The introduction speech was held by Nils Molin the Director of IDC in the Nordic countries. He clearly stressed the importance of having a strategy to handle the consequences of Consumerisation of IT. According to IDC this is a trend that will have a MAJOR impact on organisations in the following years. The message was: You cannot stop it so you have to embrace it.

After the introduction it was time for Jason Anderson, analyst at IDC. The title of his presentation was simply Consumerisation of Enterprise IT. Not very exiting title but at least we knew what he was talking about.

Consumerisation changes the way we work. The user has now the power to decide how he wants to work. Consumerisation of IT can be categorised into three different areas:

BYOD – Bring your own device – tablet and mobile
BYOC- Bring your own computer
BYOS – Bring your own software. This area is the hottest trend right since it has the most impact on organisations. Users turn to a greater extent to user friendly cloud services and collaboration tools to be more efficient in their work. The need for a collaboration tool often occurs in the middle of a business process when the team needs to figure out HOW to solve a problem or a task. The team then identify that they need a place to solve problem together and have a common place to share tips and ideas. The group then independently of IT sets up a common workplace in for example Jive, Dropbox or Yammer. They represent cloud services are easy to get started with without the agreement of IT. The users mostly tend to provide themselves with software that has chat, video and document sharing functions.

Advantages: Better collaboration, better productivity
Concern: Security

I talked to many CIO:s in the breaks and the majority of them were aware that employees in their organisation use Dropbox. But if they see it, they tell the users to shut it down until they have proven the security. The CIO:s are responsible for the security of the organisations data and they don’t trust Dropbox. So they want to offer user friendly tools that the employees like so they don’t use other tools. With the BYOS trend they are afraid they have to guarantee the security of way too many cloud services.

Mobile devices are the most important personal device for the user. Regarding BYOD there are good solutions to handle security like for example Mobile Device Management for smartphones and tablets. It is very important for CIO to have a strategy and an understandable IT policy for how the employee should handle data.
 
So in short the recommendations are

1. Policy – BYOx strategies for all three units. The policy should cover all from skype to dropbox.
2. Focus operative system instead of devices
3. Computers – Virtual desktop solution is a must
4. Software – combine UC (unified communication) strategy with social network possibilities. Choose cloud solutions that also have mobile platform possibilities. Usability – The users have demands how the solution should work. Usability is number one – Here IT needs to evaluate the tool from the users perspective and not only what it important for them.

An interesting reflection from the speaker Patrik Ugander from Telia Solution Management  was that fact that we have a tendency to place all our employees in a box by telling them how to work and what tools to use. We say: In this company we only work with these tools. In some cases employees cannot do their job at the best possible way if he cannot use the tools he is used to work with. He drew a parallel when we need a plumber to do a job at our house. He brings his own tools to work with. Tools that work well for him. We don’t provide the plumber with tools. If we did he would surely not do a great job so why are we doing this in the enterprise?

There were also presentations from security companies and the law firm McKenzie & Baker to give more insight in those areas. I was completely fascinated about all the security hacker stories like Operation Shady RAT, RSA, HB Gary and Sony. 2011 was full of attacks.

To conclude it was a great conference with great presentations and discussions.

Here are my take aways:

• Consumerisation of IT will have a MAJOR impact of organisations in the following years. You cannot stop it so you have to embrace it
• Bring your own software (BYOS) hottest area within this trend. Users turn to a greater extent to user friendly cloud services to be more efficient in their work.
• Concerns for CIO: Security. With the BYOS trend they are afraid they have to guarantee the security of way too many cloud services. So they want to be able to offer their user friendly tools that the employees like so they don’t use other tools.
• Have a clear IT policy for how to use devices in the workplace. Be one step ahead to avoid both security and legal issues.

