Vladimir Voropaev a Russian colleague writes to the PMFORUM....
'"Russell Archibald and I co-authored and presented a paper at the 17th IPMA World Congress in Moscow June 4-6, 2003, that initiated a global survey of project categories and life cycle models . At this moment there are more then fifty replies to our questionary, which are available at the specially designed web-site http://ipmaglobalsurvey.com . But unfortunately this number of replies is not enough for a serious analyses and conclusions.
We would like to enlist your kindly support to help us generate as wide a response to this survey as possible both you personally and within the members of your professional organizations and environment.
All experts who will take part in this research project will be noted as contributers in web-site and in presentation. We are going to present common results at the 18th IPMA World Congress in Budapest, June 2004. We would like to summ up all replies before the New Year.
Please visit the ipmaglobal survey web site and complete the on-line questionnaire. A one page summary of the purpose of the questionnaire can be downloaded there, as well as the 10 page paper by Russell Archibald and Vladimir Voropaev presented in Moscow in June that explains in detail the objectives of the survey. The web site is available in both English and Spanish.
Thanks for your interest and support of this professional community efforts."
Best regards,
Prof. Vladimir Voropaev,
SOVNET President.
"Building IT Value through Enterprise Project Management," co-sponsored by PM Solutions and Microsoft, will be offered Nov. 17, 2003 from 12:00 - 1:30 PM EST.
How can technology executives establish an effective Enterprise Project Management culture? Presenters Jose Levy of PM Solutions and Tracey Kruger of Microsoft Corporation will discuss how they are helping organizations boost performance, improve project delivery, better allocate resources, and effectively prioritize projects to achieve the organization's business goals.
To register:
http://msevents.microsoft.com
The Project Manager's Toolbox research project of the University of Quebec at Montreal Canada was "undertaken to better understand the use and usefulness of project management tools and techniques in practice". Professors Claude Besner PMP, PhD. and Brian Hobbs PMP, PhD. of the Master's Programme in Project Management, University of Quebec at Montreal have undertaken an empirical investigation to determine "the reality of use" of Project Manager Tools.
This study investigates the use of tools and techniques that are specific to project management The results reported as of August 2003 are from the analysis of 130 responses to a web-based questionnaire. An interim report of analysis was presented to the ESC Lille France 3rd International Project Management Workshop in August 2003. The report provided two highlights of interest :
Note1: both the listing and Analysis can be downloaded from the UQAM web site
In the definitions of this empirical set of Project Manager's Tools not one has a particular software solution. This is a departure from the usual definition of PM tools promoted by the software support vendors listed in the [PMFORUM's Expert Resources] Directory. As such this research is a break with the mainstream thought on what constitutes a project management tool. It further enlarges the gap between those who rather than search out for an understanding of a practice first search for a "template" of practice and the believe that a software client is the order of the day for success.Further, the UQAM list of tools is a useful ontology of PM ideas and concepts that can be used to advantage in the development of a PM documentation schema and in furtherance of improved web page retrieval through application of web semantic concepts.
The Analysis Report highlights some pros and cons. The good news is that one can use the approach to determine what ideas and concepts are real or vapour wear in the practice of project management in an enterprise or area of project management application. That is, the methodology has much merit. On the other had the sample to date is not sufficient or indicative of any general practitioner trend because the demographic is that of recent graduates of the Masters Program in Project Management from the UQAM.
All that being said we recommend that you participate in the research of the UQAM through completion of the on line questionnaire. Why should you participate? You will immediately receive partial results to date and all respondents will receive a detailed report.
The results will provide you with a realistic image of project management as it is currently practiced, that is, for the PM practitioner population under examination. At the UQAM web site you can download a copy of the Project Manager's Toolbox list with definitions and the Analysis Report. Both are useful reading for a project management practitioner. However to suggest that the results can be mapped onto a particular PM practitioner population would be suspect and premature. Finally, completion of the questionnaire is a particularly good approach to examining the contents of a Project Manager's Tools.
The questionnaire is accessible at the following address: Welcome page: http://www.technidoc.uqam.ca:8080/survey/welcomepage.htm
The UQAM believes that it will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.
by Rainer Volz
Working with teams in distributed environments often means: the people are geographically dispersed but they access a central website for their project work. This might be ok for some projects, but nor for all. An alternative to this centralised structure is the P2P approach where the team environments are distributed across the team members' PCs or laptops, no central sites necessary. By using the applications TeamDirection Project and Groove Workspace as an example I want to show that mechanics of project management in such distributed teams must not be more difficult than in normal projects, if you have the right tools.
