Thoughts of a Project Manager

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ryanendres — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:07:01 +0000

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How to use social media to help manage a project?

ryanendres — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:19:00 +0000

This post is an elaboration of my interview conducted by PMI which will be featured in the upcoming March 2010 issue of PM Network magazine (PMPs on FB OMG!).

I see social media as a new communication/team building tool that all Project Managers, at some point in the future, will have in their PM toolbox. This concept has been named Project Management 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0) which means project managers will use Web 2.0 concepts to manage parts of their projects.

I think the 4 main areas where this will be most effective are:

Project status updates
Discussions
Team building
Process management

Project Status updates

How about a blog which is open to all team members who weekly post their project updates. This would be useful for international teams.

A Twitter like function that can send out a short update or link to a photo of your project progress (maybe it is a construction project) to your team and it would also keep your updates in one location for all of your team members to view later if needed.

A Wiki that is open to all team members to insert lessons learned throughout the project. Currently, VistaPrint is using a Wiki to capture their programming issues and government agencies, like the CIA (tied-in with others), are using Wiki’s to track “persons of interest”.

Or how about team members giving their updates via a video? I honestly don’t think this one would work … yet.

Discussions

After that face to face discussion to gather requirements, put it in a discussion forum and send a link to the team to continue the discussion. This will allow team members to enter items on their time (you just never know when you will have that ah-ha moment). You can also use it to discuss potential risks, develop budgets, propose questions to the team or even brainstorm about solving project issues.

Team building

If each team member has a profile photo and a short bio it may help your team members learn about their team. This is especially important with international teams. Or have a link to team members that have a linkedin page, Facebook page (oh look! My team member Bobbie went to Vegas this last weekend! We will have to chat about that at our next project meeting) or blogs. Currently Serena Software is using Facebook and is seeing many positive results with their international teams. Also, NewsGator offers a Facebook like plug-in for SharePoint.

Process Management

How about we use a little web 2.0 technology to management scope change requests? The old way was to formally present (or complete a change request form) to the executive staff the change and the impact on the project. If we use an application like SharePoint we can quickly create a workflow that includes the change, impact and then each Executive can review, comment and then check yes or no and signoff (digital signature). When a comment is entered the PM will be notified by email. Now you have a full discussion and documentation on the decision instead of meeting minutes that would of said, “the additional requirement was approved” (how boring).

Some of the naysayers of PM 2.0 think these tools would never work with projects like a “$200M ERP rollout, or a manned space flight avionics program, or maybe an interstate highway project”. Companies like Pfizer are already using these concepts for managing the development of new drug products and medical devices (from a concept to a product typically takes ~1 billion dollars which includes clinical trials at hundreds of clinical sites in multiple countries). Oh yeah, I almost forgot … NASA is currently investigating social media too (checkout the slides).

The key to making this work in the future will be one stand-alone system that will have all of these features in one place. This will allow a one stop shop for PM’s to turn items on and off and for team members to get project information from one place and updates from their projects on one page (just like Facebook). SharePoint has many of these features (or if they are not there you can buy plug-ins from vendors). I would prefer to run my projects within SharePoint then having all the project information within the head of the PM.

Slide show:

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

Notable Quote:

PM 2.0 is nothing more then a new communication tool. Will 2.0 help with the 4 area’s above? Maybe or maybe not, but it may open up communications to help discuss about them. –Ryan Endres

SharePoint PMO Plugin Corasworks

ryanendres — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:44:00 +0000

PLEASE CHECK YOUR BOOKMARKS: Make sure you are going to:ryanendres.blogspot.com if you are going to ryanendres.blogspot.com/2010/02/sharepoint-pmo-plugin-corasworks.html you will just see this post….

So far I have reviewed two PMO plug-ins for SharePoint:

pmPoint by Brightworks and EPM Live.

Today I checked out Corasworks

http://www.corasworks.net

Again, here are the basics we are looking for:

1. ~4 templates for 4 different types of projects (SDLC, smaller software projects, clinical trials, R&D projects)

2. Pull information from the templates into a dashboard for organization and executives review

3. Must be able to view and pull data from Microsoft Project documents within SharePoint

Corasworks offers many different plug-ins for SharePoint (they even have an Apps store just like itunes) and some of them are even free. My adventure started when a representative from Corasworks contacted me after reading my blog (great to see a company with their ear to the interweb). We set up a time to review what they had to offer. After the demo I requested to have a sandbox set up (my own personal test site) so I could play around.

