beteo ALM Experts Blog

Category: Project & Portfolio Management

  • Three Phases for Project Leadership Success

    The article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describes how on time and on budget execution and successful completion of complex projects can be realized. It requires clearly defined leadership process covering all people involved supported by software-based leadership systems.

    Basically, the process of managing and driving project execution has three stages

    • Leadership Initiation
    • Leadership execution management
    • Leadership Closing

    Drei Phasen im Führungsprozess

    Fig.: The three stages of the leadership process

    1. Leadership Initiation

    The execution of every project should be marked by a clearly defined initiation. Setting up the process on an intelligent, elaborate and accurately described base concept can save a considerable amount of time and money.

    Initiation provides the project framework and defines the project guidelines, giving the project the actual go-ahead. A successful project start is crucial to the whole course of the project. Initiation particularly includes an exact definition and approval of the project. If the project scope including the individual goals is precisely and consistently defined, initiation is the valuable foundation enabling targeted work all daily leadership activities.

    2. Project Leadership – Project Execution Management

    The main phase is the actual phase where the project execution is managed. To ensure a highly efficient, proactive, and targeted leadership, it is recommended to base the leadership process on a standardized approach, a repetitive leadership process of measuring, evaluating, defining measures based on software-based project leadership system. Using both, leadership process and leadership system, has proven to significantly add to the chances of project success.

    3. Leadership Closing

    Every project must end with a closing phase. A deliberately scheduled closing resulting in an approved closing report avoids subsequent interventions. Apart from the closing report, the closing phase includes the acceptance by the client (e.g. customer, management), documented «Lessons Learned» and results that can be reused in next releases of the project or by other projects.

    A proper closing phase is an important and highly beneficial activity in the organization’s Lifecycle Management process and discipline.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

  • Advantages of Using a Project Leadership System

    The articles Efficient and Targeted Project Execution describe how project leadership systems support project and portfolio managers. The following list summarizes the advantages of the use of a Project Leadership System.

    • Modern project leadership systems provide fast and efficient access to all leadership information for the leadership team – from project manager to steering committee.
    • All leadership information is merged into one system, making the project leadership system the central source for leadership information for all project team members.
    • The project leadership system maximizes the transparency of project leadership across all activities, times and open issues. Particularly, this lays open repeated inefficiencies. Transparency is also important when project leaders change; for Handover it saves time and money.
    • Standardized, tool-supported and tool-enforced processes improve the attention of all people involved in and responsible for leadership and simplify the leadership task of driving execution.
    • Intelligent interfaces allow relevant leadership data (e.g. master plans from MS Project or Open Workbench) to be imported into the leadership system.
    • By using the possibility to connect leadership information and to define causal relationships, significant leadership scenarios or parameters can be traced back to the sources – a perfect instrument for modern risk management and internal control system.
    • Formalized, documented and precise sources in the leadership system, make statements more reliable and secure. Project leaders are able to make precise statements referring to possible requests.
    • All information is immediately indexed and permanently recorded. Redundancy is avoided.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

  • Efficient and Targeted Project Execution (Part 2)

    To support project and portfolio managers in their daily management of project execution work, Leadership Systems are used more and more frequently. Modern Project Leadership Systems offer predefined project execution processes which support the activities and decisions of the leadership team. In addition, they allow all relevant information (requests, decisions, risks, provisions, changes) to be centrally stored, contextually interrelated and preprocessed to support information needs of different steakholders.

    Leadership System – Core Features

    The most significant benefit of a Project Leadership System comes from mapping, complementing and supporting the leadership work. This includes all project tasks during the different phases, from efficient initiation, to complete documentation, to closure. Providing a basis for leadership, the Project Leadership System stores all leadership-relevant information including milestones (e.g. imported via an interface from MS Project), or goals and execution management cycles.

    In the process of running the execution of a project, coping with an awful lot of decisions, provisions, changes, risk assessments and notes is one of the leadership team´s tasks. The total of this information is not only stored in the Project Leadership System, but also indexed. So causal and restricting relations are recognized and visualized, resulting in reliable statements as to the target and result scores.

    From Leadership Meeting Support to Risk Management

    The range of features of a Project Leadership System covers all phases from the support of leadership meetings, active change management, progress quantification, conclusive reporting, uninterrupted documentation, traceability of the leading activities, up to a sophisticated risk management.

    Proactive risk management is gaining importance. Regulations have come into effect which call on enterprises to improve risk management and establish „internal control systems“. Such legal instructions can be comprehensively met by a Leadership System.

