Archive for May 2008

The most important piece of your software requirements is describing how you want your software to behave when your customers use it. It is the use cases and user stories: the sequence of steps the various kinds of your users will carry out in going from screen to screen of the application to accomplish the [...]

Selecting the right kind of engagement model with your offshore programmers (or the company where they work) is the best way to ensure you get more dynamic engineers that will deliver your software with the level of quality you would expect from your own software engineers in the U.S.
Even excellent project management will feel like [...]

Offshoring of software development is written off by some as not workable. Many have shared offshoring nightmares and horror stories in articles and blog postings. A recent survey says small company CIOs say they have little interest in increasing their offshore outsourcing in 2008. And many have stopped outsourcing altogether because of management challenges.

94% Are [...]

The programming press and IT journals are full of stories about the failure of software outsourcing. The statistics are sobering. Less than 50% of outsourcing meets financial objectives. The outsourcing of many business processes besides software development also has the same less-than-stellar results.
Forrester reports the top three causes of outsourcing failure are:

Technorati Tags: Global-teams, Metrics, [...]

PMO Symposium 2008: November 9-11, 2008 to be held in San Antonio, Texas at the Hyatt Regency Hotel located on the famous Riverwalk.
The PMI Project Management Organization Specific Interest Group (PMOSIG) is pleased to announce the PMO Symposium “Advancing the PMO.”  This is a “must attend” event providing opportunities for PMO practitioners, project management and [...]

What is a Project Charter?
The project charter, sometimes also called a Project Overview Statement (POS), is the signed document that formally defines and authorizes a project. Reaching an agreement on the nature of a new project, including its scope, objectives, and constraints can be a difficult but healthy process for a group of key stakeholders [...]

Most project managers find that they when they complete the planning of a project they become inundated in the following execution phase. This is primarily because of the need for overall project coordination, routine schedule management, integrated change control, and project status tracking. In most cases, there is more work than can be accomplished by [...]

A great way to establish a sense of urgency around the priority work and to produce a way to celebrate real wins is the use of campaigns.  Campaigns come in a variety of models; the most effective, in my view, are those designed similar to political campaigns: to win the hearts and minds of constituents.  [...]

Who says the PMO is only responsible for communicating project status reports or headlines when projects are in trouble?  Did you ever consider the opportunities for an Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) who coordinates and communicates business plan information across your organization?   How about informing staff on ALL business plan activities, so everyone has a [...]

The real power of a corporate vision is realized only when everyone in the organization clearly understands the vision and recognizes how everyone contributes to its success.  This is particularly true when project managers are assigned to successfully manage those projects that are most important to the company’s future success.  And yet, for most organizations, [...]

My last blog talked about applying Five Whys to elements within project management and specifically to human and team dynamics. The more challenging aspect is in attempting to apply the Five Whys on global projects where activities are performed in multiple countries and the team is typically comprised of members from more than one country. [...]

Five Whys provides a structured yet simple approach to solving problems as they occur during a project and can provide a framework for a team to work through complex problems. It is a simple process at its core. 

Technorati Tags: best-practices, Career development, communication, human-factors, people, problem-solving

In a recent project team meeting we were reviewing an Ishikawa diagram and root cause analysis as a means to determine the next appropriate steps on an issue we were addressing as a project team when a forgotten data point was brought forward be me of all people, the project manager.

Technorati Tags: human-factors, improvement, Personal-empowerment

In this final posting about the Fish Pond metaphor we will look under water to see what we can learn about how (project) organizations can adapt to change.
Fish do not simply float around in a tank. Although they once in a while bump into glass walls, they are able to find food, detect other fish [...]

In my previous postings I have introduced the use of a fish pond as a metaphor for leading projects and organizations in our ever changing times.
Thinking about a bucket of water can really help us out. It emphasizes the importance of preparation; the fish pond is all about preplanning.
Preplanning a pond is about the [...]