July Poll Results

What criteria does your company use to reward project completion?

A. On time, on budget, within scope: 19.62 % (41)
B. Customer satisfaction, high quality 27.04 % (43)
C. My organization does not offer project rewards 54.09 % (86)

Total votes: 209

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August's poll question is: How many of you use one of the Quality Management Methodologies below in your company:

A. Six Sigma
B. ISO 9000
C. TQM
D. Others
E. We do not use a QM-Methodology

If you have not already done so, please stop by allPM.com and add
your opinion today.

Project Management Poetry, by Mary Glodt

A Lifelong Project

If a project has a beginning
And a project has an end,
Then our whole life is a project
Now, isn't it my friend.

Do we spend time in planning
And assessing all resources?
Do we analyze the risks
And prepare contingent courses?

If we learn along the way,
And appreciate the growing,
We will surely complete our "project"
With our joy and successes showing!

© 2004 allPM.com

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Mary L. Glodt is a Finance Analyst and Subcontract Coordinator for SAIC, the prime contractor for the USGS EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. EDC has over 40 large projects (both within the United States and around the world), but Mary considers a lot of her work to be "mini-projects", so she uses Project Management principles and techniques on an almost daily basis. A year ago she completed her MBA with a concentration in Project Management, but she says she is still learning new things about PM, especially from allPM Today!

allPM Today Tips Feature
Top Ten Practical Tips in MS Project 2000, by Eric Uyttewaal, PMP

A shared resource pool allows you to make the total workloads of your resources visible that are involved in multiple projects. A shared resource pool is a regular project file that has only resources. You can hook the shared resource pool up to your project file by choosing Tools, Resources, Share Resources . You will need a shared resource pool if you plan to implement Project Central such that the resources will see all tasks from different projects and project managers in their Timesheet . Enter the resources once in a shared resource pool and use the pool from then on.

SUBMITTED TO MPUG, April 2002

Eric Uyttewaal (BS, Engineering; MS, Business Administration; PMP) is Director, Microsoft Project Certification, International Institute for Learning, Inc and author of "Dynamic Scheduling with Microsoft Project ® 2000." This tip appeared in the 4/2002 MPUG eZine. 

Theme of the Month: Project Quality Management, by Matthias Groh, Senior Consultant Six Sigma, International Institute for Learning

With the popularity of company wide Quality Management Initiatives, some of the newest conference room debates focus on whether Quality Management a part of Project Management or Project Management a part of Quality Management. The answer is "Yes" to both questions. These two methodologies go together as much as chickens and eggs.

Quality Management is a part of Project Management

Project Quality Management is one of the 9 PM knowledge areas in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) of the Project Management Institute ®. However, when it comes to utilizing the tools and techniques of QM it becomes like the spare tire of your car. You'll use it only when forced. That is because Quality Management is usually based on measuring and improving processes with lots of repetition to learn from past performance, to control current performance and to improve performance in the future. Since the nature of a project is to be special and is rarely repeated in the same way, it looks like Quality Management is not applicable. But these are the same arguments used a couple of years ago to say that Quality Management Programs like Six Sigma are not applicable to the Service Industry: Service companies argued that every client is different and their processes are not like manufacturing where you produce the same part thousands or millions of times. Now Six Sigma is booming within service companies in Financial Services, Health Care and Government offices, to name just a few.

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Matthias Groh (MBB, MS) is a Senior Six Sigma Consultant for International Institute for Learning. He is a specialist in Applied Statistics and Change Management and has trained, coached and implemented several Six Sigma programs. Matthias has performance improvement experience in a wide range of industries including: transportation, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and health care. Matthias.Groh@iil.com

Change Management: Training and Documentation, by Russell Roman

With business change, there will always be new systems, products/services and/or skills that employees will need to master. Also, employees need to understand the benefits of change for the company and the all important "what's in it for me," WIIFM. Training and documentation are critical change management activities to accelerate employee acceptance, continuity, cost savings and productivity improvements. In my last article, I provided an overview of change management as well as how to incorporate it into a project plan. In this article, I will explain how to project manage training and documentation. Here is a four phase approach:

Plan

In this phase, you will develop your training and documentation plans. These plans provide a road map for the entire project. In the training plan, a curriculum map shows the sequencing of the courses as well as the timing and delivery method. Training delivery method could be instructor-led or computer based training (PC or web). The training materials are identified (e.g. instructor guide, job aids, simulation software or database). Performance goals and learning objectives are developed for all courses.

