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

Quality Improvement & Project Management FREE overview
March 6, 2003 10-11:00 ET
http://www.iil.com/free_resources/free_webinars.asp

FREE Programme Management Seminar
March 11, 2003
Edinburgh, UK
www.pm-group.co.uk/seminar

PM Maturity Assessment FREE Overview
March 11, 2003 10-11:00 ET
http://www.iil.com/free_resources/free_webinars.asp

Project Management Methodology FREE Overview
March 21, 2003 10-11:00 ET
http://www.iil.com/free_resources/free_webinars.asp

ProjectWorld Spring 2003
March, 26-27, 2003
http://www.imark.co.uk/pw

February Poll Results

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

Employee's personal issues 23.88 % (16)
Frivolous e-mail 10.45 % (7)
Company hierarchy 64.18 % (43)
Technology 1.49 % (1)

Total votes: 67

As shown by the responses, "Company hierarchy" seems to be the greatest obstacle to communication for most of the respondents.

James Ward, PMP wrote: "Lack of trust in one's superiors in the company hierarchy all but prohibits effective communication in most organizations"

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March's poll question: The most difficult aspect of cost control in my projects is:

A. predicting labor costs.
B. establishing overhead costs.
C. the cost accounting process.
D. monitoring indirect labor cost.

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

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

The Effective Project Team Leader

If you think about your past experiences as a project manager, team member, team leader or sponsor, can you remember an experience where you where put on the "spot" by someone who was unhappy with the results of a task or assignment? Being asked questions like, "Why wasn't that done?" or "Who told you to do that?" Why are you behind schedule?" Some people would call this "being read the riot act" or being put on the "carpet." How did you feel during that experience?

Now think about past situations where you have found yourself doing the same thing to a team member or direct report. What did you say to that person? Do you remember the look on his or her face? What about the look on your face? Now think about someone who you believe to be an effective leader. Does this person focus on the problems and negatives of the situation? More than likely the leader is asking questions that focus more on the positive side of the experience and asks questions that will help resolve the situation, identify some lessons learned and build confidence.

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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

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

Tip #4:
The View Bar often does not show all the views, so you have to make extra clicks. The view bar also takes up a lot of valuable screen space.

Getting rid of the View Bar by choosing View, View Bar can save time and space. With the view bar gone, you can now see the name of the view in the vertical blue bar on the left of your screen (be careful with your neck!). With a quick and easy right-click on that tall blue bar, you can switch between views. You can add any view to this pop-up menu by choosing View, More Views, selecting the view, clicking the button Edit and checking the option Show in Menu. To make the view appear in the right-click menu from now on, copy it back into the GLOBAL.MPT using the Tools, Organizer.

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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 1/2001 MPUG eZine. 

Column: Project Management Six Best Practices, a series by Dr. Harold Kerzner. This month -- Best Practice #6 -"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 sixth and final best practice "Return on Invesment on Training Dollars." 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 #6- Return on Investment on Training Dollars

Having shown the importance of training and education, executives must still be convinced that there exists a return on investment on project management training dollars. Perhaps the fastest way to demonstrate this is by looking at the management support costs for a project. Consider a company with a fully burdened labor rate of $100 per hour. Also, consider a labor-intensive project with 20,000 hours of labor excluding management support. Typically, management support is calculated at 12-15 percent of total labor. Using the high end of the range, 15 percent, the company would budget for 3000 hours of project management support time, or about $300,000.

If the training and education is done such that the partnership between the project and line managers improves, then the management support costs should be lower or less because of shared accountability. If the management support costs could be lowered to 10 percent, then this would result in a cost saving of $100,000, which is significantly more than what it would probably cost to train all of the line managers. This could easily have a long-term effect of saving an organization millions of dollars.

There are significantly more best practices than the six shown here. Further information can be obtained from education and training organizations.

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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: The Rise of Women in Project Management
by Patrick O'Brien

Though project management is still a male-dominated area, an increasing number of women are being drawn to the discipline. Patrick O'Brien reports.

As project management sprung from male-dominated industries such as oil and gas and construction, it is unsurprising that it has also suffered the same sort of gender bias.

Over the last decade, though, things have begun to change noticeably. A look around the ProjectWorld and Project Management Institute events last year confirmed that more and more women are attracted to the sector, especially as project management thinking expounds its benefits to a much more diverse set of industries than before.

In the US, PMI has had a Women in Project Management (WiPM) specific interest group running for 11 years. According to Kim Hinton - who is an active member of the group and a project manager at Merck & Co - WiPM's focus has changed. "The problems women used to face were about breaking into project management, but the last five years has moved the focus to the fact that we have arrived."

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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: Does H.R. Ignore HER?
by Nick Boothroyd

Nick Boothroyd assesses the gender imbalance in project management recruitment and talks to three project managers about how and why this should be addressed.

