Project in a box
This post will be short and revolve around a handy new piece of software I’ve come across. I will not try to do a detailed software review. I will focus on the basics and identify my interests. I believe that my interests should be similar to many of my readers. So let’s start with my needs and drivers. While that means talking about StrAIT Advisors offerings, I will make very limited reference to them. A blog post should not be a sales pitch.
My needs focus on project management and a project management office. Our SLR methodology is about using various tools to identify business process and technology improvements for our clients which improve the business IT alignment. The result of that work produces one or more projects. Those projects will have a major software component. That component will consist of making better use of existing client software, purchasing new software and/or some custom software development. There may also be a related project addressing computer or network hardware. The result being multiple technology projects being managed concurrently.
Today we use Microsoft Project for schedule management and we manually manage project documentation. It’s that manual management of documentation for several concurrent projects that is the issue. That approach works fine for a limited number of smaller projects but obviously doesn’t scale well. That brings up the concept of a PMO, or project management office. A PMO is what you need to effectively manage multiple projects. To do that successfully you need a tool to manage all that documentation with an audit trail. Such tools can be large and complex content management systems. StrAIT Advisors doesn’t need that. We need something lighter than a big system but still able to handle a substantial number of documents.
While shopping for such a tool I can across Project in a box from Prosis Solutions, Ltd located northwest of London. There is a free community version for single users. There are also affordable, server-based versions. I tried the community version but quickly bought a server-based version. The free version can use the provided methodologies but cannot create any. I need to be able to build my own and work with others. The screen shot below can represent any version of the product.
This example uses the provided DSDM Atern methodology, which is actually of the most interest to me. I like the ability to include an image with click-able areas, as shown on the left of the screen. Clicking on the image loads the appropriate collection of documents, as show on the right.
The package comes with Prince2, DSDM Atern and some related methodologies. Since Prosis is a UK based company, their primary focus is on Prince2 and DSDM Atern. I’m in the process of adding a PMBOK methodology (from the PMI). Based on my needs, I think that the Atern methodology may be the best suited for StrAIT Advisors. It’s an alternative to Scrum, which gets more press in the US.
I like the version control and audit trail. It seems to be a very adaptable tool. For more detailed information I suggest that you check out their site.
With the links provided in this post you can keep yourself busy and immersed in project management reading for days. Proceed cautiously. However, if you have a need for a very useful and adaptable tool, I suggest that you check out what you can do with Project in a box. I will let you know it goes for me in future posts.
If any Prosis people read this post, please comment on my ramblings and add your thoughts. I’m just starting out with this product and would love to hear more. Your company has been very helpful so far.
Thanks for stopping by. See you next time…
Flat World, Flat Clouds
I was thinking on some of the issues raised in Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat” and what it means to the consulting world and the midsize business world. If you haven’t read this book a link to a summary is provided here. His book is actually divided into two general parts. The first part contains his observations on a globalized economy, social factors, technology and the development of several third world countries. The second part contains his social/political recommendations for the future. I think the first part is very useful. The second part, not so much (big government and big taxes aren’t my cup of tea). This post is directed at U.S. located companies. For those of you not located in the U.S., the logic is much the same.
My concern is the management of intellectual property and projects amid the proliferation of sources of skilled service labor, such as consultants, managers, engineers and software developers. For example, your company may need to develop a new product. If your company is a midsize manufacturing company, it may not have sufficient resources to execute all aspects of converting a good business idea into a mature, profitable production facility. Your company will probably look outside to various sources, both familiar and new, for help and advice. If you apply the observations from “The World is Flat” to all the companies involved with your project, the result can be a complex, interdependent web of knowledge and judgment sources.
Certainly companies deal with that situation today. However, the complexity of such arrangements will grow in the future. Now is the time to plan for how to handle that dilemma. I don’t presume to offer a solution in this short blog post. I can only try to frame the questions and offer some ideas. At least, I hope to get you thinking about this topic.