Check your work

One of the best tests of a project’s true status is performing a demonstration of the end product. Some of the most nefarious failed projects looked perfectly fine from a management perspective: deliverables were getting delivered, stakeholders were happy, teams were buzzing with activity—but the core objectives of the project were not being delivered. Staging regular demonstrations provides a great way to check the status of the final output, and nearly anyone can readily identify whether the prototype is where it should be or miles away from the final objective. It’s difficult to fake progress, and if you keep seeing rough edges or critical questions that haven’t yet been answered, this is a stark indicator that your project has deeper problems.

Lack of end-user involvement

Another nefarious danger to seemingly well-managed projects is the risk of delivering something that doesn’t meet the business objectives you set out to accomplish. Your project may be meeting its stated objectives, but if these objectives have drifted away from what’s needed, your project risks successfully delivering an inappropriate output.

The best way to combat this risk is to involve the people who will actually use the outputs of the project on a regular basis. For technology-driven projects, this might mean involving end users early in the testing phases of the project on a large scale. For a process-driven or infrastructure project, it might mean regular demonstrations to mixed groups of the people who will be directly impacted by the project, ensuring that a majority of the participants have minimal interaction with the project team.

Get an expert opinion

Even the most well-run project can benefit from getting an external stamp of approval, especially if this process is embedded in the project from the outset. Getting regular checkups from an impartial internal party or an external consultant can identify problems early, or provide a degree of comfort to project sponsors and stakeholders. As a project manager, it’s easy to get so focused on the details of managing a large-scale project that you lose sight of the larger objective, and end up being a passenger on a ship headed for a rocky coastline completely unawares. An external party can analyze the project at a high level, benchmark where it stands, and provide corrective guidance. This works best when done by the same party at regular intervals, ensuring that whoever does the evaluation has no vested interest in the success or failure of the project.

These three practices can look like an unnecessarily time-consuming and expensive proposition, and they will certainly add time, cost, and a bit of complexity to your project. Holding regular demonstrations takes time away from other work, and corralling users and requesting their involvement in your project can be a logistical nightmare as you attempt to take scarce resources away from their job. Unless your organization has an internal project office that can provide an impartial evaluation, you are likely faced with consulting fees that look unnecessary at the time. However, all these measures are a pittance compared with a failed project. Spotting failure can easily save weeks or months of missed deadlines, a far larger expense compared to the above.

Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. Prevoyance Group provides strategy consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. Patrick can be reached at patrick.gray@prevoyancegroup.com and you can follow his blog at www.itbswatch.com.

But, many software users try to avoid ever reading these help files. It is in fact often the last place people want to look for help. This is odd. The help should be the first place to turn to. Instead, people use different tactics to avoid help texts. Some use trial and error to learn, some ask others for help, some use whatever knowledge they have from other systems to try to figure out how things work.

A typical software user tends to be focused on the end result and is not willing to spend time on studying the help file and, in doing so, reducing productivity instead of saving time.

There are a few possible reasons for this:

• Information in help files is incorrect or misleading or missing.
• The wrong information is presented.
• The help can be far too basic with too many obvious instructions, or too complex.
• Help files are often difficult to navigate or search.
• The information is not predictable and there is no standard way of writing.
• Help topics are too long and difficult to read.

And what about Projectplace?

Projectplace used to deliver the help file in a standard help format. The help was based on functions and features. Whilst the information provided was of a high quality, it was difficult to search. It offered no support for films. It was a typical help, one of those helps that you would rather avoid. It is like your in-laws, you know that deep down they are good for you, but you never have enough patience to find out.

However, we wanted to improve. We wanted to offer a help that:

• Is context sensitive to direct the user to the correct information
• Has a powerful search function that presents results according to relevance
• Can be searched using regular web searches
• Can display filmed material
• Can be updated quickly
• Makes it possible to present the material from different perspectives.

A little over one year ago we launched Projectpedia as a replacement for our traditional help. It still contains much of the information that the old help had. We have also added information that is useful to know, information like why you do things in Projectplace and what results you can expect.

We have also structured the information differently. Rather than focusing only on the individual tools, we stress what you need to know in your role in a project. This reduces the number of topics a user needs to browse though to find the information he or she is looking for.

