Posts Tagged ‘project management’
The Winner Is… itensil
As I discussed in our last post, “A Consultant’s PMO”, we are looking for a PMO (Project/Program/Portfolio Management Office, take your pick) tool to form the core tool to help manage the business of the Centivity group. That is a group of independents that function as a single market entity that I’m affiliated with. Based on our selection criteria we have selected the Knowledge Apps™ tool from Itensil.
What we’ll do in today’s post is examine why we made this decision. Clearly, Itensil is not a household name and they certainly aren’t a large company so why would we make this decision. I believe there are some interesting answers.
The first thing to remember is that we are looking for a tool to manage a collection of projects, resources, documents and manage a collection of proposals, including the creation of those proposals. Consultants have to find work before they can do it. When we include the creation and management of proposals into the mix we extend the scope for our tool beyond just a traditional PMO application. We must also have the ability to manage resources and their activities that are not associated with any projects. Also, we have no expectation that one tool will do everything. Our goal is to minimize the portfolio of required software.
First we must decide how to minimize the required software. To do that we have to decide what functionality is needed in each tool. Besides the list of requirements identified in the last post, we need accounting functionality and project scheduling functionality. We need for the selected tool to connect with an accounting package. For the SMB (Small to Midsize Businesses) we chose Intuit QuickBooks for starters. It is not an elaborate tool but will service our needs. Other tools may be used instead of QuickBooks based on client requirements. As for project scheduling, I confess I’m a Microsoft Project bigot. There are many other tools and several are web-based. However, Project has been around for a long time, has many users and is a solid tool for most projects. It may run out of gas for very large projects and it may be overkill for very small projects. It is still a great overall standard for the majority of projects that we’ll run into. It too can be replaced based on client requirements.
For us, workflow is actually fairly significant. We need to standardize our business processes so we’re not reinventing how we do business with every project and proposal. That is a typical problem with small companies. We must position ourselves for an active future. Being able to incorporate automated workflow into our tools is very important, if not essential.
Now let’s focus on the available solutions. Before we start I want to acknowledge that many of you can provide many alternatives to the field of candidates we chose. We make no claims that our process was exhaustive. It did include representation of the major solution types of interest to us, like minimum cost, maximum project management features, strong document management and collaboration capabilities. First up is Google Docs. It is definitely the low cost leader. We are definitely very budget conscious so this was an early leader. However, it runs out of gas on many fronts very quickly. It’s OK for light document management and can provide some project management capabilities but, frankly, won’t build a lot of confidence in our prospective clients. It may be useful to get started but doesn’t meet the client sniff test.
Now let’s consider a Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint solution. This approach is very capable for document management, proposal management and non-automated workflow management. It’s fairly expensive and we’re pretty much on our own for doing the plumbing connections to other apps (obviously we can always hire help). This approach is not intrinsically cloud-based so there are some IT management requirements. We don’t need to worry about those things for a while. It would produce very capable tools but there would be more up front work than we want.
Next is the Project in a box solution. This is very much a document-centric approach with a heavy focus on lean project management. It is not intrinsically cloud-based which, like the Microsoft-centric approach, means more IT management. While having DSDM Atern artifacts built in is a big deal to me, it doesn’t provide a good all around solution. Connecting other apps to it is problematic. The fact that it is supported out of the UK is very inconvenient, not a deal killer but definitely a problem.
Finally, we’ll consider the Itensil Knowledge Apps™ approach. Their Knowledge Apps tool is basically a framework that is, in turn, customized to the customer’s requirements. That customization is remarkably easy and fast. Their basic offer includes a customized Knowledge App to help us get going quickly. They are cloud-based and, therefore, easily accessible by all of our project resources regardless of location. Workflow is built in, as shown in the diagram on the right, which is a huge deal for us. Wiki-based document management is strong, making collaboration on projects and proposals very easy. It can manage proposal creation as a project and supports other forms of collaboration as well. They can he
lp us with connecting the plumbing to other apps as well.
On the downside, they are a small company and there is some risk there. We have made arrangements with them that will mitigate that risk to our satisfaction. On the upside, they are a small company which makes other small companies (like us) a big fish in their pond. That’s a good thing. It offers functionality similar to Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 in a cloud-based format. That is another good thing.
Overall, we were impressed with the tool. We like what it is now and what it will become. Everyone on our side was excited with what they saw during the demo. Oh yes, and we like the price. It’s one of the more affordable tools which is a big thing to us small companies. I also believe that we have a good relationship with their management. I think they’ll deliver on everything they’ve promised. We’ll keep you posted.
