Are you a PMP ? Ok this is the most important post Im going to write in this blog for you .If you are also a PMP in my category who waited till the last moment to claim PDUs ( Please I don’t recommend that period! PMI can always reject what you claim so you need time for that) and in the mission of saving your title for another 3 years.. This post will sound music to you. First thank you Shawan Futter(http://www.theicpm.com/) ,Dr. Madhu and Cornelius (http://www.thepmpodcast.com/) for all the help. Ok Here we go. 15 points – Category 2 SDL If you are a regular listener of PMPodcast , (If not you can start now ) claim 15 points per one cycle.. (http://www.thepmpodcast.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid=33) has more details 15 Points – Category 2h If you are really doing PM related work, you can claim 5 for each year so you got another 15. Now itself you got 30., ok the next 30 is the challenge.. I will do it and update the post.. :) wait ….
Here you go for the next 30..
10 Points – Category 2g
Have you done any research on new Project Management method or framework ? why not creating a presentation on that as training material and train your own colleagues ? Or if you are in to PM consultancy, you can use that for various teams training. There you can get 10 PDUs.
5 Points – Category 2 Activity
Create a Project Management forum in your own company with people who are interested to share knowledge and talk about Project Management related stuff. You are the moderator of this forum, have weekly meetings.. there you can collect 5 PDUs.
15 Points – category 5
This is really a good one . Under volunteer activity you know that you can claim PDUs for your PM subject specific blog? You can claim 5 points per year so you can get maximum of 15 points there. But be honest they do an audit J
There are many more available. If you are doing some formal higher studies on Project Management, if you do a research degree and publish journals, you can collect many PDUs easily. But above is the most easiest path I have found.
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Special note for Sri Lankan PMPs who will be losing their credentials soon…. I know there are lots of PMPs in SL right now.. and I know many of them are going to lose their credentials this year :) I was one of them before. Just like you guys, I also like to attend to worldwide seminars, conferences and earn PDUS but there is a big price to pay for these as we are located in SL. Traveling is very costly and these seminars are costly when you convert to Rupees. I know there are ways that you can purchase PM stuff, learn and then claim for PDUs. …Again you need money.. I know most of us are not invited to address our PM chapter dinners etc ;-) so we don’t get PDUs from that way. In the same time most of us have not written any books or published journals. Then how do we do this??? Don’t worry … Still you can claim for PDUs for what you have done .. Remember how hard it was for us to do this PMP exam.. Sooo many questions..PMBOK guides, online test exams, remembering inputs and outputs of each phase of the cycle ( Shoot me !! ) , Rita’s book.. oh its a nightmare.. So don’t lose what you have gained in hard way.. Actually I also believed that earning PDUs is unbelievably difficult task till few PMPs guided me on how to do this without spending any money. All what you have to do is all the days do your reading, participate online forums etc. , help other Project managers and practice as a Project Management professional. I specially thought to post this blog post for you guys to help to claim PDUs. I will improve this post to make it much more usable as much as information I find day by day…
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
SQL Server Books..
Okii.. This is not about Project Management.. But something which I think worth dedicating a post of my blog for.
In the past I’ve been very lucky to work with colleagues who have quite unique skills in IT industry and the guys who pitched the top in their own technical domains.. They have been always a great inspiration to me..
This is another breakthrough of one of my current colleagues at Exilesoft., He published 2 Books.. WOW can you believe this.. I hardly can write a half page blog post.. But this guy, having 2 small kids at home, doing really a good job at office.. wrote 2 books..Unbelievable... (Of course Sri Lankan men don’t work at home ;-) that’s a different story )
Check his books and his blog here..
http://dbfriend.blogspot.com/2009/02/two-books-from-sql-server-central.html
http://dbfriend.blogspot.com/2009/02/book-on-sql-server-replication.html
His blog http://databasenews24x7.blogspot.com/
He is a great inspiration to me !!! J and I wish him all the success. !
Sunday, April 19, 2009
PMBOK guide for free..
You can download the 4th Edition of PMBOK guide free now..
To access the digital edition of the PMBOK® Guide:
Visit www.PMI.org
Logon to Your Members Area
Select the Resources tab
Go to Global Standards Library
Click on "Library of PMI Global Standards"
Click on "Projects (View Details)
Right Click on Language and select "Save Target As.."
To access the digital edition of the PMBOK® Guide:
Visit www.PMI.org
Logon to Your Members Area
Select the Resources tab
Go to Global Standards Library
Click on "Library of PMI Global Standards"
Click on "Projects (View Details)
Right Click on Language and select "Save Target As.."
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
New Scrum tool in the market - Agilo...
Good news is that I found this “seems to be cool “ Agile PM tool “Agilo”
http://www.agile42.com/cms/pages/tools/
The bad news is that they charge 29 Euro for 30 day trial.. Smart ha.. ;-)
http://www.agile42.com/cms/pages/tools/
The bad news is that they charge 29 Euro for 30 day trial.. Smart ha.. ;-)
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Newbie to Agile.. Some random things based on my experience so far..
