Services Safari

Trouble on the Project Mgmt Front?

Project Headaches – More to Come

Check out the 1/1/2008 issue of Computerworld (“Projects Get More Troublesome”).

Computerworld does an annual Vital Signs survey of IT managers. The number one management challenge identified by respondents is now “Managing Projects”. This is up from its number three ranking last year.

What’s contributing to the increased project complexity? Answers provided in this article included:

-          increased globalization of projects

-          fewer silo projects and more enterprise-wide initiatives

-          more geographically distributed projects

-          fewer/no people within business units to help with project specifications

Michael Krigman’s blog will likely zero in on this issue some more.

If this stat that Computerworld reported is true, then this could represent:

-          a boon for systems integrators and other consultants

-          an opportunity for independent consultants, particularly those with international backgrounds and expertise

-          new  growth  for project and program management training organizations

Personally, I’m not expecting any major sea change. Project management woes in IT have never fully been solved or may not ever go away completely as IT projects are not just technical problems to be solved. IT projects are political, economic, personal, social, geographic, power, organizational and emotional matters (to name a few). It takes exceptional skill to manage one successfully because a great project manager is adept at numerous skills. They have a high emotional IQ, are empathetic, are technically savvy, motivate others, are fiscally savvy, navigate corporate politics and possess excess political capital that must be expended from time to time to make the project a success. It doesn’t matter if you are certified project manager if you lack all of those soft side skills, political power, etc. You have to have it all to win in the world of big project management.

Successful project management is not about ticking and tying time sheets and comparing them to project PERT charts. It takes years of apprenticeship and the appropriate personality to become really successful. Sadly, some of the greatest project managers I’ve met have had to expend all of their political power to make a huge project succeed only to have to leave their employer in the end as they’ve either burned a few too many bridges or have overdrawn their personal goodwill in the effort to get the project finished.

I hold great project managers in awe and for good reason. These people are part coach, movie director, politician, fund-raiser, technician, therapist, negotiator and accountant. How many disciplines can you claim?

More on the Primavera User Conference

                   Disruptive Technology Panel Observations

 

 

I participated in a panel discussion on disruptive technologies in the PSA/PPM space while at this conference. Moderating the panel was Jim Alexander (of Alexander Consulting and the author of several books on the services space). Panelists included the CTO of Primavera, Mike Sicilia, their chief technologist and EVP, Dick Farris, and me.

I jotted down some of the subjects we discussed as well as questions/comments that arose from the audience. Here they are in no particular priority:

-          Web 2.0 differences between commercial and consumer users of same  - We talked about how the free-wheeling “everyone can publish” world works in many settings. Consumers/personal users of public wiki data, product reviews and other information may not require perfect data but businesses need to have more discipline over the published content and/or need data to possess a higher degree of accuracy. This, of course, led to a discussion as to the appropriateness of wikis vs. intranets. Ease of setup and administration was pitted against the need to keep certain matters controlled.

-          We talked about the need to introduce more predictive capabilities into application software. It’s great that everyone’s got a BI/Analytics tool on top of a SOA platform, but, when are we going to see something new besides prettier versions of existing transaction data?

-          Audience members were quite vocal in stating how vendors should provide more tools that assess how well users are actually utilizing the software. In the PPM world, are users setting up new projects in the system correctly? Could project success rates be improved if the software did more to educate user management how far off their users are from acceptable/best practices?

-          New capabilities for applications were discussed in the context of:

o       Need to improve US GDP – What else can vendors do to improve the revenue/employee ratio in US businesses today?

o       How can professional services firms better retain the newest generation of workers entering today’s workforce?

o       Are the techniques embedded into today’s applications reminiscent of obsolete/aging management disciplines? Are these relevant in the business world today? Are we businesses evolving faster than technology vendors understand?

More Team Issues

Clients and Consultants Working Together – part two

It was interesting to read what others had to say about my recent posting of a similar title.  Some felt that the posting was skewed towards the view of clients by consultants. Some thought I was being cute. Interestingly, I was actually reporting behaviors I've witnessed in my career across several consulting firms and at numerous client organizations. To that end, I've seen some outrageous behavior by both clients and consultants. I'm not picking on or defending either camp. I'm just a bystander who's amazed at what goes on when the most irrational of creatures, human beings, get together in a work/team environment.

In this posting, I would like to give space to how clients sometime view consultants.

-          “Wait a minute - you’re not the consultants we hired!”- Clients are really quite savvy.  They know that the team they hired should be the team that shows up on the job site.  When you send in a team that bears no resemblance to the one you proposed, you are guilty of something. At the least, you’re a bad business person. At worst, you’re dishonest, deceitful and maybe guilty of fraud. Habeas Corpus – We command you to produce the body!

