Is the sustained recession effecting project resource management?

August 6, 2010 — Bruce McGraw

Software development organizations are not immune to the effect of our country’s sustained recession. There is pressure from all sides – senior management, customers and other stakeholders — to cut costs and comply with budgets.  The largest component of project costs and schedule variance fall under the purview of resource management. In my experience, ineffective resource management is one of the primary causes of project failure and its impact is even more important in today’s economic climate.

Smart resource management decisions begin with knowledge. I believe it is important to all of us to understand how organizations are handling resource management — what works, what does not work,  how does it work — and to share that knowledge.  

Cognitive Technologies would appreciate your help.
Project resource management is "the planning, allocating, and scheduling of resources to tasks, generally including manpower, machine, money, and materials. In 2009, Cognitive Technologies supported research on resource management tools and processes. Our findings are posted on our website as well as discussed in three previous posts – (2009 Project Resource Management Survey,  Project Management Resource Survey 2009 – Results, Project Management Resource Survey 2009–Challenges).

In 2010, working with Christina Jackson from The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, Cognitive Technologies is conducting a further survey to study resource management practices and their impact on overall project success. The survey contains:

  • Basic profile questions about your organization, so that we can determine how practices vary by organization size, type (e.g., commercial, government, non-profit), industry, and how beliefs vary by the title of the respondent
  • Questions to assess the usage of resource management tools and processes and the existence of any challenges across organizations

I would sincerely appreciate it if you could take 10 minutes to complete the survey and help us ensure a broad representative sample of project managers and project resource management. You will find the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/rmsurvey2010. Just press “Continue” at the bottom of the screen to get started.

We will keep your answers strictly confidential. To thank you for participating, you will receive a complimentary gift and a digital copy of the final report including comparison with the 2009 survey in September.

 

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How cloud computing affects projects

July 30, 2010 — Bruce McGraw

“Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn’t have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.”
Herbert Simon

Cloud computing – that server in the sky – has gotten a lot of press recently. Organizations are investigating its power to offer less expensive client services, to more tightly couple dispersed organizations, and to integrate open source applications with proprietary ones to improve the comprehensiveness of services. Cloud computing is also touted as a way to save money and be more green because less energy and natural resources are used.  In fact, I just got back from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in DC where every presentation had something about “the cloud” and how you needed to be “all in.”

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, talked with operations personnel at OSCON 2010 about cloud coordinating services during the relief efforts after the Haiti earthquake. He discussed using information services provided through Ushahidi (Tufts University) to take source data from SMS, creating interactive maps using Google Earth, provide instantaneous translation with software developed in close to real-time, and connecting people through Skype.  

How will cloud computing change development and project management?

From a project management perspective, several things about business change in a cloud environment. Costing, for example, reflects service agreements rather than hardware and software purchases. Maintenance and troubleshooting becomes more difficult because it is the responsibility of the service provider. How queries are written against stored data changes because of the way that databases are handled in the cloud. Comfort in data security services from providers becomes a huge deal. Developers need proficiency in dynamic programming languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby etc.

Architectures change as Lew Tucker, Sun’s CTO of Cloud Computing cautions, “Different parts of an application might be in many places in the cloud. For example, a presentation layer might be on Facebook, storage could be on Amazon.com’s S3, and application logic could run somewhere else entirely. "

Nikita Ivanov,  CEO of GridGain Systems – Cloud Computing Software suggests that The best way to think about cloud computing is as a data center with an API. In his blog, he presented a provocative list of real-life challenges and observations about cloud computing from which I have selected a couple major ones for consideration by project managers and developers:

  1. You will spend weeks and months fine tuning your application and developing additional functionality; plan accordingly
  2. With 1000s of remote nodes, things that worked in 10s of nodes often “mysteriously” don’t work on the “cloud” scale.
  3. Debugging problems require pretty deep understanding of distributed computing; learning curve is very steep; trial and error is often the only solution
  4. Cloud(s) are implemented based on hardware virtualization – make sure your grid middleware can dynamically provision such images on demand.

Cloud computing requires a platform that can manage the dynamics of the application including troubleshooting performance issues. There are currently no great approaches to identify quickly the root cause of application performance issues in the Cloud. Existing tools and solutions are limited in the way they capture information reports Andreas Grabner in the post, “Challenges of Monitoring, Tracing and Profiling your Applications running in The Cloud”.