    Can Leadership be Quantified?

    Where is the project right now? What about target and result scores? Quantification is a significant factor in project leadership work. But can leadership be quantified? Modern Project Leadership Systems prove it! They include features offering business management and portfolio managers a variety of alternatives for assessing and comparing. They allow the definition of project leadership parameters relating to quantifiable criteria such as progress, cost, performance, motivation, and change management. Cross-enterprise benchmarking of project execution management is enabled.

    Project Leadership Systems – Summary

    A Project Leadership System is not only able to map the complete process of running a project or project plan to a single system, but supports all people involved in leadership with automated processes comprehensively, directly and flexibly. The resulting significant work relief and time saving can easily be verified. In addition to an increase in efficiency and project information value, there is more time to focus on the essential: the proactive, targeted leadership of a project.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG in Wallisellen, Switzerland. TimeWinner develops and sells Internet-based  Leadership System TimeWinner.

  • Efficient and Targeted Project Execution (Part 1)

    In order to meet time and budget requirements in complex projects and to accomplish projects successfully, clear leadership is required involving all project team members. At this point, software and Internet-based leadership systems are a great support.

    It´s no secret to project managers, portfolio managers and people in charge of planning: According to new statistics, about 60 per cent of all projects are not successfully completed. „Not successfully“ in this context does not imply that the project failed altogether. The point is that the project management did not succeed in achieving the goals related to time, cost and quality. What are the reasons? Or to put it the other way round: Which are the factors leading to a successfully completed implementation of a planned project?

    Managing a project means leading a project
    The factors enabling successful implementation of a planned project are manifold and largely depend on the particular project. But there is one aspect which is crucial to success or failure of ALL projects: targeted and efficient leadership. This being accepted, is makes sense to give some thought to what leadership should be like, and how it should be implemented. Who has which competencies? Which methods are used for leadership? At which intervals do the responsible people meet? How does the management of pending items look like? Or is there maybe an explicit leadership methodology to be followed?

    In order to support those in charge of planning, project managers as well as business managers in their daily work, so-called leadership systems are starting to get more commonly used. These systems systematically map leadership and leadership tasks related to a particular project. And, more importantly all leadership information is stored in a Leadership System, contextually interlinked and prepared to support the needs of particular target group.

    The leadership system maps the leadership process
    Usually, a person responsible for project planning works with a number of supporting software programs such as ERP systems, office applications, collaborative environment and project management solutions. As a result, the leadership information is often widely scattered in different systems making efficient and targeted tracking of data very difficult, for example when it comes to reproducing the reasons for a certain decision or a time delay.

    How then can the process of leading, the action of leadership, be mapped and sustainably documented? In contrast to the different programs from which the leader gathers data and facts needed for decisions, the leadership system systematically maps the process of leading the project planning and answers, among others, the following questions: At which point of the project are we? How can we quantify progress and recognize, define and estimate possible risks and bottlenecks? How do we – in accordance with our particular Leadership Methods – usefully and permanently map changes, requests, decisions, events, risks or measures, all in the same place? As it is the leadership meetings that best reflect how leadership is implemented, leadership systems usually offer a variety of automated functions related to the planning, calling, conducting and documentation of meetings.

    In the follow-up article Efficient and Targeted Project Execution (Part 2) I will focus on leadership meetings, proactive risk management and the question if there is a way of quantifying leadership.

    About the author:
    Robert Sutz is CEO of TimeWinner AG , Wallisellen, Switzerland.  TimeWinner AG develops and markets the Internet-based Leadership $ystem TimeWinner.

  • The Culture Imperative of Leadership

    We rely in the majority of decisions and actions on the cultural patterns of organizations, in which we live. Most of these patterns and values with which we steer ourselves are unconscious. Only rarely we object to them. Some individual patterns are actively learned by training or by serious “injuries”. Think about how you drive a car: You coordinate hand, foot and eye, adhere to the rules and respect the rights of other road users. Brain researchers describe this with the training of our synapses. “What has proved working and repeatedly gone through or what is equipped with high energy, engraves our actions and behavior.”