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Russell Roman is president of Clifton Heights Associates, a consulting firm that focuses on project management to successfully deliver projects on-time and on-budget. In his career, he has managed projects that generated over $100 million in revenues and were used by over 7 million consumers and 25,000 customer end-users. Mr. Roman holds a BS Degree in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. He can be contacted at russroman@yahoo.com.

The Project Manager's Likeability Factor, by Dr. Al Zeitoun, PMP
CPO - International Institute for Learning, Inc.

Introduction

Project managers create a difference in today's enterprises. It is exciting to wonder who that person is that we call the project manger. Project management, in the present era, is changing from the view of the accidental career that it used to be. With many organizations today doing project work more than at any other time in the past, sometimes these organizations miss the important realization that the success of their project managers is an indication of how successful organizations can be. The key focus of this paper is to illustrate that the success of the project manager is closely associated with his/her likeability factor.

Tim Sanders, with Yahoo, discusses the likeability factor in an article published by e Marketer on January 30, 2004 (Berkowitz, 2004). Many of today's organizations lack the understanding of the importance of this new factor or what is called the Likeability Quotient (LQ). This "LQ" is far more valuable in getting projects successfully completed than the IQ or even the Emotional Quotient (EQ) that we have heard so much about in recent years. However, the EQ works well as the foundation to set the project manager's readiness for the right dose of LQ to enable success.

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Al Zeitoun, (Ph.D., MS, and PMP) is Chief Projects Officer for International Institute for Learning, Inc. Dr. Zeitoun's extensive global project management experience encompasses engineering, construction, manufacturing, and product development. He received a research excellence award in 1992 and continues to have his papers published and presented at various PMI global conferences. He has led and chartered PMI chapters and SIGs worldwide and is on the board of the Global Accreditation Council of PMI.

Positive Leadership In Project Management - When Leaders Need Leadership, by Frank P. Saladis PMP

There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that accepting a position as a project manager also means accepting the responsibilities of a leader. There are expectations associated with the position and the person accepting the assignment must be aware of the demands at the personal as well as professional level. Of course, the type of project, the company, the organizational structure and other factors impact the role of the project manager, but there will always be some element of leadership in the position.

The PMBOK Guide ® 2000 edition defines leadership as"establishing direction, aligning people, motivating and inspiring people to overcome political, bureaucratic, and resource barriers." It falls under the heading of Key Management Skills and we all would like to believe that leaders possess the skills needed to achieve success for the team. People in general expect leadership from leaders. Leaders set the pace, they keep things moving and they become a source of energy. A strong leader creates a feeling of confidence among project team members and keeps the team working together, especially through difficult times. People don't expect to see a leader falter in any way.

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Frank P. Saladis (PMP) is Senior Consultant with International Institute for Learning, Inc. He has been involved in the development of standardized Project Management Guidelines (PMGs) for the AT&T Corporate Information Technology Services (Corporate ITS) organization and is the author of the Project Evaluation Review Process (PERP). He is the former President of the NYC PMI Chapter.

Risk Doctor Briefing-Describing Risk : How much Detail?
by Dr. David Hillson, PMP FAPM

Risks can be identified and described at different levels of detail, and there can be considerable variation between different projects or organisations.

Some projects identify just a small number of high-level risks, while others have many hundreds or even thousands of detailed risks. A generalised or high-level description of risk can make it difficult to develop responses and assign ownership, while describing risks in a lot of detail can create a great deal of work. How can we determine the correct level of detail? There are three components to consider : management, ownership, and reporting.