1. Scrum is only one of the Agile methods. There are many. But at the moment Scrum is the most popular due to its simplicity and not forgetting the scrum alliance marketing effort too.. ;-)
2. I had a situation where the product owner had an idea.. Agile is no documentation.. period!.. This is not right! If you look at what Agile Manifesto says “they prefer working software over comprehensive documentation and not over any documentation. The point is that more effort should be for making software and not for making documentation. But we always need simple good documentation in software. Which is a known factor.
3. Can the none technical Project Manager becomes the Scrum master? My answer is YES. But still if you have a choice, go for the technical guy. Because in Scrum the “Management “ is very less. All what you have is team work and coordination and resolving impediments. When the Scrum master is a techie he will be very efficient in conducting the scrum stand up meetings in the morning and resolving technical impediments for the team members to sign in for respective tasks. But still if the scrum master is none technical.. its team work.. get the techies to help you in all the aspects…
4. Sometimes I see many think that you don’t have to commit on a release date in scrum. No.. in real world it doesn’t happen like that. There is always a tentative date.. But what happens is that based on the changes to the PB, your time expansions or reductions become much more visible to the product owner. Therefore there will be lesser problems to convince on expanded time lines
5. How do we do the DB design , Architecture UI themes etc? Part by part for each delivery? No what best I have experienced is that have a pre sprint on those high level tasks which you need to perform for the whole project at once. But minimize them and have only the vital ones.
6. How do we use Scrum for research projects? – I think it’s the ideal. Very uncertain type of work.. Scrum works fine !
7. Do we still have to do reporting to the management? YeAAS – Recently I read an Article by Mike and he suggest to continue the same type of reporting as much as possible till Agile thinking mature in the organization.
8. Is Gantt charts needed.. For me the answer is “NO” but again Ive seen many agile gurus have mentioned that .. use it as a communication tool if really needed by someone.. But personally I don’t like Gantt charts..
9. Is MS Project needed for Scrum : NOOOOO
10. How about the WBS ? I say keep it as the component diagram for the project.. this has many advantages over disadvantages.
11. How long a waterfall team will take to convert to a scrum team: My experience is 2 days most the time.
12. Is planning Poker a must? Nope Nope.. But when you don’t play cards some team members start to play ;-) specially in SL context not all team members talk. Planning poker help to define your ideas and stand by it ., then there will be so much valuable points coming from the team about a particular user story. I find it helpful.
13. Do you only assign the weight to a task in the sprint? No for me number of hours at this point is also important.. the secret is not more than 16 hours per task.
14. Can you compare velocity of multiple teams to identify team performance? : NO because there is no base for that. Different team may assess weight to similar tasks differently.
15. How do you practice scrum in outsourced Projects? A million dollar question. But still possible.. there are many tools which may help with customer communication when it comes to product backlog and sprint backlog. The secret is ask the product backlog in advance.. so you can be well prepared..
16. Will the PO always write user stories?.. Hmm…….. :)Somebody has to do all the work sometimes…
17. One tip I would give is that when playing planning poker.. get the moderator to write notes about the requirements elaborated by the PO and the team. Recording the conversation is really a good idea.
2. I had a situation where the product owner had an idea.. Agile is no documentation.. period!.. This is not right! If you look at what Agile Manifesto says “they prefer working software over comprehensive documentation and not over any documentation. The point is that more effort should be for making software and not for making documentation. But we always need simple good documentation in software. Which is a known factor.
3. Can the none technical Project Manager becomes the Scrum master? My answer is YES. But still if you have a choice, go for the technical guy. Because in Scrum the “Management “ is very less. All what you have is team work and coordination and resolving impediments. When the Scrum master is a techie he will be very efficient in conducting the scrum stand up meetings in the morning and resolving technical impediments for the team members to sign in for respective tasks. But still if the scrum master is none technical.. its team work.. get the techies to help you in all the aspects…
4. Sometimes I see many think that you don’t have to commit on a release date in scrum. No.. in real world it doesn’t happen like that. There is always a tentative date.. But what happens is that based on the changes to the PB, your time expansions or reductions become much more visible to the product owner. Therefore there will be lesser problems to convince on expanded time lines
5. How do we do the DB design , Architecture UI themes etc? Part by part for each delivery? No what best I have experienced is that have a pre sprint on those high level tasks which you need to perform for the whole project at once. But minimize them and have only the vital ones.
6. How do we use Scrum for research projects? – I think it’s the ideal. Very uncertain type of work.. Scrum works fine !
7. Do we still have to do reporting to the management? YeAAS – Recently I read an Article by Mike and he suggest to continue the same type of reporting as much as possible till Agile thinking mature in the organization.
8. Is Gantt charts needed.. For me the answer is “NO” but again Ive seen many agile gurus have mentioned that .. use it as a communication tool if really needed by someone.. But personally I don’t like Gantt charts..
9. Is MS Project needed for Scrum : NOOOOO
10. How about the WBS ? I say keep it as the component diagram for the project.. this has many advantages over disadvantages.
11. How long a waterfall team will take to convert to a scrum team: My experience is 2 days most the time.
12. Is planning Poker a must? Nope Nope.. But when you don’t play cards some team members start to play ;-) specially in SL context not all team members talk. Planning poker help to define your ideas and stand by it ., then there will be so much valuable points coming from the team about a particular user story. I find it helpful.
