Project Management after the Meltdown

I think everyone will agree it has been a very tough 2 years for Project Managers.

• Budgets cuts
• Projects terminated
• Staff laid off
• Increasing demands from business users

1. It has been a sea change for survival in the market for thousands of businesses. There have been credit crisis, doomsayers, bail outs, and more bail outs. The political and strategic debates over the perfect solution in the perfect storm are numerous.
2. What will really work to restore the market that your projects are meant to support? Are you projects still implemented based on a leading corporate strategy or are they reactive in nature, leaving you and the project team feeling weak, emasculated, and uncertain about your own career choices?
3. Were you one of the millions of knowledge works laid off by your mothership corporation? What do to do? Where to go? Fetal position?
4. Did you find a career/life coach? Did you join a trusted business network or some social media network in hopes of finding the next right thing?
5. Did you actions take on the pall of victim, or did you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back in the game? Are you on the road to recovery? Do you think the global market economy is on the road to recovery? Do you see any corporate manipulations? Do you see any governmental manipulations? Do you know what the solution is?
6. Would you care to share about your survival experience? If you do, email me at rick@eprojectsource.com and lets have a chat about what your format and content could do to help others in the Project Management business.

Regards,

Rick

End of Year Recap - Career Connect Singapore

Weekly meeting each Tuesday at TCC The Central at Clarke Quay MRT from 11 am to 1 pm

Our group is recapping lessons learned from our networking experiences during 2009!

Please bring along your story of success find new jobs and new client in the Recovery Economy to share with members who are poised to succeed in 2010!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Lessons Learned 2009

Sorry not to post in awhile. I have been busy this year managing consulting projects as well as getting Career Connect up and running in Singapore and Bangkok! I have helped about 25 people find jobs in Singapore now.

Each year, and each project gives me more and more experience to learn from. This year I found myself working in Mainland China for the first time. I did a software quality assessment for a US insurance company. My learnings come from the work itself, and just living in China.

Here is some of what I found out for myself. If it resonates with you in anyway, I would enjoy hearing from you at rick@eprojectsource.com

1. When I complained about problems with taxi drivers in Shanghai, my expats friends already had an expression TIC (This is China). So I found myself humbler in a culture that is emerging from a long period of isolation and now driving 100 miles an hour towards a model of socialist/capitalist business. Keeping TIC in mind I found many instances of it on the project I was working as below:

2. Project Management means different things to different people and organizations. (not really knew)....but when placed in certain firms in certain countries...it can be cumbersome and built alongside the development organization and seen as an administrative function (witnessed in Shanghai, Manila, Singapore and Vietnam). If you are just going through the motions of project management, then the results you get will mirror the direct efforts you make from the "real" power center of the project. Then when the projects fail, the PMO can be blamed, and the power center walks away washing its hands of the project, bound for managing another project without implementing a project management methodology or PMO.

3. CPM tools are not spreadsheets. I found a project director using spreadsheets to brief his management and client management. A smart guy, but there is no way to use a spreadsheet to do the CPM analytics needed to update a completion schedule let alone do any EVM. To his dismay he was not able to delivery on time.

4. Document the project lifecycle, and use the people, processes and tools to deliver on time and on budget. Again, the project was poorly documented and would not even rate Level 0 of the SEI CMMi. Innovation cannot happen from chaos. The test phases were a mess, and set delivery of quality, zero defect software applications back months, if not more than a year. This added to the cost of the project, as well as diminished the reputations of managers and team members on both the vendor team and the customer team. It was and is a huge frustration when tech

These are just a few of the lessons learned I encountered working in Asia on projects in 2009. I am teaching them in 2 day seminars titled "Project Killers and their Solutions."

Please contact me at rick@eprojectsource.com if this is a seminar your management and staff would benefit from. I am happy to send you the outline of my talking points.

Regards,

Rick Price

Borderless Project Management

More and more projects that go global are impacted by local business cultures. To overcome some of the adverse impacts of local business culture to a global project, I suggest a kick off meeting that creates a project based culture. The project based culture should be based on the common touch points among the people, processes and tools for the projects.

Recently I was working on a project where two project teams in a co-development effort were using different change control and test tools. This caused incredible disconnects in the software development process, especially with regard to testing and change requests. In addition, there were no metrics in place to assess the actual added cost to the project due these inefficiencies.

My prescriptions were to remediate these out-of-tolerance conditions immediately in 3 quick steps. What would you do?

Project Management will end the Global Recession!

Sorry not to post in so long. I have been very busy working to end the Global Recession. I am currently working on a software project in APAC out of Singapore and Shanghai.

Project Management is key to ending the speculation of economists and other talking heads in the media. They have big fat salaries and even fatter heads that speculate about when the recession will end.

Everyone in media has given their strategy about how to end the recession. Most have not gone more than an inch deep to explain what is going on or not going on. They can flip through their college econ text to talk it up before the next commercial (the revenue that pays those fatheads their fat salaries like O'Reilly and those other Fox yahoos ). Of course, so many who are sought out for comment by the media have a political comment or two that poisons rather than heals the lives of everyday people who are suffering in these times. My late Grandmother predicted a Great Depression like event that would come in my lifetime. That was before outsourcing came to the USA. That was before the dot.com bubble (I got that joke of a $300 check from Bush in 2001). That was before Wall Street, AIG (a bit more than $300 from Bush), Madoff, and all the other crooks who want to live like kings.

The heavy lifting in this recession like any other is done by Project Managers across all business sectors. They have to have a plan, and they have to make sure it gets results everyday. Many Project Managers use Earned Value Management and Analysis to keep control of precious budget resources on their projects. Can you imagine if EVM was used on Wall Street or by any of the banks, insurance firms, or investments firms that got confused about their core mission, profit over the past few years? Instead, they spent money as if they had no bottom to their pockets, and then reached into our pockets for bail outs! They are supposed to be corporate Republican Fat Cats not socialists! At least that is what they told me over the years when I asked for a raise.

When you are out there working as a Project Manager, your resources are finite and have to be cared for or they will run through your fingers like sand. Have you got an updated Project Plan? Have you got a WBS that is detailed to a level that you can manage work packages for full compliance to the budget plan, standards, and within the master schedule? Do you have a Project Communications Plan? I think you know as well as I do, without your tool kit, you will not get the results you want, and your stakeholders short fuse will blow, and the project risks will mount until the project fails.

Project Managers know how to end this recession now! Move out of the way strategists and media fatheads. We have rolled our sleeves up and will plan, do, check....Good luck!

Status Updates

When you are involved managing a project or an entire project portfolio, you need a system for getting regular, validated status updates. One pet peeve I have is how many project management tools (CPM) often spot you 50% actual completion rates as the user default.

A huge caveat is to be wary of that on "your" project. It is one thing to have a +5 or -5 error coefficient in a regression analysis, but 50% actual completion that gets booked in a status report when less is actually done, magnifies potential risk as you move from the original project baseline to the target baseline.

The solution is to educate the entire team on how and when to update their status "as is" at a given time and day. And make sure you set up your PM software tools to default status updates at zero.

Project Charters that have teeth in them

Before you begin a new project you are going to need a meaningful Project Charter. You will need to ensure that all the elements and most importantly the goals, objectives, and stakeholders are aligned exactly with what you want to accomplish in undertaking the project.

I can think of several stakeholders and managers on a project who took visible roles on paper, but not with regard to performance. Within 6 months they awoke and were displeased not with their apathy but the PMO. hmmmm....

What you do not want is any element to be less than fully committed. Short and sweet.