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This document provides instructions for completing a self-assessment of leadership strengths and development needs. Students are asked to complete two inventories that assess self-management skills/traits and key leadership competencies. They then write a 1-2 page reflective summary identifying their strongest competencies, areas needing further development, and a plan to improve weaknesses. The summary and completed inventories are submitted for evaluation based on inclusion of required content, formatting, writing quality, and timeliness.

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Samples from GM591 Students Select one of the sample diagrams (below) for the Unit 6 Project Management Process Mapping Assignment and discuss each of the five process groups showing the inputs, tools, techniques and, outputs of each of the 47 processes. The samples below do a nice job depicting inputs, outputs, tools, and techniques. Each of the five required process maps should provide applicable inputs, outputs, tools and techniques. Appendix 1 – Process Group Flowchart Figure A-Project Management Processes Project Statement of work Business case
Contract Agreements Enterprise environmental factors Organizational assets Procurement Documents Stakeholder register Stakeholder Management strategy Project Charter Project charter Outputs from other processes Enterprise environ. factors Schedule forecasts Cost forecasts
Validated changes Work performance information Resource Calendars Risk Register Cost estimates HR Mgmt. plan Approved Change Requests Project Document Updates Performance Reports Project document updates Organizational process updates Quality control measurements Verified deliverables Performance assessments
Communication updates Executing Process Group Initiating Process Group Planning Process Group Closing Process Group Monitoring and
Controlling Process Group Project Mgmt. plan Scope mgmt. plan Requirements mgmt. plan Requirements documentation Requirements traceability matrix Project Scope Statem. Projects docum. Updates Scope Baseline Schedule Mgmt. Plan Activity list Activity attributes Milestone list
Project schedule network diagram Project document updates Activity resource requirements Resource breakdown structure Project documents updates Activity duration estimates Project calendars Cost mgmt. plan Cost estimates Project Mgmt., Plan Schedule forecasts Validated changes
Work performance information Issue log Deliverables Change requests Project document updates Quality mgmt. plan Quality metrics Quality control measurements HR Mgmt. Project staff assignments Resource calendars Change request Work performance reports Project mgmt. plan updates Project document updates Schedule forecasts
Project Management Process Mapping -showing the inputs, tools, techniques and, outputs of each of the 47 processes. Project Management Process Group and Process Diagram Start Finish Organization Environment Factors Project Initiator or Sponsor Initiating Process Group Planning Process Group Executing
Process Group Monitoring and Controlling Process Group Closing Process Group Project Initiator or Sponsor Customer Organizational culture Project Management Information System Human resource pool Policies, procedures, standards, guidelines Defined processes His torical information Less on learned Statement of wo rk Contract Project charter Preliminary project scope statement Project management plan Organizational process assets
(update) Final product, serv ice, resu lt Adminis trative closure procedure Contract clos ure procedure Project sponsor s vis ion Devel op Project team Deliverables Requested changes Manage stakeholders expectati ons Conduct procurement Implemented change requests Implemented corrective actions Implemented preventive actions Implemented defect repair Work performance information Approved changed requests Rejected chang e reques ts Approved corrective actions Approved preventi ve actions Approved defect repair Project management plan update Project scope statement update Control quality Control cost Control s chedule Approved deliverables Performance reports Manage project communication
Individual Project Part B - Self-Management Skills/Traits Inventory Self-management skills/traits are the things that make you unique. People often fail to identify these attributes as skills, or to give themselves credit for using them, yet they impact professional identity, the work that is done and the way that it is done. Self-management skills/traits are often considered as professional, leadership, and personal traits; and some are highly desirable to business organizations. To help you sharpen your focus on who you are, and to identify your current strengths, work through this checklist of personal skills/trait characteristics. First, read each word and under the left-side Mastered column, check (X) all of the skills/traits that other people (family, friends, co-workers) would say describe you as you are now (NOTE: if others have recognized the associated behaviors being demonstrated by you then it suggests this is a strong natural trait or one that you have already mastered). Second, to prepare yourself for your next move forward on your profession/future career path, look at the list a second time, and specifically at the skills/traits you did not check, and under the right side Need column check (X) the 5 or 6 self-management skills/traits you feel you currently don’t have but see as being an important benefit in the future. MasteredNeedMasteredNeedMasteredNeedMasteredNeed academic diligent
industrious precise accurate diplomatic innovative professional adaptable discreet inventive
punctual ambitious dynamic logical quick assertive eager loyal rational astute
easygoing mature realistic capable effective objective receptive caring efficient
open reflective competent empathetic open-minded reliable competitive energetic optimistic reserved
confident enthusiastic orderly resourceful conscientious fair-minded organized responsible conservative firm
outgoing risk taker considerate flexible patient self-confident cooperative friendly perceptive
self-controlled creative generous persevering sensible deliberate helpful persistent tactful democratic
honest pleasant tenacious determined imaginative polite tolerant independent
practical versatile Individual Project Part B - Key Leadership Competencies Self- Assement Directions: 1. BEFORE YOU START consider where you want to be professionally 5 years from when you graduate, and the specific nature and requirements of the type of job or area of specialization you envision yourself having – for example Project Manager of a major road reconstruction project. (If you are not sure what the nature or requirements of you envisioned job might be do an internet search of job descriptions) 2. NEXT STEP,now based on your past experiences and your present level of experience, knowledge, and/or skill, read each of the competency sets on the next 3 pages, and using the following scale, rate your current level of mastery for each competency: (N) None – I have very little or noexperience or skills in this competency area (B) Basic – I have a general understanding and could work in simple situations with support and coaching from others (C) Competent – I have a good understanding and can work in situations of moderate difficulty without support or coaching from others (P) Mastery – I have a well-developed understanding and could work in difficult situations with minimal support and coaching from others 3. FINAL STEP,firstreview the list and considering only the
competencies you checked/circled as N or B, identify and list the three competencies you believe will be most important for you to have in the next 5 years. Then review the list a second time considering only the competencies you have checked/circled as C or P and identify and list the three competencies you believe to be your greatest assets/strengths. Three most important competencies I will need to develop over next 5 years 1. 2. 3. My five strongest competencies 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Set 1: Competencies Required for Effectively Leading Oneself 1.1 Self-Management The ability to effectively organize, direct, and manage one’s own activities, time, priorities, and resources towards the achievement of one’s objectives and goals. Includes (requires) the skills of goal-setting, planning, scheduling, time management, self-evaluation, and self-development. N B C P
1.2 Initiative and Perseverance The willingness and ability to begin, and the determination to follow through energetically with a plan or task. Without being asked or directed, plans ahead for upcoming problems or opportunities; takes appropriate action, typically doing more than is required or expected; and stays on task, without being easy discourage, until objectives and goals are achieved. N B C P 1.3 Results Driven The ability to set specific, measurable improvement goals and to make timely and effective decisions, that through strategic
planning will produce successful results. Demonstrates concern for meeting objectives in a timely manner within the standards of cost and quality. N B C P 1.4 Critical Thinking The ability to disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open- minded, and informed by evidence to understand the nature an significance of problems and to evaluate arguments (reasons and their companion conclusions) N B C P
1.5 Decision-making/Judgment Perceives the impact, implications, and potential consequences of decisions and as a result exercises good judgment by making timely, rational, and well-informed decisions that take into account the facts, goals, constraints, and risks. N B C P 1.6 Flexibility/Adaptability Is open to change and new information; can adjust and adapt work behaviors and methods in response to new information, changing conditions, or unexpected obstacles. N B C P
1.7 Integrity/Honesty Instills mutual trust and confidence; creates a culture that fosters high standards of ethics; behaves in a fair and ethical manner toward others N B C P 1.8 Continual Learning Recognizes one’s own strengths and weaknesses and seeks
feedback from others for improvement; engages in self- development and takes advantage of opportunities to master new knowledge and skills. N B C P Set 2: Competencies Required for Effectively Leading Groups 2.1 Teamwork/Teambuilding The ability to foster commitment and trust of a group, and develop within them a sense of pride and cohesiveness, while inspiring, encouraging, and guiding them towards goal accomplishments. N B C P
2.2 Written Communication Has the ability to express facts and ideas in writing in a clear, convincing, and organized manner that is appropriate to the audience and occasion. N B C P 2.3 Oral Communication Makes clear and convincing oral presentations to individuals or groups tailored to the audience and the situation. N B C
P 2.4 Active Listening Is attentive and listens carefully to others, paying full attention to the speaker taking time to digest what he or she hears before responding N B C P 2.5 Interpersonal Skills
Considers and responds appropriately to the needs, feelings, and capabilities of different people in different situations; is tactful, compassionate and sensitive, and treats others with respect regardless of their level, personality, culture or background. N B C P 2.6 Leveraging Diversity Respects, understands, values and seeks out individual differences to achieve the vision and mission of the group and/or organization; creates an inclusive work environment N B C P
2.7 Conflict Management The ability to identify, and take appropriate steps to prevent, potential situations that could result in unpleasant confrontations. N B C P 2.8 Customer Focus Anticipates and meets the need of all stakeholders, has the ability to respond to changing demands, and is committed to continuous improvement of services. N B C P
Set 3: Competencies Required for Effectively Leading Organizations 3.1 Visioning/Goal Setting Takes a long-term view and builds a shared vision with others; is able to restate the organization’s mission and vision in terms of measurable and achievable goals and objectives; and can influence other to achieve those goals by clearly translating them into action. N B C P
3.2 Decision-making/Problem-solving The ability to identify and analyze problems and needs; make logical decisions; and provide workable solutions. N B C P 3.3 Strategic Thinking The ability to formulate effective strategies consistent with the business and competitive strategies of the organization. N B C P
3.4 Influencing/Negotiating The ability to persuade others, build consensus through give and take, facilitate “win-win” solutions, and gain cooperation from others to obtain information and accomplish goals. N B C P 3.5 Business Acumen The knowledge and understanding of both the internal financial, accounting, marketing and operational functions and processes of an organization, and the organization’s external markets, industry, competition, and products/services. N B C
P Set 4: Competencies Required for Technical Credibility 4.1 Project Management The ability to establish and execute a systematic course of action for self or others to ensure accomplishment of a specific objective through the setting of priorities, goals, and timetables. N B C P
4.2 Technical Expertise Understands and appropriately applies knowledge, skills, practices, and procedures related to a specialized field of practice and/or expertise. N B C P INMGT 400/600 Individual Project Leadership: A Transferrable Skill – Part B Current Leadership Strengths and Development Needs (13% of project grade) Two of the questions employers always ask you (in one way or another) are about your strengths and weaknesses. The easiest way to answer this question with sincerity is to have first (long before the questions are asked) reflected upon what your real strengths and real development t needs (weaknesses) are. Overview of Individual Project Part B – Leadership Strengths
and Development Needs The purpose of Part B is to assist you in recognizing your current leadership strengths and development needs. To this end, Part B consists of two self-assessment inventories and the submission of a short paper summarizing your findings. Explanation of Requirements and Evaluation Criteria for Part B 1. Download and save a copy of the Self-Management Skills/Traits Inventory. Then complete the inventory, identify your 5 strongest skills/traits, the 3 skills/traits you need to develop, and submit completed inventory to the Part B drop box. 2. Download and save a copy of the Key Leadership Competencies Inventory. Then complete the inventory, identify your 5 strongest skills/traits, the 3 skills/traits you need to develop, and submit completed inventory to the Part B drop box. 3. Write and submit a 1-2 page, double-line spaced reflective summary in 12 pt. Times New Roman font double line spaced, with the bolded title of Reflective Summary of MyLeadership Strengths and Development Needs, followed by you name on the next line. Your summary should provide an overall picture/explanation of your strongest competencies/skills/traits (4 or 5 not 10), the areas/competencies you feel require further development (2 or 3 not 6), and your plan (steps and actions) for developing your identified/stated leadership ‘weaknesses’. 4. Submit artifact and summary to appropriate drop box before the due date and time listed on the class schedule. The following criteria will be used for evaluation: Criteria
Traits Inventory (2 points) Copy of properly completed traits assessment tool summited Met expectations (1 points) Copy of incomplete assessment tool summited Fell short of expectations (0 points) No copy of assessment tool submitted Unsatisfactory Competency Inventory (2 points) Copy of properly completed competency assessment tool summited Met expectations (1 points) Copy of incomplete assessment tool summited Fell short of expectations (0 points) No copy of assessment tool submitted Unsatisfactory Analysis Summary (6 or 5 points) Clearly summarized required number of strengths and weaknesses and explained a development plan Met expectations (4, 3 or 2 points) Summarized only some strengths and weaknesses and/or did not explain a development plan Fell short of expectations (1 or 0 points) Wrote something but does not relate to the assignment requirements
Unsatisfactory Professionalism (2 points) Followed directions, no formatting errors, no writing errors Met expectations (1 point) Followed directions and less than 3 formatting and/or writing errors Fell short of expectations (0 points) Did not follow directions and/or more than 2 writing errors Unsatisfactory Timeliness (-2 pts penalty) Submitted after time due but not more than 24 hrs late DUE DATE: 11 & 12 Jan 2018; DUE TIME: 15 & 18:00Hrs; TOTAL Budget: $20.00 This assignment is in 2 parts. Part 1:Topic 1 DUE DATE: 11 Jan 2018 DUE TIME: 15:00Hrs GMT PART 1: Virtual Teams Please read the following article before beginning this Discussion: Tyler, M. (2008). Virtual management of teams: A revolutionary approach. Proceedings from EABR & TLC ’08: The European Applied Business Research Conference, and The College Teaching & Learning Conference. Rothenburg, GE: Clute Institute. According to Tyler in order to lead virtual teams today a manager must be a serving manager instead of a directing manager. In distributive computing there is one computer that
services all the other computers to allow them to do their individual work. Yet this computer is the focal point for all computers to pass data through, store data, exchange data and reconcile differences through. This computer is called a “server” because while it is not the most powerful computer or, the most versatile computer or, even the most expensive computer, it is a workhorse that is reliable, available, maintainable, and dependable (Tyler, 2008). Tyler’s premise that, in the development of a virtual team, you must also look for a team leader that holds these qualities. This new paradigm turns the historical concept of managing upside down. But it has historical precedence from our opening example of early Christianity all the way up through such management thinkers as Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, and Abraham Maslow (Tyler, 2008). Based on your readings and your personal and professional experiences, how accurate is this hypothesis? Part 2: Topic 2 DUE DATE: 12 Jan 2018 DUE TIME: 18:00Hrs GMT Diagram the Process Flow Table 3–1 on page 61 of the PMBOK® Guide maps out the Project Management Process Groups and the Knowledge Areas in a matrix format. Using this table and your understanding of the PMBOK® Guide, discuss the process flow to include the following: ● Select one of the sample diagrams from the Unit 6 Sample Process Mapping file and discuss each of the five process groups showing the inputs, tools, techniques and, outputs of
each of the 47 processes. ● Explain what this mapping is trying to achieve and how you would use it in managing a project? Consolidate your findings into a focus paper with a supporting thesis that justifies the utilization of the PMBOK® Guide five process groups by a project manager on a major project. Criteria for the Assignment ● Criterion 1: Is the organized discussion of the five process groups showing the inputs, tools and techniques and, outputs of each of the 47 processes? ● Criterion 2: Is there an explanation of what mapping is trying to achieve? ● Criterion 3: Is there an explanation of how mapping would be used in managing a project? ● Criterion 4: Does the focus paper support a thesis justifying the utilization of the PMBOK® Guide five process groups by a project manager on a major project? Components ● APA information presented as a cover page (please see Unit 3 Sample Assignment) ● Table of contents ● Executive summary ● Body of the focus paper (use Headings to organize). ● Conclusion stated as your thesis justifying the utilization of the PMBOK® Guide five process groups by a project manager on a major project ● After the Conclusion, insert the Project Management Process Mapping diagram you selected. ● Reference page, a minimum of 3 scholarly journal or textbook source references cited and credited according to APA format using a minimum of 6 intext citations ● The paper should be focused and to the point, containing between 700 and 900 words from the Executive Summary to the
end of your Conclusion. Recommended References: Resch, M. (2011). Strategic project management transformation. Fort Lauderdale, FL: J. Ross Publishing. · Chapter 12: “Achieving Optimal Results in the Value Attainment Phase” · Chapter 13: “From Project Closure to Continuous Value Improvement” Project Management Institute (PMI) . (2013). A guide to project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (5th ed.). Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute (PMI) . · Section 4.5: “Integrated Change Control” (pp.94-99) Pappas, L. (2006). The speed of change. PM Network®. 20(4), 42–46. Tyler, M. (2008). Virtual management of teams: A revolutionary approach. Proceedings from EABR & TLC ’08: The European Applied Business Research Conference, and The College Teaching & Learning Conference. Rothenburg, GE: Clute Institute. Diagram the Process Flow Points Possible Points Earned Content (50 pts)
Response successfully answers the Assignment question(s); thoroughly uses the text and other literature. Includes a strong thesis statement, introduction, and conclusion. The main points of the paper are developed clearly. All arguments are supported well (no errors in logic) using outside sources as assigned. 25 Sources are primarily academic journals, with thoughtful use Web sources. References are applied substantively to the paper topic. Skillfully addresses counter-arguments and does not ignore data contradicting its claim. Refers to sources both in- text and in the reference page. 25 Analysis (30 pts) Response exhibits strong higher-order critical thinking and analysis (e.g., evaluation). Paper shows original thought. 10 Analysis includes proper classifications, explanations, comparisons and inferences. 10 Critical thinking includes appropriate judgments, conclusions and assessment based on evaluation and synthesis of information. 10 Writing (20 pts) Grammatical skills are strong with typically less than one error per page. Correct use of APA when assigned. 6 Appropriate to the assignment, fresh (interesting to read), accurate, (no far-fetched, unsupported comments), precise (say what you mean), and concise (not wordy). 8 Project is in 12-point font. Narrative sections are double-spaced with a double space between. Project is free of serious errors; grammar, punctuation, and spelling help to clarify the meaning by following accepted conventions.
6 Total 100 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 1 Virtual Management Of Teams: A Revolutionary Approach M. Jeffery Tyler ABSTRACT There’s an ironic story in the Christian Bible written by John the apostle, which tells of Jesus the Christ taking a basin of water and washing his disciples’ feet. One of the disciples, a man named Peter, refused to allow his leader (rabbi) to do this. Jesus told him if he didn’t allow him to wash his feet, Peter would not have a place on the team of disciples. Given this choice Peter told Jesus to not only wash his feet but to wash his hands and his head as well.
(Bar-Zebedee, 90-100) While this story is used numerous times from the pulpits of Christianity, it also provides us with a great lesson in the evolving leadership practices required in the management of virtual teams. Introduction There is an old military axiom that I drew from, to coin the term, “You manage objects; you lead people.” (Kharvi, 2006) If applied correctly, a good manager will utilize different approaches to the way he or she allocates resources. It is relatively easy to manage objects given a simple understanding of math and knowing when and where to allocate resources as necessary. This is because objects don’t have needs. People have needs and because of this require a different blend of resource allocation principles to be applied. While we have found this to be true in the normal application of business principles and we even teach our future managers the difference between management and leadership, a new (or not so new) environment is taking place in the corporations of the world today. The corporate world is getting smaller. Clifford Gray and Erik Larson identify four different kinds of projects and, by extension, corporate endeavors, today. They refer to domestic practices as being performed in a
native country; overseas practices executed in a foreign country for a native country; foreign endeavors executed by a native country in a foreign country for a business in that country and; a global business endeavor being executed across national boundaries usually by multinational organizations utilizing individuals from differing countries working together as a team to accomplish a specific endeavor. (Gray & Larson, 2007) In each of these cases, industry has moved into the use of virtual teams and in some cases to the exclusive use of virtual teams. Just as in distributive computing, where the effort of the computing power is spread out to many different separated computers, so to is the sum of the team effort parceled out to the different members of the team. And, just as in the example of distributive computing the locale of the members on a virtual team is often separated by distance or country. How to manage and lead such teams has produced many different approaches over the years with varying degrees of success. This paper provides an approach that is based on historical success and precedence. This approach is a basic approach but constitutes a major paradigm shift in the world of business management. In distributive computing there is one computer that services all the other computers to allow them to do their individual work. Yet this computer is the focal point for all
computers to pass data through, store data, exchange data and reconcile differences through. We call this computer a “server” because while it isn‟t the most powerful computer or, the most versatile computer or, even the most expensive computer, it is a workhorse that is reliable, available, maintainable, and dependable. In the research and development world we call this RAM-D and we look for machines that meet each of these expectations. I submit to you that, in the development of a virtual team, we must also look for a team lead that holds these qualities. We can call this person a team server or service leader. And, I will postulate that in order to lead virtual teams a manager must be a serving manager instead of a directing manager. This new paradigm turns the historical concept of managing upside down. But it has historical precedence from our opening example of early Christianity all the way up through such management thinkers as Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, and Abraham Maslow. 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 2
Hypothesis In order to lead virtual teams a manager must be a serving manager instead of a directing manager. The analogy for this concept is that leading virtual teams is like implementing distributive (server based) computing. There is historical precedence for such a type of leader management. STUDY METHODOLOGY This study was a research of historical concepts and principles based on proven uses of leadership and management approaches for large groups not under the direct control or supervision of the leader or manager. This research followed three distinct categories to provide different viewpoints for similar applications of these principles. The three categories were Military, Religious, and Commerce to address three distinct and differing approaches to leadership and management of peoples not under one‟s direct supervision. All three categories provide solid examples of distributive leadership and management. In each category certain succinct principles were applied to successful completion of missions, theology, or
mercantilism. All three categories were analyzed from a historical perspective and common traits were then applied to an analysis of similar contemporary management concepts for server management. Three distinct contemporary management theories evolved that followed the historical precedence. DISCUSSION Analysis of Historical Precedence for Server Management A review of successful military leaders included Son Tzu who admonished us to, “Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.) (Tzu, 600 BC). Julius Caesar‟s perception that, “What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also” (Caesar, 100-44 BC) predates McGregor‟s premise that each employee wants to do a good job and, given the chance, will work towards that end. (McGregor, 2006) The East India Trading Company followed these tenets in allowing what might be thought to be unparalleled latitude in the way it allowed distant merchant directors to control their
own areas of operations as long as the bottom line was sustained and improved on. (Keay, 1993) George S. Patton advocated that we, “Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” (Patton, Best Leadership Quotes, 2008) His great Ardennes offensive that, when executed pulled an entire Army off the front lines to run parallel to the lines of combat and reinserted over 205,000 men back into another part of the battle shows what server leadership can do. (Patton, War As I Knew It, 1975) Recently, Jack Welch tells us, “Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital - the world's best talents and greatest ideas.” (Mezak, 2006) Again Welsh realized that, “Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.” (Welch, 2001) Analysis of Military Command and Control A synthesis of these complementary thoughts was conducted and tested. It showed that two distinct objects can be met or blended together. The East India Company showed an object managed organization that allowed
relative freedom of subordinate personnel as long as objects were managed to the good of the organization. (Keay, 1993) In this regard even people were managed and few instances were found of leadership by example. Conversely, People Led Leadership was found in many military situations but objects were found not to be managed optimally. Rommel was an exception where necessity dictated he lead people, and manage limited resources frugally to achieve his mission. (Liddell-Hart, 1953) One of the results of the Normandy invasion was the emergence of the military‟s Five Paragraph Field Order that, in many regards, is also followed in many industry plans. (Army, 1997) In this plan the writer addresses the situation (people), the mission or purpose of the effort (people), the concept of the operation or plans (people), the implementation processes (objects) and the logistics (objects). Many a military plan, project or program plan and business plan follow these precepts. As a result of this type of planning the stage is set for people to implement. But, how does this apply to the contemporary concepts of 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 3
server leadership? That is, how do we know that given a good plan, people can execute on their own without continuous supervision and guidance? Many of our contemporary business authors have given us this answer. Analysis of Contemporary Precedence for Server Management An analysis of contemporary leadership theories shows how people, given the opportunity, can take a well prepared plan and with minimal direction (interference) can achieve or exceed the organizational objectives. In his book, The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor postulated two opposing theories that, for him, encapsulated the polarity of management principles. The Theory X Variable assumed, at one end of the management spectrum is a Charles Dickens type Scrooge management precept that the average employee dislikes work and will attempt to avoid it, has no ambition and seeks no responsibility, is self-centered,
will resist any form of change, and lacks appreciable intelligent and is therefore gullible. This management principle was strongly adhered to during the industrial revolution, but McGregor proposed a different management theory built on Abraham Maslow‟s Hierarchy of Need in achieving the higher needs of esteem and self-actualization resulting in the Theory Y Variable. (Maslow, 1999) Under Theory Y the average worker works as naturally as if he or she Figure 1 were at play or rest; they are self-directed and meet work objectives if properly established, they are committed to these objectives if the opportunity to achieve self- fulfillment is provided as a reward and they will seek responsibility to achieve self -actualization because there is a common denominator of creativity and ingenuity that allows people to assume responsibility on their own. Analysis of Frederick Herzberg‟s Hygiene Theory, with regard to this study, brings to light two of his postulates, that of the Dissatisfaction Variable, and the Satisfaction Variable. (Herzberg, 1959) Given that workers are self- motivated towards an objective and that objective is well defined to them, according to Herzberg they will need to
see satisfaction in the results. A well defined statement of a team‟s work with identifiable standards and checkpoints or milestones along the way provides an environment of free endeavor to allow a team to work toward a goal needing only the support, not the supervisory direction of the manager. If this is a given then there must be examples of this from the research that validates such a reversal of a supervisor‟s role. Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Theory The military has the longest history of conducting operations in virtual or virtual-like situations over vast distances. This is accomplished in what one might assume to be a Theory X form of control; especially since the military refers to mission accomplishment through command and control. But, a closer look at military doctrine identifies motivational theory and the hierarchy of need as precepts for commanders (leaders).
