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[Published on Microsoft's Office site as "Leveraging the power of project team collaboration"] Working the Mojo of Team Collaboration How project managers can support team collaboration By Dan Webb, Principal Consultant, Team Analytics Consulting (Dan@TeamAnalytics.com) About Dan Webb Team Analytics Consulting delivers the matrix and metrics of enterprise effectiveness, including implementation of Microsoft’s Enterprise Project Management Solution. Team Analytics consultants focus on corporate performance management (CPM) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and tools for team effectiveness management (TEM). Team Analytics provides proprietary, Web-based software solutions to support consensus building through structured team communications, such as requests for commitment, change requests, problem reports, requests for resolution of issues, and requests for refined specifications. For more than twenty-five years, Dan Webb has managed software development projects based on the practices of process improvement, collaborative process management, success metrics, and high-performance teamwork. Dan has provided professional consulting services in project management, relational database application development, Web application development, strategic planning, and effective teamwork for enterprises such as Microsoft Corp., The Boeing Company, 3M Corp., Washington Mutual Bank, the law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP, and The Federal Reserve Bank System as well as for small and medium-sized companies including Global Business Solutions Inc., Design Intelligence Inc., COMSYS IT Services, Open Systems Inc., Sound Genesis Corp., Point.com, PeopleTek Inc., Evergreen CASE Tools Inc., Water's Edge Health Services Clinic, Questar Microsystems Inc., and A Bit Better Software Corporation. Outline ·
The
Impact of Team Collaboration ·
Microsoft’s
Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution ·
An
Information-Rich Environment That Promotes Team Collaboration ·
Supporting
Quality and Best Practices ·
EPM
Features that Support Team Collaboration ·
Summary The Impact of Team Collaboration A great number
of project managers have used the basic capabilities of Microsoft Project —
tasks, resource assignments, predecessor task dependencies, etc. — to predict
finish dates, display Gantt charts, and print time sheets. To be truly successful with a demanding
project, a project manager needs to track a lot of information about a project,
including estimates of work hours and duration, resource usage and availability
information, issues, risks, measures of progress, and schedule variance data. Beyond tracking the schedule- and
resource-related data, a project manager needs to support knowledge sharing and
team collaboration or suffer risks like these:
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Under
the typical urgency to begin building a solution, an important requirement goes
unrecognized until the customer acceptance test. Correcting the problem so late in the product
development cycle takes a factor of 20 or more times the duration and/or cost
of designing for that requirement from the beginning — and at the most visible
and costly time to blow the expected delivery schedule.
§
Two developers
begin inventing in incompatible directions.
§
The
customer’s priorities are not well understood by one of the business analysts.
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Under
time pressure, a software developer misses an important specification.
§
A
program manager assumes that a key new member of the team will know what
information he’ll need at each step in the process and will ask for it then. In each case
above, the Gantt chart won’t tell you that there’s a serious problem fulfilling
the customer’s requirements until it’s too late to recover. A gap in communication or understanding or
agreement can fail a project more easily than a late milestone can. The Standish Group research shows a staggering 31.1% of projects are canceled before they are completed. Further results indicate 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimates. On the success side, the average is only 16.2% for software projects that are completed on-time and on-budget. In the larger companies, the news is even worse: only 9% of their projects come in on-time and on-budget. And, even when these projects are completed, many are no more than a mere shadow of their original specification requirements. Projects completed by the largest American companies have only approximately 42% of the originally-proposed features and functions. Smaller companies do much better. A total of 78.4% of their software projects will get deployed with at least 74.2% of their original features and functions. Ineffective team
collaboration is one of the primary contributors to costly rework and delivery
failure in IT projects. Team
collaboration is about sharing knowledge
and reaching consensus within the
team. Consensus results from effectively
detecting and resolving conflicts in data, perceptions, interpretations and
actions. A key
human-factors challenge for project managers is to make sure that all crucial
information related to the project has been validated by at least two team
members who agree about the results of the validation and that the information
has been effectively integrated by the stakeholders whose successful
performance depends upon it. Team
members need access to crucial information, and they need support for
communicating clearly and reaching agreement with ease. Clear communication and ease of agreement can
never be assumed without some appropriate test for that condition. Project
Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)
defines communication skills and responsibilities this way: 10.2.2.1 Communications skills. Communications skills are used to exchange
information. The sender is responsible
for making the information clear, unambiguous, and complete, so that the
receiver can receive it correctly, and for confirming that it is properly
understood. The receiver is
responsible for making sure that the information is received in its entirety
and understood correctly. [Emphasis
added.] Simply making
information available to stakeholders does not insure that communication has
occurred. For example, publishing a list
of tasks assigned to a developer does not insure that the developer has
understood the work to be done or that the developer is committed to complete
the work according to a particular schedule.
Microsoft’s Enterprise Project
Management (EPM) Solution Microsoft’s
Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution delivers a rich environment for
knowledge sharing and consensus building, whether it’s adopted as an
enterprise-wide standard or it’s being used to support one mission-critical
project. Later in this article, we’ll
look at the capabilities of the EPM solution that are ready made to support
team collaboration. A leading financial
institution in An Information-Rich Environment That Promotes Team Collaboration The information about
a project that the project manager maintains can come from a variety of
sources, including individual team members, customers, other stakeholders, external
resources, accounting systems, and other enterprise data sources. One of the technical challenges for project
managers today is creating an information-rich environment that promotes team
collaboration, whereby all project management data can be collected easily and
shared with appropriate filtration and security using a highly automated
solution that provides feedback to the stakeholders about the quality of
communications. For instance,
how many times have you, as a project manager, re-entered task performance data
that you received from team members because there was no other way to update
the project plan? The time spent on
re-entering data distracts you from being more vigilant in higher-risk areas. And how many times have you heard from team
members that if they could get e-mail notifications about upcoming tasks and
delivery dates, they would better be able to multi-task more effectively and keep
on schedule? If your project management
solution doesn’t provide that kind of precision and timing in the transmission
of the right data to each team member at the right time, you’ve missed an
important opportunity for driving risk out of the project. Supporting Quality and Best Practices Quality
management methodologies focus on specifications, processes, standards, best
practices, and performance metrics to improve precision in fulfilling
customers’ requirements. If your project
management solution doesn’t facilitate the definition and presentation of
relevant specifications, processes and performance metrics in a way that’s
easily accessible by each team member at just the right time, there are still
unnecessary risks in the project.
Microsoft’s EPM Solution goes a long way toward providing a ready-made,
information-rich collaboration environment that raises the quality of project
outcomes. Microsoft’s Enterprise
Project Management (EPM) solution includes these components:
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Project
Server 2002, including Project Web Access (PWA)
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Project
Professional 2002
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SQL
Server 2000 with Analysis Services
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Windows
Server 2000
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Internet
Information Services
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SharePoint Team
Services
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Office
XP EPM Features that Support Team Collaboration Here’s a table showing elements
of best practices in team collaboration as we envision them, with the
corresponding supporting feature(s) of Microsoft’s EPM Solution:
An alarming
percentage of IT projects do not deliver expected functionality on schedule and
within budget. And many projects are
canceled before they are completed. Team
collaboration issues are very often the reason why projects fail, especially in
high-tech, but this is the most often neglected source of variability in
results. Microsoft’s Enterprise Project
Management (EPM) Solution goes a long way toward providing a ready-made
infrastructure that facilitates effective knowledge sharing. And it provides an adaptable platform for
adding customized features to support consensus building within a project team. |