Project set-up is easy. They currently have only one template, but it is easy to customize it and then save that template for future projects (in my case we are looking 4 different types of projects). If you are not up to customizing the template then Corasworks will work with you to set it up to fit your needs.

Cost: A onetime fee plus a yearly maintenance fee after the first year. The costs I was quoted included as many users as you want and I think are very reasonable for medium and larger organizations.

Pros:

Still have all the normal SharePoint features we are use to.

Have builder wizards to update their templates to make universal changes to templates already in use. I love this part because currently if I make a change to a template I have to make the change to all the projects that are using it.

It is possible to share a task across multiple projects.

Users can see their assigned tasks, risks … within their own view.

You can edit Project documents within SharePoint or it has a 2 way-sink with Project if you wish to edit that way.

If you like to use the Calendar view you can unselect grouped items to make it less cluttered.

Within many of the datasets you can turn on the filter bar (commonly used in Excel) to filter for certain items or to filter for items that are not contained in the column (I’ve seen this type of filtering in Excel, but not within SharePoint). This is the first PMO plug-in I’ve seen that has this function.

They have an approval workflow with Email updates as the process moves on (this may be a plug-in or request that it is added to your system). Currently in my organization we have two types of approval processes that we could use this with, 1 taking on a new study and 2 when a sponsor requests a milestone. Currently we use a Word document and it is less than efficient.

Has the normal dashboard views with project and the PMO view.

They have a blog that they update frequently with what is going on at Corasworks and they have a message forum for folks to ask questions (I see this as great product support). Also, they have an excellent help text to help with any issues that may come up.

CONS:

Currently it is not able to view over allocated resources across multiple projects, but they are planning on including this in the next update within a month.

Only offer 1 template but it is customizable by the end user or work with Coraswork to edit it for you.

May be cost prohibitive for smaller organizations.

Out of the 3 PMO plug-ins for SharePoint I’ve reviewed I think this is the best one, to date, for the following reasons:

1. Cost

2. Excellent help text and folks at Corasworks ready to help you customize the app and when a good customization request comes in they roll it out in an update to everyone

3. Easy to use and well thought out placement of items within the product

Other Reviews on Corasworks:

http://www.sharepointreviews.com/component/content/article/63-sharepoint-platforms/186-CorasWorks-Workplace-Suite.html

Enterprise 2.0 book review

ryanendres — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:12:00 +0000

Continuing on with my theme of Web 2.0 in my last few posts I thought I would review the book titled Enterprise 2.0.

The book uses case studies of organizations using social media; it goes over the benefits and pitfalls and how best to approach their adoption.

Enterprise 2.0 definition:

Is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.

The book presents a road map for success concentrating on the roles played by business leaders-managers and executives outside the HR department. These leaders are the most important constituency for successful use of the newly available technologies of Enterprise 2.0.

The book includes 4 case studies from organizations that are actually using social media. Here are a couple of examples:

1. VistaPrint had a shared hard drive which people saved documentation and other reference work, but most people felt that it was disorganized and hard to search. The president of the company felt that as workers left VistaPrint the knowledge left with them and he felt that many time workers were trying the reinvent the wheel with projects. To solve this they installed MediaWiki with the goal of getting the company’s engineers to enter their accumulated knowledge into it. The end result was an easy to read, navigate and searchable system.

2. Serena Software is using Facebook to help build a stronger and more consistent corporate culture. They brought in staff members kids (many times high school and college aged) to teach people how to use the application. It was an immediate hit because it allowed people to keep up with strong and weak ties and in many cases allowed user to see what some of their project team members actually looked like.

Overall I think the book is a must read for anyone who is thinking about introducing web 2.0 concepts to their organization to address the fear that people won’t use the newly available tool and fears that they will.

The book is available at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-2-0-Collaborative-Organizations-Challenges/dp/1422125874/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

The future of project communication…

ryanendres — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:35:00 +0000

History has shown us that communication in project management has changed over the years and it will continue to change.

If we look back 25 plus years, project management was mainly done by face to face meetings and telephone calls. Project information was kept in a “Project Room” that held items like the WBS, Gantt chart and other paper project documents.

Approximately 20 years ago we saw internal company emails start up and then email escaped from the walls of our offices to the outside world in 1993. This was a new form of communication which led us to share our thoughts, project updates and share project documents with our team members. Here we saw the naysayers who thought email was counterproductive, impersonal and would lead to a higher rate of failed projects.

About 10 years ago we started to see the beginning of social media growing in blogs, discussion boards and social connections (classmates.com comes to mind). In 2001 I lead a project to develop a web based project dashboard which had project sites that PM’s could post updates, issues log, risk log, action log and a document library. We also had discussion boards within our Lotus email system and we created a section for employees to add a headshot, their background and their hobbies. This allowed us to run our projects more efficiently since our company employees were located in 4 countries.