Military Figure 2 doctrine states that, “Command and control is the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Command and control 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 4 functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission.” (Army, 1997) Therefore, “[C]ommanders exercise control by— Acquiring and applying means to accomplish the commander‟s intent.
Defining limits. Determining requirements. Allocating means. Monitoring status and performance and reporting significant changes to the commander. Developing specific guidance from general guidance. Forecasting change. (Army, 1997) Industry has found these same tenets to hold true. Thomas Kolditz, in his book In Extremis Leadership- Leading as if Your Life Depended on It, compares leadership styles found to be successful in challenging situation. He compares what he calls extremis leadership to crisis leadership where, like professional military leaders, extremis leaders are professional and self-selected; crisis leaders are not. (Kolditz, 2007) Kolditz goes on to state the extremis leaders are inherently motivating, they embrace continuous learning, they share risk with followers, and have a common lifestyle with followers. Probably the most important characteristic they have, in my opinion, is the ability to inspire high competence and trust with the people they are in charge of and beyond to others. A manager of virtual teams today must inspire, motivate and allocate the virtual team with the means (emotional, psychological,
and physical) to accomplish their tasks on their own without direct supervision. Recruiting company Decision Toolbox is just one of many cases that show that virtual teams made up of self-starters can work from home to provide profitable, efficient business operations based on good management that inspires, motivates and allocates the virtual team with the means to accomplish their tasks on their own without direct supervision. Half of Decision Toolbox‟s recruiters are commission-only employees; the other half are independent contractors. In either case, the company doesn‟t tell them when to work. The recruiters tell the company when they will work. Instead of logging the recruiters‟ hours, the company measures them on performance, such as customer satisfaction, amount of repeat business and percent of job candidates who are hired. Decision Toolbox identified self-starters who could work without a supervisor standing over them. They hired recruiters with years of experience — the average is 17 years — who valued flexibility, working from home and the ability to do just recruiting and not sales or writing ads. Decision Toolbox provides its virtual teams (pods) with tools to prequalify job candidates and professional writers to write enticing job descriptions for Internet job boards. The company assigns recruiters to groups of three or four.
These pods have weekly Internet meetings to help one another solve problems. The manager‟s responsibility is to define objectives, determine requirements, allocate the means to accomplish the job, and monitor performance for control as needed. (Norman, 2007) Basically, as in distributive computing where the effort of the computing power is spread out to many different separated computers, so to is the sum of the team effort parceled out to the different members of the team. CONCLUSION Historical Precedence for Server Management The concept of server leadership is not a new concept but it is revolutionary. Even earlier than that moment that Jesus washed his disciples‟ feet, an ancient Chinese general by the name of Sun Tzu advocated the support of military troops. This concept has been passed down through the military to the present. That is, “Take care of your troops and they will take care of you.” It is a basic tenet that a good manager provides the necessary logistical support for a team to be effective. But, with virtual teams, one must go beyond that and anticipate special
or specific needs based on differing environments. A global team is spread out around the globe. Providing one 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 5 model of computer to work with all team members will not meet the needs of team members in countries with different power, connectivity and usability differences. Douglas McGregor postulated, in his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, that the average person is proud of his or her skills, and if the job is satisfying, he or she will commit to goals of the organization; that that average person will not only accept but seek out responsibility, and, given the opportunity, they will use imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to solve work problems. Based on what we have learned about human behavior since McGregor proposed a different way of managing people, we find the Theory Y approach results in greater productivity than the traditional Theory X approach. A tenet of Theory Y is that, since the employee wants to do his or her best, they can be given direction, and, without direct supervision, can
accomplish the expected results on their own. Contemporary Precedence for Server Management An organization based on the precepts of Theory X, requiring continuous direct supervision by the manager, cannot and will not be successful in today‟s global market, even with totalitarian organization. This was realized by Decision Toolbox, a recruiting company that eliminated the office environment and has found that Theory Y type employees who work from home can perform profitable and efficient operations (Orange County Register, 2007). Kim Shepherd, an expert in virtual teams found that she could aggrandize her organizations capabilities and reduce overhead through the use of virtual employees. However, even with her knowledge of virtual teams she discovered that, “The company hierarchy is flipped. The management team works for them,” Shepherd said. “I constantly ask, „What can I do to make your job better?‟” (Orange County Register, 2007) The article goes on to say, Marcia Cordova of Garden Grove, Calif., has been a recruiter for more than 20 years, three of them with Decision Toolbox. “You can make a lot of money, depending on how hard you want to work,” she said. “I don‟t need as much money. I need more time and flexibility
because I have two grandchildren with two more on the way” (Orange County Register, 2007). The nature of this type of work today makes McGregor's postulates even more valid than they were in the 1950‟s and 1960‟s. The application of McGregor‟s thinking to today's global business enterprise continues to show us that unique and unconventional management techniques to enhance virtual employee effectiveness is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Following McGregor‟s lead, industry needs to change its concept of employee management and expand on his ideas for the global workplace. How does this apply to management in today‟s environment you might ask? I‟m glad you asked that question. Most organizations understand the need to utilize McGregor‟s Theory Y in virtual teams, and most companies are now using virtual teams. In fact, eighty percent of companies use virtual employees today and by 2008 we will see 41 million virtual employees world-wide. The trend is towards home based distributive employee operations. Keeping these diversified workers focused on the same goals and objectives at coordinated times requires a different management approach even with the use of Theory Y type employees. Dominic M. Thomas, an
assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University discovered that, “there are real challenges trying to put together teams to do good.” (Thomas, 2007) He found, working with Peace Corps virtual teams in Nepal, that even with teams where everyone wants to work together, they tend to end up with problems and breaking down. Frederick Herzberg seemed to envision this very situation when he developed his Motivation-Hygiene theory describing the factors causing employee motivation as compared to what he called employee hygiene factors or factors leading to dissatisfaction. Of Herzberg‟s top six factors causing employee dissatisfaction, four of them (supervision, relationships with one‟s boss, work conditions, and relationships with one‟s peers) can be directly mitigated through proper implementation of virtual employee teams. The other two (policy and salary) can be emphasized through server leadership. Herzberg reasoned that there are two distinct human needs to be taken care of for the worker. The first is the physiological need to take care on one‟s physical environment and the second is the psychological human need to allow for growth. This opens the way to Maslow‟s hierarchy theory that needs must be addressed in a hierarchical manner for actualization to be realized. If we utilize Maslow „s assumption of base needs being taken care of first, to
address Herzberg‟s two sets of human needs, we can see that the manager must first take care of the physiological and security needs of the worker and then the psychological needs can be addressed. This means that salary and work conditions must be addressed first, then with positive virtual work techniques relationships with peers and supervisors can be cultivated and grown. Policies can be group co-developed to meet organizational expectations through stakeholders to ensure buy-in. Policies need to be revisited by the group to ensure continual acceptance for the good of the team. Again this is what (Tyler, 1998) Kim Shepherd referred to as management being turned upside down. The manager is a facilitator for 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 6 organizational effectiveness vice a dictator putting out organizational expectations. “Leadership is defined as the ability to get others to do your will. Great leadership is the ability to accomplish the same thing but having others think that it is their idea”. (Tyler, 1998)
REFERENCES Army, D. o. (1997). FM 101-5: Staff Organization and Operations. Washington D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army. Bar-Zebedee, J. (90-100). Gospel of John. Ephesus: Canon. Caesar, J. (100-44 BC). Think exist.com. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from Think exist.com: http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/what_we_wish- we_readily_believe-and_what_we/256587.html Herzberg, F. (1959). The Motivation to Work. New York: Wiley. Keay, J. (1993). The Honourable Company: A History of the English East Indian Company. New York: HapperCollins. Kharvi, P. (2006, October 01). Department of Management Sciences. Retrieved March 03, 2008, from University of Pune (PUMA): pumba.unipune.ernet.in/To-Lead-or-To- Manage.pps Kolditz, T. (2007). In Extremis Leadership-Leading as if Your Life Depended on it. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Liddell-Hart, B. (1953). THe Rommel Papers. New York: Da Capo Press.
Maslow, A. H. (1999). Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd Edition. New York: Wiley & Sons. McGregor, D. (2006). The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mezak, S. (2006). Software Without Borders: A Step-By-Step Guide to Outsourcing Your Software. Los Altos: Earthrise Press. Norman, J. (2007, October 2). Virtually @ Work. The Orange County Register . Patton, G. S. (2008, March 3). Best Leadership Quotes. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from Famous Quores and Quotations: http://www.famous-quotes-and- quotations.com/leadership-quotes.html Patton, G. S. (1975). War As I Knew It. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Thomas, D. M. (2007, November 15). Knowledge @ Wharton. Retrieved January 26, 2008, from Five Triggers to Watch For When Managing Virtual Teams: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ Tyler, M. (1998). True Sayings about Project Management. St. Louis: Webster University. Tzu, S. (600 BC). Art of War-ebook. Seattle, WA: Science of Strategy Institute. Welch, J. (2001). Straight from the Gut. New York: Warner Business Books.
FIGURES Figure 1. Chapman, A. (2004, November 26). BuinessBalls Retrieved March 5, 2008, from Douglas McGregor's XY Theory: http://www.alanchapman.com/ Figure 2. Tyler, M. (1999). Lecture Slides. Colorado Springs: Webster University. http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/what_we_wish- we_readily_believe-and_what_we/256587.html http://www.famous-quotes-and-quotations.com/leadership- quotes.html http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ http://www.alanchapman.com/ Resch, M. (2011). Strategic project management transformation. Fort Lauderdale, FL: J. Ross Publishing. · Chapter 12: “Achieving Optimal Results in the Value Attainment Phase” · Chapter 13: “From Project Closure to Continuous Value Improvement” ………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………. Chapter 12: Achieving Optimal Results in the Value Attainment Phase Management by objective works—if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't. —Peter Drucker Measuring, Achieving, and Optimizing Business Value Is a Formal Process
Your project was expertly project-managed and the solution has been successfully deployed. You go back to your clearly defined and thorough business case and (shocker!) many of your business benefits haven't been attained. Even with highly effective project management and successful deployments of project solutions, this happens far too often. Even when project return on investment (ROI) metrics are carefully calculated and targeted business benefits are agreed on and documented, many projects still fail to deliver on business and financial objectives. It's time to start realizing all of their intended business benefits your project investment was built to attain. Results-oriented value attainment plans can help your business achieve this lofty goal. Value attainment focuses on achieving all of the ROI- contributing and value-enabling benefits that were identified and documented in the business case. Value attainment processes are conducted in a structured and organized manner to maximize the chances of achieving the targeted business and financial outcomes. A value attainment plan is a document that focuses on attaining, optimizing, and sustaining business value. This plan can be viewed as an extension of the business case because it establishes clear guidelines on how to capture, measure, manage, and achieve the targeted value metrics outlined in that important document. The value attainment plan also establishes formal accountability for managing, achieving, and sustaining each of the targeted business benefits. This documented accountability that is available to the project stakeholders greatly increases the motivation of the responsible parties to achieve their documented benefits. Value attainment plans keep project teams focused on achieving the forecasted financial returns and other business benefits from their project investments, even after project solutions have been deployed. With these plans fully documented and agreed to, stakeholders and business leaders can be confident that project efforts are focused in the right direction and concentrated on achieving the targeted quantitative business objectives, after all,
isn't that what we're trying to do here? When a detailed plan is put in place, project teams are also better equipped to measure progress, make adjustments, or take other actions to increase the chances of attaining these targeted benefits. Since value attainment plans establish procedures for measuring and reporting the status of benefit attainment, business leaders are kept abreast of the progress on a regular basis with quantitative metrics. These metrics are typically presented utilizing dashboard reporting techniques to ensure the results can be quickly and easily understood by busy professionals. Stakeholders, then, will have the knowledge to more efficiently allocate resources, make strategic decisions, and perform operational adjustments to increase the probability that the goals can be achieved. Management may even be inclined to re- prioritize or revise the project scope based on the progress, or lack of progress, that is being made toward the attainment of the desired business value. Additionally, with a strong emphasis and focus placed on attaining the forecasted business objectives, project benefits may be achieved earlier than anticipated, which can result in the ability to close out the project ahead of schedule, a true rarity! Project teams may also capitalize on the positive, unexpected benefits that may surface as a result of tracking, measuring, and presenting value metrics. These unforeseen, positive benefits will come as a welcome relief to project teams since typically when unforeseen results occur, they are usually negative in nature and detrimental to the business. But as value metrics are tracked and unexpected, positive trends begin to appear, business professionals can act on these positive trends and deliver even more value to the business. This is what some might call gravy. If plans aren't in place to capture data, analyze the results, and identify trends, however, these unexpected, positive benefits will never be discovered and can never lead to increased value to the business. Value attainment plans can greatly assist any organization in any industry achieve their desired project outcomes. Effective
execution of these plans ensures that companies remain focused and aligned with the original intent of their projects. The ultimate goal for any project team is to achieve, and even exceed, the forecasted returns for their project investments. Value attainment plans are vital components to achieving this ultimate end goal. Let's now discuss how to put this important plan together. Developing the Value Attainment Plan The value attainment plan is a vital document that should be created to ensure that a project manager's hard work actually produces the desired business results. This plan must be tightly woven into the overall project management plan and become one of the key project deliverables. Since the project management plan is a living document, the value attainment plan is normally completed once the value metrics have been identified and agreed to and the business case finalized. Both the ROI-contributing and value-enabling benefits are direct inputs to the value attainment plan. Who is responsible for the development of this plan? As with most project documents, project managers are ultimately responsible for producing and maintaining the overarching value attainment plan. Project managers, however, may have limited involvement or control over how project outputs and deliverables are executed once handed over to the business (a major reason these plans never get developed in the first place!). For this reason, it's imperative that project managers include the appropriate business representatives, operations personnel, and other key business members in the development of these plans. Project managers may be responsible for developing the overarching plan, but it's the business personnel who are usually responsible for achieving the results set forth in the plan. These business representatives, therefore, must assume accountability for the benefits within their purview and be intimately involved in the creation of the plan to ensure that the most appropriate actions are planned for and executed. Since
these valued resources are accountable for achieving their respective benefits, they will be assigned the role of benefit owner and will maintain ownership of their respective benefits until they are achieved. Business case documents clearly articulate all of the business benefits that are expected to be achieved as a result of project implementations. Projects are successful when these forecasted benefits are achieved and, conversely, failures when they are not. It is imperative, therefore, to assign ownership and accountability to each and every one of these benefits to the persons most closely associated with them and most likely to take the best courses of action to achieve them. The value attainment plan must explicitly state what benefits will occur; when they will occur; how they will be measured, reported, and optimized; and who is responsible for their manifestation. The project manager develops the overarching plan and the various benefit owners construct the detailed plans for each of the targeted benefits. The project manager, then, consolidates the various plans from each of the benefit owners and incorporates them into the overall value attainment plan. A sound value management plan possesses key attributes, including: · Formalizes the process of capturing business value • Is an extension of the business case and is aligned to corporate strategic objectives · Defines accountability and responsibility for achieving project benefits · Establishes timeframes for achieving the benefits · Specifies measurement techniques and frequencies · Specifies performance reporting processes and frequencies · Has strong stakeholder support and commitment · Is tightly linked to change and risk management processes · Ensures objectivity in the measurement results · Identifies key dependencies for each benefit There can be no ambiguity in accountability when it comes to
achieving the business benefits for costly project investments. Project managers can eliminate any such ambiguity by creating executive summaries of value attainment plans that clearly list each of the targeted business benefits and their respective owners. Table 12.1 shows an example of a value management plan executive summary. With this executive summary, business leaders, or anyone else for that matter, can quickly determine the project quantitative objectives, the persons accountable for their attainment, and other important information. Table 12.1: Value management plan executive summary Open table as spreadsheet Project Sierra Business quantitative benefit Description Benefit owner Baseline Target date Dependencies ROI-contributing benefits Increase package deliveries by 5% New package sorter will enable faster and more reliable placement on vehicles Steve R. 25,000 deliveries per month Q3, 2013 Training department must develop and deliver hands-on training of the new sorter Reduce vehicle maintenance costs by 10% Vendor negotiations resulted in improved pricing and more vendor involvement Ashish J. $2.3MM per month Year end 2013 Vendor management team needs to finalize the contracts Reduce maintenance FTE headcount by 5%
Due to more vendor involvement in maintenance activities, a reduction in staffing levels is required to eliminate duplicate work efforts and decrease costs William S. 125 maintenance FTEs Q2, 2014 Receive executive and HR authorization Value-enabling benefits Increase customer satisfaction index rating to 3.5 out of 5 Customers will receive packages quicker as a result of faster sorting Alfonso R. Current customer satisfaction index is 2.8 out of 5 Year end 2014 Marketing team must develop new and improved online customer satisfaction surveys Improved driver morale to a level of 4 out of 5 Vehicles will operate more smoothly and with fewer malfunctions due to vendor maintenance expertise Ashish J. Current employee morale at a level of 3.5 out of 5 Year end 2014 Union leaders must approve and authorize the survey forms Depending on the project, it may be advantageous to assign multiple owners to a single business benefit. This usually occurs when a single benefit is applicable to and spans multiple geographies or departments. Project managers need to be
careful, however, to keep the number of benefit owners to a manageable amount. Table 12.2 illustrates how multiple owners can be assigned to a single business benefit. Table 12.2: Benefits spanning multiple geographies and departments Open table as spreadsheet Project Tango: Value management plan executive summary Business quantitative benefit Area Benefit owner Baseline Target date Dependencies ROI-contributing benefits Reduce FTE headcount by 10% across the company North America James K. 1,250 FTEs Q4, 2014 Finalize early retirement incentives Asia Pacific Lucy L. 650 FTEs Q3, 2014 Hire career development services consultants Europe/Middle East Hans F. 900 FTEs
Q2, 2015 Receive legal approval for each country South America Alfonso R. 700 FTEs Q4, 2014 Develop transition packages and training Value-enabling benefits Reduce employee absenteeism by 10% Marketing Ken F. 15% Q4, 2014 All employees are trained on the new policies and sign-off on them Operations Tom C. 17% Q3, 2014 Union reps approve of the new plans in writing Finance Cesare P. 22.5% Q2, 2015 Implement floating holiday policies Engineering Steve S.