13. Do you only assign the weight to a task in the sprint? No for me number of hours at this point is also important.. the secret is not more than 16 hours per task.
14. Can you compare velocity of multiple teams to identify team performance? : NO because there is no base for that. Different team may assess weight to similar tasks differently.
15. How do you practice scrum in outsourced Projects? A million dollar question. But still possible.. there are many tools which may help with customer communication when it comes to product backlog and sprint backlog. The secret is ask the product backlog in advance.. so you can be well prepared..
16. Will the PO always write user stories?.. Hmm…….. :)Somebody has to do all the work sometimes…
17. One tip I would give is that when playing planning poker.. get the moderator to write notes about the requirements elaborated by the PO and the team. Recording the conversation is really a good idea.
Friday, April 03, 2009
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Initiating Scrum at a new customer and training the team .
Last week I had really a good opertunity. A customer located in Stavenger wanted to impliment SCRUM for their project management process. So I was just there to help them on that with a new project.
The customer didn’t have any matured project management methodologies, frameoworks or tools already in place. Therefore setting up the new process was much more easier.
When we arrived, they have already got the “Ideal place” for the scrum team. It was a very open spacious room with a round table , White board.. so everybody could sit there and dicuss ideas freely. The highlight was all the refreshments and foods (wont forget Cinnamon and honey muffins )and drinks and chocolotes.. wow I love this scrum team.
Ok How did I start?
I had an idea about the customer and the nature of business/Projects before I arrived.
1. First I explained them the difference between our normal traditional project management methodologies and scrum. As most the people i meet, some of this team members also thought Agile is Scrum. So I had to explain them Scrum is Agile and Agile is not scrum :) then again I made it very clear to them the difference between looking at software project management from the manufacturing angle instead of looking at the construction industry.
2. Once they had a good overview about the framework , I asked one of their team members to give an overview of the project which they have selected to manage using scrum as a Pilot Scrum project. The idea is to manage this project using scrum, get the Scrum culture introduced to the organisation , and then once the project is sucessful, to roleout the process to all the company projects.
(Another nice thing which I couldn’t mention about this scrum team is that they had 2 members from Stavenger and 2 Members from my SL team onsite .. so multi cultural team)
3. Then we started assigning roles.. Who is going to be a product owner , Scrum master and the team and their expertiese. We decided the software manager of the company as the product owner for this specific product as he has the ownership of the product and easy access to all the stakeholders.
4. The Teachlead of the team became the scrum master and my 2 guys and other developers were the scrum team.
5. So we started creating a product backlog. Before me arriving they have created one .. But it looked more like a task list to me. And it had 300 items.. So we started creating a product backlog to create a web application framework for the company .
6. Once we created the product backlog.. I trained them on how to play planning poker and weigh the product backlog. We were not prepared with a proper planning poker card set so we just created our own sets.
7. It was bit exausting excersise at first to get the team and the product owner in to Planning poker. But after 2 , 3 user stories there was really a good progress.
8. Then the product owner added the priority to each story. For this product owner everythign was 1st priority.. so there I am again.. Convincing :)
9. Then he mentioned at what points he needs releases.
10. We called it a day there as we all were exausted.. Specialy the product owner. :)
11. The next day .. we all met at 8 Am.. ( I had only 2 days allocated for this whole thing and I had to leave at 4 PM to the Airport to take a flight to Oslo back. So it was not easy..)
12. Ok the sprint planning meeting. The mangement had some concern ….do we have to spend this much of time for these planing sessions.?. My Answer was “Yes” Because in scrum, the time we spend for planning session is not just planning task. We ellaborate hell of a lot there when it comes to requirements and moderator can just document them as a base for requirement doc .
13. They wanted 5 day scprint first.. Quite strange but nice. Because the idea of the 1st sprint was to complete studying the exisitng framework and system and coming up with a new frame work design.
14. We selected the required user stories and then split them in to atomic level tasks.. The time was not right to play a planning poker game again to asign caleries for each task so the team disucsss and weigh the sprint ( Yes I don’t recommend this.. but some times we have to use shortcuts at trainings J )
15. Then the number of hours were also specified for the tasks. This was bit of a hard thing.
16. I explained them how they should start dailiy scrum meeting next day and thehow they should track caleries burned each day by each team member.
17. Then they asked me what tools to use, any scrum tools off the shelf, team system what? I said NO. because at this time what is important is the concept and how they use it to run the project. Not the tool. So I prepared some Excel templates for the product Backlog, Product Burn down velocity, Sprint back log, sprint burn down velocity , Impediment log and Sprint review template. So they have to work with XL first as it’s the most simplest way to do it.
18. It was time for me to depart.. they showed lot of confidence on the method.. it will take some time to establish as the main challenge of scrum is the mentality change and not anything else.
It was kinda sad to leave such a good team, but they can contact me at any time for any clarifications so there were no much risks.
Overall it was really nice 2 days and good workshop.
The customer didn’t have any matured project management methodologies, frameoworks or tools already in place. Therefore setting up the new process was much more easier.