And here we are today.

Again, just like 20 years ago there are the naysayers of using new technologies to manage our projects (Glen Alleman who blogs at Herding Cats is a firm believer that the Project Management 2.0 is “IT centric, and marketing hype” and “Project communication is NOT done through the narrow pipe of a 128 character half duplex ASCII character set messaging system”). It seems like this email thing has caught on? But will project members really prefer to have a common location to get status updates, project discussions, information on team members and project documents? Or will they prefer to continue to have project documents in a shared drive on a network you may not have access to and critical project information which is only in the head of the PM who is on vacation?

My prediction is the “New Generation of Project Mangers” (Gen-Y and part of Gen-X) will expect Web 2.0 type of communication in their projects because they have grown up with the internet and can see the power of collaboration applications like Facebook, wiki’s, blogs and discussion forums.

Notable Quote:

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” - Alvin Toffler

EPM Live review

ryanendres — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:39:00 +0000

In my first PMO plug-in review I checked out pmPoint by Brightworks. Today I was able to take EPM Live for a test drive.

PMI awarded EPM Live their project of the year award in 2006 and 2007.

What we are looking for:

1. ~4 templates for 4 different types of projects (SDLC, smaller software projects, clinical trials, R&D projects)

2. Pull information from the templates into a dashboard for organization and executives review

3. Must be able to view and pull data from Microsoft Project documents within SharePoint

EPM Live was built on the familiar SharePoint features, the EPM Live solution delivers an integrated framework of Feature Rich Web Parts, Microsoft Office Add-ins, Pre-Built SharePoint Applications, Industry Best Practices SharePoint Templates, all of which are designed to work together to help the end user work smarter and more effectively.

You can start your free trail at:

http://www.epmlive.com/trial.aspx

I entered my information, to start my free trial, then it is a bit of phone tag with an EPM Live rep to set up a phone conference with a shared desktop demo.

After the demo then you can make the decision if you just want to test it yourself on a trial site that is refreshed nightly (pmPoint trial site refreshes every 30 days) or pay for a couple of users for a couple of months (no refreshing of the site). I went the free route knowing that if I spent a couple of hours building up a site that the next morning it would be gone (keep this in mind if you are planning on showing anyone your hard work). If you are planning on buying the application they also offer a hosted service to use their product on their server or you can install it on your own server.

Once logged in you enter the Project Center there is a drop-down to create a new project. Enter in a project name, select one of their 9 templates (they probably have more on their normal version; one of the templates is a PMBOK one) and enter the website name. Then it takes you to another screen to enter in some more project information to add data to help you select different types of projects within the overall PMO view.

Each template has its own dashboard view of a project. If you don’t like what is in it you can edit it (turn things on/off; add any other normal SharePoint bits and pieces). The above template has a lot of the items one would need for a normal project (risks, issues, status, documents ….); if you have a software development project you may want a different template with bugs listed on the main view.

Within most templates there is a task tab that is your timeline. You can upload your standard Project timeline in. You can use their Planner to update tasks, enter tasks (change column widths, change views, create views) or open with Project if you like. There are views built in or build your own (tasks for the next 7 days, just your tasks …). Using Project with it is seamless (edit, save and you are ready to roll).

Also, if you have a task that needs to occur across multiple projects you can share a resource.

Within each project there are Reports (issues, risks, budget, resources …). I really like the way their reports are set up, because I can select the report I want to view instead of the having the screen covered in 20 different metrics (If I like to look at two or three reports to see how things are going I can). Also, the reports use SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) so you can select the data set you want to see. It was nice to see this because we are already using SSRS within my organization to look at clinical data (quick and easy to get to the information you want to obtain). Some of the reports include graphs and charts and others are just columns of data.

Now if we take a step back … once we have multiple projects under the PMO, the PMO site has all the normal dashboard views one would want including views for team members on multiple projects so they can see their tasks across multiple projects.

Pros to the product:

1. If you use SharePoint already you have the skills to use EPM Live (if you like email alerts or any other normal SharePoint features it is there)

2. Edit your Project timelines within SharePoint or within Project (seamlessly)

3. Tasks have predecessor numbers within timelines; just like we are use to

4. Customizable; if you have SharePoint skills you can fix things to your liking

5. No clunky feel to it, I do not feel that a +500 task project would be to much info for this application

6. One task across multiple projects

7. Easy to use and read reports

8. Reports for the individuals within your organization

9. They also offer a timesheet application if you need to track that for billing issues

10. If your organization lives and breathes the PMBOK their project template includes suggested templates to use to capture project info (their document library includes documents in folders with the 5 process groups).