This post has run over my word limit so I’ll stop now. I believe that we’ve made the right decision for our PMO needs. We are looking forward to customizing the Knowledge Apps framework and working with Itensil to grow their product (the big fish in a small pond effect). Let me know if you have any questions.
Stay tuned for more…
A Consultant’s PMO
StrAIT Advisors is a part of the Centivity group. That group is a collection of independent companies which have committed to work together collaboratively, sharing resources and knowledge as one seamless group similar to what I have described in an earlier post. To manage such a group, we need to be able to collaborate, manage projects, manage proposals and share resources effectively in order to compete with larger, established traditional companies.
Essentially, what we need is an extension of a Project Management Office, or PMO, to accommodate everything. To that end, we have been searching for such a tool based on the criteria listed below:
- Supports Agile methodologies
- Web-based application
- Manages proposals like projects
- Resource leveling across multiple projects, possibly many small projects
- Time and Resource accounting
-
Collaboration
- Within project team
- External to project team but within same company
- External to project team
- Within project team
- Integrates with scheduling tool (MS Project)
- Document Wikis developed by sub-teams with sign-offs
- Similar functionality to MS Groove (MS SharePoint Workspace 2010)
- Integrated workflow
These criteria are distilled from several sources, including “Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO: Multiplying ROI at Warp Speed” (if they tried harder they could probably come up with a longer title). The image on the left is linked to that book. The experience of our team also played a major role in these specifications. From the book we extracted some common attributes for successful PMOs, listed below:
- Gather and report the initial portfolio information (see Table 14.4 for an example of the initial information required).
- Develop the goals, resource and asset portfolios (described in later chapters).
- Link project, goals, resource and asset portfolios, and perform an initial assessment.
- Determine the organization’s multi-project strategic resource (described in this chapter and in Chapter 17).
- Prioritize the project portfolio according to accepted criteria and the information currently available.
- Assess portfolio balance.
- Develop recommendations for improving ROI.
- Facilitate the Governance Board meeting and communicate the results.
Clearly, these attributes don’t include anything about managing a portfolio of proposals or a pool of project specific resources. There is also no mention of the project or resource accounting needs. However, once these considerations were added we had a reasonably complete set of requirements for our shopping trip for tools to manage our business.
We have neither the time nor the resources for an exhaustive shopping trip. We let the marketplace and our previous experience help us generate our short list. No one tool will address all of our needs so we included ease of integrating our main tool with other specialty tools, like accounting and project scheduling tools. The approaches considered are Google Docs, Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint, Itensil Knowledge Apps and Project in a box.
Google Docs offers a low cost, easily accessible solution to our basic needs. It definitely wins the cost comparison. The Microsoft products are very professional tools with an excellent support ecosystem (very important to a small group like ours) and some mature products. The Itensil Knowledge Apps is a tool from a small, new company that seems to have an intriguing offering and can provide more personalize attention. The Project in a box offering is very affordable and offers built in support for my preferred agile project management methodology, DSDM Atern. Every option has something to say for it, which is why they are on the list. The other tools most likely to be part of the solution are Microsoft Project and Intuit QuickBooks.
I will report on our selection in next week’s post. As always, your comments would be much appreciated. Stay tuned for the results…
Consulting Ecosystems – What’s Next
(Originally posted on 4/28/10 and reposted 8/10/10 due to technical problems)
I was recently at a SIM (Society for Information Management) dinner. The speaker was Jim Stikeleather, CTO of Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems). The title of his presentation was “Next Generation Computing”. I’m not going to try to repeat the presentation here, he did a much better job than I could do (it was a good presentation). I will focus on a few of the points he made. They relate to my last post, “A Consulting Ecosystem“. In that post, I warned you that there would be more on the topic. Well, here is the next installment.
I have included three slides from his presentation. All of these images are linked to full size versions, so click on them if you want to see the details of the slides. I have also included a PDF version of the full presentation here. The presentation includes some specific information about Dell Services that may be of interest to you as well.
In my last post I discussed the idea of the “Hollywood” business model and what it meant for small consulting companies. This presentation provided some of the inspiration for those views. I believe what I liked most about it was that our views of the future were so similar. Obviously, if he agrees with me he must be right on target. In the above slide he identified 
the trends and drivers in play. The point here is that as computing functionality becomes more available and less expensive, it can be more widely used. It also makes it less of a differentiator for individual companies. I have long believed that computing power has no intrinsic value. Its only value comes from those business capabilities that are enabled by its use. I’m sure that view is not well received by much of the IT community but my experience proved to me long ago that this is true.