14% Q4, 2014 Finalize plan of offering rewards of days off for performance The details of the value attainment plan come from each of the benefit owners. These benefit owners are intimately familiar with those areas of the business in which the benefits apply. They will know the minute details of how to measure, achieve, and optimize the benefits better than anyone else. I don't recommend assigning overall project ROI measurements, to include net present value, internal rate of return (IRR), ROI, and payback period, to benefit owners; the project sponsor, along with the project manager, should maintain accountability for the overall ROI metrics of the project. Project ROI results are dependent on certain benefits to be achieved. These ROI- contributing benefits and not the overall project ROI metrics, therefore, should be assigned to benefit owners. Benefit owners, however, should track the financial impact that their benefits generate in their specific areas of the business. Project managers should guide and assist the benefit owners in the creation of these detailed plans. Project managers should also produce standard templates for each of the benefit owners to complete to ensure uniformity and consistency across the board. These templates should include key areas to facilitate the monitoring, measuring, reporting, and optimizing of the targeted benefits. The key areas for value attainment plans include the following: · Benefit title—The benefit title must be clearly stated in quantitative terms. This should come directly from the business case. Benefits include both ROI contributors and value enablers. The SMART principle should have already been applied, so the benefit should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. Examples of benefit titles include: · Increase unit production 20% by the third quarter of 2012 · Reduce maintenance costs 10% by mid-year 2013 by outsourcing all maintenance operations to a single vendor Current baseline—The benefit title explicitly states what the
business is trying to achieve and the baseline states how the business is currently performing, in quantitative terms. Business leaders need to know current baselines to determine the extent of the gap that needs to be closed to achieve the targeted benefit. · Detailed benefit description—Although the benefit is stated in unambiguous terms incorporating the SMART principle, there still may be additional information that can be useful for stakeholders. This additional information should be included in this section of the plan. · Benefit owner—The benefit owner is accountable for measuring the benefit, reporting its progress, taking appropriate action to ensure its attainment, and ultimately achieving or exceeding it. The benefit owner maintains ownership of the benefit until it has been achieved and/or the stakeholders are satisfied with the level of attainment. The benefit owner is usually responsible for that area of the business being impacted and will usually maintain operational accountability for that area of the business even after benefit attainment and project closure. · Benefit owner contact information—All contact information for the benefit owner, such as mobile phone number, e-mail, department, and office location should be included so that he or she can be easily contacted by the various project team members. · Beneficiaries—All of the applicable groups, departments, or individuals benefiting from the targeted benefit should be identified and documented. For some projects, the entire organization may be positively impacted, but for others, only certain departments or certain segments of the business may be impacted. Specific office locations or even certain geographies may be sole beneficiaries. Benefit owners should get as specific as possible in determining the beneficiaries so that the most appropriate measurement and management activities are employed. Beneficiaries will usually have to modify existing work behaviors or experience some other type of change to
realize the project benefit. For this reason, they must not only be clearly identified and documented, but should be involved in the various activities of benefit attainment. It may behoove the business to offer incentives to the beneficiaries to ensure their support and lessen their resistance to change. Examples of beneficiaries include: · Marketing department · Network engineering team within the operations department · Production personnel at the White Plains, New York, manufacturing facility · All Asia Pacific office workers · Start date—The start date is when the benefit owner starts, in earnest, to measure, optimize, and achieve the targeted business benefit. This usually occurs immediately after the project solution has been implemented and the value attainment plan has been completed, but it can occur at any point along the project lifecycle. Remember, there are usually quick hits that can be achieved early in projects that can be instrumental in garnering project support and commitment. · Milestone date(s)—The benefit owner should include key milestone dates and associated objectives to more effectively track the progress of benefit attainment. These milestone dates may come directly from the cash flow model in the business case, since these models specifically convey when financial benefits begin to surface and resurface. Examples of milestone dates and objectives include: · Achieve 15% of the targeted 20% cost savings by Q2, 2013 · Have two of the four departments consolidated by year end and achieve 25% of the forecasted cost savings at the end of Q2, 2013 · Increase unit production by 50 widgets per day in Q3, 2013 and by 75 widgets per day in Q1, 2014 · Benefit attainment date—This important date is when the benefit is expected to be fully achieved. The business case and cash flow model should clearly identify this important end date. Not all of the project benefits listed in the business case will
occur at the same time. · Benefit dependencies—The benefit owner should identify all of the dependencies that exist and the associated actions that need to occur for the benefit to be achieved. They should focus their attention in the areas of people, processes, and technologies to help them identify these dependencies. Dependencies include any initiatives, changes, or modifications that need to occur within specific areas of the business before the targeted benefit can be achieved or before certain actions can be taken to achieve the benefit. Benefit owners should determine where in the organization these actions are required, who will be impacted, and when they need to happen. Examples of benefit dependencies include: · Formal and hands-on training need to be delivered to the users of the system before the end of the year. · Educational material, reference guides, and quick-tip cheat sheets need to be developed and distributed before the system goes live. · All essential staff members must be relocated to the new office building before the end of the year. · New processes need to be developed, documented, and rehearsed before going live in the production environment. · Risks to achieving the benefit—The risks to achieving the targeted benefit should be identified and documented, as well as their likelihood (high/medium/low) and impact (high/medium/low). Quite often risks can be easily and quickly addressed if stakeholders simply know of their existence. But if risks are not identified and communicated, they won't be addressed and may pose serious threats to achieving the benefit. When risks are identified, they can be tracked and managed to ensure they don't jeopardize benefit attainment. Examples of risks to achieving certain benefits include: · Lack of leadership involvement from the engineering team · Equipment shipment dates are not met · Lack of internal experience and expertise to deploy the technical solution
· Risk mitigation strategies—Mitigating risk is reducing the extent of exposure to an identified risk and/or decreasing the likelihood of its occurrence. Approaches to mitigating risks should be clearly articulated as well as any actions that should be taken to minimize any negative effects that may result from the risk. Risk mitigation strategies for the risks identified include: · The project manager will invite the vice president of engineering to executive steering committee meetings to ensure active leadership involvement from the engineering team. · The project team will submit all equipment purchase orders to the purchasing department two weeks ahead of schedule and will request that all orders pertaining to the project be expedited to ensure equipment shipment dates are met. · The project sponsor will hire external consultants to provide leadership and expertise for all technology deployment efforts. · Measurement processes and frequency—Benefit owners need to determine how and when to measure key metrics and data elements surrounding their assigned benefit. They should determine the most appropriate performance measurements methods and techniques, in both monetary and nonmonetary terms, if applicable. If baseline metrics were already established, benefit owners may be able to use the same, or similar, measurement processes and techniques. The measurement systems should provide real-time, or near real- time, information so that problems or trends can be identified and addressed as quickly as possible. Examples of measurement processes and techniques include: · Producing quarterly production reports · Analyzing monthly sales reports · Generating 24-hour network availability statistics · Distributing satisfaction surveys two months after deployment · Tracking and analyzing monthly help desk calls · Performance reporting processes and frequency—Benefit owners need to determine how and when to present the progress benefit attainment. They should work closely with project
managers in determining these important activities and incorporate them into the overall stakeholder communication plan. Quite often there will be numerous reports, statistics, graphs, trend lines, and other performance-related information. Benefit owners must determine the most appropriate ways to package all of this information into reports that are easily understood by the various stakeholders. It's best to visually represent performance metrics by displaying them in charts, graphs, and diagrams. We've discussed the importance of building cash flow models in increments of months, quarters, and half-years, as opposed to just years. The performance reports and frequency of the reports should be aligned with the cash flow trends within the project cash flow models. For instance, if the cash flow model forecasts a 10% productivity improvement at the end of Q2, a performance report should be produced at the end of Q2 showing productivity levels. · Benefit optimization processes and techniques—The purpose of tracking and measuring the progress being made toward the attainment of business benefits is to increase the likelihood that these benefits will actually be achieved. Based on the performance measurements and the progress, or lack of progress, being made, benefit owners may have to take additional actions. They may have to make adjustments to a system, expedite certain initiatives, allocate resources more effectively, or perform other actions to get the project back on track to attain the targeted benefit. Benefit owners should proactively plan for these actions and document them in this section of the value attainment plan. Examples of optimization processes and techniques are: · Work with the systems vendor to fine-tune configuration parameters to improve performance levels · Further streamline processes to achieve time savings · Allocate additional resources to the project to expedite results · Automate approval processes to prevent delays Tables 12.3a and 12.3b show an example of a value attainment plan for a process improvement initiative that includes all of the
elements described. Table 12.3a: Value attainment plan Open table as spreadsheet Help desk process improvement Benefit title Increase the percentage of incidents resolved by the first line of support of the help desk by 20%. This increase will result in the first line of support resolving 90% of all recorded incidents. Current baseline · Help desk receives an average of 5000 incidents per month · First line of support resolves 70% of these incidents · Second line of support resolves 20% of the incidents · Third line of support resolves 10% of the incidents Detailed benefit description The first line of support of the help desk is escalating far too many incidents to second and third lines of support, which is taking too much time away from strategic roles. As a result of this process improvement initiative, the first line of support should be able to resolve at least 90% of all incidents. Benefit owner Charles D. Vice President of Operations Contact information · Operations team · Office: 212-123-1212 · Mobile: 917-111-1122 · [email protected] · 1200 Broadway, New York, NY 10001 Beneficiaries · All U.S.-based employees · All Mexico-based employees · All Toronto-based employees Start date Q2, 2012 Milestone date(s)
· By Q4, 2012, first line of support resolves 78% of all incidents · By Q2, 2013, first line of support resolves 85% of all incidents Benefit attainment date December 31, 2013 Table 12.3b: Value attainment plan Open table as spreadsheet Risks to achieving the benefit First line of support may not possess adequate skill sets to resolve the more complex incidents. Risk mitigation strategies In addition to formal training, second and third lines of support will informally train the first line on the more complex incidents that are encountered. Measurement process and frequency · Help desk reports will be generated by the ticketing system on a weekly basis. · These reports will include the total amount of incidents for the week and the percentages resolved by first, second, and third lines of support. · Any anomalies will be highlighted and the operations manager will provide comments to address them. Performance reporting process and frequency · All operations managers and supervisors will receive these weekly reports. · Project stakeholders will receive monthly reports. · Executive steering committee members will receive quarterly reports. Benefit optimization processes and techniques · If performance improvements aren't forthcoming or less than anticipated, the benefit owner shall investigate the scripts that the first line of support is presenting to the customers. Perhaps the scripts aren't detailed enough or not focused in the appropriate areas. · Benefit owner shall make periodic assessments of the overall
quality of the investigative procedures and will make adjustments as necessary. · Will investigate advanced training and other vendors if performance improvements are dismal. Executing the Value Attainment Plan to Achieve Results With the value attainment plan fully vetted, it's time to achieve the forecasted business value and targeted benefits. The benefit owner and project team members should carefully follow the value attainment plan and carry out all of the specific actions prescribed within it. Central to these actions is monitoring and measuring the current performance against the targeted outcomes to ensure the business benefits are on track. These measurements should be repeated at intervals outlined in the value attainment plan to determine overall performance improvement, or even degradation, trends, and performance patterns. Based on each of the measurement results, benefit owners should resolve any issues in a timely manner and take appropriate actions to adjust and optimize business performance. Business analysis and decision making certainly doesn't stop once the project solution has been implemented. In fact, performance analysis efforts should be elevated since the deployed project solution finally starts producing business value for the organization. We've incorporated the value attainment phase into the traditional project lifecycle approach to prevent organizations from continuing down the road that leads to nowhere. In this case, the road to nowhere is unrealized or partial business value. By incorporating the value attainment phase, organizations can apply strategic focus to ensure they are going down the road that leads to successful project completion and optimized business value. As we discussed in Chapter 3, projects should not be terminated until operational teams and business units have had the opportunity to achieve the project objectives articulated in the business case. Figure 12.1 re-
introduces the value-centric project lifecycle methodology, highlighting the critical value attainment phase. As a result of this phase, optimized business value can and will be achieved and operational teams will assume control of an enhanced steady-state of operations on project closure. It's no longer business as usual! Figure 12.1: Value-centric project lifecycle With value attainment efforts, organizations can terminate the reckless and costly practices of closing out projects, disbanding entire project teams, and losing focus on project objectives right at the point where project teams have the greatest opportunities to affect and drive business value and benefit attainment. Projects cost money. Without concerted efforts to achieve or exceed forecasted business value, much of that money is wasted. Too many important business activities and changes take place once a project solution is deployed to simply forego focused and rigorous value attainment efforts. A few of these strategic activities and changes are: · Redeploying, consolidating, and even terminating employees · Changing well-established business processes and norms · Operating with new technological systems · Conducting business with new partners, suppliers, and vendors · Working in new geographic locations · Conducting business with new customers · Competing with new competitors The value attainment phase is where the rubber meets the road. This is where businesses excel or fall short. Project teams and stakeholders must be thoroughly engaged in the value attainment phase to actively manage these critical business activities and strategic changes and to motivate employees in the acceptance of these changes. They must ensure that these strategic and value-impacting endeavors are conducted in the most efficient manner possible to achieve the targeted business objectives, as well as to ensure minimal disruptions to their organizations. Doing otherwise increases the chances that their
companies will revert back to their old ways and resume business as usual, which is usually suboptimal, since projects were initiated to change these established ways. Establishing project continuity is imperative to maintaining momentum and focus on value attainment. When this continuity isn't enforced, project team members go on to their next assignments and operational teams are the ones left holding the proverbial bag in the form of project deliverables. We've seen what happens when this occurs. Some degree of project management must remain intact during the critical value attainment phase. It doesn't have to be 100%, or even 75%, but a sufficient level of project management commitment must remain to drive the project toward the ultimate goal of benefit attainment. In today's business environment, multitasking is simply part of doing business. Project managers have become quite adept at this skill and are capable of working on several projects simultaneously. If it's determined that only a fraction of project management is required for this phase, then I'm sure project managers will be able to achieve exceptional positive results with that level of commitment. This phase is simply too important to dismiss project management entirely. The project manager was responsible for the development of the value attainment plan. It makes good business sense to keep this person on board, in some capacity, to achieve the results. As with other project phases, detailed RASCI charts should be developed to determine the appropriate levels of involvement for all key project personnel, including the project manager. Measuring the performance of benefits using quantitative metrics is a key business activity of the value attainment phase. These measurements aren't taken to merely present the results to the stakeholders, but to identify trends, analyze performance patterns, perform root-cause analysis, and to identify additional business opportunities that may surface. Too often business decisions are made and actions are taken without adequate, quantifiable justification, which leads to unfavorable results. By
tracking metrics and producing performance reports, business leaders can make better decisions and implement actions most suitable to their businesses. Some of you may have heard the expression, measure twice, cut once, when used in the context of carpentry or construction. Good carpenters ensure that measurements are taken more than once to achieve high degrees of accuracy before they start cutting. If measurements are made inaccurately, their projects will not be built to specifications and they will spend additional time and money replacing wood and other materials. It's no different in the corporate world. Business professionals must measure and measure often. Based on these measurements, leaders can then take appropriate actions to meet the specifications detailed in the business case. Measurement and performance reports come in many flavors and should be presented in a manner where all stakeholders can clearly understand them. Figure 12.2 shows an example of a project performance report. As can be seen, a lot of important information can be gleaned from such a report, such as trends, variances, progress, and timelines. Figure 12.2: Performance report examples Benefit owners and project managers should conduct periodic performance reviews with key stakeholders to discuss the measurement results and any implications that may arise from the results. Project managers should encourage feedback and seek input into appropriate courses of action to expedite or enhance the progress being made. Stakeholders should collectively determine ways to maximize the benefits and to identify opportunity areas to create even more value for the business. Business leaders are often quite surprised with the value-enabling opportunities that surface when business performance metrics are monitored, evaluated, and presented. The details of the value attainment plans may even need to be updated based on the progress that was made or the new opportunities that may have surfaced.
As we all know, it's not always possible, or even practical, to get key stakeholders in a room all at once. For this reason project managers must maintain good communication channels in the value attainment phase to facilitate the presentation of project results and to elicit feedback and input into improvement areas. To ensure that feedback and input are provided, project managers may find it useful to assign homework to specific persons so that they can research certain business areas or investigate possible solutions. These homework assignments are usually assigned during key meetings and are due by the time of the next key meeting so that the results can be discussed. Project managers may want to maintain an action item register to keep track of all of the outstanding action items and homework assignments. Education and training are also key elements of the value attainment phase. Project teams typically conduct training sessions during or immediately after the project solution has been deployed. This is good, but they usually don't follow up to ensure that the training was successful or they don't train employees on how to achieve peak business performance. Training should be delivered and educational material should be disseminated to the appropriate groups impacted by the project solution. The training and educational material, furthermore, may have to be updated based on key project findings. For instance, a benefit owner may conclude that certain process steps can be eliminated to increase product delivery time to the customer. Enhancements to training material are good indicators that project teams are focusing on value and finding new or improved ways to optimize that value. As with performance reports, there are many different flavors to educational and training methods and material. Project teams should determine the most appropriate method for each of the specific groups involved. Such training can be formal, informal, handson, computer-based, internally driven, externally driven, and even self-paced. Risk and change management processes need to be carefully
implemented during the value attainment phase. There are risks associated with any type of business initiative or action. These risks will be greatly minimized when business initiatives are based on quantifiable performance metrics as opposed to abstract targets, but nonetheless, they will still exist and should be carefully evaluated and mitigated. Before implementing any change to the production environment, change control procedures should be carefully followed and the upcoming changes should be clearly communicated. The impacted teams and business units need to be informed well in advance of these upcoming change initiatives so they can take appropriate precautionary measures and develop back-out plans should the changes not go according to plan. At the conclusion of the value attainment phase, business leaders will be able to determine the true business value of their projects. They will be able to compare the forecasted results articulated in the business case against the actual results that they achieved. They will also be able to better determine why the targeted outcomes were or were not achieved. Once stakeholders are satisfied with the results or collectively determine that the project is at a point where it can be terminated, the project manager can then advance the project to the closeout phase. Business and project professionals must learn from their project efforts and determine what they did well, what they did poorly, and what they can improve on. They must also make a commitment to continuous improvement to ensure that the business stays focused on achieving increased value in order to remain competitive. These important concepts are discussed in Chapter 13. Professional Development Game Plan for Success 1. Value attainment plans are valuable tools for ensuring that specific and measurable business benefits can be achieved and even exceeded. How does your company manage value attainment? Is there a formal value attainment plan? Maybe it's
called a benefit realization plan or benefit management plan? How effective are they in facilitating value and benefit attainment? Action Plan a. Assess your company's posture on value attainment plans. What plan templates are available and readily accessible? How much value do they add? What is the process for assigning benefit owners? Does your company enforce and support the execution of the plans? How is accountability maintained? Based on your assessment, determine appropriate action plans that you can take to improve your company's posture toward value attainment plans. Consider the template of the plan itself as well as the execution of the plan. Write down three to five strategic but detailed actions that you can take or recommendations that you can make to improve your company's position toward value attainment plans. b. If your company does not embrace the use of value attainment plans, build your own business case (now that you know how to build an effective one!) to educate the appropriate management personnel on their importance and necessity for achieving maximum results from your projects. You may want to consider developing a template or putting together a slide presentation that discusses the merits of these plans. Who can you review your ideas with? Who should you be presenting them to? Go to your calendar and schedule the next step. 2. Organizations achieve consistently better business results from their projects when value metrics are monitored, evaluated, adjusted, and presented. Based on your project experience, how well are value metrics identified, monitored, and presented to management teams for review and input? Look for examples of how your measurements lead to actions that lead to improved business performance and record these. Did you use the most appropriate tools for tracking and presenting value metrics? Is this even a priority for your company or department? How effectively do you use the tools at your disposal in your job?
Action Plan a. Revisit two or three of your prior projects and assess how well value metrics were identified, monitored, adjusted, and presented. Evaluate the effectiveness of how performance reports were generated. Did the process lead to strong performance metrics that make business decisions easier? If not, where did they fall short? Were there more effective ways to generate them? What could have enhanced this part of the process? Evaluate the effectiveness of the contents of these reports. Was the information timely, relevant, and useful for decision making? Did the appropriate teams review the reports? Were they generated and disseminated at appropriate times? Create your own standard operating procedures for developing your value metrics and reports. Make it good enough to share with your team. Now write down what you will do or actions you will take on your current or future projects to ensure that the appropriate value metrics are properly tracked, measured, analyzed, tweaked, and reported. There are no wrong answers here. Your focus should be on those things you will do to ensure the targeted business benefits will be absolutely attained. This may require investigating various measurement tools, obtaining password permissions to use such tools, researching how measurements can be formatted or incorporated into management reports, or leveraging resources skilled in certain tasks for knowledge transfer sessions. Chapter 13: From Project Closure to Continuous Value Improvement Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. —Benjamin FranklinBeyond the Typical Lessons Learned
The primary purpose of lessons learned has typically been to review project management performance and execution to gather insights, both positive and negative, that can be usefully applied to future projects. Project teams usually identify which facets of the project were conducted successfully and which ones posed challenges and obstacles. The intent, then, is for project team members to learn from their past experiences to capitalize on the successes and to avoid the failures for future projects. Additionally, the output of lessons learned sessions should be made available for the rest of the organization so that other project teams can leverage the positive attributes and avoid repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, most organizations don't devote enough time and energy to this beneficial project activity and end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Since there is no transfer of knowledge or best practices from one project team to the next, the more appropriate moniker for this important project activity is lessons not learned. It behooves project managers, sponsors, and stakeholders to embrace this project activity and devote the necessary time and effort to ensure that the entire organization benefits from its outputs. Lessons learned sessions are also sometimes known as postmortems, project audits, and post-project reviews. I don't like these names because they have negative connotations and imply that they can only be useful on project closure. Besides, who really wants to be an active part of something called a post-mortem? I recommend sticking consistently to the term lessons learned as this clearly states the positive intent to learn from project lessons. Project teams can learn valuable lessons from their projects by taking these sessions seriously. Some of the questions project teams should attempt to answer in their lessons learned sessions include: · What did we learn from the project? · What strengths can we build on? · What can we do better? · How can we apply these lessons to our future projects?
· How can other project teams leverage these lessons learned for their projects? The answers to these basic questions can go a long way for future project teams, as well as for the professional development of project professionals. The concept of lessons learned is certainly not new. Sports coaches constantly apply lessons learned in the strategic management of their teams, game plans, schedules, and coaching staff. Lessons learned are applied at the end of the game to determine which strategies worked and which ones didn't so they can make adjustments before they face their next opponent. The good coaches, furthermore, not only apply lessons learned at the end of games, but utilize them at periodic points during the game, such as during time-outs, halftime sessions, between innings, between sets, and at various other points throughout the game. A bell should be going off in your heads right now: apply lessons learned throughout all phases of the project lifecycle and not just during project closeout! The lessons learned that are applied during project closeout, however, do serve as the grand finale and should be conducted and documented with precision and care to ensure their lasting effect throughout the organization. Lessons learned are not only reserved for athletic competitions and project endeavors; people apply lessons learned on a daily basis. When you go out to a new restaurant, for instance, and find the service to be dreadful and the food awful, will you go there again? Probably not. That's a lesson learned, albeit the hard way! Some of the areas for improvement in a typical lessons learned session are that they are predictable, lack depth, and don't add much value for professional development or for other project teams. Common takeaways from most lessons learned sessions include rather shallow, insubstantial lessons, such as: · Not enough time · Not enough people · Not enough management support
· Too many hidden costs · Too many other commitments for project team members · Not enough planning · Too many unrealistic expectations For the most part, there will never be enough time, resources, or management support and there will always be hidden costs and other commitments. We need to stop rushing through this important project activity and avoid producing a laundry list of so-called lessons learned. The process involves much more than a quick brain dump of what comes to mind, but rather requires detailed and thorough analysis that requires analytical thinking and even investigative work to uncover some of the not-so-obvious project lessons. For lessons learned to be useful, all project teams throughout organizations must be able to leverage them and apply them to their projects. So instead of saying there wasn't enough time, find out why there wasn't enough time, how planning could have been conducted more efficiently to account for the necessary time requirements, how to better optimize resources' time, and what meetings or activities distracted from project commitments. Now this information would be useful for other project teams trying to navigate the complexities and obstacles of their projects. The focus of lessons learned is nearly always on the qualitative side of project management and execution and not on the quantitative side of business results and value. Of course it's important to capture the qualitative side of lessons learned, because project teams can benefit greatly with this information. But it's absolutely essential to discuss and evaluate, in detail, whether or not the business benefits and project financial returns were achieved. These are the reasons for the project in the first place and can't be glanced over during lessons learned. This is what business leaders really need to know so they can continue implementing those strategies that increase value and avoid those that do not produce desirable results. By executing the value attainment plan, project teams compare