11. Monitor your resources across multiple projects

Cons:

1. It may take a bit more customization (with EPM Live support) to get the reports customized for your needs and reporting info to your dashboards.

2. It may take a bit of training of PMs (and monitoring) to get them up to speed.

3. Cost. If you are a large company the cost will be a drop in the bucket of your IS yearly costs. If you are a small company it may be to costly of an application.

Overall, EPM Live looks to be a very robust application. I’m sure it would take a few months to get it up and running with the right templates for your organizational needs, followed by several more months of moving existing data sets into the new system. If money was no object, I would choose EPM Live.

Links on other reviews:

http://www.sharepointreviews.com/component/content/article/43-sharepoint-management/248-EPM-Live-for-Enterprise-Project-Management.html

http://biztech2.in.com/india/news/enterprise-solutions/epm-live-v22-to-offer-new-sharepoint-resource-mgmt-capabilities/55082/0

http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/news/product/read/EPM_Live_Unveils_SharePoint_Workforce_Management_252262

Review on pmPoint

ryanendres — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:49:00 +0000

Many PMO’s have turned to SharePoint to help manage their projects, but in order to have a fully functioning SharePoint environment lots of customization is necessary to work with ones project management process within their organization. To help reduce the development time it may be prudent to see if there are off the shelf applications that will plug into SharePoint to help you down this road of a PMO managed within SharePoint. Currently my organization is doing just that. We are evaluating some of these plug-ins and the first one we reviewed was pmPoint by Brightworks.

What we are looking for:
1. ~4 templates for 4 different types of projects (SDLC, smaller software projects, clinical trials, R&D projects)

2. Pull information from the templates into a dashboard for organization and executives review

3. Must be able to view and pull data from Microsoft Project documents within SharePoint

I started reviewing pmPoint which is an application created by BrightWork which is a SharePoint plug-in. pmPoint includes a set of project management templates, web parts, dashboards, tools and lists that mimics the project management process found in most organizations.

You can start your free trail at:
http://www.brightwork.com/pmpoint/evaluate.asp

Enter your information and it immediately sends an email with your username and password.

There is a guide to help you with the basics:
http://www.brightwork.com/UA/PDF/v8/pmPoint_v8_TrialZone_Sandbox_Guide.pdf

Within the guide the 1st step is to setup the PMO (basically you are just installing a template); then under that you insert your various projects (they offer over 15 different templates including one on Agile for capturing the phases, bugs requirements, documents . They also have other templates (with videos about them) listed on their website). http://www.brightwork.com/templates/
Within the PMO view you can customize the views if you like and install other SharePoint features (alerts, discuss boards, doc libraries …).

I installed 3 projects and then made a couple of changes to the PMO reports. The PMO reports pull from the timeline or task information to give you graphs and charts of all of the project metrics at once.
Within the projects there is a link named “Project Statement” that has some of the info that will be pulled into the PMO dashboard. They also offer links to roles, team members, issues, risks and all of the other normal SharePoint items you can build in like: wiki’s, discussion boards, document library, build your own data capture form, email alerts and so on.

For each project there is a dashboard to look at planned cost, current cost, actual cost, planned worked actual work, resource charts, issues, risks, and so on (In the PMO view it shows all the projects at once). It pulls data from your timeline to populate the dashboard.

To build a timeline you have 2 options. One, enter in tasks (these are the normal SharePoint type of tasks). Or two, upload your Microsoft Project timeline. I uploaded one of my Microsoft Project timelines into a project (~500 tasks). It was able to import it (as an XML file) and you can view it but there are some cons:

1. If you have longer task names it doesn’t wrap the text, and you cannot resize the columns (it may be a trial version issue or I was not able to make it work)

2. You cannot just upload a Project document it needs to be an XML file; so that means if you update your project document that lives within SharePoint via Project, you have to save as a XML file and upload into SharePoint every time you change the timeline (this is a big negative). After a bit of research I found out that SharePoint 2010 will offer

synchronization that will solve this problem.

