Interesting Article on Working in Today’s Lean Environment

This is an article I read on the PMI website. Found it to be very informative, timely and accurate in today’s business climate..

Al Senzamici, PMP
Program Manager
ImageSource, Inc.

  

Working In Today’s Lean Environment

Despite the first glimmers of an economic recovery on the horizon, many executives are keeping a tight lid on resources.

Lean teams, it seems, are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. “We as project managers should be prepared to work like this for the next six months,” says Cynthia West, PhD., vice president, sales and marketing, Metafuse Inc., Irvine, California, USA.

Even in stabilizing industries, executives may still be hesitant to add new hires. The last thing organizations want to do is hire people only to let them go a few months down the line, she says. And many companies have adopted the “do more with less” mantra simply because they now know they can.  “Companies have been taking advantage of the economic downturn,” Dr. West says. They save money by having the excuse of “bad times” to explain layoffs or the postponement of new hires. 

Here are some tips on how project managers can work with today’s lean reality—and come out stronger for it.  

Be Graphical, and Be Honest

As resources are cut, remaining employees often have to step up and work harder. Dr. West says that project managers should speak up if they think the project will suffer as a consequence.  

She recommends that you run a visual report to show how heavily each team member is booked, to help you establish priorities. A graphic representation of all the projects in the portfolio that shows the impact of extra work also goes a long way in helping management understand how to prioritize initiatives.  “If you take on the jobs of three people, you’ll most likely fail,” she says. “Create an agreement with management and be honest that you can’t complete all these tasks.” 

Plan Your Projects into the Future

Although many organizations are thinking short-term right now and are waiting for the economy to completely recover, Dr. West stresses that long-term planning is always essential in project management, no matter the economy’s status.  

The “long-term” thought process usually depends on the culture, but she recommends having at least a three- to five-year plan. Map out all the projects in your portfolio in terms of crystal-clear strategies, objectives and goals, Dr. West explains.  

Part of the planning process should address the economic realities—organizations want ways to cut back. Project managers should map out a complete budget. These days, a rough estimate of won’t suffice, says Pablo Lledó, PMP, director, MasConsulting, Mendoza, Argentina.  “Now, it is not enough to be effective at only doing the project right,” he says. “You need to be efficient at doing the right project at the minimum cost.”  

Prioritize Responsibilities

If there was ever a time to know your priorities, it’s now. “You have to decide which clients are most important and most profitable,” says Dr. West. Prioritization takes considerable analysis because it might reveal that the client who spends the most money with you might not necessarily be the most profitable.  

Dr. West says tracking time and billing hours will reveal which clients should be your top priority. Project Insight, for example, assigns a weighted score to each project in the portfolio so that both the team and the leaders know which projects are the most important. 

But no matter how the order of projects fall, project managers and their teams should take this time to master the art of “working thin,” says Mr. Lledó. “The downward economy was a great signal to watch out for efficient projects,” he says. “Project teams should become stronger after all these lessons learned regarding how to keep managing projects under the crisis.”

*This article was originally published on 9 September 2009 on PMI.org. © 2009 Project Management Institute. All rights reserved.*

PUTTING TOGETHER AN ECM PROJECT TEAM

Part 2 – The Project Team

I discussed in the last blog on this general topic that the strong support of the intended Project by executive management is a critical factor for success – they need to support the projects sponsor, and smooth the path of challenges that sometimes occur when change is contemplated.  Vibrant and effective executive leadership is likely to be critical in solidifying the vision for the project.  The target of effort to achieve project acceptance and enthusiasm is cascading in that the focus of executive leadership is middle management, and then it effort fans out to focus on users and supervisors. 

What Will be the Right Team
The right team of players, working together to hone the vision, is required to construct the concepts to be considered, refine the concepts, and to develop strategies to support the selected conceptual structure to fruition.  The people on the team are as integral to your project’s success as the solution, the project plan, the software tools, and infrastructure that is chosen.

Forming the right team is not easy – as not all leaders and users welcome new ideas and changes to the routine process.  But the executive support and the right team members are just as important for for standard ECM projects success as these factors are vital for business process management (BPM) and integrated implementations.

The primary key role types that are required on any ECM project team are listed below.  The exact position titles and numbers of team members recommended for participation will differ depending on an organization’s size and individuals’ skill levels. It is important that the eight classifications of people resources below are part of the Project team.

