Transitions 2009 and a new website for this blog

PMSA Transitions 2009 Thoughts
We are now T+2 days since Transactions 2009 completed (see www.pmsatransitions2009.com). As one of the core team members and attendees, I have a few project related thoughts.

1. This was our first public conference and there was a lot of lessons learned. We got fantastic feedback overall and most of the major things went well. That said, the devil is in the details and there were a lot of details that we got wrong or missed. Small things, but in retrospect, more important than they seemed.
2. Regarding risk management and specifically risk acceptance (saying ok, we can live with this if it happens), accepting a risk is something that you should give extreme consideration to. There is a huge difference between thinking about something that might happen and saying I will be able to live with this and actually being in the movement and having that risk almost occur. Having a room full of attendees and thinking your not going to deliver on a promise is not a place I want to be in again (note that the issue resolved it’s self in the end).
3. A high performance team can make many, many things look easy. This event was so smooth (other than the early problem just referenced) that I was kind of shocked. I can’t even say we spent a lot of time ‘forming’ our team, we just all knew what to do and when to do it. I think there will be some serious discussion of this in our post mortem
4. This kind of event is not worth doing if you don’t plan to do it again. The truth of the matter is that planning for next years conference began about 12 hours before this event actually executed. Most of our side conversations during and since the event have been about next year. This was the first time we did this and the first time we reached out and built relationships with the PM community, if we didn’t plan on doing this again, I think a huge amount of goodwill and credibility would be lost.

More thoughts on this event in the near future, in a less stream of consciousness tone.

A New Site
www.PMDecisionSciences.com is not yet active, but is the future home of this blog and my efforts within the PM community. Our goal is to develop a full service PM portal for the local DC Metro Area and then grow it to an international level over time. What will be there?

• Weekly career profiles on local project managers
• Examinations of projects and other efforts
• Discussion on project management theory
• White papers and more
• Local events, such as a monthly networking happy hour
• and much more!!

I will post an announcement when the site goes active and this blog is moved over there.

Event Project Management

I am planning a one day PM conference with some fellow students from GWU.  Please take a look at our website (and buy a ticket if you like it),  www.pmsatransitions2009.com

I will star posting my thoughts on the finer points of event project management in the near future.

Work and Duration

While explaining my position on using fixed work in MS project the other day (to a co-worker) I realize that an added benefit and clarification tool (and something of an obvious step) is to record % complete on both Work complete and Duration Complete.

Why? Precisely because the two are not the same. A work package could be 50% Work complete (meaning you have completed 5 of the 10 estimated Work hours) but only 10% overall Duration complete because a resource working on it on a very part time basis.

Why is this important? Because it will help illustrate to your stakeholders and team a) the difference between Work and Duration and b) it will make sure the correct expectations are set regarding the schedule.

If your audience does not have the patience or interest to be briefed on these and the differences, record both, but report only on duration.

A Warning

Someone, somewhere once said that project management is not for the faint of heart. I also read somewhere that the only time a project manager should be comfortable is when he or she is between projects (and one could beg to differ on that as well). The point being, project managers have a lot staked up against them.

Projects are projects because they are complicated. Even the little projects will generate pages of requirements, hours and hours of discussions, disagreements, budget concerns, resource issues, stakeholder buy-in concerns and schedule complications and more.

In my experience, there is no difference between large and small projects, other than scale and the magnitude of impact (good or bad). The fundamental issues are the same, the problems similar and the pressure is always there.

This is a tough and often misunderstood job. There are too many in the profession who are sophomores and dilatants, practicing without understand or sometimes caring. There are too many executives in the world who don’t see a need for project management or PMOs. I am constantly seeing project management struggling to be justified and that annoys me to say the least. I have too often had stakeholders say ‘can’t we forget all this project management stuff and get to the work?’

So what’s my point? Am I just throwing some grenades in the room and walking away? Hopefully not.

My point is to take this warning seriously. Make sure that a career in project management is what you really want, that you are committed to a discipline whose purpose is to jump into the middle of chaos and conflict and then bring about order and agreement. If being comfortable and secure is one of your requirements, you should find a new role. If you are willing to be uncomfortable and prepared to be under appreciated (most of the time) in exchange for some of the most interesting work out there, then jump on in.

For the record, I love being a PM!

Holistic Decision Making

I was sitting in my Project Finance class (which is my next to last class before GWU will grant me my MSPM) and the topic of project selection came up. We reviewed NPV, IRR and other
methods. My issue is that, selecting a project based purely on financial returns seems highly flawed to me.

In a perfect world you could walk in with a list of 10 projects, show the ROI or NPV and then select the top 3. Done. Meeting ends and you go out and initiate them.

