PM Practices January - April 2003

PM Community of Practice - Defence Acquisiton University

PMCoP has been a pilot program developed by a Department of Navy (DoN) and Defense Acquisition University (DAU) partnership. PMCoP supports leadership's net-centric business transformation objectives by facilitating the sharing of acquisition knowledge (proven practices, examples, etc.) and the collaboration within the greater acquisition workforce (DAWIA, non-DAWIA, and industry partners). In little over a year, the PMCoP pilot has been very successful with more than 2700 members, almost 7300 contributions, great testimonials from you, the members, and a high demand for further expansion.

Effective 1 March 2003, the PMCoP effort will transition solely to DAU. Should you have questions or need assistance on PMCoP, please contact the DAU project manager at 703-805-4640.

As the DoN project manager for PMCoP, I want to pass on to you the team's deep appreciation for your support of PMCoP and thank you for all you, the membership, have done to make it successful. PMCoP is a unique application of the community of practice technique that many said couldn't work, but it is, you the membership, that has made it successful.

W. Page Glennie
Program Analysis & Support
DASN Acquisition Management
OASN(RD&A)
(703) 602-2384

This email was to the PMFORUM by W. Page Glennie, the Chief Editor of Program Management Community of Practice. You will find this online community at http://pmcop.ar.navy.mil/simplify/ev.php.

The Differences Between Different Types of Projects

Editor's Note: Bob Youker has provided a ppt chart "The Definition of Types of Projects and Sub-Projects" to illustrate the continuum and interelationship of projects. This different level of project undertaking illustrates that, particularly for significant projects, there can be projects within the stages or phases of another.

Bob writes..."the following chart was prepared for a paper on, "The World of Project Management, The Difference Between Different Types of Projects" presented at IPMA in Florence, Italy a few years ago. The list of different types of Products of Projects on the left side was developed by Russ Archibald. The chart had the following purposes: to show how

  1. what is one person's project is another person's sub-project.
  2. the relationship of sub-projects to the phases or stages of the project life cycle.
  3. projects relate to the normal functional departments of organizations
  4. projects relate to the normal sectors or industries in the Standard Industrial Classification System.

Bob Youker bobyouker@worldnet.att.net

Analyzing The Corporate Stream of Projects

There are many tools to assist in Executive management of the stream of corporate undertakings. Each project needs to be analyzed in comparison to those projects which are in the "under work" stream of projects either approved by a company or under consideration for approval. Here are some found on the web.

"Applications For Distributed Project Management"

Rainer Voltz
Editor Virtual Projects

The management of geographically dispersed teams and organizations requires technology to overcome the complexity introduced in the process by distance, and sometimes by different time zones and cultures. Although the discussion about these virtual teams and distributed projects isn't new anymore there are still many people who find the idea interesting but don't know where to begin. To provide a starting point for these people we began to look at applications for distributed project/business management and collaboration, by that hoping to give concrete examples of what is currently possible. [More]

Rainer VolzRainer Volz has been an IT architect and manager for over 10 years, mainly in the airline and financial services industries. He specializes in technology and management consulting for virtual organizations, and edits the "Virtual Projects" website (www.vrtprj.com / www.vrtprj.de) to provide more information about collaboration and distributed project management.

The Project Control Panel Software Program Managers Network

The Software Program Managers Network has a free on line project review tool that should be in Project Manager's "must have" management toolbox. This MS Excell based self contained spread sheet is accompanied by macros which run the Project Control Panel gauges to provide a graphic presentation of the metrics that reflect the condition of a project and assist in the forecasting of project future. Properly used and updated the Project Control Panel is an admirable summary of project status that can be copied and broadcast to Team Members, contractors, globally dispersed project participating organizations and stakeholders.

The Control Panel approach has been around for some time now and is a valuable graphic demonstration of project objectives of cost, schedule and performance and other project significant metrics. That is when the project data is updated regularly where metics are presented as system flow pressure gauges displaying whether the metric is within acceptable range or that an out of control situation exists.

Project Control Panel requires MS Excel. There are no external files or add-ins required. You can dd your own worksheets and other MS Excel features to help collect, manage, or display data that are specific to your projects.

The free version of Project Control Panel has a very useful Help Index and Users Manual that provide a user a head start on employing this graphic presentation without much knowledge of the underlying MS Excell Spreadsheet. The install graphic has a presentation of project data that has backup subsheets for risk data, earned value metrics, CPI and TCPI of earned value, defects activity chart and a very handy Problem Report Form.

While Project Control Panel is sponsored by the Software Program Managers Network and applies particularly to software projects the MS Excell spreadsheet can be tailored to present project progress data and metrics for projects of other areas of project management application. [ For a definition of Areas of Project Management Application ]

Project Control Panel is free download from the Software Program Managers Network The download is a 800K ZIP file which installs a helpful User Guide along with the MS Excell application. Project Control is a useful tool. - it's free, with the support being fee-based. The link for the tool is http://www.spmn.com

On Enterprise Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned are a general method for many organizations. Here are some on line lessons learned web sites.

NASA - http://llis.nasa.gov/
Hanford - http://www.hanford.gov/lessons/sitell/sitehome.htm
Society of Effective Lessons Learned -
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ll/sells/index.html
DOE - http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ll/
US Navy - http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ll/

Use these Lessons Learned with care since much of the information is linear in nature and can become immediately lost once the volume reaches a large enough value to create a disconnect between the author and the readers. This is a difficult problem now being addressed by Topic Maps (http://www.topicmaps.org/) and other semantic web technology. Some products are starting to appear, but still need to be focused on the specifics of PM and especially difficult integration processes

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