harrywaldron
Home away from home
Joined: Jun 11, 2003
Posts: 341
From: Roanoke , VA USA

  Posted: 2004-10-16 16:41



Congratulations to our 20,000th member and ALLPM for providing the best free source of PM information on the Internet, as members share their experiences and expertise with each other. We're now at 20,003, so onward to 25,000.

August Poll Results

How many of you use one of the Quality Management Methodologies below in your company:

A. Six Sigma 20.54 % (23)
B. ISO 9000 33.04 % (37)
C. TQM 7.14 % (8)
D.Others 11.61 % (13)
E. We do not use a QM-Methodology 27.68 % (31)

Total votes: 112

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October's poll question is: Does your organization use Project Portfolio Management?

A. Yes
B.  No
C. Partially implemented
D.  Plan for implementation within next two years

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

Project Management Poetry, by Rachel Goldstein, allPM.com Poet

Standard PM

This poet shall examine
In the context of this rhyme
If standard PM practices
Are really worth the time.

In recent years the scholars
By this problem have been vexed
And on the subject written
Countless lines of text.

With PM (statistics
Have been able to deduce)
The time to market
For new products
Is substantially reduced.

The modern, nimble company
To manage risk and change,
Has found that project management
Can help with "growing pains."

If client satisfaction
Is the most important goal,
The practice of PM has been
Specifically extolled.

The experts all agree,
Beyond a shadow of a doubt,
Standard PM is a thing
No firm can do without.

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Rachel Goldstein is a Senior Systems Analyst at The New York Times, a member of the NYT Company-wide Project Management Task Force. She has been a Project Manager in IT for close to 20 years, and the poetry and song parodies have been going on for longer than that.

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

Some people have estimates that are driven by simple calculations. For example, a data warehouse specialist may have to write 30 scripts for one job. The specialist knows it takes half a day per script and would like MS Project to do the multiplication and set the duration. We will use the fields Number1 and Number2 to capture the data. Number3 will calculate the estimate that we will link into the Duration field. Choose Tools, Customize, Fields and rename the task fields Number1 to " Units ", Number2 to " Days/Unit ", Number3 to " Calc. Dur. " and add this formula to the Number3 field: [Number1]*[Number2] . Now copy the value calculated in Calc. Estimate and Edit, Paste Special, Paste Link it into the Duration field. You can now keep changing the Units or the Days/unit and the Duration will automatically be adjusted. You have a dynamic schedule!

SUBMITTED TO MPUG, July 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 3/2002 MPUG eZine. 

Theme of the Month: "EPM Why It Is Important and What It Is" by George Pitagorsky, PMP, Director and Senior Enterprise Solutions Advisor, International Institute for Learning

Projects are the means for making all changes in the organization. They represent a significant expenditure of money and critical resources. Projects are the means to create new products and services, enhance and remove deficiencies from existing products, implement or improve business processes, do anything that requires action within a finite time frame to establish a base for continued operations

This article describes Enterprise Project Management (EPM) and the critical importance of taking an enterprise wide view of project management as a process that is a critical factor in helping organizations meet their strategic goals.

Project management is a business process that contributes significantly to the success of any organization in reaching its highest goals - service to clients while meeting the needs of owners/shareholders, employees and other business partners.

PMI has chosen to refer to what we refer to as EPM as Organizational PM (OPM). While we recognize PMI's reasoning we choose to retain the EPM terminology as it corresponds to usage in the wider community of those interested in the application of PM related tools and techniques, including Microsoft and many others. An enterprise may be any organization that serves internal or external clients. Regardless of the terminology, we recognize that project management goes well beyond the initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing of individual projects and must address the multiproject environment and the relationship between projects and the organization's strategic goals and objectives.