When we arrived, they have already got the “Ideal place” for the scrum team. It was a very open spacious room with a round table , White board.. so everybody could sit there and dicuss ideas freely. The highlight was all the refreshments and foods (wont forget Cinnamon and honey muffins )and drinks and chocolotes.. wow I love this scrum team.
Ok How did I start?
I had an idea about the customer and the nature of business/Projects before I arrived.
1. First I explained them the difference between our normal traditional project management methodologies and scrum. As most the people i meet, some of this team members also thought Agile is Scrum. So I had to explain them Scrum is Agile and Agile is not scrum :) then again I made it very clear to them the difference between looking at software project management from the manufacturing angle instead of looking at the construction industry.
2. Once they had a good overview about the framework , I asked one of their team members to give an overview of the project which they have selected to manage using scrum as a Pilot Scrum project. The idea is to manage this project using scrum, get the Scrum culture introduced to the organisation , and then once the project is sucessful, to roleout the process to all the company projects.
(Another nice thing which I couldn’t mention about this scrum team is that they had 2 members from Stavenger and 2 Members from my SL team onsite .. so multi cultural team)
3. Then we started assigning roles.. Who is going to be a product owner , Scrum master and the team and their expertiese. We decided the software manager of the company as the product owner for this specific product as he has the ownership of the product and easy access to all the stakeholders.
4. The Teachlead of the team became the scrum master and my 2 guys and other developers were the scrum team.
5. So we started creating a product backlog. Before me arriving they have created one .. But it looked more like a task list to me. And it had 300 items.. So we started creating a product backlog to create a web application framework for the company .
6. Once we created the product backlog.. I trained them on how to play planning poker and weigh the product backlog. We were not prepared with a proper planning poker card set so we just created our own sets.
7. It was bit exausting excersise at first to get the team and the product owner in to Planning poker. But after 2 , 3 user stories there was really a good progress.
8. Then the product owner added the priority to each story. For this product owner everythign was 1st priority.. so there I am again.. Convincing :)
9. Then he mentioned at what points he needs releases.
10. We called it a day there as we all were exausted.. Specialy the product owner. :)
11. The next day .. we all met at 8 Am.. ( I had only 2 days allocated for this whole thing and I had to leave at 4 PM to the Airport to take a flight to Oslo back. So it was not easy..)
12. Ok the sprint planning meeting. The mangement had some concern ….do we have to spend this much of time for these planing sessions.?. My Answer was “Yes” Because in scrum, the time we spend for planning session is not just planning task. We ellaborate hell of a lot there when it comes to requirements and moderator can just document them as a base for requirement doc .
13. They wanted 5 day scprint first.. Quite strange but nice. Because the idea of the 1st sprint was to complete studying the exisitng framework and system and coming up with a new frame work design.
14. We selected the required user stories and then split them in to atomic level tasks.. The time was not right to play a planning poker game again to asign caleries for each task so the team disucsss and weigh the sprint ( Yes I don’t recommend this.. but some times we have to use shortcuts at trainings J )
15. Then the number of hours were also specified for the tasks. This was bit of a hard thing.
16. I explained them how they should start dailiy scrum meeting next day and thehow they should track caleries burned each day by each team member.
17. Then they asked me what tools to use, any scrum tools off the shelf, team system what? I said NO. because at this time what is important is the concept and how they use it to run the project. Not the tool. So I prepared some Excel templates for the product Backlog, Product Burn down velocity, Sprint back log, sprint burn down velocity , Impediment log and Sprint review template. So they have to work with XL first as it’s the most simplest way to do it.
18. It was time for me to depart.. they showed lot of confidence on the method.. it will take some time to establish as the main challenge of scrum is the mentality change and not anything else.
It was kinda sad to leave such a good team, but they can contact me at any time for any clarifications so there were no much risks.
Overall it was really nice 2 days and good workshop.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
What is a dumb question..?
Ok first of all I don’t believe there are any dumb questions.. Its only dumb people. No questions are dumb. But people who don’t question are really dumb.
As a project Manager /Scrum master you need your team members to ask questions. You need your product owner /customer to ask questions.. you need your senior management and other stakeholders to ask you questions. If they don’t question and if they don’t ask questions freely , the payback you have will be too much for you to handle at the end of the project.
So how do you get people around you to question you ..? Its very simple... Create that environment around the project. Make it a project culture.. Every team member should be able to question about each other and about the product.. and about the requirements.
To my surprise I have come across with many project managers who create a shield to prevent others questioning about the project by being defensive for questions. This is really a bad syndrome. They have no idea how others around them could really help them to get them on line. Early awareness about issues to the management and to the customer really help to find solutions before its too late.
I still cant understand why a project manger cannot show his or her application design to a business manager.. and questions such as .. by looking at from the outside , do you think that this is user friendly enough ? Do you see any risks in this schedule which I have not seen so far.. its really important for a project managers to create this situation in any project. We all know scrum facilitate this situation. But unfortunately all the projects under the sun are not proper scrum projects. So no matter what the methodologies you use or technologies you use, it’s totally up to you to create enough transparency about your projects to encourage questions.