the financial and quantitative forecasts from the business case against the actual results. Quantitative lessons should be learned during the value attainment phase and at project closure. A few of the results-oriented, quantitative questions that should be asked during lessons learned sessions include: · Why wasn't the projected net present value achieved? · Why did the investment break even long after the forecasted payback period? · How did we fall 11% lower than our forecasted IRR? · How did employee productivity increase even more than the expected percentage? · Why didn't customer satisfaction increase to the targeted level? By asking and discussing these types of quantitative questions, project teams aren't merely providing lip service during lessons learned sessions but are getting to the heart and soul of why the project contributed, or didn't contribute, to the overall success of the company. It is absolutely necessary to revisit the business case during lessons learned sessions, because this document served as the basis for the project investment and specified the expected outcomes. In addition to comparing actual results against forecasted results, you will also gain extremely valuable insight into the effectiveness of the initial business case so that you can leverage these for your own professional development. Inaccuracies in the business case may cost businesses money and may even lead to the implementation of undesirable project investments. It's imperative, therefore, to revisit and scrutinize the assumptions, the costs, the benefits, the cash flows, the estimates, and financial calculations to uncover any and all lessons that could be learned and usefully applied elsewhere. Keep in mind that other project team members are developing business cases for their projects and are struggling with similar assumptions, estimates, cost determinations, and cash flow projections. They can benefit greatly by leveraging a detailed and comprehensive results-oriented repository of lessons
learned surrounding the business case. There will always be those stakeholders who like to ask, "Why did you make this assumption?" or "Why didn't you include these cost elements?" Monday morning quarterbacks always find their way into lessons learned sessions! These questions, however, are good ones, and project professionals should be prepared to answer them. Many of these Monday morning quarter-backs may find out, much to their chagrin, that business cases were prepared inaccurately because they did not engage in the development process to the level expected of them. Additionally, they may have hurriedly signed off on these important business documents without proper analysis. The successful execution of projects requires the commitment and input from all stakeholders. This is why they are stakeholders in the first place. The evaluation and analysis of stakeholder involvement is not off limits during lessons learned sessions. Stakeholders play strategic roles for many projects, and businesses can't afford to have them making the same mistakes from project to project. (For those not familiar with American football, a Monday morning quarterback is someone who criticizes the performances of the various football teams and players who played on that Sunday—yes, like many of our stakeholder friends on project completion.) If the project team concludes that the business case was solid and the contents were reasonably accurate, but the project failed to deliver the expected outcomes, the lessons to be learned will usually apply to the execution of value attainment efforts. These lessons learned can be anything from the lack of follow-on training to incomplete documentation to inadequately skilled resources. The only way to get to the root-causes of why the quantitative results weren't achieved is to do a detailed and comprehensive review of all of the activities that contributed, or did not contribute, to the attainment of the expected benefits. Each and every one of the targeted benefits should be carefully analyzed to uncover the lessons to be learned as to why these results fell short or possibly even exceeded the forecasts. Table
13.1 shows an example of how lessons learned can be applied to the business objectives set forth in the business case. Table 13.1: Quantitative lessons learned Open table as spreadsheet Project Sierra Business quantitative benefit Actual result Variance Lessons learned ROI-contributing benefits Increase package deliveries by 5%, from 50,000 to 52,500 per week Package deliveries increased by only 2.4%, from 50,000 to 51,200 -2.6% (1,300 packages short of goal) Project team did not provide enough advanced notification to the warehouses of the new package sorter. As a result, the warehouse teams could not free up their resources to attend training on the new package sorter. They were, therefore, unable to leverage the advanced features of the new equipment. For future initiatives that involve warehouse employees, a minimum of four months notification is required to allow for planning and schedule adjustments. Reduce vehicle maintenance costs by 10% Vehicle maintenance costs decreased by only 6.5% -3.5% All of the vendor costs were not accounted for in the business case. These costs included shipping, taxes, and vendor travel. The project team did not delve deep enough into the vendor cost structures and made poor assumptions. For future projects, supplier management and finance representation will be included in vendor pricing discussions and business case development activities. Reduce maintenance FTE headcount by 2.5% Headcount was reduced 2.5%
0% The project team did an excellent job of involving senior executives and human resource representatives in the early planning phases of the project. This allowed for proper and thorough planning that resulted in the achievement of this goal. Value-enabling benefits Increase customer satisfaction index rating from 3.2 to 3.5 (out of 5.0) Customer satisfaction index rating decreased to 3.0 out of 5.0 -0.5 from the objective We overpromised and underdelivered. We should not have been so aggressive in our marketing campaign, promising so many benefits for a solution that hasn’t been thoroughly proven or tested. We will not employ such tactics in the future unless we have concrete evidence that the solution produced expected results in a small scale or prototype environment. Improved driver morale to a level from 3.5 to 4.0 (out of 5.0) Driver morale increased to 4.2. +0.2 from the objective The maintenance program improved the reliability of the vehicles, and drivers did not encounter nearly the amount of vehicle malfunctions as before the program. Additionally, drivers appreciated the quick tips guide that the project team developed to assist them in troubleshooting basic problems. For future projects, we will ensure such guides are developed. To capture the relevant results-oriented lessons learned, project managers must include business owners, key stakeholders, and other representatives, as appropriate, in these thought- provoking discussions. Quantitative lessons learned go beyond the core project team and way beyond typical project management checklists. These strategic sessions focus on the business and operational issues of value attainment and growth. Benefit owners, operational teams, and key stakeholders are the ones who are capable of influencing their organizations and should, therefore, be included in lessons learned sessions. These strategic players will serve as stakeholders and decision makers
for other projects and can apply these results-oriented lessons learned to those projects as well. It's imperative to not only identify lessons learned, but to document them, store them to an easily accessible online repository and ensure that all project teams are leveraging them. Lessons learned must be an integral component to all phases of the project management lifecycle, so include the beginning stages. In Chapter 2 we talked about the importance of planning and how too many project teams rush into the execution phases of their projects. An important component to the planning process is the evaluation of lessons learned from other projects. Lessons learned is not only a post-project activity or an activity that occurs at periodic points along the project lifecycle, but must be a front-end activity as well. Project professionals can glean tremendous insight from reviewing other lessons learned, such as where they need to beef up resources, where they should allow more time for certain activities, which change agents to include, and which cost elements may produce overruns. Transferring knowledge from one project to another offers tremendous benefits, improves project performance, and ultimately leads to project success and value attainment. Value Attainment Doesn't Stop! Now that the project is over and all of the benefits have been achieved, the organization can take a breather and go back to doing business as usual. Right? Wrong! Too many business professionals, unfortunately, take this view and feel that the completion of a project indicates the end of the game; the whistle has blown, it's time to put this one behind us and move on. When the whistle blows in sports, it may indicate the end of a game, but do the coaches and players stop planning, hitting the weight room, running wind sprints, and improving their overall performance? Of course not. They know they have to contend with other opponents on other days. These opponents certainly haven't stopped upgrading their game plans and improving their performance. In the business world, the
competition hasn't stopped striving for that elusive competitive edge, nor should you. Just because a project has been completed, it doesn't mean that all of the heavy lifting is done. In fact, there's more lifting to do and the weights aren't getting any lighter. Projects may have been executed flawlessly and achieved their targeted objectives, but perfection can never be achieved; there's always room for improvement and the competition isn't standing still. Continuous value improvement of project results is not only possible but necessary to remain competitive in the challenging business environment. Maintaining and, more importantly, increasing the business value that was achieved from project deployments requires a culture of continuous improvement. Without such a culture, organizations often find themselves backsliding and losing the momentum that they achieved with all of their project efforts. When projects come to a close and resources are deployed elsewhere, too often the focus on maintaining and increasing those project value returns comes to an end. When this occurs, organizations often go back to their old ways of doing business, which leads to deteriorating performance and results. Figure 13.1 gives an example of how business results may suffer when companies lose focus on business value and continuous improvement during project closure. As can be seen, all of the business gains that were achieved during the value attainment phase quickly dissipated on project closeout. Figure 13.1: Deteriorating performance after project closure The purpose of the value attainment phase is to achieve, and even exceed, peak performance and results. Once these performance results have been attained, the bar has been set, proverbially speaking. The performance bar has been raised and set to a higher level due to the tireless work of the project team. It's now up to the management and operational teams to ensure that performance results never slip below this new level. Business leaders must make concerted efforts to ensure that their teams don't backslide and go back to doing business as
usual, resulting in poorer performance. Managers should keep their measurement systems in place and continue monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting results for peak performance. This value focus must become a normal part of doing business. It is an essential component to a culture of continuous improvement. Nobody says that business leaders and stakeholders can't continue to receive performance reports on project closure. It is good business practice for leaders to stay abreast of performance metrics. Managers rely on quantitative reports to assess the business and to make strategic decisions based on business measurements. Business performance reports that can be quite useful for managers include budgets, sales reports, production trends, time and cost savings reports, network statistics, staffing levels, productivity parameters, and marketing forecasts. Quantitative data prevents leaders from always making key decisions from the gut. Since measurement systems are already in place due to value attainment efforts, operational teams can continue to generate, analyze, and present performance reports. The project may be over but decision makers still need to evaluate business results to ensure they are not backsliding to pre-project performance levels and are trending in the right direction. As we've stressed throughout, the business environment is dynamic and constantly changing. If business leaders don't take concentrated measures to ensure their businesses are keeping pace with this dynamic environment, the changes will overwhelm them and they are more apt to lose control of the business or respective areas of the business. Even though a project may have delivered quality products or services, these project outputs have to be continually adjusted and readjusted to the changing business environment. The moment organizations cease improvement or optimization efforts is the moment they open themselves up to performance degradation and diminishing profits. When performance objectives have been achieved from project efforts, business leaders must update and formalize both
internal and external business contracts, such as operating- and service-level agreements (OLAs/SLAs), with the new performance standards. These elevated performance metrics become the new baseline which continued performance is measured. If the help desk, for instance, can now accommodate 250 service requests per day instead of the pre-project number of 200, this becomes the new standard and the help desk's new obligation to the business. If it takes financial analysts 15 seconds to access critical reports during peak periods of the day instead of the pre-project time of 45 seconds, this is the new standard and IT's new obligation to the business. I think you get the point, but to reemphasize: Performance shouldnever fall back to pre-project performance levels. Maintaining a quantitative focus on results after project closure and constantly striving to improve those results can prevent backsliding and lead to maintained or increased performance levels. Figure 13.2 shows how performance charts should look several time periods beyond project closure. Figure 13.2: Increasing performance after project closure With business distractions occurring every single day, it's tempting to eschew strategic continuous improvement initiatives to focus on tactical fire-fighting issues. This is especially true when businesses are achieving acceptable levels of performance. Too often, however, businesses become satisfied with the status quo and simply strive to maintain it. We've all heard the popular adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and too many businesses adopt this mantra as their own. Many of the businesses that have adopted this mantra aren't around anymore! This adage may apply to some areas in life, but it certainly doesn't apply to today's competitive business environment. The adage that successful companies have adopted to remain competitive is, if it ain't broke, fix it anyway. When companies wait around for their products, processes, systems, or other essential areas to break, it's much more expensive to fix those breakages than it is to take small, simple measures to ensure
that they don't break in the first place. When companies take proactive measures to continuously improve performance in all areas of their business, they become better positioned to maintain and increase that all-important competitive edge. Businesses don't need to incorporate fancy, over- intellectualized management philosophies or techniques to ensure a culture of continuous improvement. We've seen some of the management philosophies and variations of those philosophies that have been introduced and re-introduced over the past century in Chapter 1. Organizations can embrace and implement any methodology or philosophy in which they are comfortable in order to instill a culture of continuous improvement. There are certainly merits to each and every one of the management approaches. At the foundation of nearly all continuous improvement approaches and methodologies lies the popular, effective, and straightforward approach called the Deming cycle. For this reason, I strongly recommend leveraging this approach in structuring your continuous improvement activities. The Deming cycle is a continuous improvement methodology that focuses on four main stages, to include Plan, Do, Check, and Act. These four stages are repeated over time to ensure continuous learning and improvements in a product, process, or service. By leveraging the Deming cycle, companies achieve and maintain a culture of steady, ongoing improvement in practically all areas of their businesses. Figure 13.3 is a graphical depiction of the Deming cycle of continuous improvement. Placing this simple picture on your office door or wall can serve as a useful reminder that value attainment never stops and that continuous improvement must be an ongoing process. Figure 13.3: The Deming cycle When projects formally end, value attainment and continuous improvement efforts must not. By incorporating the Deming
cycle into the operational aspects of business, companies can maintain a quantitative focus on business value and continually improve bottom-line results. Significant amounts of time, money, and resources are expended on project investments to achieve positive business results; it's an absolute shame when these results diminish on project closure. I'm sure you wouldn't like to see the financial returns of your personal investments dissipate after attaining all-time highs. Well, business leaders and shareholders certainly don't want to see the returns of their project investments diminish either. This is what happens, however, when businesses lose focus on maintaining and improving business results on project closure. The Deming cycle is a straightforward, proven approach that enables continuous improvement and quality assurance. In leveraging the Deming cycle, organizations can employ quantitative measurement techniques and procedures to ensure that returns on project investments continue to trend favorably, keeping the shareholder investors satisfied with their returns. A quick note on Deming. Dr. W. Edwards Deming was a pioneer in the field of quality and business management. His most notable achievement during his lifetime was the tremendous impact he had on the Japanese postwar industrial revival by teaching his quantitative approaches to quality management and continuous improvement. He taught that business processes and operational procedures should be constantly measured and evaluated to identify sources of variation that cause deviations from customer requirements. To ensure continuous improvement, he recommended that business processes be placed in a continuous feedback loop to allow business leaders to identify and modify the parts of the process that need improvements. In addition to the Deming cycle, he is also well known for other revolutionary approaches, such as the fourteen points, system of profound knowledge, and seven deadly diseases. There is a wealth of information out there covering this visionary's life and teachings. I highly recommend exploring some of his works. You won't be disappointed.
I was fortunate to have been a part of a Deming focus group early in my career where we studied the intricacies of his methods and philosophy. To this day I have not found an approach that is as straightforward, understandable, and effective as the Deming cycle with regard to continuous improvement and quality enhancement. That is not to say that other methods aren't as good, or even more effective, but I feel that the Deming cycle can be used universally across all businesses in all industries with the most ease. Of course, organizations should employ whatever method works for them, but at the core of any of these methods usually lie the four simple components of the Deming approach. Let's explore the four stages of the Deming cycle and see how they can be leveraged for your continuous improvement efforts: 1. PLAN: This stage involves analyzing the current situation, gathering data, recognizing opportunities, and developing ways to make improvements. These activities usually occur when a formal project is being executed, but once project deliverables are handed over to steady-state operations, they usually cease. Operational teams can and must perform these planning activities as part of their normal job functions. The operational goal is to continuously measure and improve on baseline performance metrics. Managers need to identify those areas that are not operating at peak capacity and devise solutions to rectify the problems. It's important for business units to focus intently on their respective money makers and not get too caught up in the weeds. Business leaders should focus primarily on those areas that produce the greatest business value and have the greatest impact on their organizations. There will always be low hanging fruit and it's good to achieve these quick hits, but concerted efforts should be taken continuously to improve those areas that most directly impact overall profitability. 2. DO: In this stage business professionals implement improvement ideas. It's advisable to implement changes in small-scale, testing or pilot environments to assess the effectiveness before deploying them to wider or production
environments. Conflicts and glitches may arise during this stage that should be resolved before proceeding with the change or solution on a larger scale. The actions that are taken in the Do stage are usually operational procedures such as changing configuration parameters of a system, upgrading hardware revisions, automating process steps, or consolidating software platforms. These operational tasks may seem innocuous to some folks, but they can have adverse effects if they don't go as planned. For this reason, strict change and risk control procedures should always be followed. 3. CHECK: Business professionals should now review the changes, analyze the results, verify their effectiveness and identify lessons to be learned so they can be applied when implementing the change to the wider or production environment. Remember, lessons learned is a continuous process and doesn't simply occur on project closure. Managers should verify that the desired results are being attained and that quality standards are also being achieved. Operational teams should also investigate any problems that result from the change and address them appropriately. Finally, the measurement reports should be presented to decision makers for analysis and approval. 4. ACT: Once the change has been verified and approved in the small scale environment, operations teams can now fully implement the changes into the production environment or to the wider audience, leveraging what was learned in the previous stages. Risk and change control procedures should again be strictly followed. Managers must continually measure and verify the results of the fully deployed solution until they are confident that the results are repeatable and sustainable. Once all of the stages are successfully completed and business leaders are satisfied with the results, the improvements resulting from the changes are now standardized. The proverbial bar has been raised to a new level, and this level becomes the new and improved baseline. These new performance standards must be fully documented in all relevant documentation, such as
OLAs, SLAs, and vendor contracts. The new performance standard is again subject to further improvement, given business requirements and timelines. The Deming cycle, thus, is repeated again and again continuously monitoring, measuring, and improving them, ensuring that companies don't become complacent. For some companies, embracing philosophies of continuous improvement, constant learning, and unceasing focus on quality may require complete cultural transformations. But for most companies, the tenets of these philosophies already exist in some form or another, and it's usually simply a matter of focus and emphasis to ensure they are being followed. This strategic focus must begin at the top and must be filtered throughout the entire organization so that all business professionals are on board and are conducting appropriate continuous improvement activities. Projects may be officially closed out and core project teams disbanded, but the roles of senior managers, business owners, subject matter experts, and staff members certainly aren't going anywhere. When these key roles possess a perpetual focus on performance improvement, the financial returns and other business benefits resulting from project investments won't be wasted but will continue to trend favorably for the long haul. This is what it's all about. Professional Development Game Plan for Success 1. Lessons learned sessions are tremendously valuable project activities when conducted thoroughly and with a quantitative, results-oriented focus. These sessions are useful for core project team members, stakeholders, extended team members, and even other project teams throughout the organization. What has your experience been with lessons learned? Have you learned from them? Do you leverage lessons learned from previous or other projects when embarking on a new project? Do you employ a quantitative, results-oriented focus? Is it a mandatory requirement to conduct, document, and post lessons learned on project completion? What about when embarking on a project?
Is it a mandatory requirement to leverage lessons learned from a central repository to assist with planning efforts? Action Plan a. Pick two or three of the lessons learned sessions in which you've been involved over the years. Evaluate their effectiveness and usefulness. What did you learn from them? How did they enhance your professional development? What do you do differently as a result of them? How does your organization share lessons learned? What quantitative project aspects do they focus on? As a result of your analysis, write down five to eight activities you will do differently on your next project to ensure that lessons learned are not only conducted, but conducted in a way that is truly beneficial for the project team as well as other project teams throughout your organization. Think about some of the things you will do throughout all phases of the project and not just during project closeout. You may want to leverage any lessons learned templates and consider revising them, or perhaps you need to develop them from scratch. I'm sure you can think of many improvement areas. Start writing! 2. Continuous improvement initiatives ensure that the returns from project investments don't diminish on project closure but continue to improve long after these project milestones. How does your organization foster continuous improvement? What methodologies or approaches are followed to ensure continuous improvement? How long does your company measure and report on projects after closure? Action Plan a. Think about what happens after your project deliverables are submitted for approval, the project team disbands, and the project is officially closed. Does business as usual resume or do operations teams embrace the project outputs and use them to improve performance? Now think about several months to a year after project closure. Has performance improved, declined, or stayed steady? Revisit two or three of your prior projects that have been closed for at least a year and assess how your
organization is currently performing as a result of those projects. What conclusions can you make? Record five to eight activities or processes that could have been done differently to improve overall performance. This includes what could have been done during the project, as well as after project closure. These can include transition activities, performance reporting, performance checkpoint meetings, operational tasks, improvement methodologies, or leadership practices. Be specific. Be sure to include anything that you could have done that would have improved performance over the last year or so. b. Now write down what you will do or actions you will take on your current or future projects to ensure that performance parameters keep improving long after project closure. Record three to five continuous improvement actions that you will take or will influence. What will you do to maintain the momentum and ensure that the business results continually improve? How will you interact with operations teams? With management teams? What mechanisms or tools are in place or need to be in place for continuous improvement? How can you leverage these mechanisms or tools? Write them down! Chapter 4 - Project Integration Management A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), Fifth Edition by Project Management Institute Project Management Institute © 2013 Citation 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control Perform Integrated Change Control is the process of reviewing all change requests; approving changes and managing changes to deliverables, organizational process assets, project documents, and the project management plan; and communicating their disposition. It reviews all requests for changes or modifications to project documents, deliverables, baselines, or the project management plan and approves or rejects the changes. The key benefit of this process is that it
allows for documented changes within the project to be considered in an integrated fashion while reducing project risk, which often arises from changes made without consideration to the overall project objectives or plans. The inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs of this process are depicted in Figure 4- 10. Figure 4-11 depicts the data flow diagram of the process. Figure 4-10: Perform Integrated Change Control: Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs The Perform Integrated Change Control process is conducted from project inception through completion and is the ultimate responsibility of the project manager. The project management plan, the project scope statement, and other deliverables are maintained by carefully and continuously managing changes, either by rejecting changes or by approving changes, thereby assuring that only approved changes are incorporated into a revised baseline. Changes may be requested by any stakeholder involved with the project. Although changes may be initiated verbally, they should be recorded in written form and entered into the change management and/or configuration management system. Change requests are subject to the process specified in the change control and configuration control systems. Those change request processes may require information on estimated time impacts and estimated cost impacts. Every documented change request needs to be either approved or rejected by a responsible individual, usually the project sponsor or project manager. The responsible individual will be identified in the project management plan or by organizational procedures. When required, the Perform Integrated Change Control process includes a change control board (CCB), which is a formally chartered group responsible for reviewing, evaluating, approving, delaying, or rejecting changes to the project, and for recording and communicating such decisions. Approved change requests can require new or revised cost
estimates, activity sequences, schedule dates, resource requirements, and analysis of risk response alternatives. These changes can require adjustments to the project management plan and other project documents. The applied level of change control is dependent upon the application area, complexity of the specific project, contract requirements, and the context and environment in which the project is performed. Customer or sponsor approval may be required for certain change requests after CCB approval, unless they are part of the CCB. Configuration control is focused on the specification of both the deliverables and the processes; while change control is focused on identifying, documenting, and approving or rejecting changes to the project documents, deliverables, or baselines. Some of the configuration management activities included in the Perform Integrated Change Control process are as follows: · Configuration identification. Identification and selection of a configuration item to provide the basis for which the product configuration is defined and verified, products and documents are labeled, changes are managed, and accountability is maintained. · Configuration status accounting. Information is recorded and reported as to when appropriate data about the configuration item should be provided. This information includes a listing of approved configuration identification, status of proposed changes to the configuration, and the implementation status of approved changes. · Configuration verification and audit. Configuration verification and configuration audits ensure the composition of a project’s configuration items is correct and that corresponding changes are registered, assessed, approved, tracked, and correctly implemented. This ensures the functional requirements defined in the configuration documentation have been met. 4.5.1 Perform Integrated Change Control: Inputs4.5.1.1 Project Management Plan Described in Section 4.2.3.1. Elements of the project management plan that may be used include, but are not limited
to: · Scope management plan, which contains the procedures for scope changes; · Scope baseline, which provides product definition; and · Change management plan, which provides the direction for managing the change control process and documents the formal change control board (CCB). Changes are documented and updated within the project management plan as part of the change and configuration management processes.4.5.1.2 Work Performance Reports Described in Section 4.4.3.2. Work performance reports of particular interest to the Perform Integrated Change Control process include resource availability, schedule and cost data, and earned value management (EVM) reports, burnup or burndown charts.4.5.1.3 Change Requests All of the Monitoring and Controlling processes and many of the Executing processes produce change requests as an output. Change requests may include corrective action, preventive action, and defect repairs. However, corrective and preventive actions do not normally affect the project baselines—only the performance against the baselines.4.5.1.4 Enterprise Environmental Factors Described in Section 2.1.5. The following enterprise environmental factor can influence the Perform Integrated Change Control process: project management information system. The project management information system may include the scheduling software tool, a configuration management system, an information collection and distribution system, or web interfaces to other online automated systems.4.5.1.5 Organizational Process Assets Described in Section 2.1.4. The organizational process assets that can influence the Perform Integrated Change Control process include, but are not limited to: · Change control procedures, including the steps by which official organization standards, policies, plans, and other project documents will be modified, and how any changes will
be approved, validated, and implemented; · Procedures for approving and issuing change authorizations; · Process measurement database used to collect and make available measurement data on processes and products; · Project documents (e.g., scope, cost, and schedule baselines, project calendars, project schedule network diagrams, risk registers, planned response actions, and defined risk impact); and Configuration management knowledge base containing the versions and baselines of all official organization standards, policies, procedures, and any project documents. 4.5.2 Perform Integrated Change Control: Tools and Techniques4.5.2.1 Expert Judgment In addition to the project management team’s expert judgment, stakeholders may be asked to provide their expertise and may be asked to sit on the change control board (CCB). Such judgment and expertise are applied to any technical and management details during this process and may be provided by various sources, for example: · Consultants, · Stakeholders, including customers or sponsors, · Professional and technical associations, · Industry groups, · Subject matter experts (SMEs), and · Project management office (PMO).4.5.2.2 Meetings In this case, these meetings are usually referred to as change control meetings. When needed for the project, a change control board (CCB) is responsible for meeting and reviewing the change requests and approving, rejecting, or other disposition of those changes. The CCB may also review configuration management activities. The roles and responsibilities of these boards are clearly defined and agreed upon by appropriate stakeholders and documented in the change management plan. CCB decisions are documented and communicated to the