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George Pitagorsky, (PMP), is Senior Enterprise Solutions Advisor for International Institute for Learning (IIL).  He is an expert in project management, and process improvement and facilitator.  George authored IIL's Project Management Basics? , a multimedia interactive browser based course, and has authored or directed development of all of IIL's core PM courses.  He has written numerous articles on Project Management, organizational development, conflict resolution and personal development subjects.  George is the author of IIL's IT Project Management System, a multimedia product, and co-creator and director of IIL's The Unified Project Management Methodology (UPMM?) , Web PM knowledge tool.  He is a meditation teacher with over thirty years of experience in Yoga and meditation practice and co-creator of both the Conscious Living and Working Wisely workshops.

Positive Leadership In Project Management - Common Sense Project Leadership, by Frank P. Saladis PMP

When someone mentions the phrase "common sense" I immediately think of something Dr. Steven Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People said: "Common sense is not commonly practiced." I have also heard many people say that project management is nothing more than organized common sense. Maybe that's why many projects fail. Common sense is just not applied. That may be one of the problems, but it isn't just the lack of common sense that creates problems and in some cases causes failure; it's a lack of the necessary combination of learned skills, common sense, and natural leadership ability. In other words, project success depends on "Common Sense Project Leadership."

Effective project management requires a unique skill set. The project manager must be competent in a variety of skills such as: project planning, estimating, use of software, scope management, and resource leveling, to name a few. But, to be truly effective the project manager must possess a significant number of "soft" skills such as: creativity, problem solving, verbal communications, conflict management, negotiating, influencing and team building. Additionally, the project manager must understand business expertise in such areas as budgeting, business case development, strategic and tactical planning. Each of these skills and numerous others are essential for a project manager to achieve success.

These skills can be found, in some form or another, in most competency models designed to assess a project manager's overall ability and to target areas where additional training, education, and professional development are required. What isn't included in these competency models and other forms of appraisal and assessment is a section or category entitled "common sense". The reason: it really can't be measured, at least not by using some type of formal metric. Common sense is actually embedded in what most people define as leadership. Leadership also includes intuition, a sense of confidence, creativity and improvisation. Yes, we need the hard skills of project management, but soft skills and sensible leadership are what really make the difference. Common sense may not be measurable but most of us will know it when it isn't present.

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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.

Spotlight on Government - Managing Expectations (when your customers carry guns), by Sherry Higgins, PMP

Managing expectations is something we all do every day. Sometimes we do it well, and if we don't, the consequences are not usually pleasant. The stakeholder is surprised, unhappy, and can't be convinced that it's not ALL your fault. Besides, you were the one who set their expectations in the first place. Although it might be unpleasant, the irritated customer is usually your biggest intimidator. Now imagine if that customer was legally armed and your role was to provide a solution that would ultimately make the United States of America a safer place….

I feel the need to tell you a little about my background. I was born and raised in Georgia , worked in Georgia , only left Georgia for business trips or vacations. So, I frequently hear, "You're not from here, are you?" I do say y'all and all y'all (plural of y'all). I don't say "can't," "try" or "hopefully." "Hopefully" is NOT a word you ever want to hear your contractor say.

I grew up in the telecommunications industry - first AT&T, then Lucent. I have had great projects like the 1996 Olympics and supported the 2002 Olympics Technology Command and Control Center . I have been a PMP since 1991 and still carry a 3 digit PMP number!!! And I am pretty much red, white, and blue and Mom and Apple Pie (or grits).

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C. Z. (Sherry) Higgins, Senior Consultant, joined International Institute for Learning in September, 2004. Prior to joining IIL she was the FBI acting Assistant Director of the Program Management Office / Project Management Executive. Sherry joined the Bureau in March 2002 and was tasked with bringing the FBI computer infrastructure into the 21st century.

Ms. Higgins began her career at AT&T in the early 1970s and also held many positions with Lucent Technologies, including Director of the Chief Information Office and Chief Technical Office of Global Program and Project Management Organization. Immediately prior to joining the FBI, she had been an instructor of Project Management with the International Institute for Learning. During the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, she supported the Technology Command Center and in 1996 was the Program Manager for Voice Services for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games.

