Project Lifestyle

Following on from my previous post about using methodologies, here is a recent announcement from our Oracle Methods development team. Basically we (Oracle) are announcing that customers are now free to obtain copies of our Oracle Unified Method subject to their meeting some qualifying criteria.

Nice one!

Ubiquity (appearing to be everywhere) is a key quality of anything that has ambitions of becoming a de facto standard. Making it freely (well kind of) available is a step in that direction.

Here follows the official customer messaging on the subject (sorry for the corpspeak)

Oracle® Unified Method (OUM) Customer Program - Customer Messaging

Oracle is evolving the Oracle® Unified Method (OUM) to achieve the vision of supporting the successful implementation of every Oracle product - applications, middleware, and database.  OUM applies the best-of-the-best of Oracle's legacy and acquired methods onto an industry standards-based framework. The goal of the OUM program is to establish a common language and approach for ensuring our customer's superior ownership experience across our fast-growing product and industry footprint.

For more information on OUM, refer to the OUM Brief and OUM White Paper available to the public on Oracle.com.

1. Go to http://www.oracle.com.
2. From the top Navigation bar, select "PRODUCTS AND SERVICES".
3. From the Products and Services page, select "ORACLE CONSULTING".
4. Then select "ORACLE CONSULTING" again.
5. From the left-hand navigation bar, select "Resource Library".
6. See the BROCHURES and WHITE PAPERS sections.

The OUM Customer Program allows customers to obtain copies of the method for their internal use - including guidelines, templates, and tailored work breakdown structure - by contracting with Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) for an engagement of two weeks or longer meeting some additional minimum criteria.  Customers are permitted to download the current release of OUM for their perpetual use and they may also obtain subsequent releases published during a renewable, three year access period.

For more information on the OUM Customer Program, contact your Oracle Sales Representative.

[5 October 2009 Update: Added two external reference blog posts with a similar slant to this topic. Andrew] 

We get the project staff that we get. Period.

We can always hope that we have “the best and the brightest” consultants and high-potential internal folks who know the most about what we are trying to improve with the project. But…

The ability of this group of individuals to form a team and successfully bear the load of successfully delivering a project does not rest on their individual qualities.

It sure as hell is not contingent on them doing an offsite survival weekend or cooking course together so they can get to know each other’s individual qualities.

So what is the recipe for building project teams that can take anything on?

Think of it like this. How do you build up physical fitness? Start with a light training load and build from there. Add kilograms or kilometers in a planned build-up. Alternate training with recovery.

The same principles apply to building strong teams. The project team has to learn how cope as a team with the unexpected. They have to learn how to debate issues in a forthright way.

Don’t waste the honeymoon period at the start of the project pretending it is all going to be sweetness and light. It’s going to be tough so the team needs to get used to it in a controlled way. In addition to the project milestones and deliverables, use early conflict or debate to help the team learn how to work through it all together.

Some suggest that it may even be worth artificially creating a conflict or mini-crisis if necessary.

So, create the load yourself– don’t just wait for it to hit you (and it will sooner or later).

The second part of the equation is of course, creating the safe environment for the project team to build up their load capacity:

• Enforce robust project processes to formalize issue management
• Demonstrate leadership to help people work through conflicts in a safe, respectful way (what is said in the in the project meeting room, stays in the meeting room)
• Demonstrate the value of balancing workload with recovery (folks need to go home every once in a while…)

The key to thing remember here is: no free lunch (or back to the sports idea – no pain no gain) 

You have to start this from scratch with every project team, regardless of how many project veterans you have managed to scrounge.

It is the team capacity to carry the load that counts in the end, not that of individuals.

Every team is unique and they need to build their load capacity anew.

Discuss.

[October 2009] Via the Metacool blog (tagline: thoughts on the art & science of bringing cool stuff to life, by Diego Rodriguez)  I discovered a couple of posts that bring additional context and flavour to ideas on building load-bearing teams.

Metacool - Grok the Gestalt of Teams.html

John Foster's Blog - Another Kind of Team

Read. Think. Discuss.

Unlike other elements of journalism – blogging is about disclosing your sources.

So here is a tip o’ the hat to the folks over at ChangeThis for providing a great forum for people to exchange manifestos on all kinds of topics.

Well worth a read if you’re interested in learning new tricks.

Particularly liked Hugh MacLeod’s one on How To Be Creative. Worth reading even for the most rabid PM or technologist.

[Update 13 March 2009: I decided to update the title on this series of posts from “Talking Points” to “Architecture Strategy” as it better describes what I’m talking about.]

[Update 2 April 2009 added reference to previous post show why GSI projects are just so hard to pull off. The conclusion is fairly easy to make that our technical capability to engineer the hard & software infrastructure is outstripping our social ability to implement it.]

Global Single Instances as an applications strategy, particularly for ERP,  are something that Oracle has advocated for more than 10 years now.

The concept has become broadly popular in the IT industry as customers consolidate their systems in search of greater efficiency, flexibility and of course lower costs. 

These days the software and infrastructure can deliver this capability with (relative) ease.

The issue however is that such projects are extraordinarily difficult to pull off successfully. I talked about this in my post on Enterprise Architecture as Strategy

Over the next couple of months I'll be publishing a series of posts on Global Single Instance (GSI) Architecture Strategy to cover a number of  recurring themes that come up in customer conversations. A glorified FAQ if you like, based on 10 years of doing these projects.

As a first grab on some of the typical questions, I’ll list a few out here. Readers are (of course) invited to contribute additional suggestions for subjects!

• GSI’s: How many and where? Functional splits?
• Multilingual. Do we really need to install all of these languages?
• Localizations. The quagmire of dealing with exotic local (statutory and/or fiscal) reporting
• Test environments for GSI projects. How many is a good thing?

To start to my series on Global Single Instances let’s deal with some basics first.

Not Literally “Global” or “Single”

We may not literally be talking about a single instance of a system supporting global operations for a corporation.

A true GSI may only be a realistic goal for few enterprises right now.

As a provocation or target, however, it can work well for anyone. So the less sexy, non-soundbite version might be something like:

Consolidate your business systems and business information to as few places and platforms as possible.

Like any good system, I try to perform periodic maintenance on the Project Lifestyle blog.

As I get more to grips with the Moveable Type blogging software I’ll make periodic updates & improvements.

This months updates were mainly about cleaning up the widgets – all the small sections of stuff on the right hand side of the screen.

Added an aggregated feed of posts from other project management oriented blogs (PM Blender Feed) and reordered the widgets to take contribution/comments and recent posts nearer to the top of the page.