3. Tasks have no numbers (which I’m use to)

4. If you tie in one task to multiple tasks there is just the text of the task, not the task number of the predecessor

5. If you have more than 50 tasks it is just too clunky to think about editing it within SharePoint

6. When editing within SharePoint if you open one task to edit there is no budget information for the task (I bet you can turn this on)

7. Doesn’t import calendar settings, but it will pick up a custom SharePoint calendar

Pros:
1. Allows users without Project the ability to view the project and filter for their tasks, or tasks coming up in the next 7 days

2. If you don’t have Project you can just create tasks (which is fine for a small project with less than 50 tasks)

3. Within the PMO view, with the projects under it, you can view all of your tasks for just your projects you are associated with

4. If you use SharePoint making changes to reports within pmPoint will feel familiar

Conclusions: I think that pmPoint will work very well for smaller organizations with smaller projects. For larger organizations there may be a few hurdles to jump:

1. If you have multiple PMO’s then you would need the folks at pmPoint to do some customization to allow you to have, let’s say, 4 tabs for 4 PMO’s and 1 tab to bring in all of the PMO’s information into one dashboard

2. Getting PM’s use to uploading the XML file into their projects when they make a change to their Project documents (non-issue if you have SharePoint 2010)

The key to make this more user friendly would be a flash based Project editor within SharePoint (are you listening Microsoft?). This will allow the PMs that have been using Project for +10 years the ability to edit and save it in one place, and will allow the users to have the same look and feel that we have seen from Project.

Links:
Other reviews on pmPoint:
http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/102052/review-pmpoint-70.html
http://www.gantthead.com/discussions/discussionsTopicContainer.cfm?ID=13605
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=172947071049

What type of Leader are you?

ryanendres — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:39:00 +0000

This past week I gave a talk on Leadership titled: What type of Leader are you?

Prior to the talk I sent out a link to an online survey which was meant to determine who in history you would be matched up to with their leadership styles. I received some positive and negative feed-back on the survey. Try it and see what you think.

During the presentation I talked about the traits of leaders, mixed in some video’s from youtube on leadership, and ended with a little CHARCOAL.

(if you want to embed youtube videos into your powerpoint presentations visit AuthorStream for their free app; you will need a live internet connection to make the videos play while you are presenting. If you do not have a live internet connection then try Media Converter. Their app will download the video file from youtube, which you can then link to or embed into your presentation)

Link to the Presentation (links to the youtube videos are embedded into the slides; view it in presentation mode)

What is Leadership?

See more presentations by ryanendres | Upload your own PowerPoint presentations

Facebook Ads for your job search

ryanendres — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:31:00 +0000

In a recent tweet from Dan Schawbel he included a link to a blog post about using Facebook Ads to promote yourself to try to find a job. It sounded like an interesting idea so I tried it out for 4 weeks.

Setting up the ad was easy to do. I set my limit at spending $1.00 a day (this was research after all) and would pay $0.50 every time a person clicked on my ad. Then I selected 9 companies in my area to target and limited it to within 25 miles of my city, which gave me 2780 Facebook users who may see my ad. If you want to, you can further filter for keywords in Facebook users accounts.

I linked it to my personal webpage (alternatives could be your Linkedin page, blog or your resume online). In the first 2 weeks I had over 13,000 impressions; yet this only yielded 5 clicks.

The next 2 weeks I changed my ad to include the header: UW Health, and then only selected Facebook users who work at UW Health (270 users possible) within 10 miles of my city. Here is my second ad:

During this 2 week period I had over 12,000 impressions; yet this only yielded 5 clicks.

So out of the 10 clicks, I didn’t receive any emails or phone calls, but it does seem like an excellent cheap way (my test cost me 5 bucks for the month) to market oneself.

For local companies this may be an excellent way to try to select just the right Facebook users who may be interested in your product, website, event or restaurant. Give it a try and see what happens!

A link to another blogger who tried this out

Get my files into SharePoint!

ryanendres — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:33:00 +0000

This past week I attended the Madison PMO Managers Forum where two members showed their live project SharePoint sites. It was great to see a behind the scenes look at others SharePoint sites. One member of the group vented his frustration about moving existing files into a document library within SharePoint. I too had issues with this since it seems you can only upload 1 file at a time, but there is a solution to this!

Open your file library and click on Actions, select “open with Windows Explorer” and like magic you have a file browser that looks like the one you are use to using in Windows. Now you can create folders or drag and drop (or copy and paste) files from the old location to the new location.

The advantages to using the document library in SharePoint 2007 are:
1. You can turn on versioning; so every time you update a document the old one is still accessible.

2. Easy editable permissions. No more asking IS to lock down folders when you can do it yourself!

3. It treats it as a database that you can add columns of data to it, like a description (that is searchable).

4. Document checkout; you can have a team work on a document, by having one person “checkout” the document to work on it.

5. Email notification if someone adds or edits a document.