From my experience in recruiting project managers, it is obvious that although there are more women getting involved, project management is still dominated by men. But is this because of sexist attitudes, or simply because it has not been offered as an attractive career to women?

In my research for this article I spoke to a number of women who have all established themselves in project management, in spite rather than because of their gender. When asked about their early experiences in project management, some associated the predominantly male discipline with a real feeling of intimidation.

Exclusion from traditional male pursuits such as golf and 'the old boys' club' meant missing out on networking opportunities and not being privy to unscheduled changes to the project scope as discussed on the 19th green.

The issue of having to prove credibility and worth was a recurrent one yet these were seen more as challenges to be conquered rather than barriers to success. Wendy Bott, a freelance project and programme manager, was clear: "I was attracted to project management partly to prove to myself and others that I could succeed in a male dominated environment."

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Nick Boothroyd is a project and programme management recruitment consultant. He is director of Project IT Resource Ltd, UK.

Column: A Brief History of Planning Engineering
by Dr. Paul Spice

The Ancient History of Planning Engineering

From the earliest recorded times, and maybe even before that, groups of people have been organised to work together towards planned goals. Therefore planners must have co-ordinated and controlled their efforts to achieve desired outcomes.

Considerable planning and project control skills were used by the ancient Egyptians to build their pyramids, by the ancient Chinese to build the Great Wall of China, and by the Romans when building their roads, aqueducts and Hadrian's Wall. These huge time-enduring construction projects required large amounts of human effort with organisation, planning, control, and co-ordination. And all with no computers, no electric power, no long distance communications, and no modern materials handling equipment. In fact without even clocks!

Ancient Chinese philosophers, for example Mencius, (372-289 BCE), wrote about things that would now be described as "concept models" and "production management techniques". Plato, (427-347 BCE), recognising importance of the specialisation and division of labour, wrote, 'A man whose work is confined to a limited task must necessarily excel at it'

You may have to read the next sentence twice! The one single great pyramid at Giza contains more stone than all the churches in the whole of England. It would be a costly exercise and daunting thought for any modern construction company to even prepare a bid to build another Great Pyramid of Giza! We must not under-estimate the planning and management skills of the ancient Egyptians who completed these tasks.

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Dr. Paul Spice's early career began in internal combustion engine testing with United Technologies Inc (UTI). In Saudi Arabia Paul did construction and maintenance in Water, Oil and Gas installations until 1985. He then lived in Egypt, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Jordan developing bulk storage tank specialist repair and maintence techniques. Paul now lives in Singapore and works for Schering-Plough constructing a pharmaceutical plant. Paul is also the founder of the International Association of Planning Engineers.

Column: Including KANO in Your Project Planning
by John C. Goodpasture, PMP

Is Noriaki Kano on your project team? Perhaps not, unless your job is to lead projects that develop products and services for customers. But since 1984, Kano's ideas about how to provide a quality experience for customers and account for their wants and needs in product and service projects have been in the project manager's toolbox1. Kano analysis is no magic bullet, but it's a technique that can help. Latent (hidden) requirements may be discovered in the process of applying Kano analysis, or made more obvious. Requirements that are "ah-ha's" today, but may be taken for granted tomorrow, can be identified and prioritized. And, if your resources are limited as those in most projects are, Kano analysis can help set priorities about investment decisions and timelines for incorporating requirements into the baseline

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John Goodpasture, PMP is a program manager with broad practical experience in executive management, project management, system engineering, and operations analysis. As founder and chief consultant at Square Peg Consulting, he specializes in customized application and delivery of project management techniques, business process analysis, and education of project practitioners. John can be reached at 770 650 6405 or by email at john.g@sqpegconsulting.com, or on the web at www.sqpegconsulting.com

Column: Effective Communication- Whose Responsibility Is It Anyway? by Frank Saladis, PMP

Every project manager knows the importance of effective communication. PMP ® candidates are tested on it, project managers are challenged by it daily, and managers must master it if they are to become and remain successful in their positions. The "great communicator" is generally recognized by upper management and rewarded with greater levels of responsibility and leadership. Employees are more apt to trust a person who can communicate clearly, confidently, and credibly. A very basic, but critical skill for the effective project manager is the ability to communicate.

The communication process is well known by most project managers: A message is prepared and encoded. It is then transmitted to a receiver from the "region of experience" of the sender. It passes through the personality screen of the sender, into the "region of experience" of the receiver, through a perception screen, and then the message is decoded. A similar process is experienced as the receiver becomes the sender in the feedback loop. This sounds fairly straightforward and simple, but it is actually far from simple. There are numerous opportunities for the message to become distorted or changed in some way from the encoding process through delivery and then in the feedback loop. The communications process previously described basically refers to communication between two individuals: a sender and a receiver.

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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