As a project Manager /Scrum master you need your team members to ask questions. You need your product owner /customer to ask questions.. you need your senior management and other stakeholders to ask you questions. If they don’t question and if they don’t ask questions freely , the payback you have will be too much for you to handle at the end of the project.
So how do you get people around you to question you ..? Its very simple... Create that environment around the project. Make it a project culture.. Every team member should be able to question about each other and about the product.. and about the requirements.
To my surprise I have come across with many project managers who create a shield to prevent others questioning about the project by being defensive for questions. This is really a bad syndrome. They have no idea how others around them could really help them to get them on line. Early awareness about issues to the management and to the customer really help to find solutions before its too late.
I still cant understand why a project manger cannot show his or her application design to a business manager.. and questions such as .. by looking at from the outside , do you think that this is user friendly enough ? Do you see any risks in this schedule which I have not seen so far.. its really important for a project managers to create this situation in any project. We all know scrum facilitate this situation. But unfortunately all the projects under the sun are not proper scrum projects. So no matter what the methodologies you use or technologies you use, it’s totally up to you to create enough transparency about your projects to encourage questions.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Project Management in global economy crisis situation..
If you are a software company, depending on outsourced projects from western; USA, Europe, What may come along your way now ?How you should analyze the risk and get prepared to face the worst and still to deliver your projects as planned? Something to think about J
After hearing many things happening in the industry what I can see coming along our way are as follows;
1. Reducing resources of your projects which are in execution. This can happen if you are in to fixed price deals – Customer may ask you to reduce the number of heads in the project. Even internally, due to employee recession and recruitment freeze there will be corporate decisions to reduce the number of resources of your projects.
2. Requests for reducing the cycle time of the project- You may get requests to cut down on processes and documentation. You may get this request very often. A project which you spent 10 months to develop may have to be delivered within 6 months by cutting corners from your lengthy documentation and processes.
3. Even your teams may be over loaded with resources. – If you are in accompany where they have lost few projects due to the situation and still keeping the resources in house due to many reasons, your projects may get overloaded unless they get together and develop a specific product to the market.
4. You may have hear the news all of sudden “ we need to stop this project now because the customer or the investor stopped funding this project” What would be your position as the project Manager?
5. Some of your team members may not in focus and May not in their peak of productivity as they are so concerned about their lost hopes of increments, bonus, and even the stability of the company and their jobs.
6. Quality process may dropped drastically due to all these reasons
7. Sometimes only must have features will be requested.. If you are practicing scrum the product owner may satisfy with the project after first few sprints which delivers his core functionalities
8. You may have to cut down your project budgets dramatically, your team allowances, entertainments, team building activities will be a question mark.
Still you are a lucky PM ? why ? you still have a project to manage with all these problems and test your real PM skills of working under tremendous pressure.. .
As a PM nothing worst than not having any projects in your company to manage J
Lets discuss this further in a future post..
After hearing many things happening in the industry what I can see coming along our way are as follows;
1. Reducing resources of your projects which are in execution. This can happen if you are in to fixed price deals – Customer may ask you to reduce the number of heads in the project. Even internally, due to employee recession and recruitment freeze there will be corporate decisions to reduce the number of resources of your projects.
2. Requests for reducing the cycle time of the project- You may get requests to cut down on processes and documentation. You may get this request very often. A project which you spent 10 months to develop may have to be delivered within 6 months by cutting corners from your lengthy documentation and processes.
3. Even your teams may be over loaded with resources. – If you are in accompany where they have lost few projects due to the situation and still keeping the resources in house due to many reasons, your projects may get overloaded unless they get together and develop a specific product to the market.
4. You may have hear the news all of sudden “ we need to stop this project now because the customer or the investor stopped funding this project” What would be your position as the project Manager?
5. Some of your team members may not in focus and May not in their peak of productivity as they are so concerned about their lost hopes of increments, bonus, and even the stability of the company and their jobs.
6. Quality process may dropped drastically due to all these reasons
7. Sometimes only must have features will be requested.. If you are practicing scrum the product owner may satisfy with the project after first few sprints which delivers his core functionalities
8. You may have to cut down your project budgets dramatically, your team allowances, entertainments, team building activities will be a question mark.
Still you are a lucky PM ? why ? you still have a project to manage with all these problems and test your real PM skills of working under tremendous pressure.. .
As a PM nothing worst than not having any projects in your company to manage J
Lets discuss this further in a future post..
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Cone of Uncertainty
Uncertainty of project estimates (Specially the software projects) is the biggest problem we face when planning a project ahead. I’ve never made a perfect plan for a project (The preliminary plan to be valid till the project is completed and to complete the project successfully with the same exact number of hours I planned initially?? No I have never been lucky).. So how do we deal with this uncertainty of projects when planning? Yeah I hear you .. Agile .. Scrum.. NO in this post I’m not talking about that.. Im just talking about our normal pre planned projects.
“Cone of uncertainty” (research done by NASA) reflects the uncertainty at different points of sequential development of a project. It shows that
In feasibility study stage schedule estimate can be different in a range of 60% - 160%
After the requirement specifications - + or – 15%
Likewise when the project progress each stage of the project reduces the uncertainly of the estimate. However uncertainty of estimate becomes 0 when the software is accepted.