1. Firstly, risks should be described at the level to which they are going to be managed. A high-level description such as "Something unexpected might happen during the project" is quite useless as no management action is possible at this level. Too much detail is also pointless, for example "George Smith the junior system architect may break his right leg at the football match next Tuesday night and not be able to finish the Phase 2.4.2 detailed
design drawings." The risk might be better stated as "Key staff may not be available when required to complete the system design." At this level the risk can be managed proactively, with careful resource planning, use of shadowing or deputies, and ensuring that key tasks are not assigned to one person. Of course it is true that some risks will need to be managed at a detailed level while others can be addressed at a higher level.

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© 2004 Dr. David Hillson PMP FAPM, david@risk-doctor.com

Dr. David Hillson (PMP, FAPM, FIRM, MCMI) is an international risk management consultant, and Director of Risk Doctor & Partners ( www.risk-doctor.com ). His speciality is risk technology transfer, assisting organisations to develop in-house risk processes, and he is a popular conference speaker and author on risk, winning several awards for his papers. He is recognised internationally as a leading thinker and practitioner in risk management, and his recent emphasis has been the inclusion of proactive opportunity management within the risk process, which is the topic of his latest book "Effective opportunity management : Exploiting positive risk", published in 2003 by Dekker of New York.

David is an active member of the global Project Management Institute (PMI) and was a founder member of its Risk Management Specific Interest Group. He received the 2002 PMI Distinguished Contribution Award for his work in developing risk management over many years. He is a Fellow of the UK Association for Project Management (APM) and a Fellow of the UK Institute of Risk Management (IRM), as well as being a member of the Chartered Management Institute.

Communications in the Workplace - "Buzzwords," by Kate McLeod, PMP

Several months ago I was invited, with all the other managers in my organization, to a two-day conference where senior management was to explain the vision and coming changes within the organization.

I was struck by the considerable use of buzzwords by the speakers. It got to the point where I started making a list of all the buzzwords that I was hearing. I have over 60 items on my list, which provides a high level of entertainment value for my colleagues. Here are some of my favourites:

• Foundational enabler
• Consolidated view
• Integration hub
• Change agenda
• Legacy portfolio analysis
• Internal constituencies
• Significant life event
• Gap analysis
• Internal reconciliation process
• Telephony preparedness
• Broader collaboration of delivery models
• Evolutionary approach to revolutionary change
• Justify the balance
• Future competencies
• Thought Manager

Let's just review a few of those for a moment and dissect what they really mean in everyday English:

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Kate McLeod (PMP) is currently working as an Information Technology Project Manager for the Canadian Federal Government. She is a graduate of York University and also has college diplomas in Web programming and Project Management. She received her PMP designation in 2002. Kate lives in suburban Ottawa , Ontario with her husband Brian, two children ages 9 and 10, and two cats. She hopes that when she retires it will be to a place that is warm in the winter.

Work Breakdown Structure: The Swiss Army Knife of Project Management, By Eoin Callan (MBA, PMP)

Try to name one project you've ever worked on that did not use a Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS. If you can even think of a single project where you did not use a WBS, chances are that you simply did not document the WBS. Simply put, the WBS is a project management cornerstone present on every project.

What is it? PMI defines the WBS as a deliverable oriented grouping of project components, but that helps little for someone who's never put one together before. Imagine that the WBS is an organigramme, or org chart, of what is in scope for the project. In other words, imagine a company org chart that shows a CEO who has VP direct reports, the VPs have Directors who report to them, Directors have Managers under them and Managers have Non-executive Employees slotted beneath them. Now replace the people in the chart with chunks of the project and you've got a WBS.

WBS generation is all about the vertical dissection of the features, functions and effort of the product as well as the administration of project. For example, picture a car before you (better yet, imagine it's a 1965 Ford Mustang). The car as a whole would be the root of the WBS, the CEO in the example above. The car can be described in terms of the functions of what it can do (transportation, locomotion, storage, power). It can be described in terms of the features of how it can do what it can do (bucket seats, transmission, trunk, engine). Building those features requires effort and managing that effort requires disciplined administration. The documented WBS can help keep track of all that.

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Eoin Callan (MBA, PMP) has over 15 years of practical application of disciplined project management. His business experience includes varied industrial expertise such as call centers large and small, financial services firms, direct mail efforts, pharmaceutical companies, software manufacturers, market research ventures, medical research, journalism/public relations and training.