-          “We hired senior people – you gave us green beans!” – Seriously, where are all those gray-haired people that you listed in your proposal?  You know, the ones who were supposed to cost $400-$800 per hour?  These were the people who had all of that vertical/industry or technical knowledge that we found so valuable.  Why should we accept fresh new college students as replacements for the senior team you proposed?  Clients can sense bait and switch tactics and they will object to their usage.

-          “Why can’t you keep your people on this project?”- It is really insulting to clients to suggest that another client’s needs are more important than yours.  When you pull staff from one project team to send to a “more worthy” client, what does that really say about your current client relationship? If a client has negotiated with a consultancy in good faith, they should receive the personnel they contracted for the entire expected duration of their stay.  Sure, consulting firms can come up with all sorts of rationale why they need to relocate one person or another to other client engagements, but the bottom line is these conversations should have occurred before the client signed this deal.

-          “Why do you have such high turnover?”- Retention is a significant issue for many consultancies, integrators and offshore service providers.  Clients cannot understand how a company can experience 12 - 25% attrition and remain in business.  Clients have no responsibility to solving a consulting firm’s attrition problems.  If the consulting firms abuse their people, leave them stranded in remote out-of-town engagements for years on end, underpay them, etc., then why should these consultants have any loyalty to these firms?  Retention is only possible when consulting firms strike realistic staffing assignments with their people and discuss these in advance with clients.

-          “Why doesn’t your staff already know this stuff?” – When client personnel have to teach consultants most everything they need to know, something’s really amiss. If an integrator’s personnel need to bring their training manuals to your job site, you got ripped off. If the integrator or outsourcer staff need to shadow the client staff for more than a few minutes, they probably lack critical skills.

In the final analysis, more could be done to make mixed teams work better together. First, some basic empathy for the other party would go a long way to developing better teams and better outcomes. Second, when team members find that the other parties are people of integrity and can be trusted, more than morale is improved. Third, accountability is something both clients and consultants should demand from each other. If either side is allowed to 'get away with less than quality deliverables or miss key deadlines, then trust is destroyed.

Business Engine & PlanView

                   Consolidation in Project Mgmt Space

Last month, Planview, an Austin, Texas based provider of Project Portfolio Management software, acquired most of the assets of Business Engine (see: http://www.planview.com/company/news/press_releases/news_pressreleases_070213.aspx ). I've met executives of both firms over the years and here are my comments.

• Business Engine was a company with exceptional penetration into the Financial Services space. Their founder was instrumental in securing software licenses with major Wall Street financial powerhouses in the late 1990s and early 2000. Those customers should add great credentials to Planview's existing customer base.
• Business Engine had a few tough years in the first half of this decade. Their second CEO died unexpectedly and tragically. Then, one of their employees was caught snooping through a competitor's sales system. A lengthy and public trial ensued.
• Business Engine had a collaboration system called BEN that was significant in capability and scope. It was impressive.
• Planview is a low-key firm with solid products. It will likely find the Business Engine solutions at least as capable as their own. That's a good thing.

Going forward, I would encourage Planview to:

• make the most of this deal as soon as possible and as loudly as possible. The project management software space has been very quiet lately and this new combination could bode big things. Seize this PR opportunity and use it to educate the marketplace that a new standard for project solutions has arrived.
• consider doing one more acquisition - a PSA (professional services automation) vendor. This functionality would round out the product line and give them an extraordinarily complete suite for internal service organizations (e.g., IT groups), professional service organizations (e.g., consultancies) and project managers.
• draw a clear bead on ERP vendors and make sure that the software buying world knows just how big the difference is between the limited ERP solutions in the services automation (or project management) space and what Planview can offer.
• ensure that users of Microsoft Project know that they can and should get something more valuable for their firm. MSFT Project is a solid tool and it should co-exist in any vendor's Project Portfolio Management solution. However, there's an awful lot more that project teams and service firms need to successfully run their firms. Make sure the leaders of these firms know this.

Good luck with this deal Planview. Let's see you re-energize this space.

Understanding Today's Services Marketplace

I'm in Austin, Texas this week and have spent some time at the QuickArrow user conference. QuickArrow is a Professional Services Automation (PSA) vendor that has been experiencing solid growth in recent years.

                                   Big "A-Ha" Highlights

In meeting with industry experts, QuickArrow management, speakers, etc., I have made the following observations:

• The marketplace for PSA software continues to expand beyond traditional service providers (i.e., consulting, Legal, Accounting, etc.) and is branching into some interesting spaces (e.g., Oil & Gas firms, Mapping companies). The diversity of clients and prospects here was eye-opening.
• Project and Program management disciplines are still big needs in many companies.
• Transparency in service firm operations is why companies initially buy PSA solutions; however, a new vision for the space is needed as customers will have this problem (mostly) solved in a few years.
• Regulatory problems (e.g., SarbOx) and revenue recognition issues still give service firm executives the shakes. As I recently posted, the documentation requirements of BPO operations are an even bigger concern area.
• Service executives are really hungry for operations and other statistics that can be used to better benchmark their operations. However, several participants and speakers bemoaned the industry's appalling lack of consistency in capturing and reporting data.