Ok this is a long discussed theory.. then what does PMI say about the project uncertainty ? I wanted to refresh my memory J
PMI also believe in progressive accuracy of estimation. PMI defines some asymmetric way of viewing the uncertainty of estimates.
Initial order of magnitude estimate can have a difference from +75% to -25%
Budgetary estimate can have a difference from +25% to -10%
Final definitive estimate reduce the difference up to +10% to -5% Most the time at the level of the budgetary estimate , we sign up the contract with the customer. So we have somewhat risk in the estimations to take in to consideration when preparation of the estimates.
Twice I worked with some pretty large projects where we had to agree on penalties for each day of the schedule over run if occurred in the project.. Both times I could manage it within the agreed schedule.. (So didn’t pay any penalty to the customer) But I didn’t complete the project with expected profit to the last cent. Because I had to do certain resource utilization variance to deliver a project which was confirmed based on the budgetary estimate.
But now that I need to think beyond what I see I just like to have some feedback from other readers about this situation.. One solution which we can do is to apply risk factor to the budgetary estimate and have the luxury of that provision. The other solution is revising the estimate in selected milestones. I have done that many times.. but this needs establishing trust , loads of negotiations and convincing with the customer and other stakeholders as most of the stakeholders don’t care about cone of uncertainly..:-) The Million dollar question is that how do you handle this situation in traditional project management methods without hurting your project bottom line ?
“Cone of uncertainty” (research done by NASA) reflects the uncertainty at different points of sequential development of a project. It shows that
In feasibility study stage schedule estimate can be different in a range of 60% - 160%
After the requirement specifications - + or – 15%
Likewise when the project progress each stage of the project reduces the uncertainly of the estimate. However uncertainty of estimate becomes 0 when the software is accepted.
Ok this is a long discussed theory.. then what does PMI say about the project uncertainty ? I wanted to refresh my memory J
PMI also believe in progressive accuracy of estimation. PMI defines some asymmetric way of viewing the uncertainty of estimates.
Initial order of magnitude estimate can have a difference from +75% to -25%
Budgetary estimate can have a difference from +25% to -10%
Final definitive estimate reduce the difference up to +10% to -5% Most the time at the level of the budgetary estimate , we sign up the contract with the customer. So we have somewhat risk in the estimations to take in to consideration when preparation of the estimates.
Twice I worked with some pretty large projects where we had to agree on penalties for each day of the schedule over run if occurred in the project.. Both times I could manage it within the agreed schedule.. (So didn’t pay any penalty to the customer) But I didn’t complete the project with expected profit to the last cent. Because I had to do certain resource utilization variance to deliver a project which was confirmed based on the budgetary estimate.
But now that I need to think beyond what I see I just like to have some feedback from other readers about this situation.. One solution which we can do is to apply risk factor to the budgetary estimate and have the luxury of that provision. The other solution is revising the estimate in selected milestones. I have done that many times.. but this needs establishing trust , loads of negotiations and convincing with the customer and other stakeholders as most of the stakeholders don’t care about cone of uncertainly..:-) The Million dollar question is that how do you handle this situation in traditional project management methods without hurting your project bottom line ?
Friday, December 26, 2008
Seasons Greetings !
Seasons greetings to all known and unknown blog readers and wish you all the best from my heart!
Thanks to projectized blog for connecting you with me from every corner of the world and thank Dilbert who keep me laughing and giggling all year long… :)
Thanks to projectized blog for connecting you with me from every corner of the world and thank Dilbert who keep me laughing and giggling all year long… :)
So this is one of my favorites this year which may bring a smile to you today…(Hopefully :-) ) and waiting to see so many good stuff in 2009.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Project Communication in Outsourced Project Management
We all know that, in average a project manager spend more or less 90% of his or her project management time for communication. Proper and effective communication is one of the most challenging areas in project management.. How about communication in outsourced project management..? that is any PM’s nightmare unless they manage it properly from day one.
This issue is not about language, either you do nearsoursing or outsourcing, nowadays most the professionals will speak good English. But poorly managed remote communication may increase the risk of project failures drastically. All aspects of remote communication should be carefully quality managed by a project manager who is in to outsourced project management. Unfortunately this needs quite lot of experience.
Over the years I’ve seen most the PM methodologies have matured, and processes has been introduced for project management.. New tools have come to the market., but still the challenge of remote communication remains the same.. How do we overcome it ?
Recently I had a chat with one of my project managers. He told me a story about a project he has managed while working in his previous company. It’s a very small sized project developed for one of the European countries. So him being the project manager sitting in the development company in Sri Lanka has communicated with customer via 600 emails. It gave me a fright.. Are we really doing something right here?
Have you heard about “Mad email Syndrome” which is very common in outsourcing operation. These are the symptoms;.
