Partial Listing of Upcoming Project Management Events
For a complete listing of events, please visit the Online Calendar at allPM.com

Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management Solution
Feb. 6, 2003 9-11:30 PT
Irvine, CA
http://www.microsoft.com/usa/government
and search for event ID 1032225848

Microsoft Project 2002 Overview -FREE 1-hour webinar
February 7, 2003 3-4pm ET
http://www.iil.com/free_resources/free_webinars.asp

Planning for PMP® Certification FREE 1-hour webinar
February 5, 2003 3-4am PM ET, February 25, 10-11am 2003
http://www.iil.com/free_resources/free_webinars.asp


Project Management Maturity Assessment FREE 1-hour webinar
February 27, 2003 10-11am ET
http://www.iil.com/free_resources/free_webinars.asp

Free Online Webinar: Powerful, Agile Charting, Graphing and Reporting
February 19th, 1:00-2:00pm EST, online with Distributive Software
http://www.distributive.com

January Poll Results

January's poll question: What is the most significant benefit of creating and maintaining a Project Management Office?

Maintain management support 34.15 % (14)
Measure and report improved project performance 14.63 % (6)
Obtain buy-in from functional organizations 36.59 % (15)
Develop an enterprise wide methodology 14.63 % (6)

As shown by the responses, "to obtaining buy-in from functional organizations" was voted the most significant benefit of the PMO followed very closely by "to maintain management support."

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February's poll question: What is the greatest obstacle to communication in your firm?

A. Employees' personal issues
B. Frivolous e-mail
C. Company hierarchy
D. Technology

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

Column: Positive Leadership in Project Management- First in a Series, by Frank Saladis, PMP

In a class I was teaching recently, the subject of Communications Management was the focus of discussion. We, as project managers, all know how important effective communication is to project success but we may not realize how important it is to "People Success." During the class, one participant offered this observation: The problem with management is that they are more busy listening to what they are about to say, than what is being said to them. I don't believe this situation is limited to managers. Everyone has been guilty of this particular behavior at one time or another. If we are not good listeners, how can we become good (or great) leaders?

Leadership is a combination of many qualities, and listening skills are only one component of a much larger and complex skill set but, if we are not listening, how will we know how much we have missed and how much of what we missed was truly important? I've asked project managers from several different disciplines to describe the characteristics of a leader and at or near the top of the list is the skill effective communicator. A major factor in effective and successful communication is the art of LISTENING. From this, one can conclude that the truly effective leader listens carefully to their teams, employees, families, and associates. Connecting communications to positive leadership comes down to the following description of active listening.

L-Like to listen
I- Ignore distractions
S- Summarize
T- Tame emotions
E- Encourage openness
N- NEED to listen
I- Inspire openness
N- Never interrupt
G- Generate conclusions

I don't have a source for this description but I carry it with me and share with as many people as possible. Of course, being a good listener is not the only skill required to become a great leader, but it certainly is important and worth the effort to master.

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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

Feature: "Ask the Expert"—Question of the Month, answered by George Pitagorsky, PMP

Question:
I am looking for audit process information with regard to review of projects once completed. I hope you can help.

Answer:
In general the process is to have a relatively objective party or small team facilitate the audit. Depending on the size and scope of the project and the nature of your organization these may be professional auditors using formal guidelines or people from other areas within the organization in a less formal process. The facilitators create an agenda for an interactive review session using a checklist and based on interviews with the project stakeholders and review of project records and results. The audit goal is to identify opportunities for process improvement and to communicate lessons learned. No blaming or finger pointing. Identify problems, their causes and possible solutions. Acknowledge the successes and effort. For a very formal audit process see IEEE Std 1028 Standard for Software Reviews via and Audits. You can use IS9001 (available from ASQ 1 800 248 1946). Also see www.dir.state.tx.us/eod/qa/evaluate/ for a more down to earth process description with checklists. Search Google for Post Project Review for a 10 page list of other process descriptions. IIL is one company that provides training and consulting services. Its experts facilitate project audits and reviews, project management processes, Project Management Office plans and operations.

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George Pitagorsky (PMP) is Senior Vice President of Program Development at IIL. He is listed in Who's Who as an expert in Quality Operations & Quality Improvement.

allPM Today Tips Feature
Top Ten Time-Savers in MS Project 2000, by Eric Uyttewaal, PMP

Tip #3:
1. Use Edit, Fill, Down for several purposes:
- To fill a series of cells with a value. You enter the value in the first cell and you select all the cells by dragging over them (you can even include summary task cells). Then choose Edit, Fill, Down.
- To fill a randomly selected cells with a value. You enter the value in the first cell and you select all the cells by holding down the CONTROL key and clicking the cells. Then choose Edit, Fill, Down.
- To fill an entire column with a value. You enter the value in the first cell. (If it is a summary task, it may be a calculated field in which you can't set the value. You could insert a detail task above it and delete it afterwards). You click on the column heading and you choose Edit, Fill, Down.
BTW The shortcut key for Fill Down is CONTROL + D.

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Eric Uyttewaal (BS, Engineering; MS, Business Administration; PMP) is Director, Microsoft Project Certificaton, International Institute for Learning, Inc and author of "Dynamic Scheduling with Microsoft Project ® 2000." This tip appeared in the 10/2000 MPUG eZine. 