Information is also added to make it easier for users to know where they are in a workflow, what they need to do before they perform a task, and what they can do with the outcome of a task.

Projectpedia is also supposed to be more than just a place where a user can get help with a task in Projectplace.  We have added:

• More printed manuals that can be easily downloaded
• Information about what is new in the most recent Projectplace releases
• Information about and links to our Add-ons
• The possibility for everyone to compile customized manuals
• Articles about project management in general, and an introduction to Social Project Management.

We hope that our users will find Projectpedia the place to turn to when they need information about Projectplace.

You find Projectpedia here: https://help.projectplace.com/index.php?title=Home_-_Projectpedia

A close friend of mine sent me this quote and I felt I wanted to share it with everyone. Why is it that, although we know that this is what makes us happy and creates satisfaction, we still search for short-term monetary success that just creates the opposite? Why is it that, most of the day, I’m working to create growth for our shareholders who already have more money in the bank than they need?

Market conditions have become extremely tough; competition is fierce and growth pressure is ever increasing. Can infinite growth be achieved? If growth is the measure of success, does it mean that we have failed the day we stop growing? I’m currently working with new sales, trying to expand our customer base with our existing product portfolio. Expansion can either be achieved through product diversification or by conquering new markets. Let’s say that, hypothetically, a company exists in all geographical markets, targeting all customer groups (this will of course be extremely difficult considering, among other things, the ever increasing requirements for customization). Also, this super company has managed to create an unlimited product portfolio, basically covering everything that a person needs (this will of course be contradictory to what we have learnt about successful companies and the need to focus on the core business). Imagine that, despite these difficulties, we managed to create such a company and no other companies were needed. The only way for this company to survive and to continue growing is that the population on earth continues to grow. Can it grow forever?

What have we based our economic system on? How logic is it to see people getting laid off despite the fact that they are working for a financially healthy company that is making huge profits? And that before the quarter has even ended and the quarter report has been released, the pressure is already set for the coming quarter to deliver a better report than the last one as well as the same quarter last year? How logic is it to know that the GDP – the measure of a country’s standard of living, is based on the goods and services produced within a country? The weapon industry is one of the most frightening examples. It actually makes great sense for a country to go to war with another country and totally destroy it – and then go back and rebuild it. It makes great sense from an economic point of view. Healthcare is another frightening example; the more sick people are in a society, the better it is for the healthcare economy. And the more people get addicted to harmful substances, the better it is for the tobacco industry. These are just some examples of why the system is just fundamentally wrong.

Does someone feel in control of the complexity of the economic system that we have built? When money creates money in the stock market without the creation of any (good) products or services, when poor people pay high interests to borrow money from rich people, when one percent of the population owns more than 40% of the global financial wealth, and there is no way this would change with the current system….it is difficult to feel there is hope. Will humanity let itself be sucked in a black hole and disappear as it never really existed? Or will miracles happen to change the situation 180 degrees and turn away from the wrong direction that was once defined as the right one?

Revolutions have always started with a small group of people and I believe this will always be case. I’m not afraid of the future; I just want to feel that when I leave, the world will have become a better place.

While project planning is second nature to most PMs, many miss out on a critical element of consideration for each task: its context. Context is occasionally the same as the person assigned a particular task, but more often it’s the environment where a task must be completed. By organizing tasks and project elements in this manner, you can quickly reflect on your current environment, and gather the tasks relevant to that environment.

If you’re having a meeting with a particular team, you can quickly retrieve tasks for that context, and with a moment of foresight, come to the meeting with an idea of what needs to be accomplished in that particular context, making the meeting and its outcomes significantly better. Similarly, when you have an uninterrupted moment with your PC, quickly retrieving tasks that revolve around that context will focus your efforts, and prevent scattershot time wasting.

Contextual task management is also very effective at the individual level. One of the key skills that separates highly effective individuals is their ability to rapidly transition between tasks, essentially being able to “close the books” on one task, and immediately begin working on another. Less effective workers spend much of this transition time attempting to get organized and gathering their thoughts, all while dealing with everything from ringing phones to email pop-up alerts. Given five minutes, the person whose tasks are organized contextually can quickly accomplish a relevant objective, while the less effective person has barely determined what to do next.