stakeholders for information and follow-up actions.4.5.2.3 Change Control Tools In order to facilitate configuration and change management, manual or automated tools may be used. Tool selection should be based on the needs of the project stakeholders including organizational and environmental considerations and/or constraints. Tools are used to manage the change requests and the resulting decisions. Additional considerations should be made for communication to assist the CCB members in their duties as well as distribute the decisions to the appropriate stakeholders. 4.5.3 Perform Integrated Change Control: Outputs4.5.3.1 Approved Change Requests Change requests are processed according to the change control system by the project manager, CCB, or by an assigned team member. Approved change requests will be implemented through the Direct and Manage Project Work process. The disposition of all change requests, approved or not, will be updated in the change log as part of updates to the project documents.4.5.3.2 Change Log A change log is used to document changes that occur during a project. These changes and their impact to the project in terms of time, cost, and risk, are communicated to the appropriate stakeholders. Rejected change requests are also captured in the change log.4.5.3.3 Project Management Plan Updates Elements of the project management plan that may be updated include, but are not limited to: · Any subsidiary plans, and · Baselines that are subject to the formal change control process. Changes to baselines should only show the changes from the current time forward. Past performance may not be changed. This protects the integrity of the baselines and the historical data of past performance.4.5.3.4 Project Documents Updates Project documents that may be updated as a result of the
Perform Integrated Change Control process include all documents specified as being subject to the project’s formal change control process. Table 3-1 reflects the mapping of the 47 project management processes within the 5 Project Management Process Groups and the 10 Knowledge Areas. Table 3-1: Project Management Process Group and Knowledge Area Mapping Open table as spreadsheet (ATTACHED) Project Management Process Groups Knowledge Areas Initiating Process Group Planning Process Group Executing Process Group Monitoring and Controlling Process Group Closing Process Group 4. Project Integration Management 4.1 Develop Project Charter 4.2 Develop Project Management Plan 4.3 Direct and Manage Project Work 4.4 Monitor and Control Project Work 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control 4.6 Close Project or Phase 5. Project Scope Management 5.1 Plan Scope Management 5.2 Collect Requirements
5.3 Define Scope 5.4 Create WBS 5.5 Validate Scope 5.6 Control Scope 6. Project Time Management 6.1 Plan Schedule Management 6.2 Define Activities 6.3 Sequence Activities 6.4 Estimate Activity Resources 6.5 Estimate Activity Durations 6.6 Develop Schedule 6.7 Control Schedule 7. Project Cost Management 7.1 Plan Cost Management 7.2 Estimate Costs 7.3 Determine Budget 7.4 Control Costs 8. Project Quality Management 8.1 Plan Quality Management 8.2 Perform Quality Assurance 8.3 Control Quality 9. Project Human Resource Management 9.1 Plan Human Resource Management 9.2 Acquire Project Team 9.3 Develop Project Team
9.4 Manage Project Team 10. Project Communications Management 10.1 Plan Communications Management 10.2 Manage Communications 10.3 Control Communications 11. Project Risk Management 11.1 Plan Risk Management 11.2 Identify Risks 11.3 Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis 11.4 Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis 11.5 Plan Risk Responses 11.6 Control Risks 12. Project Procurement Management 12.1 Plan Procurement Management 12.2 Conduct Procurements 12.3 Control Procurements 12.4 Close Procurements 13. Project Stakeholder Management 13.1 Identify Stakeholders 13.2 Plan Stakeholder Management 13.3 Manage Stakeholder Engagement 13.4 Control Stakeholder Engagement
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Samples from GM591 Students Select one of the sample diagr.docx

  • 1. Samples from GM591 Students Select one of the sample diagrams (below) for the Unit 6 Project Management Process Mapping Assignment and discuss each of the five process groups showing the inputs, tools, techniques and, outputs of each of the 47 processes. The samples below do a nice job depicting inputs, outputs, tools, and techniques. Each of the five required process maps should provide applicable inputs, outputs, tools and techniques. Appendix 1 – Process Group Flowchart Figure A-Project Management Processes Project Statement of work Business case
  • 2. Contract Agreements Enterprise environmental factors Organizational assets Procurement Documents Stakeholder register Stakeholder Management strategy Project Charter Project charter Outputs from other processes Enterprise environ. factors Schedule forecasts Cost forecasts
  • 3. Validated changes Work performance information Resource Calendars Risk Register Cost estimates HR Mgmt. plan Approved Change Requests Project Document Updates Performance Reports Project document updates Organizational process updates Quality control measurements Verified deliverables Performance assessments
  • 4. Communication updates Executing Process Group Initiating Process Group Planning Process Group Closing Process Group Monitoring and
  • 5. Controlling Process Group Project Mgmt. plan Scope mgmt. plan Requirements mgmt. plan Requirements documentation Requirements traceability matrix Project Scope Statem. Projects docum. Updates Scope Baseline Schedule Mgmt. Plan Activity list Activity attributes Milestone list
  • 6. Project schedule network diagram Project document updates Activity resource requirements Resource breakdown structure Project documents updates Activity duration estimates Project calendars Cost mgmt. plan Cost estimates Project Mgmt., Plan Schedule forecasts Validated changes
  • 7. Work performance information Issue log Deliverables Change requests Project document updates Quality mgmt. plan Quality metrics Quality control measurements HR Mgmt. Project staff assignments Resource calendars Change request Work performance reports Project mgmt. plan updates Project document updates Schedule forecasts
  • 8. Project Management Process Mapping -showing the inputs, tools, techniques and, outputs of each of the 47 processes. Project Management Process Group and Process Diagram Start Finish Organization Environment Factors Project Initiator or Sponsor Initiating Process Group Planning Process Group Executing
  • 9. Process Group Monitoring and Controlling Process Group Closing Process Group Project Initiator or Sponsor Customer Organizational culture Project Management Information System Human resource pool Policies, procedures, standards, guidelines Defined processes His torical information Less on learned Statement of wo rk Contract Project charter Preliminary project scope statement Project management plan Organizational process assets
  • 10. (update) Final product, serv ice, resu lt Adminis trative closure procedure Contract clos ure procedure Project sponsor s vis ion Devel op Project team Deliverables Requested changes Manage stakeholders expectati ons Conduct procurement Implemented change requests Implemented corrective actions Implemented preventive actions Implemented defect repair Work performance information Approved changed requests Rejected chang e reques ts Approved corrective actions Approved preventi ve actions Approved defect repair Project management plan update Project scope statement update Control quality Control cost Control s chedule Approved deliverables Performance reports Manage project communication
  • 11. Individual Project Part B - Self-Management Skills/Traits Inventory Self-management skills/traits are the things that make you unique. People often fail to identify these attributes as skills, or to give themselves credit for using them, yet they impact professional identity, the work that is done and the way that it is done. Self-management skills/traits are often considered as professional, leadership, and personal traits; and some are highly desirable to business organizations. To help you sharpen your focus on who you are, and to identify your current strengths, work through this checklist of personal skills/trait characteristics. First, read each word and under the left-side Mastered column, check (X) all of the skills/traits that other people (family, friends, co-workers) would say describe you as you are now (NOTE: if others have recognized the associated behaviors being demonstrated by you then it suggests this is a strong natural trait or one that you have already mastered). Second, to prepare yourself for your next move forward on your profession/future career path, look at the list a second time, and specifically at the skills/traits you did not check, and under the right side Need column check (X) the 5 or 6 self-management skills/traits you feel you currently don’t have but see as being an important benefit in the future. MasteredNeedMasteredNeedMasteredNeedMasteredNeed academic diligent
  • 20. practical versatile Individual Project Part B - Key Leadership Competencies Self- Assement Directions: 1. BEFORE YOU START consider where you want to be professionally 5 years from when you graduate, and the specific nature and requirements of the type of job or area of specialization you envision yourself having – for example Project Manager of a major road reconstruction project. (If you are not sure what the nature or requirements of you envisioned job might be do an internet search of job descriptions) 2. NEXT STEP,now based on your past experiences and your present level of experience, knowledge, and/or skill, read each of the competency sets on the next 3 pages, and using the following scale, rate your current level of mastery for each competency: (N) None – I have very little or noexperience or skills in this competency area (B) Basic – I have a general understanding and could work in simple situations with support and coaching from others (C) Competent – I have a good understanding and can work in situations of moderate difficulty without support or coaching from others (P) Mastery – I have a well-developed understanding and could work in difficult situations with minimal support and coaching from others 3. FINAL STEP,firstreview the list and considering only the
  • 21. competencies you checked/circled as N or B, identify and list the three competencies you believe will be most important for you to have in the next 5 years. Then review the list a second time considering only the competencies you have checked/circled as C or P and identify and list the three competencies you believe to be your greatest assets/strengths. Three most important competencies I will need to develop over next 5 years 1. 2. 3. My five strongest competencies 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Set 1: Competencies Required for Effectively Leading Oneself 1.1 Self-Management The ability to effectively organize, direct, and manage one’s own activities, time, priorities, and resources towards the achievement of one’s objectives and goals. Includes (requires) the skills of goal-setting, planning, scheduling, time management, self-evaluation, and self-development. N B C P
  • 22. 1.2 Initiative and Perseverance The willingness and ability to begin, and the determination to follow through energetically with a plan or task. Without being asked or directed, plans ahead for upcoming problems or opportunities; takes appropriate action, typically doing more than is required or expected; and stays on task, without being easy discourage, until objectives and goals are achieved. N B C P 1.3 Results Driven The ability to set specific, measurable improvement goals and to make timely and effective decisions, that through strategic
  • 23. planning will produce successful results. Demonstrates concern for meeting objectives in a timely manner within the standards of cost and quality. N B C P 1.4 Critical Thinking The ability to disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open- minded, and informed by evidence to understand the nature an significance of problems and to evaluate arguments (reasons and their companion conclusions) N B C P
  • 24. 1.5 Decision-making/Judgment Perceives the impact, implications, and potential consequences of decisions and as a result exercises good judgment by making timely, rational, and well-informed decisions that take into account the facts, goals, constraints, and risks. N B C P 1.6 Flexibility/Adaptability Is open to change and new information; can adjust and adapt work behaviors and methods in response to new information, changing conditions, or unexpected obstacles. N B C P
  • 25. 1.7 Integrity/Honesty Instills mutual trust and confidence; creates a culture that fosters high standards of ethics; behaves in a fair and ethical manner toward others N B C P 1.8 Continual Learning Recognizes one’s own strengths and weaknesses and seeks
  • 26. feedback from others for improvement; engages in self- development and takes advantage of opportunities to master new knowledge and skills. N B C P Set 2: Competencies Required for Effectively Leading Groups 2.1 Teamwork/Teambuilding The ability to foster commitment and trust of a group, and develop within them a sense of pride and cohesiveness, while inspiring, encouraging, and guiding them towards goal accomplishments. N B C P
  • 27. 2.2 Written Communication Has the ability to express facts and ideas in writing in a clear, convincing, and organized manner that is appropriate to the audience and occasion. N B C P 2.3 Oral Communication Makes clear and convincing oral presentations to individuals or groups tailored to the audience and the situation. N B C
  • 28. P 2.4 Active Listening Is attentive and listens carefully to others, paying full attention to the speaker taking time to digest what he or she hears before responding N B C P 2.5 Interpersonal Skills
  • 29. Considers and responds appropriately to the needs, feelings, and capabilities of different people in different situations; is tactful, compassionate and sensitive, and treats others with respect regardless of their level, personality, culture or background. N B C P 2.6 Leveraging Diversity Respects, understands, values and seeks out individual differences to achieve the vision and mission of the group and/or organization; creates an inclusive work environment N B C P
  • 30. 2.7 Conflict Management The ability to identify, and take appropriate steps to prevent, potential situations that could result in unpleasant confrontations. N B C P 2.8 Customer Focus Anticipates and meets the need of all stakeholders, has the ability to respond to changing demands, and is committed to continuous improvement of services. N B C P
  • 31. Set 3: Competencies Required for Effectively Leading Organizations 3.1 Visioning/Goal Setting Takes a long-term view and builds a shared vision with others; is able to restate the organization’s mission and vision in terms of measurable and achievable goals and objectives; and can influence other to achieve those goals by clearly translating them into action. N B C P
  • 32. 3.2 Decision-making/Problem-solving The ability to identify and analyze problems and needs; make logical decisions; and provide workable solutions. N B C P 3.3 Strategic Thinking The ability to formulate effective strategies consistent with the business and competitive strategies of the organization. N B C P
  • 33. 3.4 Influencing/Negotiating The ability to persuade others, build consensus through give and take, facilitate “win-win” solutions, and gain cooperation from others to obtain information and accomplish goals. N B C P 3.5 Business Acumen The knowledge and understanding of both the internal financial, accounting, marketing and operational functions and processes of an organization, and the organization’s external markets, industry, competition, and products/services. N B C
  • 34. P Set 4: Competencies Required for Technical Credibility 4.1 Project Management The ability to establish and execute a systematic course of action for self or others to ensure accomplishment of a specific objective through the setting of priorities, goals, and timetables. N B C P
  • 35. 4.2 Technical Expertise Understands and appropriately applies knowledge, skills, practices, and procedures related to a specialized field of practice and/or expertise. N B C P INMGT 400/600 Individual Project Leadership: A Transferrable Skill – Part B Current Leadership Strengths and Development Needs (13% of project grade) Two of the questions employers always ask you (in one way or another) are about your strengths and weaknesses. The easiest way to answer this question with sincerity is to have first (long before the questions are asked) reflected upon what your real strengths and real development t needs (weaknesses) are. Overview of Individual Project Part B – Leadership Strengths
  • 36. and Development Needs The purpose of Part B is to assist you in recognizing your current leadership strengths and development needs. To this end, Part B consists of two self-assessment inventories and the submission of a short paper summarizing your findings. Explanation of Requirements and Evaluation Criteria for Part B 1. Download and save a copy of the Self-Management Skills/Traits Inventory. Then complete the inventory, identify your 5 strongest skills/traits, the 3 skills/traits you need to develop, and submit completed inventory to the Part B drop box. 2. Download and save a copy of the Key Leadership Competencies Inventory. Then complete the inventory, identify your 5 strongest skills/traits, the 3 skills/traits you need to develop, and submit completed inventory to the Part B drop box. 3. Write and submit a 1-2 page, double-line spaced reflective summary in 12 pt. Times New Roman font double line spaced, with the bolded title of Reflective Summary of MyLeadership Strengths and Development Needs, followed by you name on the next line. Your summary should provide an overall picture/explanation of your strongest competencies/skills/traits (4 or 5 not 10), the areas/competencies you feel require further development (2 or 3 not 6), and your plan (steps and actions) for developing your identified/stated leadership ‘weaknesses’. 4. Submit artifact and summary to appropriate drop box before the due date and time listed on the class schedule. The following criteria will be used for evaluation: Criteria
  • 37. Traits Inventory (2 points) Copy of properly completed traits assessment tool summited Met expectations (1 points) Copy of incomplete assessment tool summited Fell short of expectations (0 points) No copy of assessment tool submitted Unsatisfactory Competency Inventory (2 points) Copy of properly completed competency assessment tool summited Met expectations (1 points) Copy of incomplete assessment tool summited Fell short of expectations (0 points) No copy of assessment tool submitted Unsatisfactory Analysis Summary (6 or 5 points) Clearly summarized required number of strengths and weaknesses and explained a development plan Met expectations (4, 3 or 2 points) Summarized only some strengths and weaknesses and/or did not explain a development plan Fell short of expectations (1 or 0 points) Wrote something but does not relate to the assignment requirements
  • 38. Unsatisfactory Professionalism (2 points) Followed directions, no formatting errors, no writing errors Met expectations (1 point) Followed directions and less than 3 formatting and/or writing errors Fell short of expectations (0 points) Did not follow directions and/or more than 2 writing errors Unsatisfactory Timeliness (-2 pts penalty) Submitted after time due but not more than 24 hrs late DUE DATE: 11 & 12 Jan 2018; DUE TIME: 15 & 18:00Hrs; TOTAL Budget: $20.00 This assignment is in 2 parts. Part 1:Topic 1 DUE DATE: 11 Jan 2018 DUE TIME: 15:00Hrs GMT PART 1: Virtual Teams Please read the following article before beginning this Discussion: Tyler, M. (2008). Virtual management of teams: A revolutionary approach. Proceedings from EABR & TLC ’08: The European Applied Business Research Conference, and The College Teaching & Learning Conference. Rothenburg, GE: Clute Institute. According to Tyler in order to lead virtual teams today a manager must be a serving manager instead of a directing manager. In distributive computing there is one computer that
  • 39. services all the other computers to allow them to do their individual work. Yet this computer is the focal point for all computers to pass data through, store data, exchange data and reconcile differences through. This computer is called a “server” because while it is not the most powerful computer or, the most versatile computer or, even the most expensive computer, it is a workhorse that is reliable, available, maintainable, and dependable (Tyler, 2008). Tyler’s premise that, in the development of a virtual team, you must also look for a team leader that holds these qualities. This new paradigm turns the historical concept of managing upside down. But it has historical precedence from our opening example of early Christianity all the way up through such management thinkers as Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, and Abraham Maslow (Tyler, 2008). Based on your readings and your personal and professional experiences, how accurate is this hypothesis? Part 2: Topic 2 DUE DATE: 12 Jan 2018 DUE TIME: 18:00Hrs GMT Diagram the Process Flow Table 3–1 on page 61 of the PMBOK® Guide maps out the Project Management Process Groups and the Knowledge Areas in a matrix format. Using this table and your understanding of the PMBOK® Guide, discuss the process flow to include the following: ● Select one of the sample diagrams from the Unit 6 Sample Process Mapping file and discuss each of the five process groups showing the inputs, tools, techniques and, outputs of
  • 40. each of the 47 processes. ● Explain what this mapping is trying to achieve and how you would use it in managing a project? Consolidate your findings into a focus paper with a supporting thesis that justifies the utilization of the PMBOK® Guide five process groups by a project manager on a major project. Criteria for the Assignment ● Criterion 1: Is the organized discussion of the five process groups showing the inputs, tools and techniques and, outputs of each of the 47 processes? ● Criterion 2: Is there an explanation of what mapping is trying to achieve? ● Criterion 3: Is there an explanation of how mapping would be used in managing a project? ● Criterion 4: Does the focus paper support a thesis justifying the utilization of the PMBOK® Guide five process groups by a project manager on a major project? Components ● APA information presented as a cover page (please see Unit 3 Sample Assignment) ● Table of contents ● Executive summary ● Body of the focus paper (use Headings to organize). ● Conclusion stated as your thesis justifying the utilization of the PMBOK® Guide five process groups by a project manager on a major project ● After the Conclusion, insert the Project Management Process Mapping diagram you selected. ● Reference page, a minimum of 3 scholarly journal or textbook source references cited and credited according to APA format using a minimum of 6 intext citations ● The paper should be focused and to the point, containing between 700 and 900 words from the Executive Summary to the
  • 41. end of your Conclusion. Recommended References: Resch, M. (2011). Strategic project management transformation. Fort Lauderdale, FL: J. Ross Publishing. · Chapter 12: “Achieving Optimal Results in the Value Attainment Phase” · Chapter 13: “From Project Closure to Continuous Value Improvement” Project Management Institute (PMI) . (2013). A guide to project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (5th ed.). Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute (PMI) . · Section 4.5: “Integrated Change Control” (pp.94-99) Pappas, L. (2006). The speed of change. PM Network®. 20(4), 42–46. Tyler, M. (2008). Virtual management of teams: A revolutionary approach. Proceedings from EABR & TLC ’08: The European Applied Business Research Conference, and The College Teaching & Learning Conference. Rothenburg, GE: Clute Institute. Diagram the Process Flow Points Possible Points Earned Content (50 pts)
  • 42. Response successfully answers the Assignment question(s); thoroughly uses the text and other literature. Includes a strong thesis statement, introduction, and conclusion. The main points of the paper are developed clearly. All arguments are supported well (no errors in logic) using outside sources as assigned. 25 Sources are primarily academic journals, with thoughtful use Web sources. References are applied substantively to the paper topic. Skillfully addresses counter-arguments and does not ignore data contradicting its claim. Refers to sources both in- text and in the reference page. 25 Analysis (30 pts) Response exhibits strong higher-order critical thinking and analysis (e.g., evaluation). Paper shows original thought. 10 Analysis includes proper classifications, explanations, comparisons and inferences. 10 Critical thinking includes appropriate judgments, conclusions and assessment based on evaluation and synthesis of information. 10 Writing (20 pts) Grammatical skills are strong with typically less than one error per page. Correct use of APA when assigned. 6 Appropriate to the assignment, fresh (interesting to read), accurate, (no far-fetched, unsupported comments), precise (say what you mean), and concise (not wordy). 8 Project is in 12-point font. Narrative sections are double-spaced with a double space between. Project is free of serious errors; grammar, punctuation, and spelling help to clarify the meaning by following accepted conventions.
  • 43. 6 Total 100 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 1 Virtual Management Of Teams: A Revolutionary Approach M. Jeffery Tyler ABSTRACT There’s an ironic story in the Christian Bible written by John the apostle, which tells of Jesus the Christ taking a basin of water and washing his disciples’ feet. One of the disciples, a man named Peter, refused to allow his leader (rabbi) to do this. Jesus told him if he didn’t allow him to wash his feet, Peter would not have a place on the team of disciples. Given this choice Peter told Jesus to not only wash his feet but to wash his hands and his head as well.
  • 44. (Bar-Zebedee, 90-100) While this story is used numerous times from the pulpits of Christianity, it also provides us with a great lesson in the evolving leadership practices required in the management of virtual teams. Introduction There is an old military axiom that I drew from, to coin the term, “You manage objects; you lead people.” (Kharvi, 2006) If applied correctly, a good manager will utilize different approaches to the way he or she allocates resources. It is relatively easy to manage objects given a simple understanding of math and knowing when and where to allocate resources as necessary. This is because objects don’t have needs. People have needs and because of this require a different blend of resource allocation principles to be applied. While we have found this to be true in the normal application of business principles and we even teach our future managers the difference between management and leadership, a new (or not so new) environment is taking place in the corporations of the world today. The corporate world is getting smaller. Clifford Gray and Erik Larson identify four different kinds of projects and, by extension, corporate endeavors, today. They refer to domestic practices as being performed in a
  • 45. native country; overseas practices executed in a foreign country for a native country; foreign endeavors executed by a native country in a foreign country for a business in that country and; a global business endeavor being executed across national boundaries usually by multinational organizations utilizing individuals from differing countries working together as a team to accomplish a specific endeavor. (Gray & Larson, 2007) In each of these cases, industry has moved into the use of virtual teams and in some cases to the exclusive use of virtual teams. Just as in distributive computing, where the effort of the computing power is spread out to many different separated computers, so to is the sum of the team effort parceled out to the different members of the team. And, just as in the example of distributive computing the locale of the members on a virtual team is often separated by distance or country. How to manage and lead such teams has produced many different approaches over the years with varying degrees of success. This paper provides an approach that is based on historical success and precedence. This approach is a basic approach but constitutes a major paradigm shift in the world of business management. In distributive computing there is one computer that services all the other computers to allow them to do their individual work. Yet this computer is the focal point for all
  • 46. computers to pass data through, store data, exchange data and reconcile differences through. We call this computer a “server” because while it isn‟t the most powerful computer or, the most versatile computer or, even the most expensive computer, it is a workhorse that is reliable, available, maintainable, and dependable. In the research and development world we call this RAM-D and we look for machines that meet each of these expectations. I submit to you that, in the development of a virtual team, we must also look for a team lead that holds these qualities. We can call this person a team server or service leader. And, I will postulate that in order to lead virtual teams a manager must be a serving manager instead of a directing manager. This new paradigm turns the historical concept of managing upside down. But it has historical precedence from our opening example of early Christianity all the way up through such management thinkers as Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, and Abraham Maslow. 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 2
  • 47. Hypothesis In order to lead virtual teams a manager must be a serving manager instead of a directing manager. The analogy for this concept is that leading virtual teams is like implementing distributive (server based) computing. There is historical precedence for such a type of leader management. STUDY METHODOLOGY This study was a research of historical concepts and principles based on proven uses of leadership and management approaches for large groups not under the direct control or supervision of the leader or manager. This research followed three distinct categories to provide different viewpoints for similar applications of these principles. The three categories were Military, Religious, and Commerce to address three distinct and differing approaches to leadership and management of peoples not under one‟s direct supervision. All three categories provide solid examples of distributive leadership and management. In each category certain succinct principles were applied to successful completion of missions, theology, or
  • 48. mercantilism. All three categories were analyzed from a historical perspective and common traits were then applied to an analysis of similar contemporary management concepts for server management. Three distinct contemporary management theories evolved that followed the historical precedence. DISCUSSION Analysis of Historical Precedence for Server Management A review of successful military leaders included Son Tzu who admonished us to, “Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.) (Tzu, 600 BC). Julius Caesar‟s perception that, “What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also” (Caesar, 100-44 BC) predates McGregor‟s premise that each employee wants to do a good job and, given the chance, will work towards that end. (McGregor, 2006) The East India Trading Company followed these tenets in allowing what might be thought to be unparalleled latitude in the way it allowed distant merchant directors to control their
  • 49. own areas of operations as long as the bottom line was sustained and improved on. (Keay, 1993) George S. Patton advocated that we, “Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” (Patton, Best Leadership Quotes, 2008) His great Ardennes offensive that, when executed pulled an entire Army off the front lines to run parallel to the lines of combat and reinserted over 205,000 men back into another part of the battle shows what server leadership can do. (Patton, War As I Knew It, 1975) Recently, Jack Welch tells us, “Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital - the world's best talents and greatest ideas.” (Mezak, 2006) Again Welsh realized that, “Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do. Because then they will act.” (Welch, 2001) Analysis of Military Command and Control A synthesis of these complementary thoughts was conducted and tested. It showed that two distinct objects can be met or blended together. The East India Company showed an object managed organization that allowed
  • 50. relative freedom of subordinate personnel as long as objects were managed to the good of the organization. (Keay, 1993) In this regard even people were managed and few instances were found of leadership by example. Conversely, People Led Leadership was found in many military situations but objects were found not to be managed optimally. Rommel was an exception where necessity dictated he lead people, and manage limited resources frugally to achieve his mission. (Liddell-Hart, 1953) One of the results of the Normandy invasion was the emergence of the military‟s Five Paragraph Field Order that, in many regards, is also followed in many industry plans. (Army, 1997) In this plan the writer addresses the situation (people), the mission or purpose of the effort (people), the concept of the operation or plans (people), the implementation processes (objects) and the logistics (objects). Many a military plan, project or program plan and business plan follow these precepts. As a result of this type of planning the stage is set for people to implement. But, how does this apply to the contemporary concepts of 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 3
  • 51. server leadership? That is, how do we know that given a good plan, people can execute on their own without continuous supervision and guidance? Many of our contemporary business authors have given us this answer. Analysis of Contemporary Precedence for Server Management An analysis of contemporary leadership theories shows how people, given the opportunity, can take a well prepared plan and with minimal direction (interference) can achieve or exceed the organizational objectives. In his book, The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor postulated two opposing theories that, for him, encapsulated the polarity of management principles. The Theory X Variable assumed, at one end of the management spectrum is a Charles Dickens type Scrooge management precept that the average employee dislikes work and will attempt to avoid it, has no ambition and seeks no responsibility, is self-centered,
  • 52. will resist any form of change, and lacks appreciable intelligent and is therefore gullible. This management principle was strongly adhered to during the industrial revolution, but McGregor proposed a different management theory built on Abraham Maslow‟s Hierarchy of Need in achieving the higher needs of esteem and self-actualization resulting in the Theory Y Variable. (Maslow, 1999) Under Theory Y the average worker works as naturally as if he or she Figure 1 were at play or rest; they are self-directed and meet work objectives if properly established, they are committed to these objectives if the opportunity to achieve self- fulfillment is provided as a reward and they will seek responsibility to achieve self -actualization because there is a common denominator of creativity and ingenuity that allows people to assume responsibility on their own. Analysis of Frederick Herzberg‟s Hygiene Theory, with regard to this study, brings to light two of his postulates, that of the Dissatisfaction Variable, and the Satisfaction Variable. (Herzberg, 1959) Given that workers are self- motivated towards an objective and that objective is well defined to them, according to Herzberg they will need to
  • 53. see satisfaction in the results. A well defined statement of a team‟s work with identifiable standards and checkpoints or milestones along the way provides an environment of free endeavor to allow a team to work toward a goal needing only the support, not the supervisory direction of the manager. If this is a given then there must be examples of this from the research that validates such a reversal of a supervisor‟s role. Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Theory The military has the longest history of conducting operations in virtual or virtual-like situations over vast distances. This is accomplished in what one might assume to be a Theory X form of control; especially since the military refers to mission accomplishment through command and control. But, a closer look at military doctrine identifies motivational theory and the hierarchy of need as precepts for commanders (leaders).
