Phil Wolff: project management

Getting things done.

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The Well-Heeled Dean CIO Quiz
I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?
1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?
How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?
1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?
Mon, 16 Feb 2004 21:14:03 GMT
Hospital intranet blogging.
Working notes from D. Keith Robinson's project of moving most of the hospital's intranet into Moveable Type. Useful observations on deployment, template design, new uses (project coordination). "Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars to do distributed authorship or content management the right way. It’s simply not true." (Staff time excluded, of course.)
Mon, 05 Jan 2004 22:13:18 GMT
Director Ron Howard shares project management insights
Director Ron Howard spoke about project management with Charlie Rose this week.

On executive sponsorship of projects...

If they're going to make a movie, it's a big deal. Every movie is an investment, a commitment. You want a studio that believes.

Finding a project's spirit. Project scope as narrative...

It's my hook on the movie. It's making some sort of connection or defining a thematic value that I think I understand and that I think I can express to an audience. Then I have something to bring it. Otherwise I'm a technician setting up camera angles. I can do that, but I'm not really offering anybody much. But if I can come to understand the story, then I have conversations with the actors that can add up to something that can be meaningful. And I have a way of evaluating each and every moment. Because at the end of the day it's not so much about setting up camera angles, it's really about making a thousand little choices during the course of any one day.

The payback from effective communication of your vision...

Once you discover what the film can be, you can then begin to sort of rally everyone. And it becomes a kind of an organism. And it's moving together. And it's exciting to be at the center of that. Because this consciousness is now making a lot of creative decisions and suddenly it's very exciting because everyone's ideas are working in concert in synch. As a director you wind up saying 'yes' a lot more than you say 'no' because you've been able to create a sort of a sensibility, you know how to fulfill it and everyone starts seeing roughly the same movie. That's what I love, that's what excites me.

Can you say emergent project management? "akasig"

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 23:23:45 GMT
Mower musings: 5 blognet justifications.
Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication.

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes. "akasig"

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 19:47:00 GMT
Klogging case study: Blogging in Corporate America.
via Roland Tanglao: Michael Angeles presentation on Lucent Technologies' intranet blogging at a Usability Professionals Association meeting. Download presentation slides with notes, PDF. (5 MB) While he doesn't reveal number of intranet bloggers (my obsession) he describes the range of tools, categories of users, and the nature of blogging.

Michael, an experienced blogger in his own right (see IAslash, urlgreyhot) also shows deep understanding of how blogs fit into his enterprise's IT architecture. Creating blogfodder via RSS from corporate databases. Providing tools for search and discovery. Supporting knowledge workers and communities of practice.

If you're coming to my BloggerCon Sunday session on workplace blogging, this should be on your reading list.

Sun, 21 Sep 2003 21:40:19 GMT
PowerPoint isn't evil. People who misuse PowerPoint are evil.
Michael Gartenberg and Chris Sells blame the user, not the tool. Room enough for both, I think. There is always the question of doing the wrong thing more efficiently. Or using a tool as a crutch or substitute for presentation prep and delivery skills.

I'm quite fond of some common tips:
1. One idea per slide
2. Replace words with pictures
3. Fewer words are better. One word or phrase is best.
4. Talk over slide transitions
That said, nothing replaces rehearsal to perfection, clear organization, ruthless editing, and people skills.

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 23:35:24 GMT
Machine Blogging: Microsoft SharePoint to intranet RSS.
"ManMachineLogo"The folks at NewsGator share a case study.

Triple Point Technology has transformed the way they share information within the enterprise. From critical build and release notifications, to internal publishing and collaboration, publishing via RSS has dramatically changed their information landscape.

Michael Sippey summarizes:
It's not really about weblogs at all, rather it's about how RSS (or whatever you want to call it) can be used to augment typical email- and web-based collaboration systems. Key points:
- Feeds are generated not only by individuals, but also by teams, and by software. They publish the output of their release management system in RSS. They've retrofitted Sharepoint to output RSS streams for watched folders.
- They're driving the posts right into their mail client (Outlook), which is where info workers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time. No need for training on a new piece of software, and power users can customize views to their heart's content.
- The subscription model is much more efficient and user-driven than internal mail archives. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for theobvious on how I wanted Yahoo Groups for my intranet. The key thing there was (a) discovery and (b) user control over subscription. An "OPML" directory and user-controlled aggregator solves that problem. No more sysadmin time dealing with "hey, can you put me on this list for the next few weeks while I monitor what's going on with this project?"
If the blog/feed/echo/rss whatever thing takes off inside large organizations, and thousands of people, teams and systems inside companies like IBM or HP or Sun start blogging, there's gotta be a market for the intranet equivalent of blo.gs where users could learn of recently updated feeds they don't subscribe to, find new ones based on existing subscription lists, etc. (Question: is anyone selling software like this today? To slurp up user's OPML files and discover relationships and create an interlinked directory?)
Sippey gets it. So does Triple Point.

