Leveraging Advantages of the Two Styles

Is it possible to successfully introduce the best bottom-up practices to an organisation by utilising traditional tools? Traditional project management software was originally designed with the top-down approach in mind. Traditional applications are not meant for bottom-up management. They are complex and hard to master. These applications are focused on the project manager and make him the major link in project communications. Team members very often do not have access to the project plan and cannot make contributions. The employees e-mail their updates to the project manager in disconnected files. The project manager then has to collect all the data and put the information manually into the project plan. Then he has to communicate the changes to the corporate executives. The misalignment between the bottom-up best principles and the old tools may cause situations when the project manager's talents are buried by the routine operations. Sometimes project managers just do not have time for leadership.

The old methods of how people share and receive information have been radically transformed in recent years. Now there are more means for the successful implementation of the bottom-up management best practices. These are Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as wikis, blogs and collaboration tools. The new technologies come into organisations and change the old way of managing projects. They turn traditional project management into Project Management 2.0 and bring new patterns of collaboration, which are based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collection of valuable knowledge from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. This knowledge is now successfully collected and shared in a flexible, collaborative environment brought by second-generation project management software. The project manager is the one to conduct the work and choose the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from individual employees.

The role the project manager plays in the project changes. Project Management 2.0 software helps him create complete delegation. People become less dependent on the manager as a to-do generator. The project manager turns from a taskmaster into a project leader who facilitates the team communications, provides a creative working environment and guides the team. He becomes a visionary who can leverage the team strengths and weaknesses and adjust project development to the external changes.

The second-generation tools allow project managers to merge the advantages of the two initial management approaches. These applications let you combine control and collaboration, clarity of project goals and visibility of internal organisational processes.

Thousands of companies now report that bottom-up project management, implemented with the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, improved their business performance. Among them are Bell Canada, Sun and Yahoo. These corporations created their corporate blogs to streamline project communications. Even giants, such as IBM, realise the benefits of allowing contributors to have a more active hand in how collaborative work is organised.

Democratising project management is never an end in itself. The primary goal is always to find ways to make project management and project collaboration more efficient. New technologies applied to projects offer us the powerful ability to make projects more successful and teams more productive. With the help of new-generation tools, projects can be delivered much faster, and this is to everyone's benefit.

Project Management Best Practices II: Work the Plan

Manage and Control
Once the project has been planned sufficiently, execution of the work can begin. In theory, since you already have agreement on your Project Definition and your work plan and project management procedures are in place, the only challenge is to execute your plans and processes correctly. Of course, no project ever proceeds entirely as it was estimated and planned. The challenge is having the rigor and discipline needed to apply your project management skills correctly and proactively.

Manage the Workplan
Review the workplan on a regular basis to determine how you are progressing in terms of schedule and budget. If your effort is small, this may need to be weekly. For larger projects, the frequency might be every two weeks.

Monitor the schedule. Identify activities that have been completed during the previous time period and update the workplan to show that they are finished. Determine whether there are any other activities that should have been completed, but have not been. After the workplan has been updated, determine if the project will be completed within the original effort, cost, and duration. If not, determine the critical path and look for ways to accelerate these activities to get you back on track.

Monitor the budget. Look at the amount of money your project has actually consumed and determine whether your actual spending is more than estimated based on the work that has been completed. If so, be proactive. Either work with the team to determine how the remaining work will be completed to hit your original budget or else raise a risk that you may exceed your allocated budget.

Best Practice – Look for Other Warning Signs
Look for other signs that the project may be in trouble. These could include

• A small variance in schedule or budget starts to get bigger, especially early in the project. There is a tendency to think you can make it up, but this is a warning: If the tendencies are not corrected quickly, the impact will be unrecoverable.
• You discover that activities you think have already been completed are still being worked on.
• You need to rely on unscheduled overtime to hit the deadlines, especially early in the project.
• Team morale starts to decline
• Deliverable quality or service quality starts to deteriorate.
• Quality control steps, testing activities, and project management time starts to be cut back from the original schedule.

If these situations occur, raise visibility through risk management, and put together a plan to proactively ensure that the project stays on track. If you cannot successfully manage through the problems, raise an issue.

Manage Scope
After the basics of managing the schedule, managing scope is the most important activity required to control a project. Many project failures are not caused by problems with estimating or team skill sets, but by the project team working on major and minor deliverables that were not part of the original Project Definition or business requirements. Even if you have good scope management procedures in place, there are still two major areas of scope change management that must be understood to be successful – understanding who the customer is and scope creep.