    You have a wealth of experience that these organizational and individual process of coining patterns does not always run smoothly, specifically in companies and organizations. Not only that nowadays some patterns became dysfunctional, which most probably in the past were perfectly appropriate. Some organizational patterns, in particular how we act in power struggles or protect us from these like “devalue”, “dominate”, “intrigue”, “to put on ice,” “denounce”, “refuse to support”, “subject”, “threaten,” “spread  rumours” are quite indecent, even if they are individually applied not fully aware nor intended. To use words of Hannah Arendt, they are part of the “banality of evil”, as you find it even today in times of democracy and market economy (occasionally).

    You rightly take this for a “moral argument”. Even if there is nobody personally to blame for: “Do not judge!” –  If leadership by example and effects of actions in organizations supplies and shapes the cultural patterns, an imperative can be formulated: “In everything you do or initiate as a manager, think about which cultural patterns you want to shape or make available for your organization through it.” This usually also pays off economically, as long as we depend in our value creation on cooperation, responsibility and creativity. And even if not …

    About the author:
    Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant and author of the monthly publication “Change Management Short Cut“.

  • Integrating HP PPM with HP Quality Center – As Simple as It Looks?

    Very often, the processes of change & transport and quality management in the IT organzation are technically not very tightly integrated. Although organizationally, they are well coordinated, with both processes being clearly defined, digitized, automated and constantly improved, I doubt if their integration is tight enough.

    Integration von Change Management und Quality Management

    HP Software, a significant vendor not only of the process engine for change and transport management HP PPM, but also of HP Quality Center as the leading test management solution, provides a basis for an integrated solution. I was asked to carry this over into practice – an exciting as well as seemingly simple task.

    The first step was to technically join both environments together and logically merge them into one platform.

    The Search

    Well, searching for information in the Internet was not very fruitful or, to be exact: there is none. So I was forced to utilize my good connections to HP to get holf of the documents I needed. Thanks to the competent people I addressed, it was a success.

    Compatibility with versions

    An overview of the compatibility of versions was particularly important and helpful. Our PPM versions required that we used the PPM extension Application Change Lifecycle (ACL 2.0) for the intergration with QC. The newer tool Managing Application Change Tool (MAC) does not yet work with our customer´s version.

    Integration guide

    The procedure of integrating PPM and QC is documented in the Integration Guide of HP and described step by step. So it was my job to work out the 200 pages of this guide one page after another.

    Mappings

    Applying the technical procedure to our actual environment and system landscape was a challenge, particularly with regard to the mappings. The intergrated standard workflows and interface definitions may be a good basis for implementation. But to meet all requirements, the mappings of data, stati, and processes must be elaborated. Careful attention must be paid to the change of stati in the workflow in order to avoid uncontrolled process steps.

    What next?

    So far, I have made a huge step towards the integration aimed for. But I am sure there will be more problems to be sorted out. In due time, I will report on my experience with the ongoing implementation. Comments and further hints from fellow sufferers or sympathizers are welcome.

  • ITIL, PRINCE2, PMI – Just Paper Tigers?

    Historically developed IT structure
    Within their IT organizations, enterprises historically distinguish between project business, IT operations and IT development. In addition to these separate areas, there are several processes and systems for project requests, notification of incidents and problem management.

    ITIL, PRINCE2 and PMI are Used Separately within their Silos?
    For these processes, there are standards such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), PRINCE2 and the PMBOK of Project Management Institute (PMI). But the project management office (PMO) and the change advisory board (CAB) execute their requests and analyses separately. This way of thinking in separate categories creates redundancies and ignores the synergistic potential. Interdependencies and influencing factors are neglected.  IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) states:

    „Change management is responsible for the control of changes within the productive environment. It is not responsible for changes within running projects. However, a close coordination between development project managers and the change manager is expected.“

    From a project perspective, PRINCE2 and PMI require that operation must be included into planning. But the prioritization process in classical project portfolio management only covers project requests. Also change requests are only managed for projects. Neither of the two seems to be responsible. However, regarding them in isolation from one annother is a barrier to a holistic handling which enables a provisioning of IT services conforming with strategy.

    An Isolating View has Negative Effects
    There is no basis on which decision makers could define an order of priority for the activities between project business and IT operations. Although IT service management (ITSM) as well as project portfolio management (PPM) are already implemented and operated with a good process maturity level, the list of problems is long. Typical examples are:

    • Repeated processing of the same objects
    • Intransparent dependencies create higher risks
    • Troubleshooting and project implementation are delayed
    • Inaccurate planning due to lack of information
    • Critical resources can not be optimally used
    • Service level agreements (SLA) are defined only selectively
    • Changes cannot be tested comprehensively

    Comprehensive Service Portfolio Management is Desirable

    • Would it be helpful to view and evaluate all requests and requirements?
    • Could harmonizing the individual release processes (CAB und PMO) facilitate IT control?
    • Would pooling of problems and projects increase efficiency?
    • Could a holistic resource and schedule planning help to reach overall enterprise goals more efficiently?
    • Would a comprehensive view on risks help to avoid failures of IT operations?