I think another interesting point is show in the slide covering the evolution of cloud computing. In this slide, he provides a vision for the evolution toward the federation of cloud resources and applications. In this context, a “federation” means using multiple cloud applications together to meet a business goal or goals. What this means to me is that we should see more and more “specialist” applications being mashed-up and used together. This idea is some time away but I believe it is a reasonable expectation since we’re seeing it today to some extent. As standards mature this trend should accelerate.
Some of the slides in this presentation offer a specific timeline with forecasts by year. While these forecasts seem reasonable, I am a little nervous about forecasting specifics far into the future. However, I do agree with the overall trends. I do believe our comfort level with the use of cloud-based applications will grow steadily over time. I believe that standards will continue to mature. I do believe that more and more organizations will want someone else to provide the computing infrastructure. I believe that cloud-based applications will become more capable over time. I believe that the physical infrastructure of the cloud will become more capable and reliable over time.
The presentation document speaks to business process outsourcing, or BPO, more that the speaker actually did. The presentation was very interactive and so it was hard to get to everything. As a disclaimer, I must mention that my business does not include BPO but does include the analysis of business processes. The two are separate but the analysis work is often part of a larger consulting engagement for BPO firms. The question here is very personal for each BPO customer. Essentially, it boils down to whether a prospective customer is comfortable with their business process living outside their firewall. The data that I’ve seen implies that small to midsize businesses (SMB) are signing up quickly but larger businesses are taking more time to decide. It’s basically a cost reduction decision with some business simplification thrown in to the mix.
I can’t say that I’m as enthusiastic about this as the other topics of the presentation. Besides that, I can’t find a consistent definition of what BPO “2.0″ means. I’m going to assume in this post that it means more pervasive use of BPO than “1.0″ versions and includes the idea of federated BPO providers. Having run many manufacturing business processes over the years, I struggle with the idea of my business processes living outside the firewall. I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. The closer an application lives to my company’s P&L, the closer I like it to be to me. I just worry about the exposure to cloud-centric risks like a patch or upgrade to the application coming as a surprise.
In conclusion, I think this presentation was valuable in that it collects insight from various sources, not just Dell/Perot. It did include some Dell/Perot sales material but that’s to be expected and wasn’t emphasized by the speaker. I encourage you to take a harder look at the presentation. It has some valuable nuggets of information. It does support the notion that the technology world is evolving in a direction which will allow smaller consulting companies to be far more scalable and effective than ever before (good news for us!).
Thanks for stopping by.
A Consulting Ecosystem
I recently attended a dinner meeting addressing, among other things, the future of work. That reminded me of a book that I read a long time ago in which the same thing was discussed. That book is titled “The Future of Work”. An image of that book cover is shown here (click on it to see that book on Amazon.com). I’m not going to attempt to do a book review here. I will address one of the points made in the book and what it means to the consulting business.
In Grantham’s book he describes the “Hollywood Model”. That business model is based on the movie making business in Hollywood where teams of independent, self-supporting specialists group together for a project. At the completion of the project, these teams disband. These specialist entities may be individuals, small organizations, larger organizations or yet another small team of specialists. As this idea evolves we start to envision a network of entities that begin to look like a complex molecule.
Maybe it would be more meaningful to refer to a molecular consulting ecosystem. Just for kicks I did a Google search for “molecular consulting ecosystem” and got no hits. I think I’ll include that phrase in my keywords for this post. Or not. Back to a serious note, the notion of comparing coordinated groups of independent entities for some common purpose to something like a molecule is not a new idea. Actually, if you think about it, we are talking about a fairly structured collection of entities focusing on very specific goals or projects. I think the best analogy is a crystal. Crystals are composed of atoms in a very specific structure. They tend to be stronger and more predictable than more typical organic molecules. They also tend to last a long time. Maybe naming such a business model after a crystalline structure is a good idea.
So what should be done to actually use this idea in a more general purpose consulting environment? Let’s think about a few more details and specific goals of such an arrangement. So what are the basic goals for the group?
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be knowledgeable.
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be perceived as knowledgeable by the group’s clients.
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be safe to do business with.
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be perceived as safe to do business with by the group’s clients.
- The group must have a means of generating new opportunities.
- The group must have a means of presenting a unified presence to the marketplace.
- The group must have an accepted means of distributing revenue among the entities.
- The group must have an accepted means of distributing operating costs among the entities.
- The group must have an accepted means of distributing liability among the entities or centralizing it as appropriate.
- The group must have an accepted means of recruiting and vetting new entities.
- The group must have an accepted means of allocating rights and access to any intellectual property generated by the group during an engagement and not the exclusive property of the client.
