I have just updated the post with a couple of additional links to very relevant articles from two other interesting bloggers on this topic. Go have a look.
Conventional wisdom on how a team should operate. Click the picture to take you to the source article in John Foster’s blog.
I did also contribute a review on the Amazon site (I sure you will be able to find it).
Needless to say I think he does a good job of arguing that many aspects of modern risk management are poor…The lessons for us in the world of Project Management are clear…
It also led me to discover how good our Oracle Crystal Ball product is for data analysis and performing Monte Carlo simulations.
Am now busy trying to apply this tool to our estimating models….more on this later.
My biggest surprise, having corresponded with the Douglas on a couple of his examples in this book, was to receive a call from him!
I also completed reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable while we were on summer vacation in Brittany France. In combination with Hubbard’s book this was nothing short of a revolution in my thinking about risk and dealing with what we do not know.
Brand New Role
A further development I should comment on (which partially explains my lack of updates over the summer months…)
As part of a wide ranging reorganization of our Oracle Consulting business in Europe I decided to fold my International Projects team back into the new Western Europe Applications Consulting organization.
WE Apps has been created by amalgamating the Oracle Consulting organizations in UK, Western Continental Europe and EMEA Divisional Consulting (my team was part of EMEA Div).
This left me without a role.
Happily I was offered a role managing the delivery teams within the new WE Apps Managed Services line. I am very excited about the role as it is (again) an international role managing teams in the UK Netherlands extended with near- and off-shore folks in Malaga, Spain and Bangalore, India. It also gives me the opportunity to implement a number of the things I have been studying during the Spring and Summer months in the areas of (internal) program management and risk management.
In the meantime I will continue to comment on the Project Lifestyle….
I took Bas De Baar up on his kind offer to do a guest post over at his Project Shrink blog. It took a couple of weeks longer than planned due to some other things going on in my day-job and a spell of fantastic summer weather (one has to prioritize!).
Bas kindly published it today. The post deals with the concept of project rhythm. Follow the link to read it.
Issue lists are the unsung heroes of the Project Lifestyle. This is the last of a series of three posts on how a new look at issue list might radically impact your project outcomes (in a positive way I hasten to add).
In Part 1 I opened the discussion by looking at why issues are such slippery things to manage. I then got perspectives on managing issues from various colleagues who know a thing or two about them.
In Part 2 I applied the Getting Things Done productivity process to derive a workflow for handling issues in a project setting. The key idea here is to introduce a robust, repeatable process to capture and work through project issues. I make the point that
Issues running around in the wild are the dangerous ones.
Once you capture them, you can tame and manage them.
So doing, you exercise a lot more control over theunknowns in your project.
In this post I want to look how some concepts from the social sciences seem to offer proof that a robust issue management process will contribute to improved project outcomes overall, and that this is the secret life of issue lists.
Any good project pauses regularly to check whether the scope still matches stakeholder expectations.
So how does this blog project look 7 months in?
Great! If I may say so myself.
However based on some feedback and encouragement from an old teammate of mine (thanks Nilo!) I want to refine and clarify the scope of the Project Lifestyle blog a bit.
discussing subjects in the field of Project Management, with a particular focus on implementing packaged software: Oracle Applications, in the broadest sense
In practice I have found myself frequently exploring two themes
The human factors element of project management. To borrow from Bas over at Project Shrink: projects are about people: deal with it!
Oracle Applications themes with a special focus on ERP, and Oracle E-Business Suite in particular. Global single instances and multinational implementations themes make a regular appearance as this is where I have spent a large amount of my professional life
The Software Industry resembles the Fashion Industry in some ways: it’s all about This Years Model.
So while most Oracle-facing pundits (internal and external) continue to focus on features & functions of the Next Release I will continue to report and comment on the hard and tricky work of getting it all up and running and delivering business value.
The project work style has moved from being infrequent or incidental to a continuous stream of parallel and overlapping projects for our customers, many of whom are poorly prepared and equipped for this reality. This led me to look at the phenomenon of projects as a lifestyle choice. Hence the name of the blog.
Continuing a series of posts on Global Single Instances architecture strategies. This one’s a touchy subject: maintenance.
Maintaining a Global Single Instance presents a number of unique challenges to the IT organization, all of which can be overcome with some common sense, discipline and by taking advantage of all of the relevant features that the software and hardware infrastructure offer you.
Where for art thou Downtime? The most obvious challenge for GSI maintenance is finding downtime to execute the maintenance. What influences the (potentially) available downtime? Key influences on downtime are listed below in no particular order. Instance Status Typically it costs more to have a production instance offline than a project instance. However, one usually has more project instances to maintain as there is usually a many-to-one relation of project to production instances. Furthermore, project instances often need to be maintained more frequently to support project progress or to promote patches through the test instance set to production. In some cases project instance downtime can be very costly. The cost of project team delays (including expensive consultant time) can add up quickly and is frequently overlooked. Equal care can be required in planning project and production instance downtime depending on the project phase. Instance Functional Footprint The downtime cost for an instance depends to a degree on the business processes supported by the instance. Revenue side or customer-critical operations (e.g. billing, manufacturing, shipping or some CRM functions) carry a higher downtime cost to the company. These business processes can frequently have a 2- or 3-shift or 24x7 character. Timezones The more "global" an instance is (the number of timezones to be supported) the more difficult it can be to find a maintenance window that does not impact production (or project) operations somewhere. This can be made even more difficult when you add a new region to the program (e.g. adding project operations in Asia-Pacific to instance with Americas & EMEA) or dealing with regions with a shifted workweek (e.g. Sunday - Thursday) System Overheads Some system aspects do not impact the available downtime as such, they impact the scope of what has to be executed in each maintenance window. Examples of this are multiple languages installed (linear impact on number of patches to be installed) and synchronization feeds to reporting instances/DWH (requiring stop/start/resynchronize time in the window). GSI Maintenance Management Each of the influences on downtime can be be mitigated. Communication First First and foremost all maintenance schedules need to be clearly communicated, highly visible to all relevant parties and frequently updated with the planned activities to be executed in each window. Communication needs to be a combination of static information on the project/IT website on the standard maintenance windows and similar relevant information and dynamic updates via email blasts, news/rss updates on the planned activities for each window and maintenance start/stop notifications. All of this builds an operational environment where maintenance is an expected element of the landscape and there are no surprises when an instance goes offline for patching or other maintenance. Planning Allied with communication, plan the instance maintenance windows 6 - 12 months in advance (for *all* instances) and publish the plan. This becomes a framework for negotiation (particularly with the project instances) but at least everyone is starting with the same baseline of information. Slots and Kaizen Use a kaizen process of refinement to keep maintenance under control and drive performance. Plan 2x - 3x per week windows for 4 - 6 hours (say) for project environments. Publish as SLA. Then drive to improve to get to 1x or 2x per week. Plan 1x per week 4 - 8 hours window for production environment(s). Publish as SLA. Then keep driving process improvements to get to 2x per month, then 1x per month then 2x per quarter...