While too much planning and categorization can make your project or individual task planning overly burdensome and complex, briefly considering the context of a new task can greatly increase your effectiveness when it comes time to perform that task. Like a manufacturing facility that carefully plans its production to reach maximum efficiency as it transitions between products, this planning will certainly pay off in the long run.

What background factors can help us to explain the development? One factor is globalization of the world’s economy. Economical, political and juridical barriers have during the latest decade been lowered. Further the decrease of transportation and transaction costs has made it possible to produce goods where it is cheapest and sell them to another part of the world. The pressure to deliver better value to customers and to be competitive has lead to a more global perspective when management is optimizing resources. Jobs in production have moved from the west to for example China and India. The western countries have developed from being industry economies to “knowledge economies” where headquarter functions have stayed in the west. Isn’t this just the beginning of globalization? Will now the service jobs make the same journey? Thomas Friedman calls it Globalisation 3.0. One driving force behind is the development of the new IT infrastructure with the investment in broadband connections. More and more people are now connected. How do we use the new technology and which jobs will it affect? Location has always been a strong argument for service jobs to stay in the west. Service jobs within health care can for example not be allocated to another geographical environment or can they? Cisco has introduced tele health. With the help of technology like videoconferencing and sensors doctors now can treat more patients at a distance and at a cheaper cost. The service is almost the same as meeting the doctor in real life. We in Sweden can for example get access to the best specialist in the US.

The analysts at Kairos also pointed out that we will see a transfer of knowledge work as the education level of China and India has risen. New knowledge centers have been established and we see more innovations coming from the east like high speed trains, super computers and electric cars. Technology development of robots is also an explanation to why jobs disappear from the west. Service jobs like stock brokers and lawyers have seen some part of their jobs being automated, specially the parts where you have to go through a large quantity of information.

In the seminar we discussed which service jobs that can be replaced by robots and the majority were of the opinion that jobs characterized with structure, information rich and logical features will be replaced. The seminar group however meant that creative jobs were less likely. Fashion designer was mentioned as an example of a profession that could be hard to be replaced since it would be hard for a robot to decide what beauty is. Beauty also varies from culture to culture. In many companies values and experience play important parts. Only logical based solutions might not be always be the best solution. Finally we are social creatures and many jobs are depending on social ability can hardly be done by a robot. We like to work and be a part of a team, weather the team member is in China or in France. So the technological development is more seen as a work tool that will help us to work and collaborate better but most people in the seminar agreed that in the future we will see a tougher and more competitive work climate where the “middle wage” work might disappear.

What do you think? What jobs will be the future for the western economies? How will globalization and automation affect your work?

If you are interested in reading the whole report that also describes different future scenarios, please contact Kairos Future Club.

During the past year we have been hard at work modernising the web-client architecture in the system to enable development of a delightful look-and-feel and new advanced usage models for rapid navigation and easy interaction. But the most significant change of the Projectplace system are the ways in which we support project management.  We are designing a new kind of social tools to help the project manager engage project stakeholders and team members in a collaborative planning process. You can experience some of these upcoming enhancements in the Customer Preview which is launched on 20 March 2012. 

We strongly believe that the people who execute project work should be the ones planning it. Details in the plan should be refined by project members most familiar with the challenges at hand – at a time when those details are needed. Toyota named this principle “The Last Planner Rule” forty years ago and this has been a fundamental principle within Lean Management and modern production methods ever since. 

Collaborative planning increases the chances of running a successful project. Why? Involving the stakeholders in the planning helps them prioritise and articulate the purpose of the project, and its most fundamental goals. Involving the team in project planning helps the team members understand what the project is all about. If a project manager single-handedly does all the detailed planning, the plan will more than likely be pure speculation and it will be difficult for others to understand it. Consequently, the people supposed to execute the plan will not be truly committed to it. 

