Project Management Journal Feb 2013

 

Project Management Journal Feb 2013

The February edition (vol 44,no 1) arrived today and I took some time to explore the articles and see if I could extract some thoughts.

My first thought is that the Journal is not for project management practitioners. I learned to read and write in a similar style while working on my doctorate and my dissertation. The language used in the PM Journal is primarily used by academics and not by the half a million PMPs out there. If there is a gap between the writing style of academics who do the research and the practitioners who read it, I wonder how we will be able to develop and apply much of the knowledge that is developed.

When doctors read medical journals they often look for applications that affect their ability to provide better care to patients. The articles in the journal do not seem to have a similar focus on practical application. Still, some of the research will have value and as our profession develops, I suspect research will become more focused and applicable.

With this in mind I summarized two articles. I am interested in what you think.

Russ

The first article A Bayesian Approach to Improve Estimates at Completion in Earned Value Management was basically a very complex statistical process of taking expert opinions and generating an estimate of project completion. With 18 charts and the use of 10 different equations, (none found in the PMBOK) the authors demonstrated how they calculated estimates at completion. The authors appear to acknowledge that you would need to be a highly qualified statistician to understand their formulas and I acknowledge that I didn’t. The intent of the article was to provide a foundation for a software package that would be user friendly. The article did not describe how the authors obtained the expert opinion. To me, any output generated from expert opinion, no matter how sophisticated the calculation methods is very dependent on the quality and method of gathering expert opinion.

The article I found most relevant to project management practice was the article by Brian Hobbs (who I have read and enjoy) and Claude Besner of the University of Quebec, Montreal. Contextualized Project Management Practices: A Cluster Analysis of Practices and Best Practices reflected on the data that was derived from a survey with approximately 2,500 respondents. Among the findings I found the link between the projects with well defined definitions and project success intuitive but it is nice to see it confirmed with research. In a gross over simplification of the findings, Hobbs and Besner found that across projects, organizations with mature project management practices that use tools and techniques to develop well defined projects are more successful. They also found five best practices across project contexts; initial planning, use of databases, business case definition, baseline change management, and team management.  I am curious about how we manage projects across different industries and within different contexts and I think this research added to our knowledge. These are incremental steps in our understanding but at this level of research, exploring our advancement of project management knowledge will be incremental.

Project Management for Instructional Designers

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2013

Project Management for Instructional Designers

http://pm4id.org/

The link above connects you to the Website by students at Brigham Young University for instructors designing courses for project management. They highlight my book; Project Management from Simple to Complex which I authored with my friend John Preston.

I hope you enjoy

Russ

Table of Contents

About PM4ID

1 Introduction to Project Management

2 Project Profiling

3 Project Phases and Organization

4 Understanding and Meeting Client Expectations

5 Working with People on Projects

6 Communication Technologies

7 Starting a Project

8 Project Time Management

9 Costs and Procurement

10 Managing Project Quality

11 Managing Project Risk

12 Project Closure

Download

Glossary

Mindfullness and project focus

Focus, it is a daily decision, maybe a moment by moment decision that project managers make and how well and how often you put your focus on the right things will influence the outcome of your project. Where do I focus my attention, my energy, what conversations do I need to have today? Do I focus on cost and schedule, do I focus on team morale?, do I focus on the client? Of course you have to do it all and you don't have time to do everything now. So you prioritize.


Sometimes you look at a report and spend five minutes and know everything is OK and go on to the next items on your list. Sometimes you see something that doesn't look right and you spend the next few hours reading in more depth and then making inquiries. Sometimes this investment of time and energy pays off big time and sometime you just feel better knowing you checked it out.  Sometimes you read the fifth report and know it is time, even though you don't see any indication, that it is just time to go deeper and make sure things are happening, the way the report shows.


 Sometimes you read these reports during a staff meeting. You glance at the report while listening to a speaker. You now what the report is suppose to say, if it sounds right you can move on quickly. You are also listening to the speaker. Allowing your subconscious to listen for key words that would peak your interest very quickly. You are multitasking. A good use of time, as long as you have the skills and know when it is OK to Multitask and when your shouldn't.

