Volume IX - Issue IV - April 2007
Featured Papers
Power, Politics and Program Management By Russ Martinelli and Jim Waddell Joseph Algere, a veteran program manager, is a bit perplexed and more than a little frustrated. He just returned to his office from a meeting with the senior manager of his division. Staring at the wall, he wonders why several key program core team decisions concerning the features of the new patient scheduling system have been overturned by senior management - especially since they were approved just two weeks ago during the program plan approval meeting. Not only that, this morning Joseph found out that his senior system architect had been re-assigned to a research project last week by the architecture functional manager. Now that the new system has fewer advanced features, the schedule has been extended, and the budget has increased, he has to revise the program business case and determine if the program is still viable from a business perspective. This is not an isolated case. This will be the fifth time Joseph has had to re-evaluate the business case due to decisions by personnel outside of the program team. He is beginning to wondering if he made a mistake in leaving the aerospace industry to take a job with his new employer in the medical system industry. What Joseph is not aware of is that the senior leaders of the firm have not fully empowered their program managers as part of the company’s transition to the program management business model. Read complete paper in English Read the previous paper in this series. Churchill the Project Manager (Part 9)
Churchill the Agile Project Manager (Part 10) By Mark Kozak-Holland Most people are very familiar with Winston Churchill but may not be familiar with his “agile” approach to project management and his skills as a PM in May 1940. Part 9 looked at how Churchill’s position as PM was put at considerable risk, by the Dunkirk evacuation, and how he swung his communication plan into action. This article looks at how Churchill laid out a strategy with short and long term objectives. On June the 5th Churchill had been swept up by a series of event (Parts 3 to 8) and had to operate reactively. He had been in power for less than a month. Dunkirk, a grasped victory from the jaws of defeat, gave Churchill a small window to operate proactively and start to implement an overall strategy. In every project there comes a point were the PM needs to lay down plans and bring clarity to the project.
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Read earlier papers in this series.
Earned Value- A Leading Indicator of Clean Governance? By Paul Giammalvo As a long time resident of Indonesia, with extensive experience throughout South and Eastern Asia, the question of corruption and “leakage” in Project funding has long been of prime interest to me. For many years, I have been beating the drums, advocating for adoption of Earned Value Management by various NGO’s and multi and bi-lateral funding agencies in particular as one of the ways to at least make the leakage of funds more difficult and if leakage does occur, make it easier for audits to uncover where the money went. While I had long believed that Earned Value Management (and it’s alter ego, Activity Based Costing) were synonymous with “clean” project management, it was difficult to make any clear connection Read complete paper in English
Effective Software Sizing IT departments are under increasing pressure each year to deliver projects on time and on budget. Finance teams closely monitor project budgets to ensure ROI, while marketing teams keep a close eye on schedules to ensure software will be delivered when promised. Despite all this monitoring, project overruns are alarming. The Standish Group –well-known for its 12+ years of IT project research – reports budget overruns for projects since 2000 have averaged 50%, while schedule overruns occur in more than 75% of all projects.
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Ingredients to a Successful Project Team, The 4Fs - How Youth Pushed Kodak into Medical Imaging “Youth is wasted on the young.” George Bernard Shaw Well George didn’t know everything about youth - because once upon a time there was a team of young energetic individuals that developed Eastman Kodak Company’s first digital medical imaging system. Ask anyone that has worked in Health Sciences Division (HSD) about their best work experience, and all will mention their time at C Building. C Building was one of many pieces of real estate owned by Eastman Kodak Company and was so named because it had once housed Stromberg-Carlson a telecommunications equipment manufacturing company formed in 1894 as a partnership of Alfred Stromberg and Androv Carlson. Kodak was big on acronyms, and the name C Building was given to this series of interconnected brick buildings.
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