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 06:57:12 GMT
Klognets give faster payback than tradtional Intranet portals
John Robb asks:
1. Can blogs can replace portals?
2. If so, what are the relative costs, benefits, ROI?
His answers (and I concur):
1. Yes for everything except "adding a web front end to business apps"
2. Blogs look better:
Considering that so many projects:
- Aren't funded at all in this economy
- Fail completely (around 25% are cancelled or aborted)
- Fail partially (blowing scope, schedule, or budget)
Setting up a klognet seems like a low risk, high payoff proposition.

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 00:55:06 GMT
Quovix is hiring a project manager.
President Marty Morrow posted this project manager gig to his blog a few weeks' ago. As outsourcing and offshoring grow, so will Quovix, a project/product management collaborative software company.
Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:27:13 GMT
Machine Blogging: Programmers sought for project: CVS to weblog/RSS, and back.
CVS as Blogger. Bill Lazar seeks programmers interested in bootstrapping a new system. Improve project communication by having your codebase blog.

Yes, blog.

You're all busy doing your own thing, coding here, checking stuff in there, testing this, trying that. Common point of reality? The code. Keeper of the reality? Your configuration management system.

Bill's solution: Wrap common events in plain english and post them to a weblog. Syndicate the results if you like. Add your project CVS to your blogroll. Comment on your CVS's posts in your own blog.

Wanted: Programmers and QA folks interested in making a tool that will extend the five most popular code management systems with a blogging interface. Contact Product Manager Bill. Bill is an alum of both Sun and Pyra, has a Rutgers MBA, and is polishing his C# in his spare time.

p.s. Bill pays attention to movies in the works. Very cool. He's interested in syndicating this content while preserving its structure. Any suggestions?

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 07:02:33 GMT
Is your email program the ultimate microcontent manager?
Lilia wrote:

One of the questions from the audience was about number of technologies that one can cope. I share this concern given the number of communication/discussion tools I use.

Everything becomes email, according to some theories. Usenet, for example, was blended into mail clients, treating the usenet post like an email message. Completely hiding the plumbing from users, the differences ceased to matter. The usenet post became just another email message.

Perhaps blogging tools will also blend into mail clients.
- Posting from your mail client (your blogs are just special email addresses) and IM/irc/SMS.
- Read your RSS feeds with Outlook or Eudora or whatever Macheads use these days.
- Configure your weblog with a properties dialog your mail client.
If so, there are some bonuses.

Safety and Comfort
- Exploit mail's ability to block spam and advertising (you're expecting RSS advertising in your feeds, aren't you?)
- Scan RSS posts for active or hostile organisms (viruses, worms, etc.)
Filtering, Search and Notification
- Organize incoming posts by content (not just point of origin or date) into folders.
- Search your archive across email and RSS archives, one big database.
- Alert the user to very interesting posts, using filters.
- Apply family filters.
Workflow and Collaboration.
- Perhaps everything on a project gets cc'd to a project weblog
- Trigger user action from enterprise systems
- RSS as transport for distributed calendaring and scheduling.
- Manage my groups of people. One tool (my Address Book) to manage:
Servers conflate also:
- Mail servers cache and aggregate RSS feeds, just like usenet.
- Servers following the IMAP model can hold backups of your email/blogging databases and address books.
- Server managed access control to private feeds.
Microsoft, for one, believes users want all variations in microcontent to be manageable from one place, with one interface. Their standalone task-reporting tools for project members went nowhere until they blended them into the email clients. Now your Things To Do Lists work with the MS Project servers, communicating by specially formatted emails.

