Project Management Methodologies and Tools: Is Your Process or Tool as Simple as it Can Be?

This is a guest post by Brian Kennemer, Senior Enterprise Project Management Consultant at Microsoft.

Obviously we are all making adjustments because of the changes in our economy. It has caused us to reexamine what we work on and how we work on it. For many of us, it has meant having fewer team members but the same expectations for what we need to accomplish. How we spend our time is always important, but is even more important now. There has never been a better time for reexamination of our processes and our tools.

A methodology should require you to document or track only as much as is absolutely required for the PM, the team and management to make decisions and accomplish the real work (or if the document or action is required by your customer or by regulation.) Often though, our methodologies call for the generation of reports and documents that are never read or do not actually add value to the project. The question I always ask about such things is “What decision would be made impossible or more difficult if we did NOT do this step, write this report or generate this methodology deliverable?” Software development is an area where one can find methodologies that are on the extremes, with some calling for huge outpourings of deliverables and others calling for next to nothing with regard to requirements and documentation deliverables. Somewhere in between lies what is best for most of us. Do you really need every deliverable that your projects are creating? Would there be any ill effects if some of them were not created? Run your deliverables through a few tests to see what the impact would be if they were not produced or if they were produced in an abbreviated form. How much time would that same per project where a project manager or team member could be adding real value? Be ruthless. Sure you have “always done it” but that does not mean you always have to. Answer this question for all your deliverables: “When was the last time someone accessed this deliverable for the last year worth of projects in your organization?” If nobody has accessed it for that number of projects it should be slated for cutting from the methodology.

This same idea works for the configuration of project management software systems (well really ANY software system actually.) I use this principle for every design decision I make when I’m working with clients on their Microsoft Project Server deployments. Before I will add a custom field I want to know what views it will be in and how that field being there will support a key business decision or enable project work to be accomplished. Before I create a view I want to know who specifically will use it and what decisions they are making while viewing it and how NOT having it will impact the project and the process.

A view in Project Server Web Access or a SQL Reporting Services report is in the system for a specific reason. It is designed to support a specific business decision. If an executive needs to be able to see the start and finish dates, the total effort and total cost of projects broken down by which organization is paying for the project and which strategic goal the project supports then there is a view for that. For that view you need the project name, the start and finish dates, work effort and cost totals. All project management systems produce these fields as a matter of course. Also needed though are fields that align the projects to an organization and to a strategic goal. So in this case we need to add two custom fields. If this were the only view required then we would only need two custom fields. We would not need a field that tracked what software system the project was modifying or what geographic region the project team is in. Even if you currently capture that information and 20 more data points you don’t need them if they are not going to be in a view or report that is going to help someone make a real decision. Again, be ruthless. If the justification is “It would be interesting to know” then your next question should be “Why would it be interesting? What is going to be done with the knowledge that such a field would provide? To whom would it be interesting and useful?” The answers to these questions will help you know if the field\view\report is actually needed.

“Doing more with less” is not just a cliché, it is an all too real fact of life that requires all of us to figure out where time and effort can be saved. Smoothing out your methodology and your project management system data collection scheme may not seem earth shaking in its impact but it can make a difference in the time spent by your project managers and team members. They are the ones that are actually feeling the impact of the current situation. Taking unnecessary items off their plates frees them to do the real work you are paying them to do.

Action Items:

1. Look at your project management system and see what it is capturing about your projects and tasks. Ruthlessly question the value they add and analyze the time spent creating or maintaining them. Kill the items that fail to provide the required value for the money spent.
2. Take the same ruthless look at the data your project management system is capturing. Do all those fields show up in reports or views that are actually used to make decisions? If not then think about removing them.

ProjectWorld: Day 2, Recap

Excuse the erratic frequency of coverage, but the internet has been funky all conference. I’m sitting in the lobby again as the conference is winding down, exhausted from BA-PM-Six-Sigma overload. Attendance was even lighter today than it was yesterday. Both of the sessions I attended had less than ten participants—but the presenters were quick on their feet and opened the lecture up to a group discussion.

If you haven’t yet, stop by the PM Boulevard booth and pick up a tote bag in the last few hours.

Keynote: Navigating the New World of Work, Daniel W. Rasmus

• 46% of employees have discussed work related issues on social networking sites.
• Our workforce demographic now: Consultants, employees, outsourcer, partners, contractors, customers, freelancers, contingent staff.
• There’s no such thing as a best practice—strike the word from your vocabulary. Best implies it’s unchangeable, there’s always room for change and improvement.”
• Placeless working environments: doesn’t matter where we live anymore, we’ve completely eliminated the “place” of work.
• A poet once said, that the biggest commodity we have are words—the value comes from the innovative way they are arranged. The same is true of technology.

