Can you say ‘stop’ when customers ask too much?

I differ from Kimberling’s blog Four Reasons Why ERP Projects Take Longer Than Expected, that ERP project timelines are due to software vendor sales people under-estimating issues and implementers finding unexpected customisation needs.

It can happen with some projects, but in my experience it is unrealistic expectations by customers of when the implementation should be completed and what to be included.

On The Art of Project Management blog, there are some good points on the whys and hows of Saying No.

It’s not easy to say ‘stop’ or ‘no’ but too many projects have got into trouble because either of those words weren’t said often or soon enough.

Project Communication

A couple of posts on Paul Rasmussen’s blog prompts me to make my own comments about communication between members of a project team. In The Problem of Communication in Project Management Part 2, Paul discusses the types of communication currently used, which are meetings, phone calls and emails. In Part 3 he mentions new communication technologies – smart phones, wikis and social networking.

Having just been through two projects, I have found that the old ways of communication, particularly face-to-face, are the best for project communication. As we all know, more than 50% of our communication is non-verbal (ie, body language, voice tone), and also as we know, projects success is highly dependent on communication. So as in the case of one project manager, most communication was by email, then mis-understandings can happen. Our company has now instituted a directive that email is not considered adequate communication.

We have tried collaborative tools, such as Basecamp, to help with dispersed team members, but there seems to have been some reluctance to try these new tools. I find that interesting, considering we expect our clients to adopt new tools in the form of ERP solutions. So whether we would benefit from new communication technology is up for debate.

Email can be used to confirm and document facts and issues, however in my opinion, nothing replaces personal contact when it comes to communication.

Why are ERP consultants needed?

In a blog on the ITtoolbox site, Steve Phillips comments that companies are moving away from using external ERP consultants in favour of using in-house expertise – Why ERP Software Consultants Cannot Save The Day.

His view is:

The ownership philosophy is about controlling your project destiny and built on some fundamental principles. … 1) It is possible to take internal responsibility for project management. 2) It is possible to develop and/or acquire internal software expertise to the point outside application consultants are rarely needed. 3) It is possible to become much more educated and less reliant on the false sense of security an army of consultants can bring. 4) It is possible to realize ERP benefits by developing better software and business process solutions with fewer outside consultants. 5) It is possible for internal personnel to do up to 70% of what many pay consultants to do.

Except for item 4, in my experience, I haven’t found any companies that can do what he suggests. I suspect it is a function of certain factors – a primary one being the size of the organisation. But I also believe that business maturity, and the availability of knowledge and experience play a significant part.

In the South African market, most businesses fall into the small-to-medium (SMB) category. Employees in SMB companies tend to take on more than one role (debtors and creditors, pre-sales technical and sales, production planning and management) which leaves them little time to focus on issues which are not directly relevant to the job they must do. So finding time to acquire software expertise is difficult or requires after-hours learning. In time, and if a person stays in the same job, they might become “more educated and less reliant.” However, given their time constraints, it is highly unlikely that people will have the time or knowledge “to do up to 70%” of what a consultant will do.

Also skills and expertise are in short supply in this country, so someone who develop technical skills may easily find themselves moving out of their business job and into a technical or consulting role. Similarly, project management requires experience and time to spend on it, which senior staff in SMBs (e.g., finance managers and directors) rarely have. Companies will tend to have a less senior person overseeing the project, but all the details and work that goes into project management has to be done by someone with the background and time allocation to do it – in other words, a consultant.

In the South African context, therefore, most average companies (not large ones over 1000 people) do not have the people, skills or time to take on an ERP implementation themselves. The cost of bringing in consultants outweighs the risks of failure in trying to do the project in-house.

Project Server 2010 defines its market segment

One of the Microsoft bloggers has provided the software requirements to run the forthcoming version of Microsoft Project Server 2010, which is:

Project Server 2010 will be 64-bit only
Project Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2
Project Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL 2005 or 2008
Project Server 2010 will only support Internet Explorer 7 or 8 (IE 6 will not be supported nor other browsers)

What this effectively announces is that Project Server is aimed at the large enterprise organisation (over 1000 users), and that Microsoft will not be continuing with an enterprise project management (EPM) solution for the mid-market. I would see that as an indication that Microsoft believes it should be competing with Oracle’s recently acquired Primavera product, rather than with products like Sciforma’s PSNext.

Organisations need to be project-prepared before they adopt PPM technology

Brian Sommer commented on reports that organisations should really start looking at project portfolio management (PPM) – PPM & IT Management – is now finally the time?

Many organisations have some rudimentary project management capability – such as an enterprise licence for Microsoft Project – but have no idea how to really benefit from a project-oriented to their business.

The work that I have been doing at my company in the last 2 years has shown me that simply implementing a technology solution is most unlikely to make an organisation project-prepared. The problem is that the project software vendors like to promote their software as the first step. Working with consultants like the X-Pert Group have shown me that to become project-oriented, an organisation has to go through a cultural change, starting at the executive level, and has to be prepared for a long learning curve and a number of struggles on the way.

So while I would love more people to come to us for project technology, I would recommend that they put their houses in order first.

Rise of EPM applications

Thanks to Twitter, I have started to follow the blog by Forrester Research’s Ray Wang. He seems to have coined a term project-based solutions (which we might start to use to segment our software), and tracks software companies in that segment.

So I am surprised, and pleased, to see a number of start-ups in the project space. They seem to be more in the IT and workforce project management space – eProject (now Daptiv), Tenrox, Augeo, QuickArrow, and OpenAir (NetSuite); interestingly, SaaS offerings are quite common.

