on pies

Selling Spree Sends Dow Below 10,000 Mark. Turmoil In Europe. These were today’s headlines on NPR’s website. It’s a no brainer. Companies will be tightening down with cuts here and freezes there. Knee jerk reactions. Is that a good move? Maybe not. If the reaction is not thought through and implemented systematically, things could get worse in the longer run. I propose the strategy of getting new processes and procedures in place to ensure efficiencies. 

For example, let’s say your organization has many projects. Now executives say their budgets are being cut in half. A smart organization would not react without thinking. It will invest up front time in defining processes to drive the cost cutting initiatives. One such process is how to review and decide on whether a project should be cut. Treat this as a a crisis management project in itself that can be repeated over and over for each department for their projects and roadmaps. This crisis management project would have project phases, action steps, people roles, and final deliverables.

Another example is an enterprise initiative to implement efficiencies. Again, this could be setup as a process template with procedures that identify efficiency opportunities and execution correction steps. This template would then be replicated throughout the enterprise, driving efficiency best practices or hard procedures for cost cutting and efficiency gain results.

Investing in new processes require a systematic approach. You need processes, good people, and technology for implementation and governance.

Now bear with me. I’m going to put on my sales hat, but I’m doing so for a good reason. PIEmatrix can help as the technology facilitator.

As a process and procedure platform, PIEmatrix can be setup by small to large enterprises with their act-now-financial-crisis procedure steps as ready-to-use templates. They can execute these templates as projects. Assigned team members would use PIEmatrix to know what to do, collaborate with stakeholders, and keep track of execution progress. And upper management can then monitor the results in real-time.

Timing is critical, so get started now. Define proceses for finding and implementing efficiencies. Use PIEmatrix to get those processes executed. Govern the initiative. Update the process quickly. Be smart, systematic, and stay out of trouble. 

This past week PIEmatrix conducted a survey at the NorCal PMI Symposium 2008 hosted at Stanford University. The survey question was “What are your top three challenges in migrating to a more mature process organization?” There were close to 300 attendees (mostly project managers) and we received responses from the majority. Here is the list of the top five areas that need the most improvement. (The percentage reflects the occurrences).

1. Enhance executive and sponsor commitment - 16%
2. Improve project knowledge and implementation - 13%
3. Improve culture - 12%
4. Improve training and skills - 12%
5. Enhance people change management - 9%

It’s interesting to get a different survey results when comparing what project managers see as issues and what project management office directors see as issues. They don’t really align. (See the PMO survey blog). It’s clear that that many feel there is a lack in sponsor commitment. The second day of the conference, they setup table workshops that focused on these and other issues. The idea was to discuss the issues and come up with improvements. I was lucky to sit in on one table. The thoughts that came out of my group included adding a project process step to capture the sponsor’s expectations, personal commitement, reporting needs, etc. I captured these ideas and entered them into the PIEmatrix Community crowdsource platform as ready-to-use process steps. Any PIEmatrix beta customer can log in and contribute to these ideas and also import them into their own private PIEmatrix context from where they can implement them directly on projects. I hope to see customers work together and share more ideas with their peers in this manner. I saw this as a great value from a conference. Not only did people let out some steam, but also banded together and came up with some real solutions that can be applied!

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.

Do you need to build best practices for your projects? Maybe you can spit it out in one sitting. Maybe not. I recently wrote about using crowdsourcing to help build best practices for projects. The concept is working with your peers from different organizations, across industries. The power of leveraging others’ experiences is a win. Today, I want to focus on outsourcing to your own internal team. They deal with your process every day, so why not leverage their expertise?

One approach is to get the group together for a story-boarding session. Post-Its on a wall works. Or you could use PIEmatrix to help story-board. Focus on high level process steps first and keep it simple. Ask them to kick start by listing the deliverables. This is the easy part and you may already have this documented. Next is to list all possible failure points (future fires). Most everyone is a critic. So, leverage this. It may not take long to list experience with risk in each project stage. Now, turn the table and ask them to come up with high-level process steps to reduce the risks. This is harder, but at least they have a good starting point. At the end of the session, ask for volunteers to take certain process points to decompose into more detail. You will find the details goes to those who have the depth.

The other option is for you or your firm’s process expert to define the high-level process steps and then outsource the detailed definitions to the front-line team members based on their expertise.

Once you have your new best practice process defined (documented or placed in PIEmatrix) the challenge is to get it to stick. However, you have an advantage. The team who needs to do the sticking has personal stake. They are more likely to better adopt to process change if they helped build it. Over the longer term, keep the best practices fresh with process evoluton workshops.

My last post introduced the “pie”. Today, I’ll explain how we turn a pie on its side to represent a matrix. To recap, many iterative project methodology models are circular. For example, in my last post, I chose slices (or project stages) Plan, Discover, Design, Construct, etc. Now, let’s take this two-dimensional pie and flip it on its side to show its edge. The side view is what I call the pie’s layer. Let’s say this layer is called Project Management. Under the first slice called Plan is a cell that aligns with Project Management. If you were to look in this cell, you may find process steps such as identify business needs, define budget, etc. Basically, the layers and their cell content can contain process methodology, best practices, or procedures steps.

As we all know, project management is only one factor in project processes. There can be others such as risk management, project implementation, or steps for a regulation. The idea of looking at the pie from its three-dimensional layer view is you can start to stack up more process layers, such as adding toppings to a cheese pizza. This is where the matrix becomes clear. The slices are columns and the layers are rows. What is interesting about this model is it forces each process methodology or best practice to align with each other.

Many companies are struggling with different process methodologies on large projects, each method having its own structure and nomenclature. Let’s say if an IT team is using the PMI standard for project management and the RUP method for the systems development life cycle. Now throw in an audit committee with their own process for Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. You end up with groups of people on the same project speaking different languages.

What if we formulated a pie-matrix structure that forces all team members to agree on the naming of the project stages (pie slices). Then add each process methodology as a layer. The simpleness is you now have stage alignment between standards. This is the basic model I created for the PIEmatrix platform and this was only the starting point. PIEmatrix is an open web platform and is process content agnostic, meaning its up to our users to enter any best practice content they choose. We expanded the platform to allow further integration of different standards with pointers across standards boundaries. We added project task management features for the front line team members, dashboards for governance, and an SaaS model where people can collaborate together from anywhere around the world, all speaking the same process language and working together on the same page.

This is my first blog post. I’m the founder of PIEmatrix, and as you would guess I’ll write about pies and matrices. But of course most of you have no idea about what I’m talking about since PIEmatrix is a new start up, which hasn’t officially launched. A couple of years ago, I devised a pie and matrix paradigm to better present processes for projects of all kinds. (More on the matrix later). The common circular shape lends well since most projects are iterative in some nature. Since it’s a pie shape, I logically named the stages/phases of a project “pie slices”.  So far so good? I’m sure many of you have seen this concept, so nothing new here. Now, since many love acronyms (sorry), I had to get something out of p-i-e and that’s how I thought of “process for implementing excellence”.

Going forward I plan to share ideas and hopefully get input on how better processes can improve excellence.