From my point of view this ideal world is an illusion. First and foremost, no decision is purely quantitative; there are many qualitative factors that need to be considered in project selection, such as:
- The politics of the organization
- The availability of resources
- The
impact of committing resources (similar to opportunity cost of money
committed)
- How is the project aligned with strategic objectives
- What are the risks of the project, is the organization adverse to those risks
- Does this help or hurt the stakeholders or customers (there are many projects that
could have a positive financial impact initially, but then anger your customers,
such as sending customer service to overseas call centers)

There are many more and I am not genius in pointing these out. In fact there are many methods to make a selection using both qualitative and quantitative values. I can recommended AHP, but there are others.

My point in bringing this up is that I think we, as PMs, need to push holistic approaches more often (or even all the time). Stats and financial models are nice, but they never show the whole picture. If you want to do your best to avoid things like unintended consequences, you need to be holistic in your decision making.

Fixed Work, I'm a convert

I am not going to pretend I have the pros and cons of Fix Work, Fixed Units and Fixed Duration down 100% of the time. That said, I do regularly try to determine which is best to use in my MS project plan. For a fantastic review of how each works in MS project please check out this:

http://www.pmconnection.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=52

Thank you pmconnections.com for the best review of this topic that I have seen!

So now that you have reviewed this and can consider yourself among the great schedulers of our day, you might wonder why I am excited about fixed work?

I work in an environment where I rarely know what resource commitments I will get and often can't estimate purely on the basis of how long a period of time will be required for a work package (for the cited resource issue and other issues). This leaves me with work.

Even in my constrained environment, I can get either the resources or a qualified stand in resources to help estimate the amount of work required to complete each work package. Once I create the work column and estimate the work, I can then create the duration I feel is likely (if I am forced to do this on my own) by assigning generic qualified resources and then playing with how much allocation % I think I will get from them. The duration is then recalculated, based on this. I can also then more the duration around (if required) which will recalculate my resource requirements.

I can also add in other factors, but no matter what, my original work estimates stay fixed and this seems to really limit the strange things that project sometimes likes to do.

So my advice is that if you are in an environment like mine, stop estimating duration and instead estimate work (and fix it).

Next Time: Is MS Project enough (or where is my Monte Carlo Sim)?

The Old Resource Switch Trick

I want to start this posting by saying: a) I don’t think vendors are evil b) I don’t think my simple tools are better then MS Project or other Professional ones

I have been on a number of projects, where during the sales process, followed by all efforts to estimate, my vendor will suddenly re-assign the fully qualified resource I have been working with to another project and give me someone ‘who is just as good’. I have also had this happen with internal departments, such as internal development groups. Either way, I consider this deceptive and a significant impact to the project schedule (and yes, I am assuming here the resource is not as qualified as the original). Why? Because vendors often use their more impressive resources to make the sale or get the project moving, but then require those resources to perform that same magic elsewhere.

Why assume that the newly assigned resource is not as good? Firstly, why would resource X be removed in the first place if resource Z is just as good? It is possible there is a legitimate reason, but mainly I think it is not the case. If you are working well and already trust that resource, it is in the vendor’s interest to keep the client happy. Secondly, the person now doing the work is no longer the person who made the estimates. That is always less desirable. To be fair, sometimes it is the customer (in this case myself or you as the PM) who requests a new resource. This could be because of quality issues (maybe you will get someone better), cultural issues (of the organizational kind) or something else. Regardless of who removes the original resource, your estimates and costs are now in question.
Here is a quick analysis tool I made in excel to help you size up the risk that was just created:

You have three questions to answer, per work package that is impacted by the resource change:
1. What is the qualification of the new resource (assume 100% for the original)?
2. What is the availability of the new resource (assume 100% for the original, unless you know otherwise)?
3. What is the rate of the new resource (again, I am assuming you knew the rate of the old resource)? Enter this information in the correct fields and you will now know your new duration and cost for that work package.

How it works:
Duration = (effort/qualification)/availability
Where effort is an hours value and both qualification and availability are % values

Cost= effort/qualification*rate
Where effort is an hours value, qualification is a % value and rate is a currency value You do need to know your original estimates as well.

You do this for two rows, row 1 is the original resource and row two is the new resource, this way you have a clear indication of the change if you don’t feel like computing the DELTA elsewhere.

Obviously you can do all of this in MS Project (and in more holistic way), but sometimes you need a quick and dirty picture that is easy for your stakeholders to grasp.
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Please email me for the calculator in excel format.

MS sins with Project 2007 but makes up for it with Viso 2007

I was disappointed to see that MS Project 2007 has removed the Visio WBS toolbar (as far as I can tell), because I am in the habit of exporting my task structure into Visio, via that toolbar, to create a nice graphical WBS.  I have no idea why MS thinks that upgrades require the removal of reports and features, but there is a silver lining here.

Checkout the Project visualization with the Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007 WBS Modeler Add-in it lets you create an excellent WBS in Visio and send it out to project, becoming the basis of your new project plan file.  The tool is well developed and powerful, while being stable and simple to use.  It gets the Input/Output stamp of approval!

Happy 2009!