Remember it is not about the starting point, it is about the journey of continuously reducing the frequency of planned downtimes and improving reliability and predictability of the process.
Which Slot? Timezones As stated in the section on influences - timezone coverage can squeeze your maintenance window slots badly. But you can also take advantage of this. Maintenance windows from 0200 - 0600 CET can also be expensive in terms of overtime if your data center staff are also in the CET timezone. Using (for example) staff based in IST (India) combined with PST (California) or EST (East Coast US) can mitigate this very well and give 24x7 coverage. Make the timezones work for you. Use Available Technology Invest time in understanding how to get the best out of the technology you have and what additional technology you may need to acquire to meet your downtime requirements. I will always recommend colleague Steven Chan’s excellent blog for more detail on this subject – but here is a grab bag of suggestions to follow…
Invest in the hardware infrastructure (e.g. disk technology) to speed backup and recovery operations
Hot backups must be routine
Use the well documented features of Oracle E-Business Suite to minimize patching time. Some examples:
Minimize the number of individual patches and human interference in patching by merging patches
Minimize the software distributions to be patched by consolidating to a single shared software directory
Run the patches faster by spreading multiple parallel patch utility worker processes over multiple servers
Install patches in offline staging area (staged APPL_TOP technique)
Analyze which patch (components) can be installed hot according to Oracle Development guidelines
As a bit of an experiment I have set up the Project Lifestyle Twitter account at http://twitter.com/PMLifestyle The idea here is really to use it as a companion (micro)blog to this one. Let’s see how it goes…
[Update 22-Apr-2009 Links to the mind map file, free Mind Manager Viewer and same in pdf format added. Apparently IE can’t render the embedded viewer either. Kudos to Hans Henrik Krohn for pointing this out.]
This is the second part of a discussion on the secret life of issue lists in our project lifestyles.
In Part 1 I opened the discussion by looking at why issues are such slippery things to manage. I then got perspectives on managing issues from various colleagues who know a thing or two about them.
In this post I’ll see how some of the latest thinking in personal productivity intersects with issue management in projects.
I compared my colleagues’ perspectives on issue lists and issue management to some of the concepts outlined in the action management method "Getting Things Done” (GTD) developed by David Allen.
Basically this method rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of their mind by recording them somewhere.
That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks. Hmmm…sounds like the projects lifestyle to me…
Two things distinguish GTD from other time- or action-management systems.
GTD is not about prioritizing up front. It is about dealing with things as the come using a standard workflow.
Secondly GTD the idea of grouping tasks by the context (defined as a place or set of available resources) in which they are to be performed.
Really I wanted to see what would happen by applying GTD workflow to the project context and the issue process in particular.
Here is a MindMap I built to document the steps in the workflow. You can grab this file directly from the link and view using the free MindManager Viewer.
You will need to view this in IE or install the excellent IE Tab plugin for Firefox to view this embedded MindMap Viewer.
The biggest thing really is the concept of collecting issues out of the minds of project team members and users and getting them recorded.
Issues running around in the wild are the dangerous ones.
Once you capture them, you can tame and manage them.
So doing, you exercise a lot more control over the unknowns in your project.
In the next and final post I will examine how better management of issues may have an overall impact on project outcomes by referring to Tipping Point theory.
Sometimes little things can make a big difference, and sometimes those little things are right there in front of you, waiting for you to notice them.
Take project issue lists for example
As a key project document I first started getting interested in them about 10 years go when I was doing a lot of Critical Accounts & remediation work. It was impossible to go into a project and have an agreed issue list waiting there, ready for you to work on.
Nothing has changed. Getting agreement on what the key issues are and their status still feels like getting blood out of a stone.
Recently I decided to have another look at issue lists in projects in the light of some of the latest thinking in the fields of personal productivity and sociology. I wanted to see if that led to any new insights on how those concepts could be applied in the context of project teams.
Obviously the underlying question is "If we manage issues better, will that improve our project outcomes?”
He also makes some great comments on cheating (of all things).
Everyone cheats, a little. But only to a point where it does not challenge their self image of being a “good” person
People start cheating (more) when a member of their in-group blatantly cheats
People stop cheating when a member of an out-group blatantly cheats
People cheat less when confronted with moral standards (people lie less about remembering the 10 commandments, for example)
In our project lifestyles we come across this phenomenon all the time. No so much cheating as social behaviors like groupthink that we as project managers need to find ways of combating.
A good start is to be aware from the outset that people are sometimes “predictably irrational” and may not be sensitive to your rational, evidence-based arguments…