Action Creates Clarity
In the Customer Preview, we are introducing the first version of an important new planning tool, “Actions”. The purpose of this tool is to empower the project team to break down project goals into actionable items that team members can make firm commitments to. The time horizon in this kind of planning is typically a week or a month. The Actions tool allows the project team to co-ordinate work in real time by making highly visible commitments to each other; it is social and it is interactive. The tool allows project work to be grouped onto Planning Boards suitable for visualisation of work progress and that lend themselves beautifully for high-resolution screens and tablets. You will see more of that going forward. 

We have also created a completely new Project Overview containing a new interactive and informative project timeline that clearly puts the overall project goals in full view.  And inspired by modern behavioural science, we now also provide configurable progress widgets designed to increase project advancement by promoting transparent conversations on current status, deliverables and stage goals.

Only Getting Started
The Customer Preview on 20 March is definitely not the end of our efforts in the areas I have covered in this post. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning of a new generation Projectplace tools for Social Project Management!

I wonder why I haven’t raised this question sooner. Hmmm. Here is my shot at it.

A “culture” is about the shared notion of “how we do things around here”, shared values, assumptions and beliefs.

So. A “project culture” is about the shared notion of “how we do things around here in the project”.

A “project culture” provides direction to the essential conversations around projects. About the goals, the roles, what people have done before, the trip itself, the way interaction with the stakeholders is done, how we know how far we are.

What fascinates me is how a project culture comes into existence? How can you bootstrap a project culture? How can you facilitate these essential conversations without freaking people out?

Currently, I believe there are three steps to bootstrapping a culture.

1. Setting the agenda.
2. Enable the conversations.
3. Explore associations.

In this presentation I describe all three steps with examples. The presentation starts with an introduction to the concepts around culture. Like flags!, essential conversations, template conversations and even The Legend Of The Busy Bodies.

You can view the presentation below, or follow this link to Youtube.

Many project managers would scoff at this idea, explaining that they’ve already carefully defined and delineated the various phases of their project, and that a review is a key component of each one. While this is likely the case in any phased methodology, these reviews tend to be cursory, and in complex projects, the project tends to slide into the next phase by sheer momentum rather than due to a careful assessment of whether it has met its objectives. While some sort of review process is not new, there are two key elements to tollgate reviews that provide a powerful driver for success.

Tollgates are pre-defined

With complex projects, it’s difficult to know all the variables that could affect the project when you begin planning. However, it’s usually possible to identify what success looks like at each phase of the project and what questions you should have answered when a particular phase completes. If you look at these questions through the context of the business problem you’re solving, you’ll end up with benchmarks that look like “Deliver a prototype of the Accounts Payable process that’s approved by Mrs. Smith in AP and Mr. Jones in Audit” rather than a deliverables-based metric like “Complete 95% of the functional design documents.”

When these objectives are prepared well in advance of the completion of a phase, you’re more likely to be honest than when letting missed dates, changed budgets, and leadership pressure affect your objective setting. Evaluating the state of your project using metrics that were set before you began is the closest thing you can get to an independent expert with deep knowledge of your business performing the evaluation. If your review is completed without this context, you’re likely to settle for unanswered questions or deliverables-based metrics that shortchange your project and let you slip into the next phase, gradually creating a massive gap that will explode around go-live time.

Tollgates provide the “power to pause”

When tollgate metrics are created in advance, and circulated and agreed to by project stakeholders, they give project leadership the ability to legitimately pause a project before it proceeds into the next phase. Without pre-defined metrics, you lose the context of where your project should be, and many will be tempted to charge ahead based on where you are. The tollgate metrics again act as an independent voice and, if your project is not meeting these metrics, you can make an objective call that there’s more work required before moving to the next phase, rather than making an emotional or seemingly personal appeal that’s likely to be met with dissent.