Since 1991, Ms. Higgins has been industry-certified as a Project Management Professional through the Project Management Institute, and a 1996 Computer World Magazine article featured her as one of its six "Top Gun Project Managers" in the world.

The e-mail Epidemic, by Dr. Bob Kriegel

The pressures on project managers today are enormous. To keep ahead of the incredibly rapid changes that are occurring in every area and to get an edge on the competition, everybody is working faster, longer and harder and trying to do more with less or, as one manager told me, do more with nothing.

One solution for streamlining your work, saving a great deal of time and providing more value for your organization is literally right in front of your eyes. In fact, you get hit with it every time you open your computer… if you ever have it closed.

It's e-mail, the wondrous piece of technology that promised to help us communicate more effectively, work more efficiently and cut down our work load. E-mail, however, has turned out to be like some wonder drug that promised dramatic results, but because of overdosing has begun to cause what if promised to cure. "People are using it for everything," one manager told me. "It's like an epidemic that's gotten out of control."

A recent survey I did with over a hundred companies found that most people are spending at least an hour and a half a day on email. But here's the kicker; the next question was: what percentage of those emails were really valuable, helping you to move forward, take the ball down the field? Take a minute and answer that question for yourself.

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New York Times best-selling author Dr. Bob Kriegel's books are :  If it ain't broke... BREAK IT!, Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers (Business Week best seller list) and his latest,  How to Succeed in Business Without Working so Damn Hard . Kriegel is one of the most highly sought after business speakers. His website is www.kriegel.com

Risk Doctor Briefing: Imaginary Risks, ©2004 Dr David Hillson, PMP, FAPM

Some say that risk identification is the most important phase of the risk management process, since it is impossible to manage a risk unless it has first been identified. As a result, many risk identification techniques have been developed, including brainstorms, interviews, questionnaires, checklists and prompt lists, assumptions/constraints analysis, SWOT analysis, Delphi groups, nominal group technique, root cause analysis, failure modes analysis and others. Some of these methods are creative and others draw on past experience; some can be undertaken by individuals while others require group input; some approaches are simple and rapid where others are labour-intensive and take time.

Whichever risk identification technique is used however, they all require one factor to make them effective. This powerful characteristic is possessed by all, but forgotten by most. Every person is born with it, and some people work to develop theirs into a mature capability while it remains dormant in others. This risk identification tool exists in the human head, and is called the imagination .

All risk identification techniques require people to imagine potential future conditions which do not currently exist. The success of risk identification depends on people's ability to envisage imaginary circumstances and possible futures. Without imagination, risk identification is limited to what has happened before, and specific new risks which challenge the current situation cannot be foreseen.

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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.

Great Teams Are Made By Great Leaders, by Peter Dimov, PMP

It is hard to believe that one can be in the management profession and not understand the need for and value of teamwork. The question is not "to team, or not to team" (with an apology to W. Shakespeare), but how to build successful teams in practice.

The concept of team building is deceptively simple. When people get together in a group, they represent a collection of diverse mental models. We call mental models the abstract reflections of the real world in our heads. The models are based on observations, experiences, knowledge and culture filtered through the prism of our values and individuality. To understand the complex world around us, we compartmentalize it mentally into objects, categories and abstractions commonly known as mental models. The compartmentalization introduces a level of inaccuracy in our image of the world because it does not exist in reality. This inaccuracy is expressed in the natural differences in views and opinions we have on any given subject. For a group of people to become a functioning team, it must develop shared mental models. The shared models produce the feeling of togetherness and cause the individuals to think and act similarly.

This is all great, you say, but how do you build such high functioning teams in practice? How do you build these shared mental models? I wish I had a simple answer to this question, but all I can say is "it depends…." The reason I am so evasive is that regardless of the definition and concept of teambuilding, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all' solution. Instead, we have different methods relevant to specific situations. In this article I will review four methods that are designed to give you practical help. These methods are: the dialog, the process, the shared experience and family method.

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Peter Dimov co-founded Digital Enterprises, Inc. a management consulting firm. He has over 15 years of experience in the IT Industry working with companies of various sizes, from start ups to household names like Northrop Grumman, EDS, MCI and Exxon Mobil to name a few.