1. Executives: provide the supporting vision and enthusiasm for the solution objective

2. Line-of-Business (LOB) Managers: provide important project support and key higher level objectives

3. Business Analyst: provide discovery and analytical resources, reporting, perspective and ideas

4. Records/Compliance Manager: assure objectives and solutions match mandates and requirements

5. IT/IS Manager: supporting infrastructure, including business & IT challenges into the plan

6. WorkGroup Manager/Supervisor staff:  provide working knowledge of operations being addressed and realistic possibilities on what will work and where the challenges will be

7. End users: discovering what will and won’t work and where the challenges for acceptance are

8. Project Manager:  This person is the organization’s operational leader of the project and the coordinator with outside resources – ECM industry experts, software vendors, conversion resources, Training, etc. 

From time to time this blog will continue with the subject of team challenges, some considerations to remember, use of supporting vendor resources, and some recommended methods for implementation.

Neil W. Lindsey, ECM^M, CDIA+
Project Manager / Senior Business Analyst
ImageSource, Inc.

The Value and Role of Mentoring in Teams

As Project and Program Managers, we are leaders. Certainly within our teams, but often within our organizations as well.  Ideally, if we’re doing it right, our influence is also felt beyond our immediate sphere.

Almost everyone knows or has an idea of what mentoring is.  Not everyone has had the advantage of having a good mentor, or the privilege and responsibility of being a good mentor.  Consider these thoughts on mentoring in the context of leading and developing project and program teams.

• Mentoring contributes.  It contributes to the individual being mentored, it strengthens the organization that you both belong to, and it often benefits the person mentoring in intangible but meaningful ways. It’s the right thing to do for the right reasons.
• In the constantly evolving, educated and highly skilled world we operate in, people will come and go in organizations as their careers grow and develop. This is not a reason to not mentor them.
• Mentoring can center around hard skills and soft skills.  Often it is the mentoring on soft skills that facilitates the most significant growth in an individual.  Hard skills can be taught in classes if necessary. The subtleties of soft skills (understanding what matters and what doesn’t, and how to apply that in tactical managment strategy, in business or in life) can’t.
• Mentoring is not about doing things for people and thinking they will learn through the exercise.  It’s about sharing insight, sometimes resourcing them, supporting and nurturing them, and then getting out of the way.
• It’s OK for those being mentored to struggle and even fail at times.  It’s often when things are difficult that growth occurs. Many times mentoring simply takes the form of continued encouragement and belief in the individual being mentored.
• Show that you value the time of those mentoring you by being concise with your interactions with them, listening and applying what is learned.
• We as leaders are never too old, too experienced, or to knowledgeable to be mentored. Opening ourselves up to and considering the ideas of others is one of the most meaningful ways that our experience can be leveraged to the benefit of our teams and organizations.

Mentoring can make a huge difference in the effectiveness and cohesiveness of your teams and your organizations.  It’s all in what you put into it.

Gene Eckhart
Program Manager
ImageSource, Inc.

  

“Economize” Your ECM Investment by Making Your Datacenter “Green”

In today’s economy, Information Technology departments for both private and public entities are looking at ways to reduce costs. Many companies, cities, states and other local governments also have environmental concerns about their data centers and have “green” initiatives underway to make their data centers more environmentally and economically friendly. Both can be achieved through system/server virtualization.

Many companies are reducing their energy consumption and costs by as much as 80% through virtualization. Through the use of virtualization, maintenance costs and server sprawl are also being reduced. A typical virtualized server saves about 7000kWh of electricity annually which equates to about a $700 savings in energy costs alone. Individual Servers sit idle 85-95% of the time. Virtualization can improve server utilization from the typical 5-15% to 60-85%.  Many of today’s data centers have either run out or are running out of space and available power. You can run fewer, more highly utilized servers, freeing up data center space and reducing power requirements. It is reported that 4 tons of CO2 are eliminated for every virtualized server. This is the equivalent of taking 1.5 cars off the highways.

Not only do you get the cost and environmental benefits from a virtualized environment you also gain:

• Centrallized Management
• Performance Monitoring
• Clustering and pooling of physical server resources
• Rapid Server Provisioning
• Automated Disaster Management

The product support stance by many of the Enterprise Content Management companies and their products is this (taken from statements by some of the larger vendors):

We (ECM Vendor) have  not certified any of our products on VMware or MS Virtual Server virtualized environments. Product Support will assist customers running products on virtualized environments in the following manner: 

We (ECM Vendor) will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware.

VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server can be assumed to be supported unless specifically noted otherwise. Product Support will provide a “best-effort” support and conduct normal troubleshooting procedures as if the product was installed and operating on a standard computer. If Product Support identifies the problem is related to the virtual environment, you will be advised to contact the manufacturer of the virtual software for assistance.

