Project Management: It is all about the execution
By Avinoam Nowogrodski
CEO, Clarizen
Today’s business environment is constantly changing, with trends such as globalization and outsourcing greatly altering the pace in which companies operate, and as a result their team and group dynamics. Companies are making decisions at a faster pace, and they are constantly challenged with maintaining their competitive edge. In order to keep up with ever-evolving ecosystems, a company needs to ensure good execution on its initiatives, as well as an ability to rapidly respond to any external changes.
Most of today’s project management tools address project planning extremely well, however a great plan only gets you 20 percent of the way – the rest is all about good execution, and therein lies the problem. The key to ensuring successful project execution must always begin with the team and its approach to group collaboration. Each team member must actively engage, connect and remain a consistent participant to achieve success. Yesterday’s tools such as Microsoft Project are just project planning tools – they do not provide any project execution capabilities, forcing team members to collaborate on a project using other means. As a result, project plans, project documents and day-to-day discussions are managed using separate tools in disconnected environments and are not working together. This increases the inherent risk in the success of the project.
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Avinoam Nowogrodski
Author
Avinoam Nowogrodski is the CEO of Clarizen, a provider of Project Execution systems. Avinoam Nowogrodski brings over 20 years of experience in sales, engineering and business management to Clarizen. He brings insight and expertise gained in those positions to Clarizen's vision of bringing collaborative project management to every business. Prior to establishing Clarizen, Avinoam co-founded SmarTeam Corporation, a leading provider of collaborative product life cycle management (PLM) solutions. As CEO from 1995 – 2005, Avinoam's leadership molded SmarTeam into a leading enterprise PLM solution which was sold and supported by IBM. In 1999 SmarTeam was acquired by Dassault Systemes (DS) and Avinoam served on the DS General Executive Management team for 6 years. At his departure from the company, SmarTeam had 3,500 customers across diverse industries and over 100,000 users worldwide. Avinoam Nowogrodski holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, Israel. Clarizen has seen tremendous interest in its product by focusing on collaborative project execution, rather than project planning. For more information, visit www.clarizen.com.
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Agile - Software Project Management - Scrum methods
By T.D. Jainendrakumar
The core principle of project management remain unchanged and deals with mainly five process groups, initiation of projects, planning projects, directing and executing projects, monitoring and controlling projects and closing projects which interacts with nine knowledge areas, scope management, time management, communication management, risk management, cost management, quality management, Resource management, Procurement management and a successful project manger must be able to align it with the over all business success of the organization. Then what is changing in the project management ?, it is the way we manage projects day to day, there are many ways to manage a project, now there is whirlwind happening in the project management world especially in IT Project Management that is called “Agile”. So agile approach is the way of delivering projects. There are many agile development methods. Most of them minimize risk by developing software in short amount of time, and scrum is one among them.
About the Author:
  
TD Jainendrakumar
TD Jainendrakumar, PMP, has over 20 years’ of extensive experience in the areas of IT Project management/Head IT PMO in e-governance at Ernakulam District Collectorate, District Courts of Kerala, Central Administrative Tribunal Ernakulam, Rajeev Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission New Delhi and Principal Systems Analyst in National Informatics Centre, Madhya Pradesh State Centre especially in the following areas of specialization: 1. IT practice management (Project Management Methodologies, Tools and techniques, Standards & Knowledge); 2. IT Infrastructure Management (Project Governance, Assessment, Organisational Instructions & Facilities and Equipments); 3. IT-Resource Integration Management (Resource Management, Training & Education, Career Development & Team Development); 4. IT-Technical Support (Project Mentoring, Project Planning, Project Auditing and Project Recovery); and 5. Business Alignment Management (Project Port folio management, Customer Relationship Management, Vendor Management & Business performance management). He completed a Master of Computer Applications (MCA), a 3 year post graduate course deals with software Engineering and Project Management. He scored 4.11 out of 5 in the project management (2005) examination conducted by brainbench.com, secured a Masters Certificate in Project Management, and is one among the top scorers (First in India and 3rd position in the world in the experienced category). Additional information about TD Jainendrakumar can be found at http://www.brainbench.com/xml/bb/transcript/public/viewtranscript.xml?pid=6557177. He lives in India and can be contacted at jainendrakumartd@yahoo.co.in.