  • 54. Military Figure 2 doctrine states that, “Command and control is the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Command and control 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 4 functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission.” (Army, 1997) Therefore, “[C]ommanders exercise control by— Acquiring and applying means to accomplish the commander‟s intent.
  • 55. Defining limits. Determining requirements. Allocating means. Monitoring status and performance and reporting significant changes to the commander. Developing specific guidance from general guidance. Forecasting change. (Army, 1997) Industry has found these same tenets to hold true. Thomas Kolditz, in his book In Extremis Leadership- Leading as if Your Life Depended on It, compares leadership styles found to be successful in challenging situation. He compares what he calls extremis leadership to crisis leadership where, like professional military leaders, extremis leaders are professional and self-selected; crisis leaders are not. (Kolditz, 2007) Kolditz goes on to state the extremis leaders are inherently motivating, they embrace continuous learning, they share risk with followers, and have a common lifestyle with followers. Probably the most important characteristic they have, in my opinion, is the ability to inspire high competence and trust with the people they are in charge of and beyond to others. A manager of virtual teams today must inspire, motivate and allocate the virtual team with the means (emotional, psychological,
  • 56. and physical) to accomplish their tasks on their own without direct supervision. Recruiting company Decision Toolbox is just one of many cases that show that virtual teams made up of self-starters can work from home to provide profitable, efficient business operations based on good management that inspires, motivates and allocates the virtual team with the means to accomplish their tasks on their own without direct supervision. Half of Decision Toolbox‟s recruiters are commission-only employees; the other half are independent contractors. In either case, the company doesn‟t tell them when to work. The recruiters tell the company when they will work. Instead of logging the recruiters‟ hours, the company measures them on performance, such as customer satisfaction, amount of repeat business and percent of job candidates who are hired. Decision Toolbox identified self-starters who could work without a supervisor standing over them. They hired recruiters with years of experience — the average is 17 years — who valued flexibility, working from home and the ability to do just recruiting and not sales or writing ads. Decision Toolbox provides its virtual teams (pods) with tools to prequalify job candidates and professional writers to write enticing job descriptions for Internet job boards. The company assigns recruiters to groups of three or four.
  • 57. These pods have weekly Internet meetings to help one another solve problems. The manager‟s responsibility is to define objectives, determine requirements, allocate the means to accomplish the job, and monitor performance for control as needed. (Norman, 2007) Basically, as in distributive computing where the effort of the computing power is spread out to many different separated computers, so to is the sum of the team effort parceled out to the different members of the team. CONCLUSION Historical Precedence for Server Management The concept of server leadership is not a new concept but it is revolutionary. Even earlier than that moment that Jesus washed his disciples‟ feet, an ancient Chinese general by the name of Sun Tzu advocated the support of military troops. This concept has been passed down through the military to the present. That is, “Take care of your troops and they will take care of you.” It is a basic tenet that a good manager provides the necessary logistical support for a team to be effective. But, with virtual teams, one must go beyond that and anticipate special
  • 58. or specific needs based on differing environments. A global team is spread out around the globe. Providing one 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 5 model of computer to work with all team members will not meet the needs of team members in countries with different power, connectivity and usability differences. Douglas McGregor postulated, in his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, that the average person is proud of his or her skills, and if the job is satisfying, he or she will commit to goals of the organization; that that average person will not only accept but seek out responsibility, and, given the opportunity, they will use imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to solve work problems. Based on what we have learned about human behavior since McGregor proposed a different way of managing people, we find the Theory Y approach results in greater productivity than the traditional Theory X approach. A tenet of Theory Y is that, since the employee wants to do his or her best, they can be given direction, and, without direct supervision, can
  • 59. accomplish the expected results on their own. Contemporary Precedence for Server Management An organization based on the precepts of Theory X, requiring continuous direct supervision by the manager, cannot and will not be successful in today‟s global market, even with totalitarian organization. This was realized by Decision Toolbox, a recruiting company that eliminated the office environment and has found that Theory Y type employees who work from home can perform profitable and efficient operations (Orange County Register, 2007). Kim Shepherd, an expert in virtual teams found that she could aggrandize her organizations capabilities and reduce overhead through the use of virtual employees. However, even with her knowledge of virtual teams she discovered that, “The company hierarchy is flipped. The management team works for them,” Shepherd said. “I constantly ask, „What can I do to make your job better?‟” (Orange County Register, 2007) The article goes on to say, Marcia Cordova of Garden Grove, Calif., has been a recruiter for more than 20 years, three of them with Decision Toolbox. “You can make a lot of money, depending on how hard you want to work,” she said. “I don‟t need as much money. I need more time and flexibility
  • 60. because I have two grandchildren with two more on the way” (Orange County Register, 2007). The nature of this type of work today makes McGregor's postulates even more valid than they were in the 1950‟s and 1960‟s. The application of McGregor‟s thinking to today's global business enterprise continues to show us that unique and unconventional management techniques to enhance virtual employee effectiveness is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Following McGregor‟s lead, industry needs to change its concept of employee management and expand on his ideas for the global workplace. How does this apply to management in today‟s environment you might ask? I‟m glad you asked that question. Most organizations understand the need to utilize McGregor‟s Theory Y in virtual teams, and most companies are now using virtual teams. In fact, eighty percent of companies use virtual employees today and by 2008 we will see 41 million virtual employees world-wide. The trend is towards home based distributive employee operations. Keeping these diversified workers focused on the same goals and objectives at coordinated times requires a different management approach even with the use of Theory Y type employees. Dominic M. Thomas, an
  • 61. assistant professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University discovered that, “there are real challenges trying to put together teams to do good.” (Thomas, 2007) He found, working with Peace Corps virtual teams in Nepal, that even with teams where everyone wants to work together, they tend to end up with problems and breaking down. Frederick Herzberg seemed to envision this very situation when he developed his Motivation-Hygiene theory describing the factors causing employee motivation as compared to what he called employee hygiene factors or factors leading to dissatisfaction. Of Herzberg‟s top six factors causing employee dissatisfaction, four of them (supervision, relationships with one‟s boss, work conditions, and relationships with one‟s peers) can be directly mitigated through proper implementation of virtual employee teams. The other two (policy and salary) can be emphasized through server leadership. Herzberg reasoned that there are two distinct human needs to be taken care of for the worker. The first is the physiological need to take care on one‟s physical environment and the second is the psychological human need to allow for growth. This opens the way to Maslow‟s hierarchy theory that needs must be addressed in a hierarchical manner for actualization to be realized. If we utilize Maslow „s assumption of base needs being taken care of first, to
  • 62. address Herzberg‟s two sets of human needs, we can see that the manager must first take care of the physiological and security needs of the worker and then the psychological needs can be addressed. This means that salary and work conditions must be addressed first, then with positive virtual work techniques relationships with peers and supervisors can be cultivated and grown. Policies can be group co-developed to meet organizational expectations through stakeholders to ensure buy-in. Policies need to be revisited by the group to ensure continual acceptance for the good of the team. Again this is what (Tyler, 1998) Kim Shepherd referred to as management being turned upside down. The manager is a facilitator for 2008 EABR & TLC Conferences Proceedings Rothenburg, Germany 6 organizational effectiveness vice a dictator putting out organizational expectations. “Leadership is defined as the ability to get others to do your will. Great leadership is the ability to accomplish the same thing but having others think that it is their idea”. (Tyler, 1998)
  • 63. REFERENCES Army, D. o. (1997). FM 101-5: Staff Organization and Operations. Washington D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army. Bar-Zebedee, J. (90-100). Gospel of John. Ephesus: Canon. Caesar, J. (100-44 BC). Think exist.com. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from Think exist.com: http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/what_we_wish- we_readily_believe-and_what_we/256587.html Herzberg, F. (1959). The Motivation to Work. New York: Wiley. Keay, J. (1993). The Honourable Company: A History of the English East Indian Company. New York: HapperCollins. Kharvi, P. (2006, October 01). Department of Management Sciences. Retrieved March 03, 2008, from University of Pune (PUMA): pumba.unipune.ernet.in/To-Lead-or-To- Manage.pps Kolditz, T. (2007). In Extremis Leadership-Leading as if Your Life Depended on it. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Liddell-Hart, B. (1953). THe Rommel Papers. New York: Da Capo Press.
  • 64. Maslow, A. H. (1999). Toward a Psychology of Being, 3rd Edition. New York: Wiley & Sons. McGregor, D. (2006). The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mezak, S. (2006). Software Without Borders: A Step-By-Step Guide to Outsourcing Your Software. Los Altos: Earthrise Press. Norman, J. (2007, October 2). Virtually @ Work. The Orange County Register . Patton, G. S. (2008, March 3). Best Leadership Quotes. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from Famous Quores and Quotations: http://www.famous-quotes-and- quotations.com/leadership-quotes.html Patton, G. S. (1975). War As I Knew It. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Thomas, D. M. (2007, November 15). Knowledge @ Wharton. Retrieved January 26, 2008, from Five Triggers to Watch For When Managing Virtual Teams: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ Tyler, M. (1998). True Sayings about Project Management. St. Louis: Webster University. Tzu, S. (600 BC). Art of War-ebook. Seattle, WA: Science of Strategy Institute. Welch, J. (2001). Straight from the Gut. New York: Warner Business Books.
  • 65. FIGURES Figure 1. Chapman, A. (2004, November 26). BuinessBalls Retrieved March 5, 2008, from Douglas McGregor's XY Theory: http://www.alanchapman.com/ Figure 2. Tyler, M. (1999). Lecture Slides. Colorado Springs: Webster University. http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/what_we_wish- we_readily_believe-and_what_we/256587.html http://www.famous-quotes-and-quotations.com/leadership- quotes.html http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ http://www.alanchapman.com/ Resch, M. (2011). Strategic project management transformation. Fort Lauderdale, FL: J. Ross Publishing. · Chapter 12: “Achieving Optimal Results in the Value Attainment Phase” · Chapter 13: “From Project Closure to Continuous Value Improvement” ………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………. Chapter 12: Achieving Optimal Results in the Value Attainment Phase Management by objective works—if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't. —Peter Drucker Measuring, Achieving, and Optimizing Business Value Is a Formal Process
  • 66. Your project was expertly project-managed and the solution has been successfully deployed. You go back to your clearly defined and thorough business case and (shocker!) many of your business benefits haven't been attained. Even with highly effective project management and successful deployments of project solutions, this happens far too often. Even when project return on investment (ROI) metrics are carefully calculated and targeted business benefits are agreed on and documented, many projects still fail to deliver on business and financial objectives. It's time to start realizing all of their intended business benefits your project investment was built to attain. Results-oriented value attainment plans can help your business achieve this lofty goal. Value attainment focuses on achieving all of the ROI- contributing and value-enabling benefits that were identified and documented in the business case. Value attainment processes are conducted in a structured and organized manner to maximize the chances of achieving the targeted business and financial outcomes. A value attainment plan is a document that focuses on attaining, optimizing, and sustaining business value. This plan can be viewed as an extension of the business case because it establishes clear guidelines on how to capture, measure, manage, and achieve the targeted value metrics outlined in that important document. The value attainment plan also establishes formal accountability for managing, achieving, and sustaining each of the targeted business benefits. This documented accountability that is available to the project stakeholders greatly increases the motivation of the responsible parties to achieve their documented benefits. Value attainment plans keep project teams focused on achieving the forecasted financial returns and other business benefits from their project investments, even after project solutions have been deployed. With these plans fully documented and agreed to, stakeholders and business leaders can be confident that project efforts are focused in the right direction and concentrated on achieving the targeted quantitative business objectives, after all,
  • 67. isn't that what we're trying to do here? When a detailed plan is put in place, project teams are also better equipped to measure progress, make adjustments, or take other actions to increase the chances of attaining these targeted benefits. Since value attainment plans establish procedures for measuring and reporting the status of benefit attainment, business leaders are kept abreast of the progress on a regular basis with quantitative metrics. These metrics are typically presented utilizing dashboard reporting techniques to ensure the results can be quickly and easily understood by busy professionals. Stakeholders, then, will have the knowledge to more efficiently allocate resources, make strategic decisions, and perform operational adjustments to increase the probability that the goals can be achieved. Management may even be inclined to re- prioritize or revise the project scope based on the progress, or lack of progress, that is being made toward the attainment of the desired business value. Additionally, with a strong emphasis and focus placed on attaining the forecasted business objectives, project benefits may be achieved earlier than anticipated, which can result in the ability to close out the project ahead of schedule, a true rarity! Project teams may also capitalize on the positive, unexpected benefits that may surface as a result of tracking, measuring, and presenting value metrics. These unforeseen, positive benefits will come as a welcome relief to project teams since typically when unforeseen results occur, they are usually negative in nature and detrimental to the business. But as value metrics are tracked and unexpected, positive trends begin to appear, business professionals can act on these positive trends and deliver even more value to the business. This is what some might call gravy. If plans aren't in place to capture data, analyze the results, and identify trends, however, these unexpected, positive benefits will never be discovered and can never lead to increased value to the business. Value attainment plans can greatly assist any organization in any industry achieve their desired project outcomes. Effective
  • 68. execution of these plans ensures that companies remain focused and aligned with the original intent of their projects. The ultimate goal for any project team is to achieve, and even exceed, the forecasted returns for their project investments. Value attainment plans are vital components to achieving this ultimate end goal. Let's now discuss how to put this important plan together. Developing the Value Attainment Plan The value attainment plan is a vital document that should be created to ensure that a project manager's hard work actually produces the desired business results. This plan must be tightly woven into the overall project management plan and become one of the key project deliverables. Since the project management plan is a living document, the value attainment plan is normally completed once the value metrics have been identified and agreed to and the business case finalized. Both the ROI-contributing and value-enabling benefits are direct inputs to the value attainment plan. Who is responsible for the development of this plan? As with most project documents, project managers are ultimately responsible for producing and maintaining the overarching value attainment plan. Project managers, however, may have limited involvement or control over how project outputs and deliverables are executed once handed over to the business (a major reason these plans never get developed in the first place!). For this reason, it's imperative that project managers include the appropriate business representatives, operations personnel, and other key business members in the development of these plans. Project managers may be responsible for developing the overarching plan, but it's the business personnel who are usually responsible for achieving the results set forth in the plan. These business representatives, therefore, must assume accountability for the benefits within their purview and be intimately involved in the creation of the plan to ensure that the most appropriate actions are planned for and executed. Since
  • 69. these valued resources are accountable for achieving their respective benefits, they will be assigned the role of benefit owner and will maintain ownership of their respective benefits until they are achieved. Business case documents clearly articulate all of the business benefits that are expected to be achieved as a result of project implementations. Projects are successful when these forecasted benefits are achieved and, conversely, failures when they are not. It is imperative, therefore, to assign ownership and accountability to each and every one of these benefits to the persons most closely associated with them and most likely to take the best courses of action to achieve them. The value attainment plan must explicitly state what benefits will occur; when they will occur; how they will be measured, reported, and optimized; and who is responsible for their manifestation. The project manager develops the overarching plan and the various benefit owners construct the detailed plans for each of the targeted benefits. The project manager, then, consolidates the various plans from each of the benefit owners and incorporates them into the overall value attainment plan. A sound value management plan possesses key attributes, including: · Formalizes the process of capturing business value • Is an extension of the business case and is aligned to corporate strategic objectives · Defines accountability and responsibility for achieving project benefits · Establishes timeframes for achieving the benefits · Specifies measurement techniques and frequencies · Specifies performance reporting processes and frequencies · Has strong stakeholder support and commitment · Is tightly linked to change and risk management processes · Ensures objectivity in the measurement results · Identifies key dependencies for each benefit There can be no ambiguity in accountability when it comes to
  • 70. achieving the business benefits for costly project investments. Project managers can eliminate any such ambiguity by creating executive summaries of value attainment plans that clearly list each of the targeted business benefits and their respective owners. Table 12.1 shows an example of a value management plan executive summary. With this executive summary, business leaders, or anyone else for that matter, can quickly determine the project quantitative objectives, the persons accountable for their attainment, and other important information. Table 12.1: Value management plan executive summary Open table as spreadsheet Project Sierra Business quantitative benefit Description Benefit owner Baseline Target date Dependencies ROI-contributing benefits Increase package deliveries by 5% New package sorter will enable faster and more reliable placement on vehicles Steve R. 25,000 deliveries per month Q3, 2013 Training department must develop and deliver hands-on training of the new sorter Reduce vehicle maintenance costs by 10% Vendor negotiations resulted in improved pricing and more vendor involvement Ashish J. $2.3MM per month Year end 2013 Vendor management team needs to finalize the contracts Reduce maintenance FTE headcount by 5%
  • 71. Due to more vendor involvement in maintenance activities, a reduction in staffing levels is required to eliminate duplicate work efforts and decrease costs William S. 125 maintenance FTEs Q2, 2014 Receive executive and HR authorization Value-enabling benefits Increase customer satisfaction index rating to 3.5 out of 5 Customers will receive packages quicker as a result of faster sorting Alfonso R. Current customer satisfaction index is 2.8 out of 5 Year end 2014 Marketing team must develop new and improved online customer satisfaction surveys Improved driver morale to a level of 4 out of 5 Vehicles will operate more smoothly and with fewer malfunctions due to vendor maintenance expertise Ashish J. Current employee morale at a level of 3.5 out of 5 Year end 2014 Union leaders must approve and authorize the survey forms Depending on the project, it may be advantageous to assign multiple owners to a single business benefit. This usually occurs when a single benefit is applicable to and spans multiple geographies or departments. Project managers need to be
  • 72. careful, however, to keep the number of benefit owners to a manageable amount. Table 12.2 illustrates how multiple owners can be assigned to a single business benefit. Table 12.2: Benefits spanning multiple geographies and departments Open table as spreadsheet Project Tango: Value management plan executive summary Business quantitative benefit Area Benefit owner Baseline Target date Dependencies ROI-contributing benefits Reduce FTE headcount by 10% across the company North America James K. 1,250 FTEs Q4, 2014 Finalize early retirement incentives Asia Pacific Lucy L. 650 FTEs Q3, 2014 Hire career development services consultants Europe/Middle East Hans F. 900 FTEs
  • 73. Q2, 2015 Receive legal approval for each country South America Alfonso R. 700 FTEs Q4, 2014 Develop transition packages and training Value-enabling benefits Reduce employee absenteeism by 10% Marketing Ken F. 15% Q4, 2014 All employees are trained on the new policies and sign-off on them Operations Tom C. 17% Q3, 2014 Union reps approve of the new plans in writing Finance Cesare P. 22.5% Q2, 2015 Implement floating holiday policies Engineering Steve S.
