on pies

I recently presented PIEmatrix at the CBP Summit 2008 in Scottsdale, AZ. The conference is one of the top PMO (Project Management Office) events in the US. Most attendees where PMO directors from large enterprises. We had the opportunity to conduct a conference survey for all the attendees. The survey asked “what are the top 3 best practice needs for project implementation that you would like to discuss with your peers?”. We received about a 90% response rate. The result displayed 34 different process standard needs. The following are the top five:

1. Resource Management - 17%
2. Risk Management - 8%
3. Portfolio Management - 8%
4. Project Management - 6%
5. Financial Management - 6%

This is an interesting statement showing where the pain is in the project industry from the PMO perspective. I would assume that resource management is also the top challenge project managers face since their issues funnel up to the PMO and upper management. This was not unexpected since many of our beta customers have asked PIEmatrix for more resource management features. However, it’s great to be able to show real metrics from the market.

Further in the conference we learned that within resource management, the challenges include utilization management, motivation, skills mapping, etc. One breakout workshop came up with some shared best practice needs and example solutions. At the conference we captured this data in our new PIEmatrix crowdsource-community platform. This opens up the ability for the PMO directors to go back to their offices and continue to discuss and share best practices with their peers. This is still a work in progress, but the need in the market to collaborate on resource management pains is very clear.

The term “crowdsource” is defined by Wikipedia as a new word “for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and oursourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.” I sometimes relate the concept of Wikipedia itself as a crowdsource model since an encyclopedia item is open for the community to elaborate, correct, or update rather than locking it down to one “expert”.

Traditionally, best practices or process methodologies have been devised by an individual or as small, closed group of experts. Often processes are generated within an organization from past experiences or collected from an industry standard, such as PMI for project management. I have found that one major challenge organizations have with defining or improving their internal best practices is the lack of time or priority commitment. They all know its valuable for the long-term, but most have fire’s they need to put out. I was recently at Charles Schwab in San Francisco, and process leader gave me a great analogy. She said its like a river flowing past you and and you see a person thrashing in the river, nearly drowning. You jump in and pull him out to safety. The next person comes by and you pull her out at the last minute. You’re exhausted, but there are more and more people thrashing for their lives and you jump in again and again to save them. While this is going on, you miss the main issue. Up the stream there’s a man on bridge pushing people off!

Many would like to build a better process (such as having people cross a different bridge), but are too busy saving the day. Coming up with a better method can take a lot of thinking and trial and error. What’s interesting is many companies have the same issues. I’m sure that among the thousands or organizations, someone has figured it out. I think this is where the power of collaboration and crowdsource can come in.

Last week, I tested the idea of crowdsourcing at a CBP Summit 2008, a Project & Strategy conference for Project Management Office directors and executives. Overwhelmingly, the audience felt peer collaboration with building best practices would be very helpful. Really, that’s why they go to these conferences — to get ideas from their peers. We presented a sneak preview of our PIEmatrix Crowdsource platform and it went better than I had expected. With this experience, we will expand this concept to include in our launch later this year. As we move forward, there’s a number of ideas we will share with our private beta users, such as how crowdsourcing will be self policing, how to provide quality transparency (i.e., ratings), and how an organization can place a call to invite the community to work on their best practice needs, such as how do I get that dang guy off the bridge.

I would like to get your thoughts or ideas. Please comment.