I need to define the types of service labor and regions that will be relevant to this discussion. First, I categorize service labor into three basic groups, shown in the table below. The table also includes some of the major attributes of each category. The key differentiation between each 
category is the tightness of the bond between the company and each group. That is determined by the level of involvement in core business processes. The “coreness” of a business process is defined by how integral it is to the value proposition of the company. “Direct” labor will always be direct employees of the company. “Close” labor may not be employees of the company but they will probably seem to be employees to an outside observer. “Packaged” employees will obviously not be employees of the company although their contributions will be considered very valuable. Other categories could also be defined for various levels of closeness to the company but these three will be sufficient to make my point.
There is also a need to define the notion of proximity. Direct labor will mainly be located at one of the company’s locations or a location sanctioned by the company, such as an employee’s home office. Close service labor may be located at the same locations as Direct labor or their employer’s locations. Packaged labor will typically be remote to the company’s locations but available when needed. This type of labor can be located anywhere in the world. Typically they will be located in one of the areas on the global map above colored in red (Note that the color red does not have a political significance, only an ease of visibility significance).
There are also some other terms of significance. You will also need definitions for “outsourcing“, “insourcing“, “offshoring” and “onshoring“. To save time and words, those definitions are provided by their corresponding links. All of these terms apply to the location and accessibility of service labor resources. For example, it is entirely reasonable to talk about outsourcing a business process to a domestic (onshoring) contractor. That service may require “Packaged” service labor requiring a well defined scope of work and contract.
Projects, such as the types discussed above, can require a traditionally managed approach or use a lean, timeboxed approach. For example, if using the lean approach, a timeboxed part of a larger project could be outsourced to an offshore provider of Packaged engineering resources. The customer must then provide a home for all of the intellectual property being generated as the deliverables. A well defined policy and content management system are essential requirements. Fortunately, various tools are already available to fill these needs and more are on the way.
In summary, every company needs to be developing policies and tools for managing the intellectual property produced from multiple, smaller and networked service providers. These providers of skilled service labor can be located almost anywhere in the world. They may be close at hand or at arm’s length. I want to strongly encourage readers from midsized companies to not view this as a problem only for large, multinational corporations. If not now, it will also be your problem in the near future. In future posts, I’ll drill down into these broad ideas and suggest some specific actions. Hopefully, I’ve raised the awareness of those of you who haven’t been thinking about these ideas before now.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…
Herding Consultants 2.0
What kind of title is “Herding Consultants 2.0″? I suppose for search engine optimization reasons I should have used “aligning” instead of “herding” but at some point the whole alignment theme can get boring. I’ll stick with “herding” this time. Having been on both sides of the consulting table leads to some firm convictions about what that means in an era of highly available sources of judgment and advice. In the “old” days (before the late 1990’s) consultants found consultants based on their business offerings, sales campaigns and contacts. A relationship was built based on repeated personal contact. The competitive differentiator was the consultant’s previous work and their skills inventory. That ultimately led to a “resume bake off” when consultants competed for your business. That model is still viable to a large extent.
A new model has appeared over the last few years based on Internet based tools and virtual presence. Blogs have grown rapidly and any consultant worth his salt has one (me included). We use some tool to subscribe to the blogs that interest us, such as our email clients, browsers or any number of other tools. My preference is a tool called BlogBridge. That keeps the blog posts out of my inbox which reduces clutter and makes them easy to scan. The end result is that I now have subscribed to many blogs. I did that because there are many topics about which I want to stay current or have an interest. That creates a need to assign levels of credibility to each blog. BlogBridge makes the assignment of a ranking very easy. It’s the deciding on a rank that’s hard.
My current technique is to look over my “herd” of consultant blogs to spot trends. Once I do that I decide if I’m in agreement with the consensus. If not, I research the topic more to validate my opinions. I’m not trying to be a technical expert but I am trying to understand the topic well enough that I can offer my own options and judgment in a way that adds value for my target clients (C-level executives in mid-market manufacturing or manufacturing related service businesses who are trying to make decisions on the use and deployment of technology tools). I will then vet my opinions with a few people whose opinion I trust and who have differing backgrounds.