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Information Security: what Project Managers
should know and do about Insider Threat
By Kumar Sarma, PMP
How Info security became important for organizations?
The history of computing started in 1960’s.A lot has happened since then. Mainframes were widely used during the earlier days. They used to reside in closed ,secure room accessed by dumb terminals. Only few people knew how to operate the mainframes. Fast forward to present day, where distributed computing and interconnection through internet has become the norm. Digital Information is replacing paper Information. All business across the world are becoming dependent on networks for all business activities.
There was a time in 1990’s when info security attacks were orchestrated by individuals to display their skills to the world. Nowadays, info security breaches mainly happen because people are increasingly lured by the money that can be pocketed from this activity. Laws have changed. Info security issues has become serious and very important to the extent that that CEO’s and CFO’s of organizations are held responsible for major breaches with respect to the data they are entrusted with. Info security is now no longer a technical issue but a business issue.
About the Author:
Kumar Sarma
Author
Kumar Sarma is a CCNA,CCNP*,PMP and Six sigma green belt certified and also currently pursuing CISSP.He is currently working as team lead in Quality Assurance with Netscout Systems India Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, India. Prior to that he was associated with companies like HCL technologies (Cisco division) and EMC data storage Ltd. His main area of interests include Information security, leadership, people/risk management and six sigma in addition to his core area of Networking domain. About his present company Netscout systems-(NASDAQ: NTCT) has been an industry leader for advanced network and service assurance solutions for over twenty years. NetScout's breakthrough technology solutions provide trusted, comprehensive real-time and historical performance intelligence, including advanced early warnings and rapid, definitive problem analysis. These capabilities are vital to IT operators who are accountable for reducing the Mean Time to Resolution For more info on company products ,visit www.netscout.com.
He can be reached at kumarsarma@yahoo.com.
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The Technical Support Project:
How to Create a Winning Team, Part 3
By Randy Miller,
Director of Services, Journyx
Now that you have a new and improved technical support team in place, you need to let people know. This includes departments within your company and external customers, both of whom need different types of marketing. This article will outline some ideas on how to spread the good word.
Where to Start
What happens when you tell someone to do something? The person’s reaction will be based on your relationship with them. An acquaintance might tell you “no.” A friend will explain to you why they aren’t going to do what you told them. Your kids will pretend to obey while they secretly do exactly the opposite. Your employees will sometimes do you the honor of attempting to do what you tell them to. That, frankly, is as good as you will ever get by telling someone to do something.
Have you ever had any luck telling someone at your company who doesn’t report to you what to do? Me neither. So what you need to do is sell it to them. This is not a one-time deal—you are looking to ingrain deep-seated changes and repeated transactions. That is the realm of marketing.
Randy Miller
Author
Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including: Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company's largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at randy@journyx.com
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Value Delivery Management
By Jed Simms
Or, Are you ready for a capability uplift?
You have a choice.
For, usually the same cost, you can deliver real, measurable business value from your project; or you can deliver your project.
The difference is in how you approach your project.
Aware of the risks and complexities of projects in general, many project managers are at pains to curtail their project’s scope and, in particular, avoid accountability for anything that is actually business delivered. Understandable, but not what the business wants.
The business wants results — tangible, measurable results. Not just financial results, but new capabilities, competitive opportunities, increased productivity and customer satisfaction. They don’t want ‘on time/on budget’ project delivery.
Project management has to up its game to focus on ‘value delivery management’ — focusing on delivering, supporting and enabling the realization of the expected and desired business value.
