Some useful project management templates

Phil Wolff of diJEST.com has an interesting selection of project management checklists and templates available here, including a copy of the 1996 PMBOK (for thost light bedtime reading moments.)

This one is particularly useful as a sanity check during project initiation, and there’s a lot more besides. Useful stuff.

Creative solutions, critical skills

Dave Pollard writes a consistently interesting (and prolific!) blog on a wide variety of subjects, mainly centering around business innovation and knowledge management. There’s so much there it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with everything that he posts, but much of what he writes is worth reading.

This article from a couple of days ago is an interesting - and comprehensively argued - take on managing change in organisations. Dave’s perspective is that the only way that organisations will succeed in the long term is to enable its employees to work smarter rather than harder - and the only to ensure that this happens is to equip them with the skills and the competencies that they need.

Invest effectively in developing Critical Skills and you’ll reap Creative Solutions. That’s the best ROI you can get.

A quick summary like this really doesn’t do justice to the very comprehensively thought-out arguments - and it’s made more interesting by the fact that Dave is practising what he preaches, reinventing himself publicly along the lines that he’s suggesting. Consistently thought-provoking, he’s worth a visit.

Sanity checks for feature lists

Here’s a simple technique that we use on a regular basis as a ’sanity check’ for the technical requirements of a development project. The idea is that you guard against the tendency to load the system with glamorous - but unneeded - features that will increases the risk of project failure.

The process is extremely simple:

1. If it’s not already been done, write out the functional specifications as a numbered list of requirements.
2. Do the same for the business requirements that were identified in the earlier stages of the project.
3. Take each functional requirement in turn and cross-reference it against one or more business requirement. At each iteration, ask yourself “what business benefit does this feature deliver?”
4. If there are any functional requirements that can’t be linked to a business requirement, ask yourself if it’s needed - and be very sceptical of the answer if it’s “yes”.

The idea is simply that each and every feature of a system should deliver some value to the business - if it doesn’t, you’re in danger of building in flashing lights for the sake of it. And there are numerous dangers with that approach:

• The system will take longer to develop.
• It will become more complex to use.
• The internal interactions between features will become more complicated, and unintended consequences will become more likely.

This technique is just the “keep it simple, stupid” approach put to work. But in virtually every organisation we go into we hear stories about development projects that have gone wrong because of feature creep and its consequences - so this is a technique that’s simple enough to be done quickly to try and guard against these kind of disasters.

GM blogs from the top

If you’re currently engaged in a debate about whether blogging could help the public profile of your organisation - and you’re encountering the “if it was any use then big firms would be doing it” line of resistance - you might be interested in pointing out a new blog that’s just come online.

It’s a small company that you might have heard of in passing - General Motors.

Yes, the General Motors. And it’s not some anonymous drone in the marketing department that’s blogging - it’s the Vice Chairman of Product Development and Chairman of GM North America, Bob Lutz. I always find the US style of executive job titles a bit confusing, but I think we can safely assume that he has the key to the executive washroom.

Reading the posts so far, it does appear to be a genuine blog by a real person - it’s certainly not written in the corporate house style that you’d expect from a PR agency. It’ll be very interesting on three counts. Firstly to see if he can keep it up, and secondly whether he can manage to be interesting without revealing too much that would be of interest to his competitors - you have to assume that the inside of his head would be an interesting place to be if you’re a rival. And lastly, it’ll be fascinating to see if this starts a trend, either within the motor industry or more widely. 2005 could be the year of the CEO blogger.

Procrastination and how to avoid it

We all have days when despite a to-do list a mile long, we’ll find any excuse not to get on with the task inhand - or indeed any task. Regardless of best intentions, it’s all too easy to put something off when a few minutes would be enough to get the job underway or finished completely.

This article by Steve Pavlina, CEO of Dexterity Software, has a look at the root causes of procrastination and has some useful insights into what you can do to overcome it.

The solution to perfectionism is to give yourself permission to be human

They’re simple methods, but effective nonetheless - and could easily be coupled with a process such as Getting Things Done to make a good attempt at breaking bad habits. Now should I get on with updating these project plans, or make another coffee….?

Jaws in space - selling blogs as a PM tool

Via Moonwatcher, this is a presentation on how Lucent are using blogs as a project management tool. It’s interesting for a number of reasons - firstly as an example of how blogs can be used (and the suggestions that are made in the presentation match our experiences, so this is far from being specific to a high-tech industry).