Many companies and government agencies have succesfully implemented Enterprise Content Management solutions in a virtualized environment. This includes production environments.

Only about five percent of all physical servers have been virtualized to date. Virtualization is one of the main topics when speaking with today’s Information Technology managers and  staff members. Many of these IT departments have virtualization of their environments as one of the key initiatives to address in the near term. If we are looking for a ”stimulus” to improve the economy we should be looking at these technologies that not only reduce costs for the companies and government agencies but also help to preserve our resources and environment.

Now is the time to start benefiting from these technologies.

If you plan to attend Nexus ’09  ECM Solution Conference you can learn more about “economizing your business”.

Al Senzamici, PMP
Program Manager
ImageSource Inc.

 

Embracing Client Budgets in Meaningful Ways

Setting the “Fixed Bid” model of funding projects completely aside for a moment, let’s talk about the “Time and Materials” model of project funding in relation to project management…

In these difficult economic times, the realities are that budgets for funding projects, particularly new implementations of technology, have become more scarce. When they are available, they are often smaller than what might have typically been allocated for a given organization even 2 or 3 years ago. Many clients that might have historically embraced a fixed bid model for project funding are considering the time and materials model as an alternative for any number of reasons. Again, setting aside the wisdom of those choices, it is a reality that we are seeing more frequently.

Another importat dynamic in this equation as partners and project managers is that even in a T&M engagement, there is often a cap on the funding for the project, which may or may not be sufficient to do the project properly from a consulting vendor or a “best practices” perspective.

The unspoken choice that we have as project managers for these types of projects is whether or not we truly embrace the client’s budget in a meaningful way. The short, easy path is to simply carry on with planning and executing the project the way we would normally in a well funded fixed bid effort, and when problems do occur, to simply blame it on the fact that the client doesn’t have the funding to ‘complete’ the project properly. While this may be an accurate statement, and you may have performed due diligence in planning and execution (up to that point), in the end it serves neither yourself or the client. If your project is not completed, or is completed in haphazard manner, the benefit sought by the project is lost, the relationship with the client is damaged and no one wins.

We have to understand that our clients constraints and limitations are our own by virtue of our current relationship, and our desired long term relationship with them. Once we are truly reconciled to that fact, we should seek ways to meaningfully embrace the budget to accomplish the overall goals and objectives of the project. Consider the following possibilities:

1) Have open and honest dialogues with the project sponsor and key stakeholders about the potential shortfalls in the budget. The message that you want to communicate should be clear. You both need to have a realistic understanding of the limitations of the budget. That being said, they should know that you are conciously and proactively working with them to find creative ways to make it work for both parties within those limitations. By setting these expectations properly, everyone will be more engaged in the process.

2) Fully assess the internal resources that your client can make available for the project. Be creative in how you engage these resources. Be willing to stretch their normal experience boundaries and give them a growth opportunity on the project. Their growth opportunity if properly managed can be an effective way to complete necessary tasks and to take vital project dollars for your teams and use them more strategically in areas of the project (e.g. development) that are more important to the end game.

3) Work with your end users to figure out creative ways to address training. Be open to models other than conventional classroom training which might require significant time (and expense) to develop courseware and curriculum. Consider rapid development of “Cheat Sheets” focused only on the specfic tasks that users will need to complete their jobs. Consider incorporating ‘train-the-trainer’ models into the customers Change Management plan.

4) Be thoughtul when developing your QA\Test plans. Be open and flexible as you work closely with the stakeholders and end users to determine what the true success and acceptance criteria should be. It’s easy, particularly with software development projects, to spend a large amount of time and budget on properly performing Quality Assurance, System Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing. Seek to find the balance between the overall budget of the project, the anticipated ROI for the customer, and what is reasonable and prudent given the technical complexity of the software that is being developed. This is also an area where the first item comes into play. If you are proactive in engaging client resources early on in the project, you may be able to turn a large part of this effort over to them, and help to reduce the budget.

5) Be diligent in recognizing the difference between genuinely flushing issues out in discovery, and eating up project dollars while your team sits and watches clients sort out their internal decisions and differences. Don’t get caught up in internal politics that can consume large amounts of time and budget with meetings that don’t necessarily require your attendance or participation.

Again, it’s easy to say, “The client didn’t have enough money to do it properly”, particularly if you have done ‘good work’ on the project. The scenario where everybody wins is when you creatively work together and find ways to complete the project successfully, and meet the budgetary constraints of the project by thoughtful planning, management and leveraging the client staff and end users in a manner that gives them opportunities for growth and a deeper sense of ownership of the solution.

Gene Eckhart

Program Manager

ImageSource, Inc.