Projects Are Not About Schedules – They’re About People

No matter how good your are at slapping together a gant chart, what kind of certifcates you’ve earned or what letters come after your name, what makes or breaks a project is managing people.  There’s a quote by Anne Coffin, CIO of Beck/Arnley, in the CIO Magazine’s State of the CIO ’07 feature that sums it up best:

“Project management is not just moving dates around on a chart, it’s really people management,” says Coffin. “And it’s frequently people management with people that do not report you.”

Expanding on this a little, and in no particular order, the key people skills for a good project manager are:

• Negotiation
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Conflict management
• Communication
• Relationship building
• Consensus building
• Emotional intelligence
• Motivating individuals

As I referred to in an earlier piece if you are spending more time on the tools than on the people it’s a good bet that your projects aren’t going well.  If they aren’t now, just give it a little time.

Web 2.0 as the Global SOA – Web 3.0 as the Global BPM

2007 trend #7 over at Intelligent Enterprise’s Seven Trends for 2007 discusses the long hard slog organizations face as they implement drive towards a service oriented architecture (SOA).  What struck me is this paragraph:

Organizations that have moved forward with SOA as a new platform for business integration are trailblazers, feeling their way toward solutions to sometimes severe XML scalability, performance and management challenges inherent in SOA designs. In 2007, we may see Web 2.0 options take some of the performance pressure off with more “human-centered” approaches to information delivery and integration. After all, business integration is about more than middleware: It’s about connecting people so they can collaborate like never before.

As I mentioned before more an more of the products and services that organizations use continue to be deployed has hosted, on demand solutions with web services built in.  Two enterprise applications I’ve just rolled fit this mold, one a salesforce automation tool/CRM and the other a professional services automation package.  Both examples of highly adaptive, service-when-I-need-them solutions with open API’s.  Integration with other systems is either built in or doesn’t take long to do.

More are coming.  So, even if companies make little progress internally they may very well find themselves on a global SOA called Web 3.0.

I can easily see Web 2.0 evolve into what Business Process Management (BPM) is working to accomplish – users can connect the information and process from online applications to create new applications to address their needs.  Businesses will be able to adapt in real time.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 Hamstrings Web Standards

Bizarre.  Microsoft has hamstrung web standards in Outlook 2007, which is due out soon.  Instead of using Internet Explorer to render web content, the new version of Outlook will be using Word 2007 which supports a subset of the HTML and CSS standards.  Better go get the Outlook 2007 HTML and CSS Validator and start checking any system that sends e-mail to see what you are in for.

What perplexes me is why doesn’t Microsoft use Internet Explorer for rendering in all their products?  Why develop, maintain and support two renders? 

I’m sure Microsoft will play the security card, but what that says to me is “We don’t trust the security features in Internet Explorer enough to use in Outlook.” Hmmm.  Not the message I’d want to send.

Call me old fashioned, but this is contrary to some basic principles to good software design and product development.

For example – code reuse.  Don’t reinvent the wheel.  Especially when web content is embedded and/or accessible from practically every application today.  The web is as much a part of a user’s platform as the operating system is.  More-so as services continue to be the norm.  There should be one render for all their applications. 

And how about making easier for people to do their jobs.  Not harder.  You never want to increase the amount of time it takes for people to get the same results.  Unfortunately this move makes anyone’s job who communicates information via e-mail using HTML much harder.  At least twice the work.   This is in addition to the amount of work to check all the legacy communication systems to make sure they’re not affected.  Any that are will need to be retooled. 

From my experience, you never want to take features away.  Add functionality as you release not take it away. 

Why should you care if Outlook 2007 guts the HTML and CSS standards how it sees fit?  It’s only e-mail after all, right?

Right.  E-mail – still the killer app of the Internet.  The primary way for connecting to your internal and external clients.  Not only does it affect the communication, marketing and sales folks, but it also impacts everyone else.  Analytics, KPI events, pipeline updates, technical support communication and so on are pushed automatically to Inboxes.  This is information that is used to run the business and touches everyone from the C-suite on down.

This means that any system that sends e-mails needs to be checked.

Amazing.

A Simple Example Why Code Audits Are Critical

Found this function call in a code audit I performed on software development that’s being outsourced: 

function loadAndPlayAudio2(audioFileName, continueToNext, audioPosition)

Unfortunately, there are several other function calls that apparently have twins as well.  I don’t have to look anywhere else to know that I could have a bumpy ride ahead of me in terms of release quality, additional support needs and increased costs and time to release with upgrades down the line.

How do those few function calls lead me to this conclusion?

What Everyone Should Know About Using Logic Questions in Interviews

Over at Imran on Tech there’s a great post about the value of using logic questions in the interview process.  I couldn’t agree more.  In addition to situational and behavioral questions this is a good way to round out the types of questions being asked a candidate.  It helps give a different view of a prospect in terms of how they approach problem solving. 

What makes this a good post is the discussion rolling on in the comments.  Lots of good takes on the subject. 

The Problem With Leaning on Microsoft Project

I’ve been using Microsoft Project for about 10 years now.  Great tool.  It’s indispensbile on large, complex projects and to help manage many parallel, yet unrelated, projects.

However, it is a tool.  Knowing how to use Project does not make someone a good project manager.  I’ve known a number of people that know more about the software than I will ever know (not particularly hard to do), but who were not particularly good at managing a project – let alone several projects at once.