    The Solution: Problem Portfolio as Part of Service Portfolio
    For these requirements, there are no established standards. The following method of procedure helps to clearly improve the efficiency of IT organziations:

    1. Establishing a problem portfolio

    • Situation analysis of incident, problem and change management
    • Definition of requirements for an overall problem management handling
    • Definition of an integrative problem management process
    • Harmonizing with incident  and change management
    • Establishing a problem portfolio as a control instrument

    2. Expanding and integrating service portfolio management

    Summary
    ITIL, PRINCE2 and PMI are highly useful frameworks capable of laying the foundation of an IT organization. But in order to challenge the „silo mentality“ and to take adequate advantage of them, they must be integrated with one another forming a holistic service portfolio & project management. Otherwise, they will be nothing but paper tigers.

  • Hungry for Change

    How hungry are you for change? – Clearly, ‘change’ is in itself not a serious management approach. Without content and its implementation change remains an empty talk. Successful executives connect therefore contentful imagination with execution. In the recent study “Enterprise of the Future” by IBM (www.ibm.com/enterpriseofthefuture) executive officers, selected all over the world, tell about theirs imaginations of the company in the future.

    • Markets will be actively designed. Innovations are beyond the wishes and needs of customers.
    • The company is globally integrated, inserted into the global economic exchange relations.
    • The inner engine is the transformation of business models, with new partners, customers, with modified performance processes realize new value-added potentials.
    • And companies assume more responsibility for their contributions to the visual world society “Corporate Social Responsibility” as environmental, financial and social sustainability.

    This brings people in the focus, their will and theirs skills to change themselves and others, who take part in the change:

    • “Hungry for change” has therefore the first place in the study. Who led and managed changes in the past successfully, dares to do quite so in future. “The key for successful transformation is the change of mind.” Or as my colleague Hans Rudolf Jost apt to say “Corporate Mind Change”. The desire for change is part of the change itself, courage for improvement potentials and new to exercise. It is about a culture of change: Tomorrow successful companies have already incorporated change, being even an actor of change in the world.

    That makes at least appetite, right?

    About the author:
    Dr. Michael Loebbert is Coach and Management Consultant and author of the montly publication “Change Management Short Cut“.

  • HP BTO Software Centers – Overview

    HP offers a number of BTO Centers. These software packages support in the context of a BTO strategy specific phases of the application lifecycle. The following overview is meant to shed light on the HP BTO jungle.

    HP BTO Centers

    IT STRATEGY

    • Project and Portfolio Management Center (CIO Office)
      The IT management solution enables control and documentation of the enterprise processes, particularly with regard to an optimization of priorities, staff members and processes in IT organizations. For this purpose, modules for the management of portfolio, demand, time, changes, projects, resources, finances and programs are available. Upon coordination with business processes and enterprise requirements, the distribution and use of resources are optimized and processes are standardized (IT Governance).
    • SOA Center (CTO Office)
      The HP BTO solutions for governance, quality and management of service-oriented architectures (SOA) are designed to help customers to minimize economical risks in SOA project phases and to create a comprehensively controlled, business-oriented SOA basis. HP SOA Center enables registry/repository, policy management, consumer management, policy enforcement, performance monitoring und problem solving.

    APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

    • Quality Center
      With HP Quality Center, a cross-enterprise exchange of information about test requirements, test planning, test execution and error reporting is possible, as well as checking for web security issues covering the entire testing and development team. Through functional test runs, GUI interfaces are automatically tested in applications and various release cycles.
    • Performance Center
      HP Performance Center features a real-time simulation of the maximum access demanded by customer requests using active virtual user input of the applications. This enables system optimization before „going live“ and ensures the desired steady availability. A required optimization can be controlled and accomplished under system load by help of an analysis program. Thus, new web or SAP applications are made secure before going into production.
    • Application Security Center
      By using the technologies of HP Applications Security Center, security gaps in web applications can be identified and judged all across the lifecycle: from development and quality control up to operation. Also applications that are already running in a productive system, can be checked for security gaps. In addition, audit and compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIP AA or PCI can be met.