To cloud or not to cloud, that is the question. There is certainly potential value added to applications and organizations using the capabilities of cloud computing. However, before making the plunge into territory that will significantly change the way you do application development and manage projects, I strongly recommend educating yourself on process and procedures and get advice from experts.  There are several good places to start and Microsoft has some good resources to help you get started.

Please share your thoughts and experience with computing in the cloud.

 

 

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Project Manager Tips for Successful Negotiating

July 23, 2010 — Bruce McGraw

What do you do when you cannot get what you need or want by simply asking (or using brute force — as appealing as that might be)?  Negotiation is one way to get most of what you want when you run into this situation.  Negotiation may involve a simple two-person dialogue (I want Joe Smith to head up testing on the new product before its release; you want Joe to stay with testing the current product; the boss says work it out between yourselves.) Your intelligent scheduling software will not assign Joe full-time to both jobs. So, negotiating an agreement is required.

Negotiation comes into play for simple decision making such as where to go for lunch or what time to should we meet to complex decisions about product pricing, developing a new approach, selecting a team leader, or putting together names for a lay-off list. As project manager, you are negotiating for your team and yourself.

Prepare for Negotiations:
Decide what you want from the negotiations and the minimum you can live with. In between what you want and can live with are the things that you have to trade in negotiations. Ask yourself what the other person wants and what they have to trade — be realistic and acknowledge the justness of their needs. If possible, breakup the total need into small bites of activity or resources. Sometimes small agreements can be achieved without a total victory.

Outside of the specific resource or activity under negotiations, consider what else you have available to “trade”. For example, think about a basketball team that needs a strong forward. The team may put up money, other players, or draft choices to negotiate the release of a player they want. Be flexible on parameters that do not matter to achieving your goal. Start times, hours, days, location, reporting chain, end time, cost, and long-term ownership are all possible areas of negotiation.

Strategies for Negotiations:
Sonshi’s “Intelligent Approaches to Conflict Resolution and Competition” provides wise advice to the beginning negotiator summarized as: 

  • Negotiation is mostly about listening.
  • Negotiation requires give and take. If you can figure out a way to give the other person something important to them while getting what you want, you have a win-win situation.
  • “Be human. Don’t try be clever. In fact, don’t display cleverness. Talk softly and be pleasant. You’re trying to have him be on your side. Share your troubles and problems if need be. You’re not trying to outsmart anyone here — you’re trying to obtain an amicable agreement with another person. When she realizes she is not going against a ruthless opponent but rather someone who’s a real person, she’ll drop her guard and work with you. Isn’t that what you want in the first place?”
  • “If time is of the essence to you, you are at a great disadvantage. Where you must obtain a resolution with the other party by a certain date, she may not be in such a rush. Because of this fact, she can walk away from the negotiation table causing you to give up something valuable just to reach an agreement. Therefore, make sure you’re not constrained by time. Even if you are, do not display it.”

In terms of negotiation strategy, Anatol Rapoport, a mathematical psychologist offered a simple and provably effective negotiation strategy called tit-for-tat. This was used to solve the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma used in game theory to optimize conditions that facilitate cooperation between two parties with conflicting goals. (For more information, see History of Tit for Tat)  According to tit-for-tat, two players have two choices: either cooperate or defect. The best strategy to a successful negotiation is to begin by cooperating (perhaps on one of those little items you identified when breaking down the bigger task). Then on your next move, you do whatever the other person did – so if they cooperate, you cooperate again. If they defect – that is refusing to make an offer – you retaliate by removing your offer or something else of value to the other person.

In studying successive evaluation of the tit-for-tat strategy, four rules emerged:

  • Never be the first to defect
  • Retaliate only after the other party has defected
  • Be prepared to forgive after carrying out just one act of retaliation
  • Adopt this strategy only if the probability of meeting the same player again exceeds 2/3

Sample dialogue – your project needs senior QA and test from a matrix organization. The manager says he can’t meet your project schedule:

(YOU)Make an offer: “The project begins May 1, but I can wait until September 1 to get Joe’s help”.
(THEM) Cooperative response: “Joe is on a project until December”
(THEM) Defecting response: “I can’t ever imagine Joe having any time available in the foreseeable future”

(YOU responding to cooperative response): “Mary Sue in QA my other project can be made available to help you from September through December.”