Since the Groove Workspace was already mentioned in previous columns, I will focus here on the project management with TeamDirection Project. Readers not familiar with P2P applications like Groove and their usage in distributed teams can refer to “Introducing Peer-to-Peer Part 1" and "Introducting Peer-to-Peer Part 2" .
Team environment versus planning application
When talking about solutions for distributed PM a frequently asked question is „How does this solution compare to MS Project?“ The quick answer is: MS Project is a planning/tracking-application only, the TeamDirection Project/Groove duo provides a complete planning and team work environment. But to be fair we must distinguish between the the planning application itself – TeamDirection Project – and its environment – the Groove Workspace – which provides the environment with functionality for presence indication, contacting people with instant messages, online and threaded discussions, shared editing of documents and so on.
To provide a comparable environment for MS Project you would have to combine it with MS SharePoint (document storage and discussion forum) , Messenger (presence, instant messages), and Office.
Using the team environment
Team rooms in Groove are called workspaces, which contain tools providing the room's functionality. A typical initial set-up for a small project sub-team could contain a discussion forum, a text tool, a sketchpad, a contact manager, a files tool with important documents, and a web browser with links to templates, more documents, and websites or external systems. This set-up would enable the team to start working immediately, except there is no work plan. Here we would include an instance of TeamDirection Project. This application provides in one screen a spreadsheet-like view of the work plan and a graphical representation (scalable Gantt chart), as well as a detail view for the tasks, a container for files related to each task (issues, design documents, test plans etc.) and a change history for the whole plan.
TeamDirection project provides the necessary functionality to create and edit a project schedule with resources, tasks, meetings, and milestones. All functionality is directly accessible from the screen, nothing to memorise, learn. I found while using it that the tool's focus on the core functionality and its simple usage makes it easy for everybody with a basic knowledge of project planning and scheduling to create or edit a plan by entering values in spreadsheet or by manipulating the graphical elements of the Gantt chart directly. Getting a hardcopy of the planning efforts is also no problem, it could be a printed version or a report in PDF format, for electronic distribution.
But hardcopies are normally only necessary for contact with outsiders, because all the team members have the plan in their workspace, for direct access, there is no need to refer to potentially outdated, external documents. Because the plan is always in direct access, it is important to protect the plan from accidental or unauthorised changes. To do this the workspace manager can set the access rights as required. In the standard scenario only users with a manager role can edit the plan and its items. Mere participants can only edit their assigned tasks, to provide progress reports (percent completed) and related documents, while users with guest status might only be allowed to view the plan. Of course these settings can be overridden.
Keeping the project together
In a normal project I would create a workspace, like the one described above, for every team, 1-15 people. Each team workspace would contain its own plan. The obvious questions are then: how do I keep the overview and how do I relate the team plans to the overall project plan?
The overview problem is solved by a second component provided by TeamDirection, the Dashboard. As the manager of my teams I should be a member of every team workspace. Normally I would have to visit each space and look at the plan individually. While I will do this anyway from time to time, it is impractical for everyday use. So I would create another workspace, this time a PM space, and would add the TeamDirection Dashboard to it. The dashboard looks for all workspaces with a TeamDirection Project tool inside and extracts information from them. By using various filters I can get very quickly an overview of the status of all my teams/workspaces or team members – what projects/tasks are on track, behind, completed, what is starting or ending in this/the next period etc.
While this feature provides an overview and guides me to potential trouble spots there is still the problem of relating the individual team plans and the overall project plan, especially regarding weekly status reporting. Currently TeamDirection Project provides three interfaces for this: MS Project, MS Excel, and XML. A project plan in TeamDirection Project can be synchronised with an MS Project plan. It can also be exported as Excel sheets, or as an XML file. With Excel the sheets can be integrated into the overall plan by using Excel or VB macros, while XML file can be transformed in various formats with XSLT, the file structure is trivial.
Initially importing a plan is possible again through the MS Project synchronisation or through an XML file import. This allows to reuse plans of previous projects, or to populate many different sub-team plans from one overall plan.
I hope this short introduction made clear that handling project planning in distributed teams must not be more difficult than traditional paper-based processes or solutions with web pages and forms. Seamless environments for team communication and project planning like the combination of TeamDirection Project and Groove Workspace help to bridge the gap introduced by distance and to focus on the project goals instead of the technology infrastructure.
For information about Groove Workspace please visit the Groove Networks website The TeamDirection Project is available in English. French. and German versions are also available. Groove Networks offers also a bundle of Groove Workspace and TeamDirection Project, the Groove Project Edition. Both vendors offer downloadable trial versions.
copyright® 2003 Rainer Volz