    (IT) OPERATIONS

    • HP Universal CMDB
      HP Universal CMDB is a configuration management database for IT organizations planning to implement business service management and ITIL-based initiatives. This software allows you to take up, document and store – in addition to physical configuration elements – logical elements. It also provides extended functionality such as an effects analysis and access control for building up and maintaining CMDB.

    Business Service Management

    • Business Availability Center
      This solution allows you to monitor the availability and performance of applications in operation for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Business processes, service levels, applications an the underlying infrastructure are coordinated to one another. The infrastructure is visualized by a graphical view with the traffic light set of colors red, orange and green showing the state of operation. A drill down is available for detailed view and error analysis. BAC is used to ensure the active operation of all business-relevant applications and to verify internal or external SLA agreements.
    • Operations Center
      This solution features a comprehensive, service-oriented access to IT management. Information is integrated and synchronized across management silos, IT and business are connected to one another. This distributed, scalable management solution which also includes security features allows you to monitor, control and record the status and performance of different IT environments, covering network, system, databases, applications, services and Internet.
    • Network Management Center
      This network management solution is considered a strategic and particularly important investment. In the last few years it has been established as an indispensible component of error and event management as well as visualization of network topologies. Network configuration, network events, application performance, and network analysis are the main areas involved.

    Service Automation

    • Data Center Automation Center
      Process automation in IT centers can be effectively supported by HP Data Center Automation Center allowing IT organizations to easily increase cost efficiency and to better meet quality and compliance requirements.
    • Client Automation Center
      More and more security risks, increasing availability requirements, and the rapidly growing number of mobile and remote staff members make it more difficult to effectively and efficiently manage client computers – a requirement, however, which every modern success-oriented enterprise should focus upon. HP Client Automation Center allows you to automate relevant IT processes across the lifecycle of the client computers, no matter where their physical locations are.

    IT Service Management

    • Service Management Center
      HP Service Manager is a comprehensive, fully integrated IT service desk solution targeted to reduce the time spent on problem solving. Thanks to ITIL-based best practice processes and a scalable, service-oriented architecture, consistent, integrated processes can be rolled out all across IT organizations. Event, problem, change, and release management processes can be automated. Service level management and catalog-based service requests are supported. All processes are coordinated by means of configuration management.

  • Business Technology Optimization (BTO)

    The New Role of IT
    For many years, all IT departments seem to have taken up the cause of cost reducing. This has changed. Business managers more and more consider IT a lever for boosting growth. Particularly, this means for IT departments to implement new business models and concepts as fast as possible.

    In most cases, IT departments are not prepared to cope with rapid changes. They utilize a major part of their capacity, sometimes 90 %, for routine work such as the operation of the data center. Very often, this means that no capacity is left for implementing the ideas and business processes the CEOs have in mind (source: Handelsblatt April 14, 2007).

    BTO Solutions
    Business Technology Optimization (BTO) solutions support enterprises in optimizing the business value created by IT. The goal is to consistently extend – by using suitable methods and tools – IT´s contribution in areas such as securing competitive advantages, increasing customer satisfaction and minimizing risks and costs.

    The combination of Business and IT perspectives may raise new questions as to the benefit, quality and reliability of an IT service.

    The focus should be on taking into account and improving the effects of IT on business results. The most important issues are: How flexible, fast and effectively do we want IT to react on enterprise decisions, corporate mergers and changed market situations? In which way do we want it to support the control of the product portfolio or the implementation of marketing strategies, and what should IT´s role of a communication platform for enterprise an customers be like?

    These requirements reach far beyond the conventional IT goals: Accounting for a number of bugfixes in development, reaching defined project milestones, or efficiently utilizing the helpdesk may be evidence of successful IT, but not necessarily of a successful business.

    BTO solutions are meant to support the enterprise with methods and tools to plan IT´s contribution to the business more accurately, to increase it efficiently, and to make it visible.

    By no means, BTO is just a project to be applied to one area of IT. Using BTO successfully means to consistently take into consideration the effects of business on IT operation, IT strategy, IT controlling, IT revision, IT process optimization and IT risk management, and, likewise, observe the influence of IT activities in these areas on business. To reach this goal, new methods and technologies must be introduced and efficiently applied.

    About the author:
    Klaus Otto is Sales Manager HP Software Commercial Accounts at HP Germany (Hewlett-Packard GmbH). This article only contains personal comments on the subject.

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