(YOU responding to defecting response): “Your department needs to hire another QA. my project has high management visibility and I would hate to report that we can’t make schedule because of failure to do QA.”

A couple final thoughts on successful negotiating techniques:

  • Think out of the box. There may be several ways to get what you both want.
  • Do not be afraid to invite an objective third party – one without a stake in the decision – to participate in the discussion. They may have new ideas that are not clouded by preconceived notions of “how this needs to be done” and will be less emotionally involved in the give and take.

If you really want to get better at negotiation I suggest taking a course  - here is the one that I took:
Karrass seminar on Negotiating – http://www.karrass.com/kar_eng/effectivenegotiating.htm

 

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Project Management Collaboration and Communication Tools

July 16, 2010 — Bruce McGraw

It seems I cannot go anywhere these days without seeing people talking on cell phones, texting, taking phone pictures and sharing them – sometimes many of these at once. People want to use every free minute to communicate with someone. And, before you ask; yes, this is the pot calling the kettle black. I am wired and I stay in contact with clients, team members and family 24/7.   And it is not just being a PM that requires this connectivity.

At work, I appreciate and recommend tools like SharePoint to facilitate collaboration and communication (see Collaboration tools for virtual project teams). However, as the capabilities of these tools continue to expand, the line between our personal and work lives blurs.

Dean Halstead, Microsoft Collaboration Architect for U.S. Federal Government Sales Team presenting to the Gov 2.0 summit in 2009 offered this list of commonly used content sharing capabilities that may crossover between project life and home life:

  • Blogs with collaborative comment capabilities
  • Video and multimedia sharing
  • Podcasting
  • Social networking
  • Syndicated web feeds (RSS)
  • Mashups
  • Social bookmarks and news
  • Microblogging
  • Cloud Tagging

(Note: If you are like me, some of the words are new and I had to look them up on the internet – you should too)

Many organizations wrestle with the desire to use some of these tools to improve communication on projects while trying to control privacy, confidentiality and make the best use of time available. Privacy is often handled through firewalls or intranets that provided a barrier to web-based tools for communication. However, advances in tool capability now allow intranets to offer these communication and collaboration tools inside the organization or project.

SharePoint, for example, offers tools for video sharing through its interactive media manager and podcast kit — available as free downloads. Mashups – combining content from multiple sources – can be created from SharePoint’s Business Data Catalogue connector, XML Mashup, Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer. And, the SharePoint Community Kit (another free download) supports social bookmarking and sharing news. Not to mention instant messaging. How much real-time information is too much? (You might enjoy reading Daniel Tenner’s perspective on this from Technology, “The questionable value of the real-time web”)

There is more …
In 2009, Google announced the release of Google Wave. Initially by invitation only, the software is now available to anyone. Described by CNET as "the e-mail of the future," Google Wave blends e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, and potentially connections to the world of social networking. According to Google, a wave helps make communication better by integrating formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Because a wave is shared within a group, members can reply anywhere in a message, edit content and add participants to the discussion at any point in the process. A playback feature lets newcomers rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Google Wave is an attempt to "combine conversation-type communication and collaboration-type communication. As summarized by Mashable, Google Wave offers innovative features one could imagine using to improve communication and collaboration on projects including:

  • Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
  • Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.
  • Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Also take a look at all the new Instant messaging products (I think they still classify as that!).  One that I have used is Trillian Astra from Cerulean Studios.  It brings together IM (from multiple sources), Video chat, Audio chat, Social Networks (like Myspace and Facebook), Twitter, Skype and email.  It is kind of a one stop communicator.

And, even Microsoft’s communicator now lets you go beyond IM and do VOIP calls or even integrate calendar and Net meetings.

Deciding which tools and capabilities will facilitate communication and collaboration on your project
Before jumping on any new technology bandwagon, remember that new processes require training and distract staff from ongoing tasks. As project manager, you need to do a realistic cost/benefit analysis before you commit that delineates who will use the technology, how they can use it within the context of the project, and understand what – if any – communication or collaboration technologies could be lost in the transition.

Like every new technique or technology that comes along, we must decide which tools to incorporate and what processes to use to “improve” our team collaboration.  Those that never try new technology will turn around one day to find they are still typing status reports on a typewriter!

 

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