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I’ve had a number of conversations with recruiters over the last few weeks where the subject of budget size has cropped up, and it’s got me thinking about whether there’s any correlation between budget size and effectiveness as a project manager. For some recruiters, it’s an obsession with absolute size – what’s the biggest budget you’ve ever worked with, and bigger is better. For others, there’s a more measured approach – although values are of interest, so are proportions and percentages.

The budget I learnt most from was also the smallest I’ve worked with for that type of project. The total amount would have been a rounding error on larger programs, but the impact on the organisation was disproportionately large precisely because their budget was so small. But to someone obsessed with absolute size, this situation would be dismissed as irrelevant as a result of falling below some arbitrary threshold.

The same thought process also seems to hold true for team sizes – again, bigger is better in some eyes. I’d argue that the reverse can equally well be the case – a manager with some insight is likely to realise that there’s a finite number of direct reports that they can manage, and sub-divide the team down accordingly. The clueless ones are those who will try to split their attention between an impossible number, and reap the consequences.

Recently I read an article where an experienced recruiter of project managers said that he’d never recruit someone unless they could give him a detailed explanation of why one of their projects had failed. I’d add another rule of thumb to that one – if your candidate insists that their biggest was their best, perhaps that’s a sign that they haven’t thought it through…

The recent BPPM show in London was fairly predictably skewed towards software and training providers – but there were one or two notable exceptions. One of the most interesting products on show was Quorum – positioned as a tool to improve the effectiveness of meetings, it’s a device that allows multiple participants to annotate documents displayed on a projector or large screen using pen tablets.

It’s one of those ideas that’s incredibly simple, yet deceptively powerful. The device sits on your network, and acts as a virtual printer – you simply print your file to it, whether it’s a presentation, spreadsheet, photo, graphic or whatever – and it can then be displayed and annotated as if it were pinned to a flip chart. There’s a built-in webserver, and each participant has a pen tablet which they can use to draw in their own colour on the screen or projector.

What makes the Quorum particularly useful is the way that several boxes can work together across a wide area network – so it can bring another dimension to video conferences by enabling documents to be viewed and annotated across locations. The demonstration examples were a good indication of how useful it could potentially be – marking out an area on an aerial photograph, for example, or jotting down bullet points. The old saying that a picture’s worth a thousand words is often true – and Quorum enables users to point at and highlight exactly what they’re talking about. “No, not that one – this one.” You could also get participants to literally sign off the finished document, which can then be downloaded directly from the Quorum box as a PDF file.

I think that could be a particularly powerful tool in the project manager’s arsenal – getting commitment to stick after the meeting has finished can sometimes be a problem, particularly if there’s a significant interval between the meeting itself and the minutes and actions being issued. Signing off on a document during the meeting can be a good way of creating a psychological contract with the participants, and this could be a neat way of achieving that.

The units don’t come cheap at around £4,000 a time, but that has to be set against the very real cost of the participants in a meeting – it doesn’t need too many people to be involved before a few minutes saved here and there starts to add up to a significant amount. While digital whiteboards have been around for a while, the combination of the ease of use, virtual printing and downloads adds up to something which could be of real use in a live project situation.

Full details, specs and case studies are available online at www.quorumtools.com.

By dint of sheer numbers, the most popular methodology at the recent Business Performance & Project Management show in London was Prince 2 – there were a number of companies offering Prince-specific training and products, not to mention the OGC themselves promoting their services.

One of the more interesting Prince products was Project In A Box – it’s aimed specifically at new Prince practitioners to help them with the sometimes daunting process of using the methodology for real. It provides document management functions within a Prince process context – the idea being that the diagrams guide you through the process while the application provides the right template at the right time and manages document control.

Although it’s hardly revolutionary, it’s been neatly done – licensing the Prince diagrams and process flows from the OGC has paid off in terms of making it familiar to anyone who’s gone through the training. The document control functions work intuitively, and it can handle a wide variety of document types.

In a very shrewd move, it’s available in two versions – the Community edition is a standalone system which lacks the networked functionality of the Professional version. The Community edition is available for free download from the Project In A Box website, so it’s easy to try before you buy, or even just use as a personal aide-memoire. This is likely to make it popular as a personal tool for PMs using Prince, so it’s easy to imagine a situation where it could become the logical choice for an enterprise-wide system.