September - October 2004
Latest Publications and Newsletters
Words are not living creatures; they cannot breathe, nor walk, nor become fond of one another. Yet, like the human beings they are destined to serve, they can lead unique lives. A word may be born into a language with just one meaning, but as it grows up, it may acquire new meaning that are related but nevertheless distinct..." Edward Lorenze - The Essence of Chaos
"It just boggles the mind how you can take a perfectly good term, often out of context, redefine it, quote some source who may or not be speaking about project management, indeed may or may not know much about project management, quote that source as authoritative, and build a whole industry on it"....Max Wideman
Earned Value in Japanese
In
the first of several translations of their Project Management Institute (PMI)
book 'Earned Value Project Management' into non-English languages, authors
Quentin Fleming and Joel Koppelman announce that the first translation was
in the Japanese language. Co-author Joel Koppelman will travel to Japan to
attend the meeting of the PMI Tokyo Chapter where the new Japanese language
book will be introduced.
"Towards more Sustainable Places"
Urban Regeneration - The Turner & Townsend Report
Turner & Townsend reveals the true definition of "Sustainable Places"
Findings published recently in a report on urban regeneration practice commissioned by construction and management consultants Turner & Townsend highlight the need for greater co-ordination of government regeneration policy and the urban design agenda in order to avoid simply recycling poverty in UK cities. Entitled "Towards more Sustainable Places", the research was conducted on behalf of Turner & Townsend by the University of Aberdeen's Department of Land Economy and Kevin Murray Associates, supported by the RICS Foundation.
Turner & Townsend's Associate Director of Project Management Nahid Majid
said, "Turner & Townsend has been involved in urban regeneration
projects for over 15 years, including many ground-breaking schemes such as
Glasgow's Crown Street and Raploch, Stirling which is set to be the first
ever Scottish Urban Regeneration Company. We are often struck by the sheer
confusion that exists within the industry about definitions, roles and responsibilities.
This piece of research has given us the ability to make a positive contribution
to the debate and make recommendations for achieving best practice."
The final report is the culmination of intensive interviews with 40 urban regeneration practitioners from a diversity of roles including the ODPM, community leaders, Urban Regeneration Companies and Regional Development Agencies into the significance of sustainable places, partnerships and skills in urban regeneration. It draws on experience gained in the key cities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, Liverpool and London and covers three key areas of sustainable place-making, partnerships and skills.
Phil Allmendinger, Head of Dept of Land Economy at the University of Aberdeen, said: "Previous government policy has resulted in an over-focus on density and landmark buildings in urban environments rather than the creation of places where people actually want to live. There is a huge job to be done in longer-term delivery of regeneration projects and it is essential that we understand where lessons need to be learned. Our research has created a typology of partnerships to help identify the most successful models of delivery."
The report reveals how the success of partnerships is frequently hampered by inequalities of power between government and public sector agencies, private sector partners and communities, with agendas characterized by 'silo mentality' and a focus on short-term output-driven goals. It highlights how regeneration practitioners are well-placed to deliver on the sustainable communities plan because of their wide ranging professional backgrounds and complex skill-sets, yet frequently suffer from complacency and a lack of fresh thinking.
Turner & Townsend has made a series of key recommendations as a result of the findings, including:
- The need for independent analysis and strategic support in establishing
Partnership Action Plans, monitoring and benchmarking criteria to
improve effectiveness. - The need for a National Centre of Excellence supported by Regional
Learning Partnerships to share best practice and provide a mixture of
vocational training and CPD to support pure academic qualifications. - The establishment of cross-professional secondment's to improve
understanding and nurture the right mixture of 'hard' and 'soft' skills.
Nahid Majid concludes, "Sustainable regeneration is often confused with redevelopment. In Glasgow's Crown Street Regeneration Project in the Gorbals, the community 'embeddedness' is starting to take place. This is because of the introduction of a mixture of new private and social housing together with new businesses and community facilities. The project has been so successful that people are queuing to purchase properties off the plans. More importantly, however, many of the early house purchasers are buying new properties in the later phases. The project has successfully changed the image of the area and created a place where people now wish to live and work. That is what we mean by sustainable places."