Best Practice - Make Sure the Sponsor Approves Scope Change Requests
In general, the Project Sponsor is the person who is funding the project. While there is usually just one sponsor, the project could have many stakeholders, or people that are impacted by the project. Requests for scope changes will most often come from stakeholders – many of whom may be managers in their own right. It does not matter how important a change is to a stakeholder, they cannot make scope change decisions and they cannot give your team the approval to make the change. In proper scope change management, the sponsor (or their designate) must give the approval since they are the only ones that can add additional funding to cover the changes and know if the project impact is acceptable.

Best Practice - Guard Against Scope Creep
Most Project Managers know to invoke scope change management procedures if they are asked to add a major new function or a major new deliverable to their project. However, sometimes the project manager does not recognize the small scope changes that get added over time. Scope creep is a term used to define a series of small scope changes that are made to the project without scope change management procedures being used. With scope creep, a series of small changes, none of which appear to affect the project individually, can accumulate to have a significant overall impact on the project. Many projects fail because of scope creep and the Project Manager needs to be diligent in guarding against it.

Manage Risk
Risks refer to potential events or circumstances outside the project team’s control that will have an adverse impact on the project.

Best Practice - Identify Risks Up Front
When the planning work is occurring, the project team should identify all known risks. For each risk, they should also determine the probability that the risk event will occur as well as the potential impact to the project. Those events identified as high-risk should have specific plans put into place to mitigate them to ensure that they do not, in fact, occur. Medium risks should be evaluated as well to see if they should be proactively managed. (Low-level risks may be identified as assumptions. That is, there is potential risk involved, but you are ‘assuming’ that the positive outcome is much more probable.)

Best Practice - Continue to Assess Potential Risks Throughout the Project
Once the project begins, periodically perform an updated risk assessment to determine if other risks have surfaced that need to be managed.

Manage Issues
In spite of your best efforts at risk management, all projects of any size and complexity will have issues arise that need to be dealt with and resolved. If you have not done as good a job managing risks, chances are you will have more issues to deal with than you might have otherwise.

Best Practice - Resolve Issues as Quickly as Possible
Issues are big problems. The Project Manager should manage open issues diligently to ensure they are being resolved. If there is no urgency to resolve the issue, or if the issue has been active for some time, then it may not really be an issue. It may be a potential problem (risk), or it may be an action item that needs to be resolved at some later point. Issues by their nature must be resolved with a sense of urgency.

Project Management Tips

Overview
You have heard the old adage – plan the work and work the plan. In essence, that is the key to successful project management. You must first plan out the project and then monitor and control the execution of the program work.

Planning
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of proper planning. In general, project failures can most often be traced back to deficiencies in the planning process. There are three major deliverables from the project planning process – the Project Definition, the work plan, and the project management procedures.

Project Definition
Best Practice – Plan the Work, Utilizing a Project Definition Document
There is a tendency for projects to shortchange the planning process, with an emphasis on jumping right in and beginning the work. This is a mistake. The time spent properly planning will result in reduced cost and duration, and increased quality over the life of the project. The Project Definition is the primary deliverable from the planning process and describes all aspects of the project at a high level. Once approved by the customer and relevant stakeholders, it becomes the basis for the work to be performed. The Project Definition includes information such as:

• Project overview – Why is the project taking place? What are the business drivers? What are the business benefits?
• Objectives – What will be accomplished by the project? What do you hope to achieve?
• Scope – What deliverables will be created? What major features and functions will be implemented? What organizations will be converted? What is specifically out of scope?
• Assumptions and Risks – What events are you taking for granted (assumptions) and what events are you concerned about? What will you do to manage the risks to the project?
• Approach – Describe in words how the project will unfold and proceed.
• Organization – Show the significant roles on the project. The project manager is easy, but who is the sponsor? Who is on the project team? Are any of the stakeholders represented?
• Signature Page – Ask the sponsor and key stakeholders to approve this document, signifying that they are in agreement with what is planned.
• Initial Effort, Cost, and Duration Estimates – These should start as best guess estimates, and then be revised, if necessary, when the workplan is completed.

Project Workplan
After the Project Definition has been prepared, the workplan can be created. The workplan provides the step-by-step instructions for constructing project deliverables and managing the project. You should use a prior workplan from a similar project as a model, if one exists. If not, build one the old-fashioned way by utilizing a work-breakdownstructure and network diagram.

Best Practice – The Planning Horizon
Create a detailed workplan, including assigning resources and estimating the work as far out as you feel comfortable. This is your planning horizon. Past the planning horizon, lay out the project at a higher level, reflecting the increased level of uncertainty. The planning horizon will move forward as the project progresses. High-level activities that were initially vague need to be defined in more detail as their timeframe gets closer.