Program and Portfolio Management, Keith Kerr

• Do I have to have a strategy before I have portfolio management? The answer is that you have to do all at the same time. They work interchangeably.
• Why do we need portfolio management now? Increased demand for collaboration communication, accountability and performance.
• Silos aren’t necessarily bad. They provide a lot of strength for the organization. Portfolio management is trying to create some permeability across the silo to see if the whole things is working. We don’t need to tear down the silo—just create a standard way of categorizing.
• Only 55% of organizations define and document projects and assets, and 14% monitor portfolio automated software.

Applying Six Sigma & Process Improvement to PM, Chuck Millhollan

• If you’re buckling down in your work and not demonstrating what you’re doing, stakeholders won’t know, and you become a target in downsizing.
• Quality management concepts forces you to broaden, we preach a lot about documenting current state, but we don’t do it enough.
• PMs and Bas might seem like overhead today, but if you do not spend the overhead and investment in your organization, then you will be dead tomorrow.
• What is quality? It’s a perception, not what’s documented. I can meet every term in my SAAS, and if it gets into the customers’ hands, and they don’t like it, then the project’s failed.
• Are our requirements meeting quality expectations? We treat requirements like an end product.
• You don’t have to have six sigma in your organization, just have to have the individual philosophy.

Whew. If you’d like to see the slides from the sessions, please visit IIR’s website here.

See you next year!

ProjectWorld: Day 1, Afternoon Recap

As Kathleen Barret said in her seminar on Business Analysis, “We are the lucky few who are allowed to get out of our business. The conference is much smaller this year.” In the opening remarks yesterday morning, IIR also commented that most people attending ProjectWorld are wearing both their Project Management hats and their Business Analyst hats. Today is the time to be a jack of all trades. The seminars were definitely more sparsely attended then previous years (only a 110 registrants as opposed to 300-400 in previous years), but the content was still strong and practical.

More snippets from the afternoon’s sessions:

Business Analysis: Helping Business Do Business Better, Kathleen Barret

• Times like these are okay, because the deadwood falls off the tree. There are organizations that have lost their way, and they need to restructure.
• When your customer don’t know what to think of you, it’s hard to pull yourself up.
• Business analysis – identifying and articulating the need for change and facility that change. If you don’t need change in your org, you don’t need BA.
• There’s not one kind of Business Analyst: Project, Enterprise and Transition.
• Elicitation: The Art of BA. How you get people to think very clearly about the issues and what they need to solve the problem.

How Agile Reduces Requirements Risks, Ellen Gottesdiener

• Building software is like a knot—a big sticky, knotty problem.
• 28% to 42.5% of software development costs go to fixing faulty requirements.
• Top risks: scope creep, lack of customer involvement, unrealistic customer expectations, poor impact analysis, changing and practice tools.
• Scope creep is normal. Not having changing requirements is a symptom of poor communication. The issue is, how to we manage and contain it?

If you’d like more about the seminar, you can find some Agile goodies here.

ProjectWorld: Day 1, Keynote Speakers

Some sound bites from the two keynote speakers that kicked off the conference this morning.

Evolving Role of the CIO: Asif Ahmad, VP Diagnostic Services & CIO, Duke University Health Systems

• Building high performance teams in this economy is getting more and more difficult.
• Information and data is an enterprise asset, just like buildings.
• CIO as process leader – Embrace what the institution is driving, rather than what the technology is driving.
• Communication is critical to empowering and organization – you can never over communicate in large organization.
• Technology on a bad process just makes the bad process happen faster.

Improve and Achieve Greater Business Value: Peter Gibson, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Wyndham Hotel Group

• Project managers probably know it better than executives know it.
• It is rough out there—how do you add value? If you don’t add value your gone.
• 75% of the workforce is not engaged.
• Change is happening greater outside the organization than inside the organization. We have to keep up with the outside.
• How can you improve and achieve greater business value in these uncertain times? There is no silver bullet—it comes down to individual and team performances.
• People that understand the business and craft the solution are going to be the future.
• We’re the most un-automated group in the world.

Peter thinks that we're in the most exciting field there is right now. Do you agree?

ProjectWorld: Day 1 at a Glance

The lobby of the Hyatt Regency is pretty quiet this morning as ProjectWorlders are still trickling in. Maybe this speaks to the current recession, but registration numbers seem to be pretty low.

My schedule for today goes a little something like this:

• Evolving Role of the CIO – Asif Ahmad, Duke University Health System & Medical Center
• Business Analysis: Helping Business Do Business Better – Kathleen Barret
• How Agile Reduces Requirements Risks –Ellen Gottesdiener
• Collaboration for Project and Business Success – Phyllis Rupert
• Resource Capacity Planning and Capacity Modeling – Lesley R Gibson

We overestimated on goodie bags at the PMB booth—so please make sure you stop by and say hello.

E-Discovery and You: Part 2

The following is a post by Penny Quirk, a principal consulting manager at Robbins-Gioia.

The previous E-Discovery and You article provided insight into the history of the changes to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP); what organizations should consider when creating their Litigation Discovery/Support teams; the impact of storing, retrieving and analyzing costs associated with an organization’s non-essential data. In this second part to the E-Discovery series we look at how a single case and the judicial ruling of Zubulake v. UBS Warburg resulted in major changes of perception, Records & Information Management processes and the way organizations view their data.

