity thanks to the rise or abuse of them.  Could proper use help increase productivity even more?  You bet, but I still don’t see how it’s actually costing us.

So, is information overload the “Problem of the Year” for 2008?  I like to read the WSJ every morning with my coffee, and judging the number of doom and gloom articles that seem to multiply each day, if this is our biggest problem of the year I’d be mighty surprised and relieved at the same time.

I apologize for this site being on hiatus for so long.  There’s a hundred excuses but I’m sure none of them sound very good when put down in print so let me just say that I will renew my efforts to keep it up to date.  I hope everyone out there had a fantastic holiday season and is looking forward to 2008. 

The world of Projects is always interesting and full of highs and lows.  I was reminded of the lows on New Year’s Eve when I received a call from an old friend, Mark, who still project manages PeopleSoft implementations for a large consulting firm.  

Mark lives in Madison, Wisconsin but his current client is in Raleigh, North Carolina.  When I got his call at my home around 9pm on New Year’s Eve we both had a good laugh.  He said that he could tell I had a wife and kids because I was home at 9pm on New Year’s.  I laughed and said I knew he’s a project manager because he was at his client’s office far away from home on New Year’s Eve!

Often the sacrifices that come from working those crazy times of the year to minimize the daily disruptions of co-workers goes unnoticed.  It takes that special breed to want to give up so much personal time to make sure a project runs as smooth as possible.

So lift up your coffee mug to those unsung heroes that toil on while you’re either snug at home watching the re-invention of Dick Clark (is it just me or does Carson Daly really, really look like a young Dick?), or catching a movie like we did (Transformers actually wasn’t as bad as I thought once you give up your grip on reality), and let’s salute the Project Managers (and all those that do the task work under them but do it for double time and a half)!