Project Manger from Venders company writes a mail to the customer about his questions regarding some requirement.. A nice email. Customer reads the mail., thinking why these people can’t even guess some simple thing like that …then he writes a reply in Blue color as comments for each question. ( yes we need to clearly separate the answer from the question)
Now that the Vendor's project manager who waited impatiently till he get all the answers to his questions receives the mail and he goes through the blue color comments made by the customer.. after reading that he find its disapointing and the customer has not answered half the things as he expected., most the points are not elaborated., so it creates much more questions for him now. Then what he does.. ? he uses another color., mostly seen is green , write comments in green color again under each blue color comments.. send this to the customer and CC to his whole hierarchy to save his back :-) and show them that he has still not got the answers right.
Customer receives the long email which is flashing in many color comments now.. He get really worked up.. certain symbols can give him a totally a different tone to the email. He write the comments in red color now.. and send it to the vendors PM again..
This doesn’t stop here… Is this situation new to you ? Im sure if you are in to outsourcing business you may have gone through this situation many times. This chain of email communication is a very strong risk trigger of project and relationship failure between outsourcer and outsourcee.. Why such a useful tool such as email can create this much of damage?
1. When communicating through emails , the other party doesn’t see your body language. They read exactly the meaning of word to word which may sound totally different to what you meant.
2. The other party don’t hear your tone of the voice. or your giggling . Recently I saw a customer commenting something like “Remove this field! “ with “!” what is that additional “!” is for ? these may create some unnecessary issues
3. Its very common that both parties think the other party is the idiot. They put less effort to understand each other. This may totally be different if you had a face to face discussion.
So how do you quality manage this remote communication? My advice for project managers are as follows;
1. Do not have email communication over 2 loops., if it goes over always try to use Voice via skype or telephone line. Or even use some tools such as Webex. Which is really good.(video con would be the best but unfortunately most of us do not have that facility )… Hmm How about Cisco TelePresence.???. I love to experience that !! :-)
2. Always read and re read your emails before sending.. do they mean something wrong to the reader.. make sure you communicate very clearly
3. Do not send too many emails. Try to summarize possible information in one email. Have your subject lines very clear.
4. If you need only 1 question mark have one .. But not three.. When you ask “can I have these replies by before end of business today? “ has a major difference between “can I have these replied before end of business today???????????”
5. Be very clear and elaborate on required points.. try to use tables as much as possible
6. Be warned when communication is not going right.. always ask help from your supervisors before it becomes too late.
7. Have the right attitude to respect the other party . if you read the mail in negative mind., you will end up with negative results.
8. Send customer status reports frequently., leave very little room for questions. Reports should be completed.
9. Always have project budgets to meet the customer face to face at least once in your project life. That will make your project communication much easier.
10. Understand that the time customer can spend for you is limited. That’s one reason why he or she outsource the project to you. Respect the fact and always think twice before you raising the question .Because you need to get the question right at the first time .
This issue is not about language, either you do nearsoursing or outsourcing, nowadays most the professionals will speak good English. But poorly managed remote communication may increase the risk of project failures drastically. All aspects of remote communication should be carefully quality managed by a project manager who is in to outsourced project management. Unfortunately this needs quite lot of experience.
Over the years I’ve seen most the PM methodologies have matured, and processes has been introduced for project management.. New tools have come to the market., but still the challenge of remote communication remains the same.. How do we overcome it ?
Recently I had a chat with one of my project managers. He told me a story about a project he has managed while working in his previous company. It’s a very small sized project developed for one of the European countries. So him being the project manager sitting in the development company in Sri Lanka has communicated with customer via 600 emails. It gave me a fright.. Are we really doing something right here?
Have you heard about “Mad email Syndrome” which is very common in outsourcing operation. These are the symptoms;.
Project Manger from Venders company writes a mail to the customer about his questions regarding some requirement.. A nice email. Customer reads the mail., thinking why these people can’t even guess some simple thing like that …then he writes a reply in Blue color as comments for each question. ( yes we need to clearly separate the answer from the question)
Now that the Vendor's project manager who waited impatiently till he get all the answers to his questions receives the mail and he goes through the blue color comments made by the customer.. after reading that he find its disapointing and the customer has not answered half the things as he expected., most the points are not elaborated., so it creates much more questions for him now. Then what he does.. ? he uses another color., mostly seen is green , write comments in green color again under each blue color comments.. send this to the customer and CC to his whole hierarchy to save his back :-) and show them that he has still not got the answers right.
Customer receives the long email which is flashing in many color comments now.. He get really worked up.. certain symbols can give him a totally a different tone to the email. He write the comments in red color now.. and send it to the vendors PM again..
This doesn’t stop here… Is this situation new to you ? Im sure if you are in to outsourcing business you may have gone through this situation many times. This chain of email communication is a very strong risk trigger of project and relationship failure between outsourcer and outsourcee.. Why such a useful tool such as email can create this much of damage?
1. When communicating through emails , the other party doesn’t see your body language. They read exactly the meaning of word to word which may sound totally different to what you meant.
2. The other party don’t hear your tone of the voice. or your giggling . Recently I saw a customer commenting something like “Remove this field! “ with “!” what is that additional “!” is for ? these may create some unnecessary issues
3. Its very common that both parties think the other party is the idiot. They put less effort to understand each other. This may totally be different if you had a face to face discussion.