Maria Konnikova's interview and book may help.

Let me know what you think
Russ

I listened to a great discussion online about mindfullness and thought about its application to project management. http://www.pointofinquiry.org/maria_konnikova_how_to_think_like_sherlock_holmes/

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Maria Konnikova, In addition to her new book, Konnikova writes the "Literally Psyched" column for Scientific American, and is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University.(from website; point of inquiry)

Project Profile Matters and Agile

One of my most often used statements in project management is "it depends", because it does.

How long should the project charter be? How many activities should I use? Who should I include as stakeholders on my project? These are all questions with answers that begin; "it all depends"

A construction project in Argentina, an IT project in New Delhi and a drug development project in Denver require very different execution approaches and differing knowledge, skills and abilities to successfully manage the project. A construction project in Argentina can vary significantly by size, by the complexity of the technology, by the tightness of the schedule, by the knowledge and expectations of the client. To understand the knowledge skill and abilities needed by the project manager and the project team, it is important to understand the profile of the project, even within the same industry.

The IT industry has developed a set of project execution tools, methods and techniques that apply to a project profile that is most common in the IT Industry. Agile is the label that has emerged to describe this set of methods, tools and techniques. (more on Agile in later blogs)

Profiling project has been an interest of mine for over 20 years. I presented in first draft of a profiling method in the mid 1990s. I continue to develop my thought and will be publishing more later.

The Project Management Institute has a long and varied approach to profiling projects. The Project Management Institute Standards Committee chartered a Taxonomy Project with Gregory D. Githens as project manager (PMI, 1999). I served on this team and we provided a framework for classifying projects for the purpose of understanding and developing better methods of managing projects. The committee presumed that a greater understanding of projects was a necessary for developing improved project management approaches. The committee explored several different approaches to understand how projects are similar, and develop a method for classifying projects. Before our work was published things changed at PMI. During a reorganization of the Project Management Institute, the PMI Standards Committee was dissolved and replaced with a Standards Program and the Taxonomy Project was abandoned.

Later the Project Management Institute chartered research to study project categorization systems within organizational contexts (Crawford, Hobbs & Turner, 2002). This research resulted in a model for practitioner organizations to analyze and design a project categorization system. Crawford et al. (2002) stated that an organization adopting one of these project categorization systems would do so to identify the project management practices best suited to each of the different types of projects. Crawford also recommended that the Project Management Institute, despite the potential arbitrariness of a standard for categorizing projects, charter a project for establishing standards for project categorization. I recommended that PMI include the work on Crawford et al in the 5th Edition of the PMBOK. This suggestions was deferred for later consideration.

To my knowledge, PMI has not followed up on this research.

I will talk about profiling projects during later blogs because the is my special area of interest within project management.

Best
Russ

Crawford, L., Hobbs, J. B., & Turner, R. J. (2005). Project categorization systems: Aligning capability with strategy for better business results.  Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

PMI 5th Edition of the PMBOK

The Project Management Institute released the 5th, latest edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge in January. I received mine in the mails on January 15th. It is a hefty 589 pages. For PMI Members, you can get a free download from the PMI Website.


I could not help but compare the 1996 edition with it's 176 pages. As best as I could tell, I was the only person listed who reviewed both of these documents for PMI. Back in the early 90's I was solicited to review the work of the committee and had several discussions with Standards Committee. In 1996 I drafted a definition of project management and worked on the quality section. Not much is left from my original work, although I still like my definition better.  This time around I responded to the open call to the membership to review the exposure draft. The process involved an automated form which was very easy to use and allow room to comment on everything, if you wanted.


I chose to select and focus on ten items. Four were accepted and changes made to the final publication. I think four were deferred to the next revision and two were rejected. Evidently, the committee worked on items deferred from the fourth edition and if things were not settled items were deferred to the 6th edition. I understand more items were deferred to the 6th edition than were settled by releasing the 5th.


As PMI goes deeper into the details of project management, I wonder if we are losing our consensus approach.  Although I accept the decision and logic of the committee, I think my suggestions that were rejected had value. I wonder how many others would disagree with the end product to some degree. If there is emerging disagreement among professional, is our standard losing value?