I reflected on my post of a few months ago – on building load bearing teams

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.

Over the summer I finished reading Douglas Hubbard’s new book “The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fisk It”.

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.

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 the unknowns 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.

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.

In my initial post Scope, Objectives, Approach I stated my focus would be on:

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.

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

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.

Issue Management and GTD

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.

For the truly afflicted you can grab the mind map as a pdf file.

Built by Mindjet LLC

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.

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?”

I was pleasantly surprised with the results. 

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely's talk from the TED conference last month was recently posted online. In his talk, Ariely (who wrote the best-selling Predictably Irrational) addresses, through his own experience, a topic that is also quite relevant for innovators in an uncertain environment: the importance of testing assumptions through experiments.

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…

Many project or program managers have no firm idea on this subject and delegate the decision making to the technical lead/solution architect/chief propeller head.

This is OK if you accept that having no firm idea = having no clue. Alternatively (waxing lyrical here):

If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything.

So what do I recommend PM’s need to know? It depends on the size of the rollout and the solution footprint.

As a project or program manager, what aspects of Crew Resource Management might help you avoid crashing your project in bad weather?

An article on the BBC News website gave me an insight in how CRM applied to a specific kind of project environment (surgical operating theatres) could reduce patient deaths by 40% and post-operative complications by more than 30%. All they did was introduce a single A4 page checklist that needs only a few minutes to complete. It focuses on basic good practice before anesthesia is administered, before a patient is cut open, and before a patient is removed from the operating theatre. So simple but so effective in improving outcomes for the primary stakeholders (the patient).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7829910.stm

So what kinds of simple changes could we make in Project Management adopt and adapt?

In another vein I thought I would create a small movie on the subject. Interesting what 90 minutes spent with MS Powerpoint, CoolIris (they have a nifty ppt plugin)  and Picasa build for you.

A different kind of improvised explosive device.

Over the years I have had this discussion on many occasions. Here are some basic truths that keep popping up. Please note that these comments are primarily applicable to functionality in Oracle E-Business Suite but you may be able to extend the ideas to other applications. Your mileage may vary.

I’ll adopt a FAQ format. For simplicity I will assume English as the default base language. You can substitute any other language here for your case – but English always remains installed no matter what.

Also see  the Homework section for additional reference information basics and background regarding NLS (National Language Support) and MLS (Multilingual Support).

How many languages do I need to install? What are the main drivers for making the choice?

Obviously this depends on the number of different language areas you will be covering in your program.

Oracle E-Business Suite R12 supports up to 30 languages (see MetaLink  Note 412218.1 Software Translation Matrix) so there is no lack of choice.

As each additional language installed carries a maintenance and performance overhead you need to choose carefully. Main drivers for consideration are:

• Lack of  foreign language (English) skills amongst the shop floor workers. These are the people using the system for the Procurement and Manufacturing processes. If you are only implementing Financials (for example in a SSC) you may be OK with English only - due to higher education levels/language skills of SSC personnel.
• Workers council sign-off. In some countries you will not get formal system acceptance without a formal workers council sign-off.  You can then encounter a situation where the workers council can give a negative (and binding) ruling against the implementation if the local language had not been installed (due to the previously mentioned point).  This needs to be part of the business case for installing the language.
• In many countries you are expected to provide your statutory reporting in local language.
• Desire to provide trading documents in local language of customer/vendor/partner

 What is the impact of installing all of these languages?

There is an impact on maintenance. About 80%+ of patches have language specific components (i.e. translatable) - so you have to install the translated version of the patch for each of the installed language.

This means increasing number of languages = roughly linear increase on number of patches to be applied. Luckily this need not translate to linear increase in amount of time require to perform the maintenance. 
Specific patching and maintenance best practices can be used to keep maintenance time down, even if you have multiple languages installed.

For detailed info on patching best practice here some links from Steve Chan’s excellent blog.

Release 11i: Patching

• 2008.08.27: Reducing Patching Downtimes with Staged Applications Systems
• 2007.11.27: Which Are Better: Family Packs or Consolidated Updates?
• 2007.06.19: Top 7 Ways of Reducing Patching Downtimes for Apps
• 2007.06.07: Top 5 Myths About Patching Apps Environments
• 2007.05.09: Reducing Patching Downtimes via Shared Apps File Systems

Release 12: Patching

• 2008.08.27: Reducing Patching Downtimes with Staged Applications Systems
• 2008.03.25: Downtime and Apache Restricted Mode in Release 12
• 2007.11.27: Which Are Better: Family Packs or Consolidated Updates?
• 2007.06.19: Top 7 Ways of Reducing Patching Downtimes for Apps
• 2007.06.07: Top 5 Myths About Patching Apps Environments
• 2007.05.09: Reducing Patching Downtimes via Shared Apps File Systems
• 2006.12.15: Patch-Related Enhancements in Release 12          

Do I need to test everything in every language?

Experience shows that (regression) testing every patch or setup change in every language is not needed. What you need is a good set of regression tests in your base language (English, say) supplemented with some random samples for one or more of the other installed languages. You only need to look further if tests in one of the extra languages show problems that are not present in the base language. This much more efficient and cost effective.

Where can I find more reference material?

Links are to relevant notes in MetaLink/My Oracle Support.

Release 11i

• Multilingual Support in Oracle Applications Release 11i
• Oracle Applications NLS Release Notes, Release 11i (11.5.10.2)
• Oracle Applications 11i Internationalization Guide

Release 12

• Globalization Guide for Oracle Applications Release 12

Original post was over at Glen Alleman’s blog Herding Cats

A great presentation of Time and Money on (construction industry) projects. You know, houses, schools, bridges…that kind of stuff. They have many of the same challenges we face (and some different ones as well – I never had an ERP project delayed due to bad weather)

Also you can download a summary and detailed version their reports on this from their CIOB website.

Managing the Risk of Delayed Completion in the 21st Century

Managing the Risk of Delayed Completion in the 21st Century - Summary Report

Oddly, as the subject implies, you should only aim to have one GSI. Of course Part 1 of the series debunked that idea right away. The idea is to…

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

In other words, as many as you need, but no more than that…