This just reinforces the point I have made before. It’s the personal relationships that matter most. It also reinforces the idea that there is just a huge amount of opinions and “experts” out there. Another way of “herding” all of the consultants you rely on for advice is to let the large consulting companies do it for you. For example, both Gartner and Forrester have become active bloggers. You can also just sign up with either of them and get even more information. Essentially, by relying on their blogs you are letting them do the vetting for you. There are other, smaller consulting groups like ebizQ and TechRepublic, which offer similar capabilities. I watch some consultants from each of these.
In summary, my point is that we need techniques to vet the web-based consultants we have all come to rely on. We each need to decide how much effort to apply to that vetting exercise and how to leverage our own personal networks. I have my approach and I recommend that you develop one that works for you.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…
Google Wave beta, the BITA view
I would like to welcome everyone back and hope your holidays were great. Consider this one those early January real world wake up calls reminding you that the holidays are over and it’s time to hit it again. It’s OK to have a heavy sigh of resignation now; I’ll wait until you’re finished… OK, now that you’re fully reengaged, I’ll move on.
A few weeks ago I became part of the Google Wave beta program. For those of you that don’t know what Google Wave is, I’ll summarize. It’s Google’s spin on what real-time threaded message collaboration should look like. For those of you who want a more robust description, I’ll provide a link here. For those of you who are more visual there is a YouTube video below.
I believe that Google sees it as the next generation of email. I think that is naïve at best. The current version of Wave tries to be all things to all people and is just too much for most people outside of a dedicated team collaboration scenario. For example, writing notes on paper preceded email by millennia. Yet it persists both in the form of paper notes as well as electronic text messages. I do think that Wave will offer some great opportunities for those of us in the business-IT alignment, or BITA, space. One of the core requirements for IT doing a better job of supporting their company’s core business processes is improved communication between IT and their customers. Any tool that makes that communication more effective is a good thing.
The best way to explain my point is through a simple example. An example wave is shown below. Since I am the only member of this hypothetical team I must ask for your understanding by imagining a larger group.
What you see is a threaded discussion much like you would see in Lotus Notes, Microsoft Groove or any one of several other discussion board tools. In this case, the wave is a new manufacturing requirement proposal document that IT needs to prepare. The initial entry for this thread is the general statement of what needs to be done. Subsequent statements hold the initial text for each of the three sections. The collaborators for each section can then begin to edit that text with supporting discussions as to why they made their changes to it.
The strength of Wave is the ability to see modifications as they are made and to engage in an instant messaging discussion as the process takes place (phone calls can work too but that isn’t very Web 2.0). You could be seeing text and discussions appearing in all three groups simultaneously in real-time by different people. It would be a little like having a real-time control room where you are watching a manufacturing activity taking place before your eyes. Such activity can become unmanageable very quickly without some ground rules, especially if the manufacturing group is included as collaborators. This doesn’t consider that the whole Wave platform is open source and can be extended to include all kinds of cloud-based tools.
To me it’s clear that for work of any complexity it makes sense to embed Wave into another application which will manage the workflow and constrain the flexibility of the Wave tool to something that is manageable for real world use. The good news is that such applications can be built fairly quickly or adapted from other existing applications.
I’m sure that Wave will evolve fairly quickly into something very useful for real business use. Then it just becomes a question of a company’s comfort level with using cloud-based tools for sensitive work. I hope you found this post useful. I can now say that I’m fully reengaged after my holidays. My heavy sigh follows…
A New Deal
I want to take a minute to wish all of you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. As a Christian, I believe that this season represents receiving a new deal.
I believe that all of us were presented with the opportunity to accept a new contract to govern how we live our lives. Like all contracts, it has terms and conditions as well as benefits. Those terms and conditions can be a real burden sometimes but those benefits are worth it. I have to remember that it is up to me to keep my life in alignment with the terms of that contract. I talk a lot about business IT alignment but I never forget that staying aligned with this larger contract is the most important of all.
From us to all of you, may this season and the new year be your best ever.
Mike Pattison