Column: Project Management Six Best Practices, a series by Dr. Harold Kerzner. This month -- Best Practice #5 -"The Project Office/Center of Excellence," by Dr. Harold Kerzner

Best Practice Makes Perfect

In this series World-renowned project management expert Harold Kerzner discusses six of the best practices in project management that are now being implemented. This month we are featuring the third best practice "Strategic Planning for Project Management." All of the best practices are related either directly or indirectly to the process of educating project personnel. Best practices are like pieces of a puzzle, when assembled, the picture can be a thing of beauty. And often, the greater the number of pieces in the puzzle, the more beautiful the final assembled picture.

Best Practice #5- The Project Office/Center of Excellence

Strategic planning is an activity done by senior managers rather than for them. If strategic planning for project management is taking place, then it must exist at the senior levels of management. Within the last few years, there has been a rapid growth in the creation of a project office (PO) or center for excellence in project management. These offices historically functioned as a senior level, project management strategic planning group; that had at its focus the creation, implementation and enhancements of a project management methodology.

Today, these groups have had their responsibilities expanded as the result of best practices. The new, added responsibilities include:

• Benchmarking the best practices of other organizations irrespective of industry
• Implementing selected best practices into the existing methodology
  Providing organizational mentorship for inexperienced project managers
• Assisting the Human Resources Department with the development of a project management career path
• Providing a list of desired project management competencies to the training personnel for customization of project management training programs
• Establishing a repository of lesions learned files on completed projects
• Monitoring and evaluating new project management tools entering the marketplace
• Assisting senior management in developing a corporate-wide capacity planning model

The last bullet regarding a corporate-wide model requires further comment. Up until a few years ago, companies were struggling with how to determine how many new projects should be undertaken within the constraint of the existing manpower base. Techniques such as Eli Goldratt's "Critical Chain" theory have been extremely helpful. Project offices are now formulating capacity planning models which roll up all projects into one master manpower plan to assist senior management in the timing and selection of new projects. This is being done through an intranet-based status updating approach performed either daily or weekly. Managers anywhere in the world can look at their corporate intranet and see the status of individual projects or groups of projects.

Stay tuned for next month's featured best practice "Return on Investment on Training Dollars"

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Article reprinted with permission from PM Review Magazine, November 2001. For information about PM Review magazine, please email: info@richardlangrish.com or call +44 (0) 20 7434 1159

Harold Kerzner (Ph.D., MS, Engineering and MBA) is Senior Executive Director with International Institute for Learning, Inc. and Professor of Systems Management at Baldwin-Wallace College. He is an expert in the areas of project management, total quality management, and strategic planning. Dr. Kerzner is the author of the best-selling textbooks: Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling, now in its eighth edition, In Search of Excellence in Project Management, and Applied Project Management: Best Pratices on Implementation.

Column: Grounds For Success
by Patrick O'Brien

England's premier soccer club only wanted to build a stadium, but Arsenal's plans have expanded to include a major urban redevelopment project. Patrick O'Brien reports.

Last season was one of Arsenal Football Club's most successful in its 116 year history. Ask supporters of the London soccer club what their favourite moment was, and they will probably single out Sylvain Wiltord's goal that finally wrested the national championship away from their arch-rivals Manchester United.

For Arsenal Director Ken Friar though, the highlight was a damp December evening at the local government town hall, when the council finally granted the club planning permission for a state-of-the-art new stadium.

Friar is overseeing the project to create what will be the finest football club stadium in Europe: a 60,000 seater stadium at Ashburton Grove, just a goal kick away from its Highbury, north London ground that has been its home since 1913.

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Patrick O'Brien is the editor of PM Review Magazine. For more information or to subscribe to PM Review, please visit their website at www.pmreviewmagazine.com

Column: Key People Skills For Virtual Project Managers
Dr. Ginger Levin and Dr. Parviz Rad

Effective and successful project managers and leaders must be extremely people oriented. They need to create an environment that is conducive to innovation, productivity, and high performance by using their human skills, along with their technical skills in areas such as scheduling, procurement, cost estimating and budgeting, monitoring and controlling, and risk management. Accordingly, they must maintain their technical and functional skills at the highest possible level, while enhancing their softer skills to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Such social skills take on greater importance in the virtual project environment where they need to facilitate and encourage successful interaction of an online project community. This virtual project environment is slowly becoming a reality of global projects, and it will only become more prevalent in the future. It represents a dramatic change in how we work on projects, and creates new challenges for all project professionals. This paper discusses five key people skills that are required of the virtual project manager: motivation, collaborative leadership, communication, commitment, and conflict resolution.

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Dr. Ginger Levin is a Project Management Consultant and President, GLH, Incorporated Lighthouse Point, Florida, USA

Dr. Parviz Rad is a Distinguished Service Professor and Director, Project Management Program Stevens Institute of Technology Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ, USA

The above article was published in the Proceedings of the International Project Management Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, September 25-27, 2002.

Column: Using Excel's Data Validation Feature
by Bob Umlas, MS MVP

A powerful feature of Microsoft Excel is Data Validation. It is a tool which enables you to ensure that the data entered by yourself of another is accurate. For example, you can use it to make sure that a date is within a certain time span or that the item entered is not a duplicate of another item already entered.

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Bob Umlas is is an Excel expert, author of more than 300 articles about EXCEL, and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1995.

Column: Portfolio Management for IT Projects
by Frank Saladis, PMP

A major challenge faced by IT project and program managers and, in many cases, the CIO or IT director is the need to establish a method for selecting, tracking, and controlling the projects within or assigned to the IT organization. Projects are started for lots of reasons. There are business needs, strategic goals, performance improvement objectives, new business ventures, internal infrastructure enhancements and many more reasons. The problem is, it's easy to lose track of the projects in progress and in many cases, why a project was started in the first place.

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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