The upside?
- Blogging as we know it becomes a feature. And everyone has it.
- One user experience means lower learning curve.
- As email clients become smarter, blogging benefits too.
The downside?
- Blogging becomes boring, routine, work-like.
- The browser interface becomes less important.
- Newsreading must compete for time with your inbox.
- It starts to feel employer-managed vs. personally controlled, just like your at work email.
A prediction:
The vendors who dominate messaging will shape blogging. AOL and Microsoft have fat clients, web clients, and chat clients. Watch them:
1. Bring blogging into their messaging family.
2. Absorb blogging user and group digital IDs into their identity mechanisms.
3. Offer faceted blogs (everyone sees just what they're intended to see and not what they don't want to see) using digital ID. You're not part of their ID world? No facets.
4. Push blogging into all their customer touch points (voice, SMS/iMode, handhelds, desktop software, etc.)
5. Fold blogging community servers (the Technoratis and Popdexes) into email and search servers.
6. Offer tools for good citizenship (i.e. censorship, filtering) via community servers.
I'm not recommending this, mind you. I just have a hard time imagining a sustainable alternative scenario.

[a klog apart klogs]

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 11:51:24 GMT
AO: software development goes abroad for good.
An Always On discussion thread. Hold on to your IDEs, American programers: the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. And the Chinese. And the Indians. And the Irish. I wrote:

If you can move work to the next building because of IM, email, file sharing, SCM, etc., you can move it a thousand miles.

The questions should be:
1. What work is very hard to move?
2. What advantages can we create that will be hard to follow?
3. What limitations of remote work can we exploit?
My gut reaction is to force jobs to stay here. My head knows that doesn't work well. So the challenge is how to move up, do better, and justify a ten-fold premium over market rates.

You don't export the requirements process, the warmth of high touch service, the intimate understanding of local and industry culture and behavior. That work remains bound to the constantly evolving local domain.

But instead of the handoff going to construction engineers across the room, the customer-aligned tasks go to Irkutsk or wherever the market dictates.

This means, of course, that those who collect requirements must do a much better job, produce clearer and more specific functional specs, test requirements documents for usability and the prevailing criteria for quality, manage shorter iterations, and conduct more rigorous acceptance testing.

The new integration costs and risks are real and substantial, especially across language, culture, legal, financial and political boundaries. If two Houstonians can make communication mistakes, you know it is more difficult when working through translators (surprise surprise but most people don't speak, read, or write English at all, let alone fluently). And culture-centric ideas like courtesy and privacy vary across industries and generations, let alone regions. All parties have currency risk and in some places material poltical and safety risks (work interruptions or delays because of violence, war, government corruption, or other things that happen in the U.S.).

But the separation of user/customer relationship from engineering/construction creates value. It gives freedom to shop for the best partners you can trust. To bid for world class performers in niche specialties for the strategic parts of your project. To make your customers' biases and assumptions explicit, perhaps for the first time. To get more satisfying tradeoffs between scope, schedule, budget, quality and risk.

This looks good for those who buy software development services. Prices "rationalized", quality varied but improving with experience.

How will this affect those who market packaged software to consumers? To businesses?

What career advice would you give a US programmer with ten years' experience? A compsci student in Mexico City?

What knowledge, skills, and abilities will the new offshore software brokers need?

What would an insurer want to know before selling you a completion bond for offshore work?

What process might buy you a sustained competitive advantage as a London game development firm?

p.s. The author of the initial post has financial ties with the AO operators. This isn't disclosed in the post. Be up front, please.

p.p.s. More gripes about AO's design (courtesy of prock+jaffe creative):
1. Comments don't have permalinks.Add permalinks, dudes!
2. Comments aren't listed in chronological order. Topics in reverse chron, Comments in chron order. Have you ever tried to follow a thread from the wrong direction? Argh!
3. No RSS feed for comment threads. Feed me!
4. Site not accessible to the visually impaired. Pass the Bobby test!
5. Rewrites html, destroying lists, html entities, and link attributes. Let me express myself!
6. Member profile pages don't show all of a person's posts and comments. They should.
7. Don't call posts "blogs" when they are posts.
8. Enable trackback.
9. Human readable urls, please.
p.p.p.s. What roles should blogs and wikis play in coordinating work across national boundaries?

Fri, 20 Jun 2003 07:52:14 GMT
Can you apply Theory Of Constraints to Human Capital?
Frank Patrick (one of the deepest thinkers on project management in our time) catches the new chapter on Critical Chain Scheduling in Ed Yourdan's new second edition of Death March. The book is mandatory reading for every project worker.