Until now, EPM (enterprise project management) has been almost an underground software offering. Noise about it started with the acquisition of Primavera by Oracle earlier this year. But the other major vendors that I am aware of – Microsoft’s Project and Portfolio Servers, CA’s Clarity – seem to follow a ’stealth marketing’ approach to their products.

With the rise of the project start-ups, I wonder if the majors are going to sit up and take more notice of this segment of the software market? As we start to expand our opportunities in the project ERP space, I hope that the attention and focus around EPM grows.

The changing EPM space

I was surprised by the announcement that Oracle was acquiring Primavera, one of the large players in the enterprise project management (EPM) space. I went to see if AMR had some comment, and sure enough they did. Apparently it wasn’t a surprise to them.

I use the term EPM, but analysts like AMR like to use the fancier term, project portfolio management (PPM); I wonder if using the word ‘portfolio’ makes it sound better to financial buyers. This latest development is particularly interesting to me because it is in the project space that my company operates.

Oracle’s acquisition of Primavera will deepen its vertical presence in industries where it already has a presence (e.g. defense), and will expand Oracle’s horizontal profile where it doesn’t have major presence (e.g. engineering, construction). Microsoft has had EPM products for a few years, Office Project Server and Portfolio Server, but has done little with it; at the recent World Partner Congress there was only one session.

EPM is currently a niche market, like product lifecycle management (PLM). Oracle bought a major PLM vendor, Agile, some time ago, but that hasn’t raised PLM to a broader level. So I doubt that Primavera’s purchase will change much in the EPM market either. 

It will be interesting though whether this will change Microsoft’s activity and approach to the market. Microsoft probably hasn’t worried about a major competitor. It has been making the link between Project and Portfolio Server tighter with SharePoint has part of an corporate portal strategy. Conversely, now that Oracle has a project management tool, will it use it against Microsoft? Microsoft’s Office Project software is the de facto standard in project management and has no competitors. Oracle is the only company big enough to develop a competitor, using Primavera. With the recent announcement of the Beehive, Oracle also has a portal product it could integrate with Primavera.

Frank Scavo points out that ”project-based organizations are relatively under-served by enterprise system vendors today” and so this may be an opportunity for Oracle.

Another question is whether Oracle plans to link Primavera with its PLM software acquired via Agile. Our experience in project industries is that the combination of the two would be quite a powerful product. However, Vinnie reminds us that this kind of integration is “going to take years of sustained investments for Oracle to make these vertically complete”. AMR also notes that “Oracle will have difficulty rationalizing the significant overlap in functionality between the products, with Oracle Projects, PeopleSoft ESA, and JD Edwards Enterprise One all having varying degrees of PPM ability.”

I do feel sorry (a bit) for Oracle’s sales people, because this is going to bring yet another set of products that they have to learn about – it now includes database, several ERP, middleware, retail, BI, CRM, and PLM.

PMO means too many things

What does the term PMO mean to you?

In the work that our company does – ERP implementation – it’s the acronym for “project management office”.

However, if you use or market Oracle’s Hyperion product, I have learnt that PMO refers to “performance management organisation”.

The IT industry is renowned for its TLAs (three letter acronyms), but I have not come across a situation where the same TLA is used to mean to totally different things.

There is an additional problem for our company, we have started to promote a solution to projecting industries and the director responsible refers to PMO, but it means neither of the two above. So does that mean we have to invent yet another TLA?

What project management methodologies leave out

In my time as an IT consultant and implementer, I have been exposed to, or had to use, several project management methodologies. Often these methodologies claim to provide a unique solution to defining, planning, implementing and closing IT projects, however in my view they tend to be fairly similar.

In all cases, these methodologies emphasise the importance of processes to follow, and documentation to be produced and maintained. In the last few months though I have come to wonder whether they omit something critical.

Two project I have been involved in have had a situation where the project has been proceeding satisfactorily but the customer wants the project manager changed because of personality issues. In other words, while the project manager may have been following process and documenting faithfully, he/she has failed to understand the social psychology of the project.

This is the area that I have not yet found any project management methodologies cover – the psychology of project management. It is a common saying that projects usually don’t falter because of hardware or software issues, but due to human factors. In the IT industry we tend to assume that the human factor is something in the customer organisation. What recent experience has shown me is that we need to recognise the human factor in the implementation provider.

I think it is important that project management courses and methodologies cover the handling of personality types that courses on selling and general management have been doing in recent years. One potential difficulty – is the personality of project managers amenable to understanding this?

On blogger’s block and managing projects

Writer’s block is a well-known issue for authors – an inability to write resulting in feelings of frustration, which seems to create a vicious cycle making it even harder to start writing.

I think I have been experiencing a blogger’s version of that? Is it also writer’s block, or should we create a sub-category for boggers?

I have been through a phase of nearly two months where I just didn’t have any interest in updating my blog. Partly I think it was due to a very intense project workload, but also I was also stressed waiting for my first performance review since I joined my company last year.

The stress is partly over as the performance review has been done and I did OK, but I am now waiting for a follow-up as my role is being changed to a more business development position.

I was criticised during my performance review for some actions I didn’t take as a project manager on a large project, and on another project I went ahead with an implementation that could have had a high risk for the company. The latter project I did get in on time, and its under budget, and no longer a risk, but the comment was I should have raised the flag early.

The experience has taught me some useful lessons, but it lowers my project management profile in the company, and I really want to grow my PM skills for my CV (that’s resumé for Americans).

I think I will have to be content with getting smaller projects, and in the meantime improve my SYSPRO knowledge so that I can be more valuable when discussing issues with clients.