- The group must have access to systems to support collaboration among the entities for skills exchange and training.
- The group must not be constrained by national boundaries.
- The group must have access to systems to allow the collaboration on work product documents and proposals.
- The group must be able to scale to perform various sizes of engagements.
- The group must be able to include external entities as necessary for specific engagements.
- The group must be able to include clients as appropriate.
Basically, the group must be able to function very much like a company but maintain the ability to expand and contract as needed. It strikes me that what the group needs is an infrastructure that looks much like a PMO, or Project Management Office. That PMO must have some of the attributes of a business and not just a department within a larger organization. Going back to our crystal analogy, there must be a seed crystal around which other crystals form or connect. That seed crystal becomes the key to making everything else stable and effective. The seed crystal contains the PMO.
Maybe I’ll just call this the “Crystal Consulting Model”. Google doesn’t have anything for that phrase either. Anyway, consider this a part of an upcoming series of posts. I don’t know how many or when they will appear but this topic is important to our business so defining it more clearly is very important to us.
Thanks for stopping by. Any comments would be much appreciated. See you next time…
Wrapping Up Timeboxes
In my last post I addressed our decision to use DSDM Atern for the projects generated by an SLR engagement. Now comes the decision on what I call the “engagement architecture”. What this phrase means is what are the tools we will use and how will we use them to actually execute projects. No one tool does everything needed to execute projects in an environment of empowered, collaborative teams executing an iterative methodology. Trust me, I’ve extensively looked for the “silver bullet” application that does it all and could only find several lead bullets and a couple of bronze ones.
We need to remember that we’re also talking about doing projects as consultants working with both our resources and the client’s. That means that the chosen approach must have negligible impact to the client’s IT infrastructure and not commit the client to additional long term recurring costs. When we leave the engagement, we must be able to fold up our tent and take our working environment with us. That certainly isn’t always true but our planning must be based on the most conservative scenarios. The only materials that must be left behind are sufficient documents to support SOX requirements and audits. For any client, the answer is one of three modes.
Mode 1 (primary)
The primary collaborative environment is Microsoft Groove 2007 (soon to be Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010). In this mode the client provides a copy of Groove to each team member. Groove functions primarily in a peer to peer architecture but has a server-based architecture available when/if needed. For small teams peer to peer is appropriate and convenient. That approach can definitely scale to larger sizes but at some point a server option may be more appropriate. I know many readers will start to groan at the mention of peer to peer. I have discussed the value of this approach before. A link to that post is here. It fulfills the requirement of leaving no lasting footprint on the client’s IT infrastructure (only user PCs), does not inflict a recurring cost on their business (there is a minimal onetime cost) and definitely provides a flexible collaborative environment for the project team. I will not elaborate on how Groove is used because I don’t want this post to turn into a pitch (it’s already more pitchy than I would like).
The brainstorming and creative component uses MindManager from Mindjet. I have found it to be very useful and its integration to Microsoft’s Office Suite is very beneficial. The use of the Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) is assumed. For project schedule management we use the venerable Microsoft Project tool. For the methodology and document control we use Project in a box. We use the client’s storage/portal for archiving project information or we can archive it on our own SharePoint server. The use of all of these tools can be adjusted based on the client’s preferences or the client can just use our default engagement architecture.
Mode 2 (cloud)
Here the primary collaborative environment is one of several cloud-based project management tools. There is a wide assortment of them available and we have a few preferences. But the client’s preferences are what count so we’ll review the options with them and go from there. The reason this is not our primary approach is that I’m not satisfied that all the security “rude surprises” are all know yet for that approach (see this link) and it can inflict a recurring cost on the client. However, it’s all the rage now, very popular and growing. It will mature in time to address all of my concerns. We acknowledge that and will be happy to not fuss too much with the client about it if that’s what they want. The bottom line is that it can work for this requirement.
Mode 3 (whatever)
This is simply the case when the client is a larger, more IT-mature organization and wants to do it their way. If this is their preference we say “yes, sir”, salute and do it their way. This is true of any consultant in the world. We will do the best to adapt the core parts of our approach to that environment to assure of project success. We won’t let the client shoot themselves in the foot (or at least not contribute to it) but we will be adaptable.
In conclusion
We’ve covered a number of tools at a very high level. Each of you has to find the combination that works for you. I believe these approaches work for us and our clients to deliver professional and successful results for each project. If anyone from the DSDM Consortium reads this please harass the Project in a box people to expand their tool from just a document repository to include some of the functionality described above. If anyone from Project in a box reads this please consider yourself harassed.
Thanks for stopping by. See you next time…