About the Author:
 
Jed Simms
Author
Jed Simms, Founder and Executive Chairman of Capability Management and project-sponsor.com, has pioneered the focus on project delivery capability as a competitive weapon. Born in Britain, Jed has lived and worked in Europe, the Middle East and, for the past 30 years, in Australia. The project-related positions he has held include analyst, project manager, sponsor, steering committee member, investment management committee member, PMO Manager, CIO and business line manager. The industry sectors he has worked in include utilities, manufacturing, insurance, banking, telecommunications, and services, and he has consulted to many more. Jed is a former Asia-Pacific IT Strategist for The Boston Consulting Group and led worldwide studies into what drives and destroys project value. Through these studies he discovered and quantified the correlation between the maturity of an organization’s capability to direct and manage projects and the financial returns it receives over time. Using these findings, he developed a suite of value delivery management approaches and methodologies (Programs) to help organizations to quickly learn for themselves how to increase their capability and consistently get extraordinary value from their projects. Professor James McKinney of Harvard Business School rate Jed's work as "World class, three to five years ahead of competition." The Australian Information Industry Association recognized his Programs as one of Australia's "Outstanding Product Innovations" in 2004. An awarded public speaker in Australia and internationally, Jed has written extensively on how business can better manage projects and use IT. His book, The Search, written as a novel, provides business executives with the knowledge they need to confidently and successfully direct and manage IT. He has also published more than 100 articles and a series of eBooks and "How To" guides. He has pioneered the concept of ‘value delivery management. Jed can be contacted at Jed_Simms@capability.com.au.
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Risk in Projects It’s About Changing Behaviors
(Part 2 in a series)
By Glenn R. Koller
Well, in our last exciting episode, you might recall that it ended with the project team leader wagging his/her finger in my (the risk assessment/risk management (RA/RM) proponent) face and accusing me of wasting his/her time, money, and effort with this risk stuff. The newsletter article concluded with the queries: “On projects that take years to go from inception to fruition, what case can you make that might convince any project team that implementation of a cogent RA/RM process is well worth their while? In spite of the existing reward system, what can you do or say that will change their behaviors?”
About the Author:
Glenn R. Koller
Author
Dr. Glenn Koller received his Ph.D. in geochemistry/geophysics from Syracuse University. In his career Glenn has held positions with the Department of Energy, DuPont, Amoco, BP, and Schlumberger. Glenn’s primary focus for the past 20 years has been on aspects of risk-and-uncertainty analysis, management, and training. Responsibilities included implementation of risk-assessment/management technologies and processes; development of statistical routines that comprise risk systems; marketing risk technology; and performing technical and consulting services. Areas of responsibility include business and product development, environmental concerns, ranking and prioritization of projects and products, analysis of legal commercial, security, logistical, financial etc. scenarios and other aspects of a diversified business. Glenn has authored four books on risk/uncertainty and currently resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Glenn may be contacted at riskaid@cox.net.
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Declare your Independence from Chaos
By Michelle LaBrosse, PMP®
It’s easy to get caught up in the speed of our hectic lifestyles both at home and at work. If you’re finding that stress and chaos is becoming the norm, it’s time to transform the storm into calm.
Here are a few tips that I use to manage my stress and keep projects flowing in all aspects of my life.
1) Identify where the stress is coming from.
If you find yourself regularly saying, “I’m stressed,” but not doing anything to change your environment or behavior, you may be running at full speed without thinking about where the stress is coming from. For example, are you saying, “yes” to everything and overloading your calendar? Are you working long hours without a break and feeling cheated because there is no personal time? Are you part of the sandwich generation caring for both your own children and your parents at the same time? Before you develop a plan, you need to pinpoint your key stressors.
About the Author:
Michelle LaBrosse, PMP
Michelle LaBrosse, PMP, is the founder and Chief Cheetah of Cheetah Learning. An international expert on accelerated learning and Project Management, she has grown Cheetah Learning into the market leader for Project Management training and professional development. In 2006, The Project Management Institute, www.pmi.org, selected Michelle as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the World, and only one of two women selected from the training and education industry. With a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, LaBrosse has done extensive postgraduate work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Educational Studies and with the University of Washington Industrial Engineering Program in accelerating adult learning with respect to meeting core business objectives. Michelle is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner & President Management program for entrepreneurs, and is the author of Cheetah Project Management and Cheetah Negotiations.
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