And there are also a number of very good points made about how to go about introducing new processes into an organisation, regardless of whether they involve software tools or not. It chimes with something that we’re keen on - the idea of having ready a 30-second elevator pitch to sell the project that doesn’t rely on a detailed explanation of the technology. Focus on the benefits that will accrue, and leave the technology - however exciting - alone.

And if you’re unconvinced about the merits of an elevator pitch, consider how convincing is this 2-second explanation of the plot of Alien: “Jaws in space”.

You can’t drop a ball that isn’t in your court

Michael Harmer of the delightfully-titled Nerdherding for Beginners has a useful piece of advice about clarification-requests-as-a-delaying-tactic:

“You can’t drop a ball that isn’t in your court.”

As he points out, bouncing a request back to the originator has a use for evil as well as good - and suggests a way of dealing with requests that get bounced back to you. So beware - if you’re a regular user of this tactic, there may be clients who will call your bluff after reading his post

The Fundamentalist Agenda

The Fundamentalist Agenda as defined by a theologist, which pretty much nails the intellectual laziness of the “my god’s bigger than your god” approach to life.

The most famous definition of fundamentalism is H. L. Mencken’s: a terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun

Having seen him on Newsnight this evening, I got the depressing feeling that Ian Paisley hasn’t read this article…

Former Osbaldwick Ladies

Spotted in the Osbaldwick & Murton Parish Link (hey, no-one can say that I’m not up-to-date with all my dead-tree reading):

Former Osbaldwick Ladies next meeting is on Wednesday 12th January at 11:30am at the Derwent Arms

I was going to be charitable and assume that they were merely ladies that had, for one reason or another, moved away from Osbaldwick - but then I noticed that the venue is in fact the village pub. Which means they must be former upstanding citizens who’s moral standards have dropped, mustn’t they?

Four ways to use wikis for project management

Following hard on the heels of 10 ways to use blogs for project management, here’s some thoughts on how we’ve been using wikis in a project management environment.

Planning meeting agendas

The task of planning agendas normally falls to one unfortunate, who’s then bombarded by emails from all quarters. Rather than stand underneath the deluge, why not plan the agenda on a wiki page? Anyone who needs to add an agenda point can do it themselves, adding notes and background information as required — and once the organiser decides that the agenda is set, the page can be locked to prevent further changes.

Then issuing the agenda is a simple matter of forwarding a link — no more bulky attachments to clog up road warrior inboxes.

Real-time minute taking

Taking minutes of meetings, conference calls, etc is vital for project managers — all too often, people’s recollection of what they’ve agreed to is — ahem — subtly different once the meeting has finished. So getting actions down on paper as soon as possible is crucial to avoid actions falling down the cracks. But the problem with minute taking is that you spend the whole meeting writing, then twice as long again typing the minutes up, and then they’re emailed out to the participants and promptly disappear into thin air.

We’ve taken to using a wiki to capture the progress of meetings while it’s still in progress by adding them to the agenda page. As the each item is being discussed, the contributions can be captured — and if it’s a conference call, participants can see the minutes as soon as the wiki page is saved - realtime and online. As soon as someone’s volunteered for an action, it’s up on screen and documented — no room for wriggling!

Wikis are also great if there’s information which wasn’t available at the time, but will be added later. Rather than send out the missing info in an out-of-context email, participants can update the wiki page so that the new details appear in the context of the discussion — and the wiki’s version control allows you to see by who and when the changes were made.

Brainstorming presentations



Collaborative presentation planning can be a nightmare, particularly if there’s more than two people involved. Despite the version tracking functionality of Powerpoint and the like, there are invariably problems as two or more contributors change the content simultaneously.

Rather than use Powerpoint, we now brainstorm presentation outlines on a wiki page. It’s simple to add and change bullet points, drop in new slides or expand on existing ones. There are wiki plugins that allow you to export pages in a format that can then be imported into Powerpoint - just apply the corporate layout template, add clipart, and your presentation is ready to go.

And to take wiki presentations to the next level, why not dispense with Powerpoint altogether? With clever page formatting, you can run the presentation direct from your browser — so no need to distribute the presentation afterwards, just send out a link.

Keep documents up-to-date

Wikis are excellent at version control - it’s built in out-of-the-box. So rather than using file documents and shared drives, why not keep project documentation online and up-to-date on a wiki? If you have documents which are subject to constant change — configuration settings for example — you can easily maintain a wiki page as a single, central source of the up-to-date configuration. And the built-in version control and change tracking make it simple to find out what changed and when.