What does this mean to you?

As more and more cases are being tried under FRCP, the interpretation by the judge and the final ruling will have impact on court cases that follow. Establishing judicial precedence and questioning those ruling are becoming common place for organization involved in legal actions while defending their electronic record and recordkeeping systems.

One of the most commonly referenced and groundbreaking case is Zubulake v. UBS Warburg. United States District Court Judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, during the year-long case (2003-2004) issued five opinions that are considered the first definitive case in the United States on a wide range of electronic discovery issues. From this case, extensive changes have impacted corporations and caused them to begin looking internally to defend their processes and programs.

The Zubulake v. UBS Warburg impact rules, the court’s decision, and how that ruling impacts organizations are as follows:

IMPACT RULE 1: The ability for the disclosing party to shift the costs of restoring “inaccessible” backup tapes to the requesting party

Court Result: The court ordered the defendant to produce, at its own expense, all responsive emails existing on optical disks, active servers, and five backup tapes as selected by the plaintiff. The court determined that only after the contents of the backup tapes are reviewed, and the defendant's costs are quantified, the court will conduct the appropriate cost-shifting analysis.

Impact Result: Organizations realizing the magnitude of this cost have taken drastic steps in reducing the age-old process of backing up the backup. IT departments are showing more responsive to annual or semi-annual backup recovery testing, evaluating the cost, time, and personnel resource required to produce data for the organization.

IMPACT RULE 2: The party's duty and scope to preserve electronic evidence during the course of litigation

Court Result: In the restoration effort that occurred according to previous e-discovery decisions in the matter, the parties discovered that certain backup tapes were missing and that emails had been deleted. The plaintiff moved for evidentiary and monetary sanctions against the defendant for its failure to preserve the missing tapes and emails. The court found that the defendant had a duty to preserve the missing evidence, since it should have known that the emails may be relevant to future litigation.

Impact Result: Organizations are aware of what may constitute “future litigation” and Litigation Hold processes are put into place at the moment a “potential future litigation” appears to have occurred. The determination to follow through and have a Litigation Support Program as part of their overall Enterprise Information Management program has proven beneficial to those organizations acting proactively.

IMPACT RULE 3: Lawyer's duty to monitor their clients' compliance with electronic data preservation and production

Court Result: The court further noted that defense counsel was partly to blame for the document destruction because it had failed in its duty to locate relevant information, to preserve that information, and to timely produce that information. In addressing the role of counsel in litigation generally, the court stated that "counsel must take affirmative steps to monitor compliance so that all sources of discoverable information are identified and searched." Specifically, the court concluded that attorneys are obligated to ensure all relevant documents are discovered, retained, and produced. Additionally, the court declared that litigators must guarantee that identified relevant documents are preserved by placing a “litigation hold” on the documents, communicating the need to preserve them, and arranging for safeguarding of relevant archival media.

Impact Results: Creation of a Legal team knowledgeable in the case and the document discovery, able to institute the Litigation Hold process, and assist the organization in locating, producing and testifying in necessary as to the process in which the data in maintained and protected within the organization. The Litigation Support team is made up of attorneys specializing in the particular disciple, internal counsel, the Records Management Office, IT representatives and key business owners.

IMPACT RULE 4: The imposition of sanctions for the spoliation (or destruction) of electronic evidence

Court Result: Although the plaintiff did not file her charges until August 2001, by April of that year, “almost everyone associated with Zubulake recognized the possibility that she might sue,” the court wrote. The court also found that the defendant failed to comply with its own retention policy, which would have preserved the missing evidence.

Impact Results: Records & Information Management Policies addressing the protection of business data by means of an approved record retention schedule, play a key role in ensuring data is retained properly. Possessing the ability to be reproduced into a readable state in the event of a litigation discovery occurs prior to the retention maturity. This action has caused organizations to rethink their “Long-Term Storage” options.

Conculsion

The Zubulake decisions are of particular interest for corporations within the United States. Judge Scheindlin’s level of subject knowledge has provided a new level of best practices for corporate legal, making all employees aware of the technical aspects of E-Discovery.

Further Reference

ZUBULAKE I, MAY 13, 2003: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).

ZUBULAKE II (Please note: this does not relate to electronic disclosure): Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, No. 02 Civ. 1243, 2003 WL 21087136 (S.D.N.Y. May 13, 2003).

ZUBULAKE III, JULY 24, 2003: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 216 F.R.D. 280 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).

ZUBULAKE IV, OCTOBER 22, 2003: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).

ZUBULAKE V: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 2004 WL 1620866 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2004).

PM Boulevard on PM Podcast

I’ve just listened to myself on the latest Project Management Podcast. You can too! Cornelius was a lovely host and the rest of the episode is a pretty good one: SharePoint for Project Management.

We’ve been talking a lot about SharePoint lately. See our previous post on improving team communications with MOSS 2007.