While no one likes to stop the forward march of a large or complex project once it starts, most phased implementation methodologies will quickly build a “black hole” as you push incomplete work from earlier phases out. In large systems projects in particular, I’ve seen project teams that keep piling on the unanswered questions and incomplete business objectives, plowing ahead in the name of progress. Only when the system is tested or goes live and is exposed to users do these come crashing down, often causing a complete reworking of the project.

The tollgate review process also forces some honesty upon the project team. No one can hide from missed objectives as you stare at a list created by the same team earlier in the project. Essentially the voice to stop comes from the team itself.

Like most good advice, tollgates are conceptually simple and fairly easy to implement. In one or two meetings you can define and document the business objectives for the next phase of your project and gain agreement from critical stakeholders. Similarly, it’s relatively easy to revisit those requirements at the end of the phase and evaluate the current state of the project in the context of those objectives. Where fortitude and discipline are required is in bringing honesty to that evaluation and empowering project management and stakeholders to pause the project when appropriate, even in the face of high burn rates or political pressure to move forward.

Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology. Prevoyance Group provides strategy consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. Patrick can be reached at patrick.gray@prevoyancegroup.com and you can follow his blog at www.itbswatch.com.

Organization

It’s all too easy for project managers to forget what Project Management is all about. It’s all too easy for project managers to lose track of what’s ahead because they’re too busy trying hard to solve the problems that keep popping. And it’s all too easy for project managers to be so focused that they lose awareness. If this sounds familiar I invite you to keep on reading.

Not that there’s something wrong with focus: there’s nothing wrong with it and in fact it’s one of the “must have” qualities of any project manager. Just don’t think for a second that focus will be enough. But having present in your mind why organizations do projects is something very useful that allows you to put things into perspective. If you check the literature, organizations do projects for several reasons that sum up to this: organizations do projects to survive. But let me elaborate on this.

An organization can do a project because they have to (for instance, because new legislation is out that demands some changes in their quality processes). If they don’t comply they may just have to shut down the company.
It could also be that an organization needs some kind of improvement. This is the case of companies that do a lot of research and development projects. What would happen to a car or a cell phone maker if they didn’t invest any more in such projects? Would you buy a car exactly the same as the one you bought 15 years ago for about the same price as any other new car on the market? I guess not… Sales would drop to a point where the company would be forced to close down. For cell phones the scenario is even worst: any 1 year old cell phone is simply out-dated…

So the argument on this article goes like this: companies have to change to survive and so they do projects to change the things they decide they want to change. Your job as a Project Manager is not to question if the planned changes are the right ones. Your job as a project manager is to make sure you project’s results are the right ones to allow the planned changes in the organization. In comparison, anything else is less important than this, even the delivery of the project on time, on budget and with the planned quality (although the planned quality should have a bit of this “fit to purpose” included).

It is very useful for you to have this present in your mind. When you discuss a change request, the first question you should ask is “does this change request contribute to the organization make the desired changes”? If it doesn’t, the interest in this change request must be low – even if this change request will permit performance improvements or whatever.

When you propose a change request you better be ready to defend it. If you can say: this change will postpone the final delivery by 2 months but it will make sure you can use the project result to improve the organization as you planned; and this will be compromised if the change request isn’t approved. The argument is much stronger in this case, agree?

This is just an example. The point is that if you always aim for the end results to be useful for the organization, you’re making sure that every step is taken in the right direction. This is the difference between project outputs and outcomes, as they’re called in some literature. Project outputs are the results of the project, what is actually delivered by the project. And a project outcome is what the organization will do with the project’s outputs.

For example, you may have a project to design a cell phone and so the cell phone will be your output. But the real outcome is the cell phone sales to maintain the company’s market share. So in this project, while you’re concerned about all the technical bits, the schedule, costs and whatever more, you must keep an eye on the outcome as well: the company keeping its market share due to this cell phone. If the company doesn’t achieve that, the project will not be successful.

Projects only exist because of the business. In order to deliver successful projects, you don’t have to be happy with the business, but you do have to understand the business you’re working in.

Image from http://www.wemakemoves.com

Written by Luis Seabra Coelho