  • 74. 14% Q4, 2014 Finalize plan of offering rewards of days off for performance The details of the value attainment plan come from each of the benefit owners. These benefit owners are intimately familiar with those areas of the business in which the benefits apply. They will know the minute details of how to measure, achieve, and optimize the benefits better than anyone else. I don't recommend assigning overall project ROI measurements, to include net present value, internal rate of return (IRR), ROI, and payback period, to benefit owners; the project sponsor, along with the project manager, should maintain accountability for the overall ROI metrics of the project. Project ROI results are dependent on certain benefits to be achieved. These ROI- contributing benefits and not the overall project ROI metrics, therefore, should be assigned to benefit owners. Benefit owners, however, should track the financial impact that their benefits generate in their specific areas of the business. Project managers should guide and assist the benefit owners in the creation of these detailed plans. Project managers should also produce standard templates for each of the benefit owners to complete to ensure uniformity and consistency across the board. These templates should include key areas to facilitate the monitoring, measuring, reporting, and optimizing of the targeted benefits. The key areas for value attainment plans include the following: · Benefit title—The benefit title must be clearly stated in quantitative terms. This should come directly from the business case. Benefits include both ROI contributors and value enablers. The SMART principle should have already been applied, so the benefit should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. Examples of benefit titles include: · Increase unit production 20% by the third quarter of 2012 · Reduce maintenance costs 10% by mid-year 2013 by outsourcing all maintenance operations to a single vendor Current baseline—The benefit title explicitly states what the
  • 75. business is trying to achieve and the baseline states how the business is currently performing, in quantitative terms. Business leaders need to know current baselines to determine the extent of the gap that needs to be closed to achieve the targeted benefit. · Detailed benefit description—Although the benefit is stated in unambiguous terms incorporating the SMART principle, there still may be additional information that can be useful for stakeholders. This additional information should be included in this section of the plan. · Benefit owner—The benefit owner is accountable for measuring the benefit, reporting its progress, taking appropriate action to ensure its attainment, and ultimately achieving or exceeding it. The benefit owner maintains ownership of the benefit until it has been achieved and/or the stakeholders are satisfied with the level of attainment. The benefit owner is usually responsible for that area of the business being impacted and will usually maintain operational accountability for that area of the business even after benefit attainment and project closure. · Benefit owner contact information—All contact information for the benefit owner, such as mobile phone number, e-mail, department, and office location should be included so that he or she can be easily contacted by the various project team members. · Beneficiaries—All of the applicable groups, departments, or individuals benefiting from the targeted benefit should be identified and documented. For some projects, the entire organization may be positively impacted, but for others, only certain departments or certain segments of the business may be impacted. Specific office locations or even certain geographies may be sole beneficiaries. Benefit owners should get as specific as possible in determining the beneficiaries so that the most appropriate measurement and management activities are employed. Beneficiaries will usually have to modify existing work behaviors or experience some other type of change to
  • 76. realize the project benefit. For this reason, they must not only be clearly identified and documented, but should be involved in the various activities of benefit attainment. It may behoove the business to offer incentives to the beneficiaries to ensure their support and lessen their resistance to change. Examples of beneficiaries include: · Marketing department · Network engineering team within the operations department · Production personnel at the White Plains, New York, manufacturing facility · All Asia Pacific office workers · Start date—The start date is when the benefit owner starts, in earnest, to measure, optimize, and achieve the targeted business benefit. This usually occurs immediately after the project solution has been implemented and the value attainment plan has been completed, but it can occur at any point along the project lifecycle. Remember, there are usually quick hits that can be achieved early in projects that can be instrumental in garnering project support and commitment. · Milestone date(s)—The benefit owner should include key milestone dates and associated objectives to more effectively track the progress of benefit attainment. These milestone dates may come directly from the cash flow model in the business case, since these models specifically convey when financial benefits begin to surface and resurface. Examples of milestone dates and objectives include: · Achieve 15% of the targeted 20% cost savings by Q2, 2013 · Have two of the four departments consolidated by year end and achieve 25% of the forecasted cost savings at the end of Q2, 2013 · Increase unit production by 50 widgets per day in Q3, 2013 and by 75 widgets per day in Q1, 2014 · Benefit attainment date—This important date is when the benefit is expected to be fully achieved. The business case and cash flow model should clearly identify this important end date. Not all of the project benefits listed in the business case will
  • 77. occur at the same time. · Benefit dependencies—The benefit owner should identify all of the dependencies that exist and the associated actions that need to occur for the benefit to be achieved. They should focus their attention in the areas of people, processes, and technologies to help them identify these dependencies. Dependencies include any initiatives, changes, or modifications that need to occur within specific areas of the business before the targeted benefit can be achieved or before certain actions can be taken to achieve the benefit. Benefit owners should determine where in the organization these actions are required, who will be impacted, and when they need to happen. Examples of benefit dependencies include: · Formal and hands-on training need to be delivered to the users of the system before the end of the year. · Educational material, reference guides, and quick-tip cheat sheets need to be developed and distributed before the system goes live. · All essential staff members must be relocated to the new office building before the end of the year. · New processes need to be developed, documented, and rehearsed before going live in the production environment. · Risks to achieving the benefit—The risks to achieving the targeted benefit should be identified and documented, as well as their likelihood (high/medium/low) and impact (high/medium/low). Quite often risks can be easily and quickly addressed if stakeholders simply know of their existence. But if risks are not identified and communicated, they won't be addressed and may pose serious threats to achieving the benefit. When risks are identified, they can be tracked and managed to ensure they don't jeopardize benefit attainment. Examples of risks to achieving certain benefits include: · Lack of leadership involvement from the engineering team · Equipment shipment dates are not met · Lack of internal experience and expertise to deploy the technical solution
  • 78. · Risk mitigation strategies—Mitigating risk is reducing the extent of exposure to an identified risk and/or decreasing the likelihood of its occurrence. Approaches to mitigating risks should be clearly articulated as well as any actions that should be taken to minimize any negative effects that may result from the risk. Risk mitigation strategies for the risks identified include: · The project manager will invite the vice president of engineering to executive steering committee meetings to ensure active leadership involvement from the engineering team. · The project team will submit all equipment purchase orders to the purchasing department two weeks ahead of schedule and will request that all orders pertaining to the project be expedited to ensure equipment shipment dates are met. · The project sponsor will hire external consultants to provide leadership and expertise for all technology deployment efforts. · Measurement processes and frequency—Benefit owners need to determine how and when to measure key metrics and data elements surrounding their assigned benefit. They should determine the most appropriate performance measurements methods and techniques, in both monetary and nonmonetary terms, if applicable. If baseline metrics were already established, benefit owners may be able to use the same, or similar, measurement processes and techniques. The measurement systems should provide real-time, or near real- time, information so that problems or trends can be identified and addressed as quickly as possible. Examples of measurement processes and techniques include: · Producing quarterly production reports · Analyzing monthly sales reports · Generating 24-hour network availability statistics · Distributing satisfaction surveys two months after deployment · Tracking and analyzing monthly help desk calls · Performance reporting processes and frequency—Benefit owners need to determine how and when to present the progress benefit attainment. They should work closely with project
  • 79. managers in determining these important activities and incorporate them into the overall stakeholder communication plan. Quite often there will be numerous reports, statistics, graphs, trend lines, and other performance-related information. Benefit owners must determine the most appropriate ways to package all of this information into reports that are easily understood by the various stakeholders. It's best to visually represent performance metrics by displaying them in charts, graphs, and diagrams. We've discussed the importance of building cash flow models in increments of months, quarters, and half-years, as opposed to just years. The performance reports and frequency of the reports should be aligned with the cash flow trends within the project cash flow models. For instance, if the cash flow model forecasts a 10% productivity improvement at the end of Q2, a performance report should be produced at the end of Q2 showing productivity levels. · Benefit optimization processes and techniques—The purpose of tracking and measuring the progress being made toward the attainment of business benefits is to increase the likelihood that these benefits will actually be achieved. Based on the performance measurements and the progress, or lack of progress, being made, benefit owners may have to take additional actions. They may have to make adjustments to a system, expedite certain initiatives, allocate resources more effectively, or perform other actions to get the project back on track to attain the targeted benefit. Benefit owners should proactively plan for these actions and document them in this section of the value attainment plan. Examples of optimization processes and techniques are: · Work with the systems vendor to fine-tune configuration parameters to improve performance levels · Further streamline processes to achieve time savings · Allocate additional resources to the project to expedite results · Automate approval processes to prevent delays Tables 12.3a and 12.3b show an example of a value attainment plan for a process improvement initiative that includes all of the
  • 80. elements described. Table 12.3a: Value attainment plan Open table as spreadsheet Help desk process improvement Benefit title Increase the percentage of incidents resolved by the first line of support of the help desk by 20%. This increase will result in the first line of support resolving 90% of all recorded incidents. Current baseline · Help desk receives an average of 5000 incidents per month · First line of support resolves 70% of these incidents · Second line of support resolves 20% of the incidents · Third line of support resolves 10% of the incidents Detailed benefit description The first line of support of the help desk is escalating far too many incidents to second and third lines of support, which is taking too much time away from strategic roles. As a result of this process improvement initiative, the first line of support should be able to resolve at least 90% of all incidents. Benefit owner Charles D. Vice President of Operations Contact information · Operations team · Office: 212-123-1212 · Mobile: 917-111-1122 · [email protected] · 1200 Broadway, New York, NY 10001 Beneficiaries · All U.S.-based employees · All Mexico-based employees · All Toronto-based employees Start date Q2, 2012 Milestone date(s)
  • 81. · By Q4, 2012, first line of support resolves 78% of all incidents · By Q2, 2013, first line of support resolves 85% of all incidents Benefit attainment date December 31, 2013 Table 12.3b: Value attainment plan Open table as spreadsheet Risks to achieving the benefit First line of support may not possess adequate skill sets to resolve the more complex incidents. Risk mitigation strategies In addition to formal training, second and third lines of support will informally train the first line on the more complex incidents that are encountered. Measurement process and frequency · Help desk reports will be generated by the ticketing system on a weekly basis. · These reports will include the total amount of incidents for the week and the percentages resolved by first, second, and third lines of support. · Any anomalies will be highlighted and the operations manager will provide comments to address them. Performance reporting process and frequency · All operations managers and supervisors will receive these weekly reports. · Project stakeholders will receive monthly reports. · Executive steering committee members will receive quarterly reports. Benefit optimization processes and techniques · If performance improvements aren't forthcoming or less than anticipated, the benefit owner shall investigate the scripts that the first line of support is presenting to the customers. Perhaps the scripts aren't detailed enough or not focused in the appropriate areas. · Benefit owner shall make periodic assessments of the overall
  • 82. quality of the investigative procedures and will make adjustments as necessary. · Will investigate advanced training and other vendors if performance improvements are dismal. Executing the Value Attainment Plan to Achieve Results With the value attainment plan fully vetted, it's time to achieve the forecasted business value and targeted benefits. The benefit owner and project team members should carefully follow the value attainment plan and carry out all of the specific actions prescribed within it. Central to these actions is monitoring and measuring the current performance against the targeted outcomes to ensure the business benefits are on track. These measurements should be repeated at intervals outlined in the value attainment plan to determine overall performance improvement, or even degradation, trends, and performance patterns. Based on each of the measurement results, benefit owners should resolve any issues in a timely manner and take appropriate actions to adjust and optimize business performance. Business analysis and decision making certainly doesn't stop once the project solution has been implemented. In fact, performance analysis efforts should be elevated since the deployed project solution finally starts producing business value for the organization. We've incorporated the value attainment phase into the traditional project lifecycle approach to prevent organizations from continuing down the road that leads to nowhere. In this case, the road to nowhere is unrealized or partial business value. By incorporating the value attainment phase, organizations can apply strategic focus to ensure they are going down the road that leads to successful project completion and optimized business value. As we discussed in Chapter 3, projects should not be terminated until operational teams and business units have had the opportunity to achieve the project objectives articulated in the business case. Figure 12.1 re-
  • 83. introduces the value-centric project lifecycle methodology, highlighting the critical value attainment phase. As a result of this phase, optimized business value can and will be achieved and operational teams will assume control of an enhanced steady-state of operations on project closure. It's no longer business as usual! Figure 12.1: Value-centric project lifecycle With value attainment efforts, organizations can terminate the reckless and costly practices of closing out projects, disbanding entire project teams, and losing focus on project objectives right at the point where project teams have the greatest opportunities to affect and drive business value and benefit attainment. Projects cost money. Without concerted efforts to achieve or exceed forecasted business value, much of that money is wasted. Too many important business activities and changes take place once a project solution is deployed to simply forego focused and rigorous value attainment efforts. A few of these strategic activities and changes are: · Redeploying, consolidating, and even terminating employees · Changing well-established business processes and norms · Operating with new technological systems · Conducting business with new partners, suppliers, and vendors · Working in new geographic locations · Conducting business with new customers · Competing with new competitors The value attainment phase is where the rubber meets the road. This is where businesses excel or fall short. Project teams and stakeholders must be thoroughly engaged in the value attainment phase to actively manage these critical business activities and strategic changes and to motivate employees in the acceptance of these changes. They must ensure that these strategic and value-impacting endeavors are conducted in the most efficient manner possible to achieve the targeted business objectives, as well as to ensure minimal disruptions to their organizations. Doing otherwise increases the chances that their
  • 84. companies will revert back to their old ways and resume business as usual, which is usually suboptimal, since projects were initiated to change these established ways. Establishing project continuity is imperative to maintaining momentum and focus on value attainment. When this continuity isn't enforced, project team members go on to their next assignments and operational teams are the ones left holding the proverbial bag in the form of project deliverables. We've seen what happens when this occurs. Some degree of project management must remain intact during the critical value attainment phase. It doesn't have to be 100%, or even 75%, but a sufficient level of project management commitment must remain to drive the project toward the ultimate goal of benefit attainment. In today's business environment, multitasking is simply part of doing business. Project managers have become quite adept at this skill and are capable of working on several projects simultaneously. If it's determined that only a fraction of project management is required for this phase, then I'm sure project managers will be able to achieve exceptional positive results with that level of commitment. This phase is simply too important to dismiss project management entirely. The project manager was responsible for the development of the value attainment plan. It makes good business sense to keep this person on board, in some capacity, to achieve the results. As with other project phases, detailed RASCI charts should be developed to determine the appropriate levels of involvement for all key project personnel, including the project manager. Measuring the performance of benefits using quantitative metrics is a key business activity of the value attainment phase. These measurements aren't taken to merely present the results to the stakeholders, but to identify trends, analyze performance patterns, perform root-cause analysis, and to identify additional business opportunities that may surface. Too often business decisions are made and actions are taken without adequate, quantifiable justification, which leads to unfavorable results. By
  • 85. tracking metrics and producing performance reports, business leaders can make better decisions and implement actions most suitable to their businesses. Some of you may have heard the expression, measure twice, cut once, when used in the context of carpentry or construction. Good carpenters ensure that measurements are taken more than once to achieve high degrees of accuracy before they start cutting. If measurements are made inaccurately, their projects will not be built to specifications and they will spend additional time and money replacing wood and other materials. It's no different in the corporate world. Business professionals must measure and measure often. Based on these measurements, leaders can then take appropriate actions to meet the specifications detailed in the business case. Measurement and performance reports come in many flavors and should be presented in a manner where all stakeholders can clearly understand them. Figure 12.2 shows an example of a project performance report. As can be seen, a lot of important information can be gleaned from such a report, such as trends, variances, progress, and timelines. Figure 12.2: Performance report examples Benefit owners and project managers should conduct periodic performance reviews with key stakeholders to discuss the measurement results and any implications that may arise from the results. Project managers should encourage feedback and seek input into appropriate courses of action to expedite or enhance the progress being made. Stakeholders should collectively determine ways to maximize the benefits and to identify opportunity areas to create even more value for the business. Business leaders are often quite surprised with the value-enabling opportunities that surface when business performance metrics are monitored, evaluated, and presented. The details of the value attainment plans may even need to be updated based on the progress that was made or the new opportunities that may have surfaced.
  • 86. As we all know, it's not always possible, or even practical, to get key stakeholders in a room all at once. For this reason project managers must maintain good communication channels in the value attainment phase to facilitate the presentation of project results and to elicit feedback and input into improvement areas. To ensure that feedback and input are provided, project managers may find it useful to assign homework to specific persons so that they can research certain business areas or investigate possible solutions. These homework assignments are usually assigned during key meetings and are due by the time of the next key meeting so that the results can be discussed. Project managers may want to maintain an action item register to keep track of all of the outstanding action items and homework assignments. Education and training are also key elements of the value attainment phase. Project teams typically conduct training sessions during or immediately after the project solution has been deployed. This is good, but they usually don't follow up to ensure that the training was successful or they don't train employees on how to achieve peak business performance. Training should be delivered and educational material should be disseminated to the appropriate groups impacted by the project solution. The training and educational material, furthermore, may have to be updated based on key project findings. For instance, a benefit owner may conclude that certain process steps can be eliminated to increase product delivery time to the customer. Enhancements to training material are good indicators that project teams are focusing on value and finding new or improved ways to optimize that value. As with performance reports, there are many different flavors to educational and training methods and material. Project teams should determine the most appropriate method for each of the specific groups involved. Such training can be formal, informal, handson, computer-based, internally driven, externally driven, and even self-paced. Risk and change management processes need to be carefully
  • 87. implemented during the value attainment phase. There are risks associated with any type of business initiative or action. These risks will be greatly minimized when business initiatives are based on quantifiable performance metrics as opposed to abstract targets, but nonetheless, they will still exist and should be carefully evaluated and mitigated. Before implementing any change to the production environment, change control procedures should be carefully followed and the upcoming changes should be clearly communicated. The impacted teams and business units need to be informed well in advance of these upcoming change initiatives so they can take appropriate precautionary measures and develop back-out plans should the changes not go according to plan. At the conclusion of the value attainment phase, business leaders will be able to determine the true business value of their projects. They will be able to compare the forecasted results articulated in the business case against the actual results that they achieved. They will also be able to better determine why the targeted outcomes were or were not achieved. Once stakeholders are satisfied with the results or collectively determine that the project is at a point where it can be terminated, the project manager can then advance the project to the closeout phase. Business and project professionals must learn from their project efforts and determine what they did well, what they did poorly, and what they can improve on. They must also make a commitment to continuous improvement to ensure that the business stays focused on achieving increased value in order to remain competitive. These important concepts are discussed in Chapter 13. Professional Development Game Plan for Success 1. Value attainment plans are valuable tools for ensuring that specific and measurable business benefits can be achieved and even exceeded. How does your company manage value attainment? Is there a formal value attainment plan? Maybe it's
  • 88. called a benefit realization plan or benefit management plan? How effective are they in facilitating value and benefit attainment? Action Plan a. Assess your company's posture on value attainment plans. What plan templates are available and readily accessible? How much value do they add? What is the process for assigning benefit owners? Does your company enforce and support the execution of the plans? How is accountability maintained? Based on your assessment, determine appropriate action plans that you can take to improve your company's posture toward value attainment plans. Consider the template of the plan itself as well as the execution of the plan. Write down three to five strategic but detailed actions that you can take or recommendations that you can make to improve your company's position toward value attainment plans. b. If your company does not embrace the use of value attainment plans, build your own business case (now that you know how to build an effective one!) to educate the appropriate management personnel on their importance and necessity for achieving maximum results from your projects. You may want to consider developing a template or putting together a slide presentation that discusses the merits of these plans. Who can you review your ideas with? Who should you be presenting them to? Go to your calendar and schedule the next step. 2. Organizations achieve consistently better business results from their projects when value metrics are monitored, evaluated, adjusted, and presented. Based on your project experience, how well are value metrics identified, monitored, and presented to management teams for review and input? Look for examples of how your measurements lead to actions that lead to improved business performance and record these. Did you use the most appropriate tools for tracking and presenting value metrics? Is this even a priority for your company or department? How effectively do you use the tools at your disposal in your job?
  • 89. Action Plan a. Revisit two or three of your prior projects and assess how well value metrics were identified, monitored, adjusted, and presented. Evaluate the effectiveness of how performance reports were generated. Did the process lead to strong performance metrics that make business decisions easier? If not, where did they fall short? Were there more effective ways to generate them? What could have enhanced this part of the process? Evaluate the effectiveness of the contents of these reports. Was the information timely, relevant, and useful for decision making? Did the appropriate teams review the reports? Were they generated and disseminated at appropriate times? Create your own standard operating procedures for developing your value metrics and reports. Make it good enough to share with your team. Now write down what you will do or actions you will take on your current or future projects to ensure that the appropriate value metrics are properly tracked, measured, analyzed, tweaked, and reported. There are no wrong answers here. Your focus should be on those things you will do to ensure the targeted business benefits will be absolutely attained. This may require investigating various measurement tools, obtaining password permissions to use such tools, researching how measurements can be formatted or incorporated into management reports, or leveraging resources skilled in certain tasks for knowledge transfer sessions. Chapter 13: From Project Closure to Continuous Value Improvement Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. —Benjamin FranklinBeyond the Typical Lessons Learned
  • 90. The primary purpose of lessons learned has typically been to review project management performance and execution to gather insights, both positive and negative, that can be usefully applied to future projects. Project teams usually identify which facets of the project were conducted successfully and which ones posed challenges and obstacles. The intent, then, is for project team members to learn from their past experiences to capitalize on the successes and to avoid the failures for future projects. Additionally, the output of lessons learned sessions should be made available for the rest of the organization so that other project teams can leverage the positive attributes and avoid repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, most organizations don't devote enough time and energy to this beneficial project activity and end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Since there is no transfer of knowledge or best practices from one project team to the next, the more appropriate moniker for this important project activity is lessons not learned. It behooves project managers, sponsors, and stakeholders to embrace this project activity and devote the necessary time and effort to ensure that the entire organization benefits from its outputs. Lessons learned sessions are also sometimes known as postmortems, project audits, and post-project reviews. I don't like these names because they have negative connotations and imply that they can only be useful on project closure. Besides, who really wants to be an active part of something called a post-mortem? I recommend sticking consistently to the term lessons learned as this clearly states the positive intent to learn from project lessons. Project teams can learn valuable lessons from their projects by taking these sessions seriously. Some of the questions project teams should attempt to answer in their lessons learned sessions include: · What did we learn from the project? · What strengths can we build on? · What can we do better? · How can we apply these lessons to our future projects?
  • 91. · How can other project teams leverage these lessons learned for their projects? The answers to these basic questions can go a long way for future project teams, as well as for the professional development of project professionals. The concept of lessons learned is certainly not new. Sports coaches constantly apply lessons learned in the strategic management of their teams, game plans, schedules, and coaching staff. Lessons learned are applied at the end of the game to determine which strategies worked and which ones didn't so they can make adjustments before they face their next opponent. The good coaches, furthermore, not only apply lessons learned at the end of games, but utilize them at periodic points during the game, such as during time-outs, halftime sessions, between innings, between sets, and at various other points throughout the game. A bell should be going off in your heads right now: apply lessons learned throughout all phases of the project lifecycle and not just during project closeout! The lessons learned that are applied during project closeout, however, do serve as the grand finale and should be conducted and documented with precision and care to ensure their lasting effect throughout the organization. Lessons learned are not only reserved for athletic competitions and project endeavors; people apply lessons learned on a daily basis. When you go out to a new restaurant, for instance, and find the service to be dreadful and the food awful, will you go there again? Probably not. That's a lesson learned, albeit the hard way! Some of the areas for improvement in a typical lessons learned session are that they are predictable, lack depth, and don't add much value for professional development or for other project teams. Common takeaways from most lessons learned sessions include rather shallow, insubstantial lessons, such as: · Not enough time · Not enough people · Not enough management support
  • 92. · Too many hidden costs · Too many other commitments for project team members · Not enough planning · Too many unrealistic expectations For the most part, there will never be enough time, resources, or management support and there will always be hidden costs and other commitments. We need to stop rushing through this important project activity and avoid producing a laundry list of so-called lessons learned. The process involves much more than a quick brain dump of what comes to mind, but rather requires detailed and thorough analysis that requires analytical thinking and even investigative work to uncover some of the not-so-obvious project lessons. For lessons learned to be useful, all project teams throughout organizations must be able to leverage them and apply them to their projects. So instead of saying there wasn't enough time, find out why there wasn't enough time, how planning could have been conducted more efficiently to account for the necessary time requirements, how to better optimize resources' time, and what meetings or activities distracted from project commitments. Now this information would be useful for other project teams trying to navigate the complexities and obstacles of their projects. The focus of lessons learned is nearly always on the qualitative side of project management and execution and not on the quantitative side of business results and value. Of course it's important to capture the qualitative side of lessons learned, because project teams can benefit greatly with this information. But it's absolutely essential to discuss and evaluate, in detail, whether or not the business benefits and project financial returns were achieved. These are the reasons for the project in the first place and can't be glanced over during lessons learned. This is what business leaders really need to know so they can continue implementing those strategies that increase value and avoid those that do not produce desirable results. By executing the value attainment plan, project teams compare
  • 93. the financial and quantitative forecasts from the business case against the actual results. Quantitative lessons should be learned during the value attainment phase and at project closure. A few of the results-oriented, quantitative questions that should be asked during lessons learned sessions include: · Why wasn't the projected net present value achieved? · Why did the investment break even long after the forecasted payback period? · How did we fall 11% lower than our forecasted IRR? · How did employee productivity increase even more than the expected percentage? · Why didn't customer satisfaction increase to the targeted level? By asking and discussing these types of quantitative questions, project teams aren't merely providing lip service during lessons learned sessions but are getting to the heart and soul of why the project contributed, or didn't contribute, to the overall success of the company. It is absolutely necessary to revisit the business case during lessons learned sessions, because this document served as the basis for the project investment and specified the expected outcomes. In addition to comparing actual results against forecasted results, you will also gain extremely valuable insight into the effectiveness of the initial business case so that you can leverage these for your own professional development. Inaccuracies in the business case may cost businesses money and may even lead to the implementation of undesirable project investments. It's imperative, therefore, to revisit and scrutinize the assumptions, the costs, the benefits, the cash flows, the estimates, and financial calculations to uncover any and all lessons that could be learned and usefully applied elsewhere. Keep in mind that other project team members are developing business cases for their projects and are struggling with similar assumptions, estimates, cost determinations, and cash flow projections. They can benefit greatly by leveraging a detailed and comprehensive results-oriented repository of lessons