Copies of the report are available via the Turner & Townsend website, or alternatively by contacting Tracy Simpson at .
PROJECT CATEGORIES AND LIFE CYCLE MODELS:
DETAILED REPORT ON THE 2003 IPMA GLOBAL SURVEY
(Revised May 22, 2004 to include verbatim comments from the survey)
RUSSELL D. ARCHIBALD, PMP, Fellow PMI and APM [Archibald Associates, USA]
and
VLADIMIR I. VOROPAEV, Prof., Dr. Sc. [GASIS, Russia]
18th IPMA Project Management World Congress, Budapest, June 18-21 2004
Report of Global Survey Results: This paper reports the results of the global
survey conducted via the Internet during 2003, as described in the paper by
the authors
Underlying Rationale for the Survey: The discipline of project management (PM) holds the promise of enabling peaceful global cooperation and collaboration across all political, cultural and economic boundaries. However in order to realize that goal we must achieve a common understanding and reasonably uniform application of the underlying principles and practices of project management on a global basis. It seems logical to enhance this effort by building an agreed list of project categories, since projects themselves are the common denominators throughout the many aspects of the discipline of project management.
Why did we engage in this survey? The purposes were to:
- Recognize the great variety of projects and life cycle models
- Establish the need for and uses of a commonly agreed project classification method
- Begin to determine how PM practitioners in all countries commonly identify their projects in terms of categories or types
- Identify the various life cycle models being used within each proposed category.
- Define their features and influence on parameters of PM processes and
tasks
Based on these results our plan was then to choose and prove a set of project categories and sub-categories as the basis for an agreed classification system that enables the definition of the needs and characteristics of adequate project management systems (PMS), thereby leading to more logical development of more effective management systems. We believe that current practice, as well as the referenced system PM model , shows that any single project, compared to others, can have different: - Concepts and structures of their life cycle models
- Concepts and structures of the PBS, WBS, OBS, CBS, etc., for different objects and subjects
- Action models (bar charts, networks, other)
- Mathematical statements of project tasks
- Methods and tools for various tasks.
Conclusion: different types of projects require different PM processes, methods and tools.
A more complete report expands on the paper presented in the Budapest Congress and includes the verbatim comments of the survey respondents. It is now posted, together with our 2003 paper announcing the survey, at www.sovnet.ru, and www.russarchibald.com.
A Virtual PM Office Learning Experience
David
Curling
I recently read a book on the "Wisdom of Teams" that described a team as
“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” And of course that applies to project teams where the skills required to manage the project come together to collaborate in the management of a one time undertaking that has a distinct life cycle, a dedicated project manager and integrated management information systems.
All very well when the team members are co-located. How does a team, whose members are globally remote, work without face to face discussion and dialogue of business matters? The need for a substitute, even a virtual one, has given impetus to the development and fielding of PM Virtual Offices. While there is no substitute for the face to face of personal discussion the reality of globalization has been accompanied by a full measure of enterprise and small business new collaboration tools.
Collaboration tools can also eliminate delays common with e-mail, instant messaging and phone tag, to create a place - for example a Web site or online conference room for people to work together towards common project objectives.
There are two styles of collaboration tools. The first is real-time, such as Web conferencing which brings remote team members together over the Internet for regular discussion of project tasks and tracking of outstanding issues. The other is synchronous tools which include electronic workspaces that allow people to share documents, files, project plans, calendars and discussions both keyboard, chat and voice at the same online place.
As an aside bulletin boards and blogs ( the topic of interest of the July-August PM World Today), which allow people to share observations, thoughts and ideas on a particular PM topic over the Web are further examples of asynchronous collaboration tool.