So how do you quality manage this remote communication? My advice for project managers are as follows;
1. Do not have email communication over 2 loops., if it goes over always try to use Voice via skype or telephone line. Or even use some tools such as Webex. Which is really good.(video con would be the best but unfortunately most of us do not have that facility )… Hmm How about Cisco TelePresence.???. I love to experience that !! :-)
2. Always read and re read your emails before sending.. do they mean something wrong to the reader.. make sure you communicate very clearly
3. Do not send too many emails. Try to summarize possible information in one email. Have your subject lines very clear.
4. If you need only 1 question mark have one .. But not three.. When you ask “can I have these replies by before end of business today? “ has a major difference between “can I have these replied before end of business today???????????”
5. Be very clear and elaborate on required points.. try to use tables as much as possible
6. Be warned when communication is not going right.. always ask help from your supervisors before it becomes too late.
7. Have the right attitude to respect the other party . if you read the mail in negative mind., you will end up with negative results.
8. Send customer status reports frequently., leave very little room for questions. Reports should be completed.
9. Always have project budgets to meet the customer face to face at least once in your project life. That will make your project communication much easier.
10. Understand that the time customer can spend for you is limited. That’s one reason why he or she outsource the project to you. Respect the fact and always think twice before you raising the question .Because you need to get the question right at the first time .
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
All work and no play ???
few readers recently asked me the question.. "Why do you make such noise about planning Poker..We have been doing this all the time even long before SCRUM became popular.. we have been discussing with all our teams when estimating Instead having poker cards and playing poker.. …”.. Yeah.. Ok I will answer..
1. When you discuss with the teams about estimation at the meeting without poker.. Fine.. But will everybody’s opinions be highlighted? Or is it still the voice of few people in the team? Think about the last discussion you had with your team.
2. Sometimes work is uninteresting.. Have you heard that before? (Specially the estimation Yaiiik.. to me that’s not a very interesting part of PM J ) But that depends on exactly how you engage with those activities..Playing poker can help in this a lot. It’s fun!
3. When you just discuss with the team about the estimation for a functional point or for the user story, they just answer.. But there is no way that you can visualize their thinking with some relative weight at the time of the discussion.. This is where your Poker card set helps. And the each individual try to reason out their decision with lots of valuable points as they are exposed with the card they play every time.
4. Further this can eliminate chaos which happens in most the planning meetings. Can think lot more.. But these are the main reasons why I encourage my teams to play poker at the product backlog and the sprint backlog planning meetings.
I read an interesting paper by Jason Yip today about Project release planning with Poker..But this is not with our card set.. This is with real tokens.. J Interesting … you can find the paper here…
http://hillside.net/plop/2007/papers/PLoP2007_Yip.pdf
1. When you discuss with the teams about estimation at the meeting without poker.. Fine.. But will everybody’s opinions be highlighted? Or is it still the voice of few people in the team? Think about the last discussion you had with your team.
2. Sometimes work is uninteresting.. Have you heard that before? (Specially the estimation Yaiiik.. to me that’s not a very interesting part of PM J ) But that depends on exactly how you engage with those activities..Playing poker can help in this a lot. It’s fun!
3. When you just discuss with the team about the estimation for a functional point or for the user story, they just answer.. But there is no way that you can visualize their thinking with some relative weight at the time of the discussion.. This is where your Poker card set helps. And the each individual try to reason out their decision with lots of valuable points as they are exposed with the card they play every time.
4. Further this can eliminate chaos which happens in most the planning meetings. Can think lot more.. But these are the main reasons why I encourage my teams to play poker at the product backlog and the sprint backlog planning meetings.
I read an interesting paper by Jason Yip today about Project release planning with Poker..But this is not with our card set.. This is with real tokens.. J Interesting … you can find the paper here…
http://hillside.net/plop/2007/papers/PLoP2007_Yip.pdf
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Ok.. its kinda sad thing.. This time Im very unlucky with Amazon.. I ordered the book., Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series)
by Mike Cohn. A book which I really wanted to have with me after going through many of his blog posts and the book reviews..
But it was never delivered to me. So I made the complain to Amazon.. they sent it again.. Didn’t receive yet.. its over one month now :( ....disappointing … Not a problem with Amazon.. but Im sure its something to do with our internal postal process.. As I checked with one of my colleagues and he said that they dont deliver the books to our doorsteps now . we have to go to a central post office and collect it .. ...:-( whyyyyy ????????????..............But I didnt get a letter like that either... So I dont know......
Do I raise the issue again.. hmmmm..
by Mike Cohn. A book which I really wanted to have with me after going through many of his blog posts and the book reviews..
But it was never delivered to me. So I made the complain to Amazon.. they sent it again.. Didn’t receive yet.. its over one month now :( ....disappointing … Not a problem with Amazon.. but Im sure its something to do with our internal postal process.. As I checked with one of my colleagues and he said that they dont deliver the books to our doorsteps now . we have to go to a central post office and collect it .. ...:-( whyyyyy ????????????..............But I didnt get a letter like that either... So I dont know......
Do I raise the issue again.. hmmmm..
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