  • 94. learned surrounding the business case. There will always be those stakeholders who like to ask, "Why did you make this assumption?" or "Why didn't you include these cost elements?" Monday morning quarterbacks always find their way into lessons learned sessions! These questions, however, are good ones, and project professionals should be prepared to answer them. Many of these Monday morning quarter-backs may find out, much to their chagrin, that business cases were prepared inaccurately because they did not engage in the development process to the level expected of them. Additionally, they may have hurriedly signed off on these important business documents without proper analysis. The successful execution of projects requires the commitment and input from all stakeholders. This is why they are stakeholders in the first place. The evaluation and analysis of stakeholder involvement is not off limits during lessons learned sessions. Stakeholders play strategic roles for many projects, and businesses can't afford to have them making the same mistakes from project to project. (For those not familiar with American football, a Monday morning quarterback is someone who criticizes the performances of the various football teams and players who played on that Sunday—yes, like many of our stakeholder friends on project completion.) If the project team concludes that the business case was solid and the contents were reasonably accurate, but the project failed to deliver the expected outcomes, the lessons to be learned will usually apply to the execution of value attainment efforts. These lessons learned can be anything from the lack of follow-on training to incomplete documentation to inadequately skilled resources. The only way to get to the root-causes of why the quantitative results weren't achieved is to do a detailed and comprehensive review of all of the activities that contributed, or did not contribute, to the attainment of the expected benefits. Each and every one of the targeted benefits should be carefully analyzed to uncover the lessons to be learned as to why these results fell short or possibly even exceeded the forecasts. Table
  • 95. 13.1 shows an example of how lessons learned can be applied to the business objectives set forth in the business case. Table 13.1: Quantitative lessons learned Open table as spreadsheet Project Sierra Business quantitative benefit Actual result Variance Lessons learned ROI-contributing benefits Increase package deliveries by 5%, from 50,000 to 52,500 per week Package deliveries increased by only 2.4%, from 50,000 to 51,200 -2.6% (1,300 packages short of goal) Project team did not provide enough advanced notification to the warehouses of the new package sorter. As a result, the warehouse teams could not free up their resources to attend training on the new package sorter. They were, therefore, unable to leverage the advanced features of the new equipment. For future initiatives that involve warehouse employees, a minimum of four months notification is required to allow for planning and schedule adjustments. Reduce vehicle maintenance costs by 10% Vehicle maintenance costs decreased by only 6.5% -3.5% All of the vendor costs were not accounted for in the business case. These costs included shipping, taxes, and vendor travel. The project team did not delve deep enough into the vendor cost structures and made poor assumptions. For future projects, supplier management and finance representation will be included in vendor pricing discussions and business case development activities. Reduce maintenance FTE headcount by 2.5% Headcount was reduced 2.5%
  • 96. 0% The project team did an excellent job of involving senior executives and human resource representatives in the early planning phases of the project. This allowed for proper and thorough planning that resulted in the achievement of this goal. Value-enabling benefits Increase customer satisfaction index rating from 3.2 to 3.5 (out of 5.0) Customer satisfaction index rating decreased to 3.0 out of 5.0 -0.5 from the objective We overpromised and underdelivered. We should not have been so aggressive in our marketing campaign, promising so many benefits for a solution that hasn’t been thoroughly proven or tested. We will not employ such tactics in the future unless we have concrete evidence that the solution produced expected results in a small scale or prototype environment. Improved driver morale to a level from 3.5 to 4.0 (out of 5.0) Driver morale increased to 4.2. +0.2 from the objective The maintenance program improved the reliability of the vehicles, and drivers did not encounter nearly the amount of vehicle malfunctions as before the program. Additionally, drivers appreciated the quick tips guide that the project team developed to assist them in troubleshooting basic problems. For future projects, we will ensure such guides are developed. To capture the relevant results-oriented lessons learned, project managers must include business owners, key stakeholders, and other representatives, as appropriate, in these thought- provoking discussions. Quantitative lessons learned go beyond the core project team and way beyond typical project management checklists. These strategic sessions focus on the business and operational issues of value attainment and growth. Benefit owners, operational teams, and key stakeholders are the ones who are capable of influencing their organizations and should, therefore, be included in lessons learned sessions. These strategic players will serve as stakeholders and decision makers
  • 97. for other projects and can apply these results-oriented lessons learned to those projects as well. It's imperative to not only identify lessons learned, but to document them, store them to an easily accessible online repository and ensure that all project teams are leveraging them. Lessons learned must be an integral component to all phases of the project management lifecycle, so include the beginning stages. In Chapter 2 we talked about the importance of planning and how too many project teams rush into the execution phases of their projects. An important component to the planning process is the evaluation of lessons learned from other projects. Lessons learned is not only a post-project activity or an activity that occurs at periodic points along the project lifecycle, but must be a front-end activity as well. Project professionals can glean tremendous insight from reviewing other lessons learned, such as where they need to beef up resources, where they should allow more time for certain activities, which change agents to include, and which cost elements may produce overruns. Transferring knowledge from one project to another offers tremendous benefits, improves project performance, and ultimately leads to project success and value attainment. Value Attainment Doesn't Stop! Now that the project is over and all of the benefits have been achieved, the organization can take a breather and go back to doing business as usual. Right? Wrong! Too many business professionals, unfortunately, take this view and feel that the completion of a project indicates the end of the game; the whistle has blown, it's time to put this one behind us and move on. When the whistle blows in sports, it may indicate the end of a game, but do the coaches and players stop planning, hitting the weight room, running wind sprints, and improving their overall performance? Of course not. They know they have to contend with other opponents on other days. These opponents certainly haven't stopped upgrading their game plans and improving their performance. In the business world, the
  • 98. competition hasn't stopped striving for that elusive competitive edge, nor should you. Just because a project has been completed, it doesn't mean that all of the heavy lifting is done. In fact, there's more lifting to do and the weights aren't getting any lighter. Projects may have been executed flawlessly and achieved their targeted objectives, but perfection can never be achieved; there's always room for improvement and the competition isn't standing still. Continuous value improvement of project results is not only possible but necessary to remain competitive in the challenging business environment. Maintaining and, more importantly, increasing the business value that was achieved from project deployments requires a culture of continuous improvement. Without such a culture, organizations often find themselves backsliding and losing the momentum that they achieved with all of their project efforts. When projects come to a close and resources are deployed elsewhere, too often the focus on maintaining and increasing those project value returns comes to an end. When this occurs, organizations often go back to their old ways of doing business, which leads to deteriorating performance and results. Figure 13.1 gives an example of how business results may suffer when companies lose focus on business value and continuous improvement during project closure. As can be seen, all of the business gains that were achieved during the value attainment phase quickly dissipated on project closeout. Figure 13.1: Deteriorating performance after project closure The purpose of the value attainment phase is to achieve, and even exceed, peak performance and results. Once these performance results have been attained, the bar has been set, proverbially speaking. The performance bar has been raised and set to a higher level due to the tireless work of the project team. It's now up to the management and operational teams to ensure that performance results never slip below this new level. Business leaders must make concerted efforts to ensure that their teams don't backslide and go back to doing business as
  • 99. usual, resulting in poorer performance. Managers should keep their measurement systems in place and continue monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting results for peak performance. This value focus must become a normal part of doing business. It is an essential component to a culture of continuous improvement. Nobody says that business leaders and stakeholders can't continue to receive performance reports on project closure. It is good business practice for leaders to stay abreast of performance metrics. Managers rely on quantitative reports to assess the business and to make strategic decisions based on business measurements. Business performance reports that can be quite useful for managers include budgets, sales reports, production trends, time and cost savings reports, network statistics, staffing levels, productivity parameters, and marketing forecasts. Quantitative data prevents leaders from always making key decisions from the gut. Since measurement systems are already in place due to value attainment efforts, operational teams can continue to generate, analyze, and present performance reports. The project may be over but decision makers still need to evaluate business results to ensure they are not backsliding to pre-project performance levels and are trending in the right direction. As we've stressed throughout, the business environment is dynamic and constantly changing. If business leaders don't take concentrated measures to ensure their businesses are keeping pace with this dynamic environment, the changes will overwhelm them and they are more apt to lose control of the business or respective areas of the business. Even though a project may have delivered quality products or services, these project outputs have to be continually adjusted and readjusted to the changing business environment. The moment organizations cease improvement or optimization efforts is the moment they open themselves up to performance degradation and diminishing profits. When performance objectives have been achieved from project efforts, business leaders must update and formalize both
  • 100. internal and external business contracts, such as operating- and service-level agreements (OLAs/SLAs), with the new performance standards. These elevated performance metrics become the new baseline which continued performance is measured. If the help desk, for instance, can now accommodate 250 service requests per day instead of the pre-project number of 200, this becomes the new standard and the help desk's new obligation to the business. If it takes financial analysts 15 seconds to access critical reports during peak periods of the day instead of the pre-project time of 45 seconds, this is the new standard and IT's new obligation to the business. I think you get the point, but to reemphasize: Performance shouldnever fall back to pre-project performance levels. Maintaining a quantitative focus on results after project closure and constantly striving to improve those results can prevent backsliding and lead to maintained or increased performance levels. Figure 13.2 shows how performance charts should look several time periods beyond project closure. Figure 13.2: Increasing performance after project closure With business distractions occurring every single day, it's tempting to eschew strategic continuous improvement initiatives to focus on tactical fire-fighting issues. This is especially true when businesses are achieving acceptable levels of performance. Too often, however, businesses become satisfied with the status quo and simply strive to maintain it. We've all heard the popular adage, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and too many businesses adopt this mantra as their own. Many of the businesses that have adopted this mantra aren't around anymore! This adage may apply to some areas in life, but it certainly doesn't apply to today's competitive business environment. The adage that successful companies have adopted to remain competitive is, if it ain't broke, fix it anyway. When companies wait around for their products, processes, systems, or other essential areas to break, it's much more expensive to fix those breakages than it is to take small, simple measures to ensure
  • 101. that they don't break in the first place. When companies take proactive measures to continuously improve performance in all areas of their business, they become better positioned to maintain and increase that all-important competitive edge. Businesses don't need to incorporate fancy, over- intellectualized management philosophies or techniques to ensure a culture of continuous improvement. We've seen some of the management philosophies and variations of those philosophies that have been introduced and re-introduced over the past century in Chapter 1. Organizations can embrace and implement any methodology or philosophy in which they are comfortable in order to instill a culture of continuous improvement. There are certainly merits to each and every one of the management approaches. At the foundation of nearly all continuous improvement approaches and methodologies lies the popular, effective, and straightforward approach called the Deming cycle. For this reason, I strongly recommend leveraging this approach in structuring your continuous improvement activities. The Deming cycle is a continuous improvement methodology that focuses on four main stages, to include Plan, Do, Check, and Act. These four stages are repeated over time to ensure continuous learning and improvements in a product, process, or service. By leveraging the Deming cycle, companies achieve and maintain a culture of steady, ongoing improvement in practically all areas of their businesses. Figure 13.3 is a graphical depiction of the Deming cycle of continuous improvement. Placing this simple picture on your office door or wall can serve as a useful reminder that value attainment never stops and that continuous improvement must be an ongoing process. Figure 13.3: The Deming cycle When projects formally end, value attainment and continuous improvement efforts must not. By incorporating the Deming
  • 102. cycle into the operational aspects of business, companies can maintain a quantitative focus on business value and continually improve bottom-line results. Significant amounts of time, money, and resources are expended on project investments to achieve positive business results; it's an absolute shame when these results diminish on project closure. I'm sure you wouldn't like to see the financial returns of your personal investments dissipate after attaining all-time highs. Well, business leaders and shareholders certainly don't want to see the returns of their project investments diminish either. This is what happens, however, when businesses lose focus on maintaining and improving business results on project closure. The Deming cycle is a straightforward, proven approach that enables continuous improvement and quality assurance. In leveraging the Deming cycle, organizations can employ quantitative measurement techniques and procedures to ensure that returns on project investments continue to trend favorably, keeping the shareholder investors satisfied with their returns. A quick note on Deming. Dr. W. Edwards Deming was a pioneer in the field of quality and business management. His most notable achievement during his lifetime was the tremendous impact he had on the Japanese postwar industrial revival by teaching his quantitative approaches to quality management and continuous improvement. He taught that business processes and operational procedures should be constantly measured and evaluated to identify sources of variation that cause deviations from customer requirements. To ensure continuous improvement, he recommended that business processes be placed in a continuous feedback loop to allow business leaders to identify and modify the parts of the process that need improvements. In addition to the Deming cycle, he is also well known for other revolutionary approaches, such as the fourteen points, system of profound knowledge, and seven deadly diseases. There is a wealth of information out there covering this visionary's life and teachings. I highly recommend exploring some of his works. You won't be disappointed.
  • 103. I was fortunate to have been a part of a Deming focus group early in my career where we studied the intricacies of his methods and philosophy. To this day I have not found an approach that is as straightforward, understandable, and effective as the Deming cycle with regard to continuous improvement and quality enhancement. That is not to say that other methods aren't as good, or even more effective, but I feel that the Deming cycle can be used universally across all businesses in all industries with the most ease. Of course, organizations should employ whatever method works for them, but at the core of any of these methods usually lie the four simple components of the Deming approach. Let's explore the four stages of the Deming cycle and see how they can be leveraged for your continuous improvement efforts: 1. PLAN: This stage involves analyzing the current situation, gathering data, recognizing opportunities, and developing ways to make improvements. These activities usually occur when a formal project is being executed, but once project deliverables are handed over to steady-state operations, they usually cease. Operational teams can and must perform these planning activities as part of their normal job functions. The operational goal is to continuously measure and improve on baseline performance metrics. Managers need to identify those areas that are not operating at peak capacity and devise solutions to rectify the problems. It's important for business units to focus intently on their respective money makers and not get too caught up in the weeds. Business leaders should focus primarily on those areas that produce the greatest business value and have the greatest impact on their organizations. There will always be low hanging fruit and it's good to achieve these quick hits, but concerted efforts should be taken continuously to improve those areas that most directly impact overall profitability. 2. DO: In this stage business professionals implement improvement ideas. It's advisable to implement changes in small-scale, testing or pilot environments to assess the effectiveness before deploying them to wider or production
  • 104. environments. Conflicts and glitches may arise during this stage that should be resolved before proceeding with the change or solution on a larger scale. The actions that are taken in the Do stage are usually operational procedures such as changing configuration parameters of a system, upgrading hardware revisions, automating process steps, or consolidating software platforms. These operational tasks may seem innocuous to some folks, but they can have adverse effects if they don't go as planned. For this reason, strict change and risk control procedures should always be followed. 3. CHECK: Business professionals should now review the changes, analyze the results, verify their effectiveness and identify lessons to be learned so they can be applied when implementing the change to the wider or production environment. Remember, lessons learned is a continuous process and doesn't simply occur on project closure. Managers should verify that the desired results are being attained and that quality standards are also being achieved. Operational teams should also investigate any problems that result from the change and address them appropriately. Finally, the measurement reports should be presented to decision makers for analysis and approval. 4. ACT: Once the change has been verified and approved in the small scale environment, operations teams can now fully implement the changes into the production environment or to the wider audience, leveraging what was learned in the previous stages. Risk and change control procedures should again be strictly followed. Managers must continually measure and verify the results of the fully deployed solution until they are confident that the results are repeatable and sustainable. Once all of the stages are successfully completed and business leaders are satisfied with the results, the improvements resulting from the changes are now standardized. The proverbial bar has been raised to a new level, and this level becomes the new and improved baseline. These new performance standards must be fully documented in all relevant documentation, such as
  • 105. OLAs, SLAs, and vendor contracts. The new performance standard is again subject to further improvement, given business requirements and timelines. The Deming cycle, thus, is repeated again and again continuously monitoring, measuring, and improving them, ensuring that companies don't become complacent. For some companies, embracing philosophies of continuous improvement, constant learning, and unceasing focus on quality may require complete cultural transformations. But for most companies, the tenets of these philosophies already exist in some form or another, and it's usually simply a matter of focus and emphasis to ensure they are being followed. This strategic focus must begin at the top and must be filtered throughout the entire organization so that all business professionals are on board and are conducting appropriate continuous improvement activities. Projects may be officially closed out and core project teams disbanded, but the roles of senior managers, business owners, subject matter experts, and staff members certainly aren't going anywhere. When these key roles possess a perpetual focus on performance improvement, the financial returns and other business benefits resulting from project investments won't be wasted but will continue to trend favorably for the long haul. This is what it's all about. Professional Development Game Plan for Success 1. Lessons learned sessions are tremendously valuable project activities when conducted thoroughly and with a quantitative, results-oriented focus. These sessions are useful for core project team members, stakeholders, extended team members, and even other project teams throughout the organization. What has your experience been with lessons learned? Have you learned from them? Do you leverage lessons learned from previous or other projects when embarking on a new project? Do you employ a quantitative, results-oriented focus? Is it a mandatory requirement to conduct, document, and post lessons learned on project completion? What about when embarking on a project?
  • 106. Is it a mandatory requirement to leverage lessons learned from a central repository to assist with planning efforts? Action Plan a. Pick two or three of the lessons learned sessions in which you've been involved over the years. Evaluate their effectiveness and usefulness. What did you learn from them? How did they enhance your professional development? What do you do differently as a result of them? How does your organization share lessons learned? What quantitative project aspects do they focus on? As a result of your analysis, write down five to eight activities you will do differently on your next project to ensure that lessons learned are not only conducted, but conducted in a way that is truly beneficial for the project team as well as other project teams throughout your organization. Think about some of the things you will do throughout all phases of the project and not just during project closeout. You may want to leverage any lessons learned templates and consider revising them, or perhaps you need to develop them from scratch. I'm sure you can think of many improvement areas. Start writing! 2. Continuous improvement initiatives ensure that the returns from project investments don't diminish on project closure but continue to improve long after these project milestones. How does your organization foster continuous improvement? What methodologies or approaches are followed to ensure continuous improvement? How long does your company measure and report on projects after closure? Action Plan a. Think about what happens after your project deliverables are submitted for approval, the project team disbands, and the project is officially closed. Does business as usual resume or do operations teams embrace the project outputs and use them to improve performance? Now think about several months to a year after project closure. Has performance improved, declined, or stayed steady? Revisit two or three of your prior projects that have been closed for at least a year and assess how your
  • 107. organization is currently performing as a result of those projects. What conclusions can you make? Record five to eight activities or processes that could have been done differently to improve overall performance. This includes what could have been done during the project, as well as after project closure. These can include transition activities, performance reporting, performance checkpoint meetings, operational tasks, improvement methodologies, or leadership practices. Be specific. Be sure to include anything that you could have done that would have improved performance over the last year or so. b. Now write down what you will do or actions you will take on your current or future projects to ensure that performance parameters keep improving long after project closure. Record three to five continuous improvement actions that you will take or will influence. What will you do to maintain the momentum and ensure that the business results continually improve? How will you interact with operations teams? With management teams? What mechanisms or tools are in place or need to be in place for continuous improvement? How can you leverage these mechanisms or tools? Write them down! Chapter 4 - Project Integration Management A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), Fifth Edition by Project Management Institute Project Management Institute © 2013 Citation 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control Perform Integrated Change Control is the process of reviewing all change requests; approving changes and managing changes to deliverables, organizational process assets, project documents, and the project management plan; and communicating their disposition. It reviews all requests for changes or modifications to project documents, deliverables, baselines, or the project management plan and approves or rejects the changes. The key benefit of this process is that it
  • 108. allows for documented changes within the project to be considered in an integrated fashion while reducing project risk, which often arises from changes made without consideration to the overall project objectives or plans. The inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs of this process are depicted in Figure 4- 10. Figure 4-11 depicts the data flow diagram of the process. Figure 4-10: Perform Integrated Change Control: Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs The Perform Integrated Change Control process is conducted from project inception through completion and is the ultimate responsibility of the project manager. The project management plan, the project scope statement, and other deliverables are maintained by carefully and continuously managing changes, either by rejecting changes or by approving changes, thereby assuring that only approved changes are incorporated into a revised baseline. Changes may be requested by any stakeholder involved with the project. Although changes may be initiated verbally, they should be recorded in written form and entered into the change management and/or configuration management system. Change requests are subject to the process specified in the change control and configuration control systems. Those change request processes may require information on estimated time impacts and estimated cost impacts. Every documented change request needs to be either approved or rejected by a responsible individual, usually the project sponsor or project manager. The responsible individual will be identified in the project management plan or by organizational procedures. When required, the Perform Integrated Change Control process includes a change control board (CCB), which is a formally chartered group responsible for reviewing, evaluating, approving, delaying, or rejecting changes to the project, and for recording and communicating such decisions. Approved change requests can require new or revised cost
  • 109. estimates, activity sequences, schedule dates, resource requirements, and analysis of risk response alternatives. These changes can require adjustments to the project management plan and other project documents. The applied level of change control is dependent upon the application area, complexity of the specific project, contract requirements, and the context and environment in which the project is performed. Customer or sponsor approval may be required for certain change requests after CCB approval, unless they are part of the CCB. Configuration control is focused on the specification of both the deliverables and the processes; while change control is focused on identifying, documenting, and approving or rejecting changes to the project documents, deliverables, or baselines. Some of the configuration management activities included in the Perform Integrated Change Control process are as follows: · Configuration identification. Identification and selection of a configuration item to provide the basis for which the product configuration is defined and verified, products and documents are labeled, changes are managed, and accountability is maintained. · Configuration status accounting. Information is recorded and reported as to when appropriate data about the configuration item should be provided. This information includes a listing of approved configuration identification, status of proposed changes to the configuration, and the implementation status of approved changes. · Configuration verification and audit. Configuration verification and configuration audits ensure the composition of a project’s configuration items is correct and that corresponding changes are registered, assessed, approved, tracked, and correctly implemented. This ensures the functional requirements defined in the configuration documentation have been met. 4.5.1 Perform Integrated Change Control: Inputs4.5.1.1 Project Management Plan Described in Section 4.2.3.1. Elements of the project management plan that may be used include, but are not limited
  • 110. to: · Scope management plan, which contains the procedures for scope changes; · Scope baseline, which provides product definition; and · Change management plan, which provides the direction for managing the change control process and documents the formal change control board (CCB). Changes are documented and updated within the project management plan as part of the change and configuration management processes.4.5.1.2 Work Performance Reports Described in Section 4.4.3.2. Work performance reports of particular interest to the Perform Integrated Change Control process include resource availability, schedule and cost data, and earned value management (EVM) reports, burnup or burndown charts.4.5.1.3 Change Requests All of the Monitoring and Controlling processes and many of the Executing processes produce change requests as an output. Change requests may include corrective action, preventive action, and defect repairs. However, corrective and preventive actions do not normally affect the project baselines—only the performance against the baselines.4.5.1.4 Enterprise Environmental Factors Described in Section 2.1.5. The following enterprise environmental factor can influence the Perform Integrated Change Control process: project management information system. The project management information system may include the scheduling software tool, a configuration management system, an information collection and distribution system, or web interfaces to other online automated systems.4.5.1.5 Organizational Process Assets Described in Section 2.1.4. The organizational process assets that can influence the Perform Integrated Change Control process include, but are not limited to: · Change control procedures, including the steps by which official organization standards, policies, plans, and other project documents will be modified, and how any changes will
  • 111. be approved, validated, and implemented; · Procedures for approving and issuing change authorizations; · Process measurement database used to collect and make available measurement data on processes and products; · Project documents (e.g., scope, cost, and schedule baselines, project calendars, project schedule network diagrams, risk registers, planned response actions, and defined risk impact); and Configuration management knowledge base containing the versions and baselines of all official organization standards, policies, procedures, and any project documents. 4.5.2 Perform Integrated Change Control: Tools and Techniques4.5.2.1 Expert Judgment In addition to the project management team’s expert judgment, stakeholders may be asked to provide their expertise and may be asked to sit on the change control board (CCB). Such judgment and expertise are applied to any technical and management details during this process and may be provided by various sources, for example: · Consultants, · Stakeholders, including customers or sponsors, · Professional and technical associations, · Industry groups, · Subject matter experts (SMEs), and · Project management office (PMO).4.5.2.2 Meetings In this case, these meetings are usually referred to as change control meetings. When needed for the project, a change control board (CCB) is responsible for meeting and reviewing the change requests and approving, rejecting, or other disposition of those changes. The CCB may also review configuration management activities. The roles and responsibilities of these boards are clearly defined and agreed upon by appropriate stakeholders and documented in the change management plan. CCB decisions are documented and communicated to the
  • 112. stakeholders for information and follow-up actions.4.5.2.3 Change Control Tools In order to facilitate configuration and change management, manual or automated tools may be used. Tool selection should be based on the needs of the project stakeholders including organizational and environmental considerations and/or constraints. Tools are used to manage the change requests and the resulting decisions. Additional considerations should be made for communication to assist the CCB members in their duties as well as distribute the decisions to the appropriate stakeholders. 4.5.3 Perform Integrated Change Control: Outputs4.5.3.1 Approved Change Requests Change requests are processed according to the change control system by the project manager, CCB, or by an assigned team member. Approved change requests will be implemented through the Direct and Manage Project Work process. The disposition of all change requests, approved or not, will be updated in the change log as part of updates to the project documents.4.5.3.2 Change Log A change log is used to document changes that occur during a project. These changes and their impact to the project in terms of time, cost, and risk, are communicated to the appropriate stakeholders. Rejected change requests are also captured in the change log.4.5.3.3 Project Management Plan Updates Elements of the project management plan that may be updated include, but are not limited to: · Any subsidiary plans, and · Baselines that are subject to the formal change control process. Changes to baselines should only show the changes from the current time forward. Past performance may not be changed. This protects the integrity of the baselines and the historical data of past performance.4.5.3.4 Project Documents Updates Project documents that may be updated as a result of the
  • 113. Perform Integrated Change Control process include all documents specified as being subject to the project’s formal change control process. Table 3-1 reflects the mapping of the 47 project management processes within the 5 Project Management Process Groups and the 10 Knowledge Areas. Table 3-1: Project Management Process Group and Knowledge Area Mapping Open table as spreadsheet (ATTACHED) Project Management Process Groups Knowledge Areas Initiating Process Group Planning Process Group Executing Process Group Monitoring and Controlling Process Group Closing Process Group 4. Project Integration Management 4.1 Develop Project Charter 4.2 Develop Project Management Plan 4.3 Direct and Manage Project Work 4.4 Monitor and Control Project Work 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control 4.6 Close Project or Phase 5. Project Scope Management 5.1 Plan Scope Management 5.2 Collect Requirements
  • 114. 5.3 Define Scope 5.4 Create WBS 5.5 Validate Scope 5.6 Control Scope 6. Project Time Management 6.1 Plan Schedule Management 6.2 Define Activities 6.3 Sequence Activities 6.4 Estimate Activity Resources 6.5 Estimate Activity Durations 6.6 Develop Schedule 6.7 Control Schedule 7. Project Cost Management 7.1 Plan Cost Management 7.2 Estimate Costs 7.3 Determine Budget 7.4 Control Costs 8. Project Quality Management 8.1 Plan Quality Management 8.2 Perform Quality Assurance 8.3 Control Quality 9. Project Human Resource Management 9.1 Plan Human Resource Management 9.2 Acquire Project Team 9.3 Develop Project Team
  • 115. 9.4 Manage Project Team 10. Project Communications Management 10.1 Plan Communications Management 10.2 Manage Communications 10.3 Control Communications 11. Project Risk Management 11.1 Plan Risk Management 11.2 Identify Risks 11.3 Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis 11.4 Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis 11.5 Plan Risk Responses 11.6 Control Risks 12. Project Procurement Management 12.1 Plan Procurement Management 12.2 Conduct Procurements 12.3 Control Procurements 12.4 Close Procurements 13. Project Stakeholder Management 13.1 Identify Stakeholders 13.2 Plan Stakeholder Management 13.3 Manage Stakeholder Engagement 13.4 Control Stakeholder Engagement