While there will be a convergence between these two collaboration technologies in the near future the current web collaboration status must be dealt with.
I agree that one should start by
- taking inventory of the various collaborative tools that are available
- understand how each of those tools with the PM business processes before selection of a candidate. (for a particular company or agency)
This is the systematic way to proceed to selection of a collaborative platform for your particular purpose. As an interim measure I chose to bring myself up to speed on what is on offer through use of the Groove Virtual Office, as a start in my PM collaborative web platform learning curve.
I chose the Groove Virtual Office as this "peer to peer application"(P2P) offered some promise for use by a SBE like the PMFORUM. Importantly, the Groove Virtual Office was a desktop application that I could run right from my local work station. An easy journey to get a feel for installing a desktop PMFORUM PM Virtual Office for increasingly continued operational matters dealing with the development of the PMFORUM Web Site.
This selection of Groove is particular to the need of the PMFORUM for an immediate PM Virtual Office to deal with web site projects now underway. That is, among others the PM Collaborative Initiative, a project to develop style sheets for each Directory and the files of the PM World Today. These includex xhtml templates for the PM World Today and the use of Dublin Core for PM Knowledge documents. These short duration web development projects require an electronic space where a set of sharespaces can be organized to collate and facilitate PMFORUM regular upgrades.
To start I read
1 A description of a P2P application [
More ]
2.A software review of Groove Virtual Office on the Virtual Projects Site
[ More
]
3.A software review of Team Direction for Groove on the Virtual Projects Site
[
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4.Groove Virtual Office - Getting Started Guide [
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5."Project Management Marries Collaboration"-an article[
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Then I downloaded the 60 day evaluation copy of Groove Virtual Office from the Groove Web Site . The installation was flawless and I had no problem with initiating the Groove navigation bar which appeared on my desktop. I chose not to have Groove loaded on each boot of my system and preferred to initiate from the schedule bar icon when I wanted to review the Virtual Groove presentation.
The evaluation version presented me with some limitations. For example, I could only install three shareplaces and there was a cut off of some of the tools at the end of the evaluation period.
The working tool bar at the bottom allowed me to choose a full list of "tools' that is, file management. Q&A discussion space, calendar, image storage, note pad, document review space, forms management, sketchpad and project manager. All of these are intuitive and easily navigated. I particularly liked the chat and voice messaging while I was not impressed with the standard Project Manager tool.
I have XP Professional Windows and it is clear that Groove Virtual Office is closely linked to MS Office products. Here I was able to review MS Word documents and Power Point presentations right on a sharespace in full view of collaborators. They can comment on the document review in the discussion space which is an easy facility to review documents. Groove has a particular tool called Document Review which facilitates this virtual review of documents.
The next step is to invite participants or guests to your sharespace. An email invitation can be sent directly from the application. An invitation from Groove to participate in a free online demonstration of the "tools" was a straighforward affair with the download of an entire sharespace dedicated to this online learning.
During a one hour free training online session, a Groove representative conducted a review of the application, via a conference call, where each of the "tools" were briefly introduced. I observed via the discussion space that the Project Manager tool was mickey mouse. I was referred to a project management tool called Team Direction which has been specially developed for Groove. I read up on this tool but did not have time to use it. In any case the Team Direction folks will be in Anaheim for the PM World Congress held this October and I will see if I can get a run through on this Groove "add on" tool.
I was impressed with the ease of install and initial use of Groove Virtual Office. An intuitive tool bar allows a quick learn for collaboration with colleagues and team members throughout the world. As a "PM Virtual Office learning experience" it is a quick start to understanding the use of virtual space for the sharing of documents and files asynchronously, and occasionally chat while there. The Groove Virtual Office is a powerful way to embed time saving communications into your world-wide project management operations.
Take the Groove Virtual Office learning experience as background for your selection of a PM Virtual Office application.It is worth the effort, the price is right.
David Curling
Editor
PM World Today