I like one of Yourdan's anecdotes:

My colleague Tom DeMarco likes to tell the story of consulting clients he visits, who ask him, "If we could do just one thing to improve our project-management situation, what would it be?" Tom's answer is often simple: "Stop assigning people to work on five or six unrelated projects simultaneously; give everyone one project to work on, and leave them alone until they finish that one project." Invariably, says Tom, the response is, "Well, yeah, that sounds very rational. But you don't understand, that just wouldn't work in our organization -- because in our organization we have constraints A, B, and C, and we have to deal with political problems X, Y, and Z, so give us another one thing that could make all of our project management problems go away." Any suggestion that attacks the dysfunctional behaviors in the organization is almost certain to be rejected with the phrase, "Well, maybe that would work in a perfect world -- but in the 'real world' where we operate, it could never happen because of X, Y, and Z" And the organization eventually finds a "pill" -- a new development tool, a new systems analysis methodology, a new buzzword -- that may bring short-term relief, but rarely attacks the underlying problems.

Changes, deep ones, important and worthwhile, shake us.

The chapter is about more than change. It is about applying Goldratt's Theory Of Constraints (TOC) to project scheduling. It requires a different set of values, behaviors, incentives, measures, and project controls. So this calls for extensive change.

Human Capital Constraints

How can we apply the Theory Of Constraints to workforce planning and recruiting?

Where are the bottlenecks to be overcome?

Can the system design be reconsidered in light of the TOC?

What assumptions and dogma are worth challenging?

What new values, behaviors, incentives, measures, and controls will lead to more of what we want?

How can we get more of the right people on our radar? Spend more time spent in meaningful conversation and less on paperwork? Shorten our cycle times while increasing our quality?

Along the way, can we take some of the strain out of the process?

Now on my reading list:
P.S. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a systems engineer. In high school I wanted to be an operations research analyst, reading Naval Operations Analysis. By nineteen I was working for the Naval Supply Systems Command as a civilian operations research analyst. My favorite book in the whole world was Quick and Dirty OR. Just to explain the utter and complete geekiness of this post.

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 07:08:33 GMT
Exporting software development is good for American software engineers.
Roland Tanglao takes exception to an AO post. The post...

How efficient is it to pay a software engineer in the Valley a loaded salary of $170,000, the average salary reported in the fourth quarter of 2001, when Asian engineers provide a much better value? We've all read the cost differentials between US and Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese workers. And one of the main reasons this work went overseas is because clients knew they were being gouged by US engineers and consultants. After all, programming is, essentially, production work. And is labor not the most expensive variable component of a software product?

Roland...

Good software is not production work. If this guy had ever actually developed good software, he'd know.

There's a huge fork in software development. If you can define scope clearly and it seems like a straightforward thing to build, then you shop it to a code farm.

On the other hand, if the scope is fuzzy, elastic and frequently changing, and there are elements of novelty (never done that before), sub-cultural awareness (how do our surgical nurses model their work process), you may need local auteurs.

When the business schools started to teach MIS 30 years' ago, you could tell that whole categories of software work would become routine. Both the problem set and the tool set had no barriers to entry. We have a million programmers in North America because of lighter weight problems and easier to use tools. That same lack of barriers makes it easy for India, China, and the rest of the world to enter our labor market.

The things that don't fit?

Thorny problems. Intractable ones that take deep scientific education and grad school maths. Edison problems that require years of tinkering to get the chemistry just right. Collaborative ones that involve close knit teams of world class experts.

Proximity. Where the development team must work intimately with the customer, eating and breathing with them.

And those barriers won't last. When you throw mass quantities of smart people at an education system, like they are doing in India and China, the bell curve says some will become world class computer scientists. People who invent things, who break through conventional thinking, who upset the apple cart. And they will compete with the industrial world's best and brightest.

So you have a few choices.
- Get your PhD in computer science.
- Become a product manager or product requirements manager, because outsourcing demands coordination.
- Become a world class specialist in a technology or an application, one of the top 5 in a very narrow field.
- Or get out.
Thu, 12 Jun 2003 17:25:56 GMT
WBS: Jupiter By Wire
There's a channel of pushed posts from the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference. Just hit refresh.
Mon, 09 Jun 2003 15:41:18 GMT

Phil Wolff: project management

RSS FEED IDEMS: Phil Wolff: project management

Project communication.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

Cross stovepipes

Due diligence

Transition and Continuity Management

Human Capital Constraints

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