Project Management Procedures
Best Practice - Define Project Management Procedures Up-Front
This document contains the procedures that will be used to manage the project. It will include sections on how the team will manage issues, scope change, risk, quality, communication, etc. It is important to be able to manage the project rigorously and proactively and ensure the project team and all stakeholders have a common understanding of how the project will be managed. If common procedures have already been established for your organization, utilize them on your project.

Ten Guaranteed Ways to Screw Up Any Project

1. Don’t bother prioritizing your organization's overall project load. After all, if there’s a free-for-all approach to your overall program management (i.e., “survival of the fittest”), then the projects that survive will be those that were destined to survive. In the meantime, senior management need not trouble themselves aligning projects with strategic goals or facing the logical imperative that people simply cannot have 12 number one priorities!
   
2. Encourage sponsors and key stakeholders to take a passive role on the project team. Let them assert their authority to reject deliverables at random, without participating in defining project outcomes in a high-resolution fashion. And above all, don’t bother project sponsors when their constituents (such as key SMEs and reviewers) drop the ball and miss their deadlines.
3. Set up ongoing committees focusing on management process (such as TQM groups, etc.) and make project team members participate in frequent meetings and write lots of reports… preferably when critical project deadlines are coming due.
4. Interrupt team members relentlessly … preferably during their time off. Find all sorts of trivial issues that "need to be addressed," then keep their beepers and cell phones ringing and bury them in emails to keep them off balance.
5. Create a culture in which project managers are expected to “roll over” and take it when substantive new deliverables are added halfway through the project. (After all, only a tradesperson like a plumber or electrician would demand more money or more time for additional services; our people are “professionals” and should be prepared to be “flexible.”)
6. Half way through the project, when most of the deliverables have begun to take shape, add a whole bunch of previously unnamed stakeholders and ask them for their opinions about the project and its deliverables.
7. Encourage the sponsor to approve deliverables informally (with nods, smiles, and verbal praise); never force sponsors to stand behind their approvals with a formal sign-off. (In other words, give ‘em plenty of room to weasel out of agreements!)
8. Make sure project managers have lots of responsibilities and deadlines, but no authority whatsoever to acquire or remove people from the project; to get enough money, materials, or facilities; or insist on timely participation of SMEs and key reviewers.
9. Describe project deliverables in the vaguest possible terms so sponsors and reviewers have plenty of leeway to reinvent the project outputs repeatedly as the project unfolds.
10. Get projects up and running as quickly as possible – don’t worry about documenting agreements in a formal project charter, clearly describing team roles/responsibilities, or doing a thorough work breakdown analysis. After all, we know what we’re doing and we trust each other. So let’s get to it without a pesky audit trail!

Future of Operations Management

Opportunity: Techno-Business Managers

Excellence in the management of business operations and technology provides a competitive advantage in today's fast-paced business environment. The ideal mix of technology and management skills creates Techno-Business Managers who are equipped with technology, farsighted management practices, and leading-edge knowledge.

Operations Management as a Career

To strengthen the position in the globally competitive market, where rules are re-written every second, companies are striving to improve productivity, quality, cost and supply chain cycle times while still maintaining supreme quality standards of products and services.

In this aggressive situation opportunities are opening up to create an identity in a variety of sectors such as product manufacturing and transportation industries that deliver goods as well as the service sector companies including banking, insurance and government agencies. The following is an illustrative list of sectors open for careers in Operations Management
· Manufacturing
· Retail
· Consulting Firms
· Financial Institutions
· Transportation and Logistics
· Construction
· Information Technology
· Hospitality
· Insurance

The specific areas where the Operations Management Students would find opportunities to contribute include
· Operations Planning, Scheduling and Control
· Purchasing and Materials Management
· Distribution and Supply Chain Management
· Customer Service Support
· Project Management
· Quality management
· Operations Process Consulting
· Forecasting
· Traffic Management
· Inventory Planning and Control
· Process and Methods Planning
· Plant Engineering Management
· Warehouse Management and Distribution
· Six Sigma
· Lean Manufacturing

OM Skills in demand:
· The ability to lead and manage business processes & utilize the power of technology for all business applications
· A comprehensive knowledge of Basic, user level and consulting level competency in ERP (SAP R/3 & SCM)
· Interpersonal skills that enhances the ability to work as part of a team, strong analysis and applied learning skills
· The ability to adapt to rapid change and the ambiguity that is created by change
· Developing planning, organizing and time management skills

In addition to these you should be able to
· Be sensitive to the of shifts in economic, technological and management trends
· Develop a matured vision to foresee the range of possibilities and a highly evolved imagination to create solutions
· Strike and confront newer challenges and be alert to adjustments required in new directions
· Develop a flexible approach towards making adjustments and being steadfast in the face of misunderstandings and mistakes
· Remain committed to the ambition that they have set out to achieve