Mr. Dimov is a Director of Project Management Institute (PMI) College of Scheduling ; serves on the Board of Directors for the Washington DC Chapter of PMI; a graduate of PMI Leadership Institute and a co-founder of the Washington Chapter of International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (IAMCP). Mr. Dimov manages the update of PMI's standard Government Extension to a PMBOK® Guide.

Currently, he is a Sr. Manager at IntelliDyne, an information technology services firm serving the needs of organizations in the public and private sectors. For more information about IntelliDyne, visit www.intellidyne-llc.com.

Dimov received his Bachelors and Masters of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering at a university in his native Bulgaria . He has published articles on technical and managerial subjects, and delivered presentations at numerous events, including PMI's Global Congress.

Column: Communications in the Workplace-Brinkmanship by Kate McLeod, PMP

Webster's on-line dictionary defines brinkmanship as follows:

The practice, especially in international politics, of seeking advantage by creating the impression that one is willing and able to push a highly dangerous situation to the limit rather than concede.

Perhaps the most famous example of brinkmanship in recent history is the Cuban Missile Crisis. For seven days in October, 1962, President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev faced off over the installation of weapons on a secret Soviet base in Cuba . In the opinion of some military analysts, this was the closest we have ever been to igniting a nuclear war. As famously stated by Secretary of State Dean Rusk: " We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked".

Matters of war notwithstanding, why do we engage in this one-upmanship behaviour? I see this constantly in the workplace. Of course, it is not always obviously threatening. It can take the form of offhand comments, or actions that are contrary to the corporate direction. Sometimes it is what it is: "If you don't do X, I will be forced to do Y."

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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.

It was a dream project to be involved in: a $ 5 million Sino-American project to photograph/digitize and present on a website images of thousands of precious Buddhist paintings and sculptures of China 's famed Dunhuang grottoes, masterpieces left from the Silk Road era of 1600 years ago. But the Mellon Foundation funded project was close to becoming derailed because of petty cultural clashes and misunderstandings, and as facilitator and translator, I had to step in and defuse situations in order to help reach the project's goal in the time frame of 1998-2001.

For example, the Chinese counterparts were secretly fuming because whenever the Americans bought bottled water, they only brought enough for their own foreign team, while assuming that the Chinese prefer to drink tea. In Chinese eyes, this was an insult to them as they were treated as “second class”. Then Chinese electricians, who had to catch the last 4:30 pm shuttle bus from the caves back to town, lied to say there was no voltage at the substation when asked to hook up the photography lights at 4 pm . Only when I found out the real reason, explained to them that the six-American team cost around $3000/day and arranged for a special late shuttle bus, did they agree to work as directed. Then there were worries about how to seat various personalities from both sides at banquet tables so that work would get done while no-one got slighted by their table number and positioning… etc., etc.

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Vincent F. Yip PhD MBA PMP - Born in Singapore, Dr. Yip received his PhD (Materials Science) from the University of Southern California in 1973 and then an MBA (International Business) in 1976. His work career began in R&D, followed by a 13-year stint with the Singapore Government in technology management, including being intimately involved in the conceptualization, development and promotion/administration of the Singapore Science Park between 1982 and 1989.

Dr. Yip was Visiting Professor at Northwestern University in 1991-94 and taught courses in technology management and cross-cultural management at Kellogg Graduate School of Management's MBA and EMBA programs. Recently he also taught courses in technology and product management at University of San Francisco. While living in China between 1994-2001, he worked as an entrepreneur as well as a trainer/consultant in project management, and he taught project management to some 3,500 engineers and managers of multinational corporations as well as Chinese companies.

Dr. Yip has lived in and traveled to various countries around the world, and is a keen observer of cultural differences among nations. He has written three books and published numerous articles in technical as well as business journals. He presently lives in Palo Alto, California with his family, and regularly travels to China and East Asia to consult and teach project management.