On that last point, I spoke with Scott Fletcher who is undertaking a deep dive benchmarking effort on service firms. He's part of the PSVillage advisory group (www.psvillage.com) and would welcome more firms joining this effort.

Vendor Service Deals Fall Short

               Is Quality Service Disappearing?

This week I was with the top executives of a F500 firm. I listened in on a discussion regarding strategies for negotiating contracts for both new ERP software and a systems integrator. Before the meeting could get underway, these executives were still buzzing about the meeting they'd just completed with one of the finalist software vendors. That vendor said, in effect, that if the client wants a higher level of satisfaction with their services people/work, then the vendor would add a 10-15% premium to the services component of their proposal.

That's right. The original proposal apparently wouldn't provide the client with a satisfactory experience.

If you bought an automobile and the dealer withholds a non-value added option like 'clearcoating', of course you can decline it and not loose sleep over it. However, if the dealer withholds something like an engine, then what are you buying?

Selling services without any regard for whether the client is satisfied or not is just unprofessional. It is ethically challenged, too.

From the vendor perspective, I have some insight as to why this trend is occurring. Software vendors have usually offered service staff in point-excellence roles and not as self-contained teams with overall project implementation responsibility. Further, these services are sold by a sales person who has no connection to the delivery process and a very distant connection to the on-going account management. These sales people don't care about the  long-term client relationship as they've gotten their commission and have moved onto the next software prospect. As services becomes more important in software companies, sales people are promising more, putting more service people on projects but not stepping up to the program and client management needs these initiatives require. The leaders of these service groups are discovering that they must add more program management time to projects but since Sales isn't baking enough time into their proposals, Services must eat this extra effort or let client satisfaction suffer.

Clients are not creating this scenario, software vendors are. Vendors need to update the way they estimate and manage projects. Both of these disciplines, by the way, often lag those of systems integrators. If vendors are taking on integrator work, they need to step up to the requirements of the job. They need to get the program management religion.

Clients have an expectation, a reasonable expectation, of receiving satisfactory work. Vendors must construct the means to do so.  Providing services with no expectation of or responsibility for client satisfaction is unconscionable.

Project/Program Managing

          CIO Dedicates A Lot of Ink to Project Management

This month's CIO magazine (www.cio.com) has several pieces on project and portfolio management. Of the individual pieces within it, I liked:

- "Skills Workers Have Versus Skills CIOs Need" - This piece highlights research SIM did within its CIO member ranks. They discovered that too many IT hires are brought in with an abundance of technical skills but lack many critical business skills. When Vinnie Mirchandani (see www.dealarchitect.typepad.com) and I were interviewing dozens of CIOs for our dot.com adventure, we heard this refrain many times. One CIO best described the problem as needing a lot of Assistant CIOs to review business cases, discuss projects with business unit executives, etc. Consultancies prosper because of this continued over-reliance on tech-only hires within IT.

- "When Failure is Not An Option" - The lengthy piece examines how one company has worked hard to improve the success rates of projects.

- "Making IT Portfolio Management a Reality" - A short article (with sidebars) that describes the courage and systems needed to kill off low value adding, delayed or over-budget initiatives. If you're waffling over these same decisions, this may give you some added courage.

New Report On PSA/PPM Software

              SPI Research Issues New PSA/PPM Software Report

A colleague of mine, David Hofferberth, has launched his own research firm and has just published his first major report. It's a review of Professional Services Automation and Project Portfolio Management software. While I don't usually plug things in this blog, I feel generous today and thought I'd give his new gig a boost.

David's a very approachable analyst (not a prima donna) and I'm sure he would welcome your thoughts, interest and support.

His company's website: www.spiresearch.com

Info on the report: www.spiresearch.com/SPIProducts.htm

His email: david.hofferberth@spiresearch.com

His phone number: 513-759-5443

Project Management Tools

                         What Baseline Says About Projects

Baseline magazine (www.baselinemag.com) is one of the best IT publications available today and has a couple of interesting exhibits in its May 2006 issue. The first is titled "How to Predict a Project's Success". It is a 25 line item checklist that allows a project leader to self score their effort. While there's probably no scientific basis (or PMI backing) behind this, the magazine is correct in pointing out how many projects fail, exceed original budget, etc. This document is just the right length to share with others and get some macro success factors in place before committing mega-dollars to a troubled project.

The other exhibit is an economic analysis of the cost to implement and operate a project portfolio management system.   This document is titled "Calculating Costs of a Project Portfolio Management System".