Have you got what it takes? Play PPM Hero today and find out!

CA is launching a new, exciting and fun interactive online game. In PPM Hero, the game, projects leaders run around an office trying to solve problems (sounds familiar?). The fun part is that you can get additional funding for your project by correctly answering various PPM questions. While loading up some energy at the PPM tool screens gives you protection from the project police. At the internal test we had over a 1000 wannabe heroes compete for a spot at the top of the internal leader board. Play today and see how you rank!

But there is also a more serious side. You can submit your own questions to test the project management capability of the other players even further (the original ones were created together with The Butler Group). The best questions will be used to create the benchmark, future heroes will be measured against.

Click here to begin the game

Certified - So you think you can dance?

Learn the Steps or Feel the Beat?
Everyone who ever attended event night at one of the major software vendors’ user conferences knows, “Real IT people don’t dance” (or should I say “IT people don’t really dance”). Yet I plan to use a dance analogy when discussing the various best practice frameworks and methods we IT people like to get certified in. Frameworks and methods like (here we go): ITIL, CobIT, Prince2,PMbok, RUP, Tickit, TOGAF, etc.Did you ever wonder why there is a world championship for ballroom dancing, but not one for individual dances such as the Waltz, the Foxtrot or the Tango? I bet you never did. But actually there are only two championship categories, Standard and Latin. (source: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballroom_dance).

I guess the reason is that if you can only do one dance (like the one you learned for your wedding party) you’re not really considered a dancer. Now, just like the previously mentioned IT methods, these dances are distinctly different. However, they do share a standard vocabulary, standard exams and common framework of reference.

Now in Holland, if we have two people with a joint idea they start an association (or maybe a “coffee”-shop). And if two guys across the river have a similar idea, they start one too. Of course in our Dutch melting pot of cultures, we have historically had a good reason for all these separate associations: one was Catholic, one reformed, one Protestant, one Lutheran, one Jewish and one typically atheist (a.k.a. communist/socialist). But what is our excuse in IT to have so many?

There are some promising signs we are coming to our senses in IT. Maybe the credit crunch crisis has some benefit after all? The PMI (member wise one of the largest bodies) is looking over the wall, by participating in Agile2009, presenting at Fusion09 and even attending the Gartner PPM summit. CobIT and ITIL have published guidance on how they best work together. The DSDM Consortium Benelux is now also the Agile Consortium i.o. And a relatively new movement like Lean is bridging the very different worlds (or should we rather say different galaxies) of IT development and IT operations.

Should we, in that case, not also strive for integral certifications, having people with a balanced knowledge across several related topics? The least it would do is cater for shorter business cards (for the few people with more acronyms behind their name than there are letters in the alphabet).

What Would Such an Integral Certification Look Like?
For sure it would not only include IT subjects. I happened to be one of the first people in Holland to receive a Masters in “Managerial Information Sciences” (BIK) Mind you, this was back in the eighties. We already had several technical IT studies (like informatics and digital electronics) but this was the first study aimed at managing (and not building) IT. The curriculum was managed by the economic faculty and included subjects like accounting, marketing and production management, but also borrowed heavily from other disciplines like Law (business, international and information law), Informatics (computer sciences, programming, systems theory) and philosophy and psychology. The last two were expected to have a positive impact as IT - and especially IT management - is about people. Being an academic study, any practical skills (like project management) were of course completely absent from the curriculum.

Needless to say “Managerial Information Sciences” was a varied and interesting study, which delivered generalists. Not people who do one task particularly well, but people who understand and oversee the big picture and bring the different constituencies together. Basically it prepared me perfectly for the world of Cloud Computing, where technical details and skills become less and less important. Unfortunately this was twenty years before anyone even was using the word Cloud. Don’t worry - I managed to pick up some specific skills (like blogging ;-)) later on.

So You Think You Can Dance?
This brings me to the main question of this blog post, how do you certify that somebody “got it”. In other words, how do you judge whether someone indeed can dance? One thing is sure, you don’t determine it by asking him or her for the definition of the foxtrot’s basic turn or reverse weave. And it is beyond me why anyone would think we should ask for such definitions in an ITIL exam. The true test of good learning is that you can apply it years or even decades later, often in situations you never imagined and to solve problems it never was intended for. That is the difference between learning a trick - like a monkey - and true knowledge: a frame of reference you can apply to different situations. That’s why the idea of adopt & adapt for any best practice or body of knowledge is so essential.

Globally there are two distinctly different schools of thought around this. One is that you describe the intent, and the receiver makes his own decisions based on what he feels will best accommodate the intent. The other one is that you describe in detail what the receiver is to do or not to do. An accounting example: European rules say that the financial books should reflect the true state of an organization’s financial situation. While North American rules say “You shall not have special entities” (SOX rule added after Enron) and thy shalled not use Ponzi schemes to pay existing investors using investments from new entrants (expect that rule to be added or at least rephrased soon). Needles to say the second list of rules will be longer, easier to circumvent (if it does not explicitly say it is forbidden, it is allowed) and less effective.

Another example: the early versions of quality standard ISO9000 stated that practices and processes should be documented and people should adhere to these written procedures. So if an organisation wrote down that “whoever picks up the phone decides on discounts”, and people indeed worked that way, then they got an ISO 9000 certification. And if you ever did mandatory computer based ethics training you surely answered questions like “Accepting gifts is not allowed for legal, compliance and financial reasons.” Name three reasons why you should not accept gifts?” Wow, we became a lot more ethical through that training!

Our IT frameworks and methods are not only too fragmented (as discussed earlier), but somehow they also seem to be becoming more and more mechanical (tricks instead of knowledge). Looking at some of the comments this week on the ITIL V3 refresh (there are hundreds of comments out there) and reading about inconsistencies in definitions which apparently caused people to fail exams (seriously!) ITIL also seems to have fallen into this “tricky” trap. As described earlier, good knowledge in my view is not only adopted but also adapted. Maybe the upcoming refresh can be blessing in disguise, as it can get us back to an adapt approach. After all the best dancers are not the ones that stick to the steps, but the ones that move to the beat.

A Service Portfolio approach to Cost Management

Do Lean Times require Smart IT, or does Lean IT mean Smart Times?

This week a major European IT magazine launched Smart IT, an expert forum dedicated to how smarter IT can help reduce enterprise cost, So not just IT cost itself. It is only fitting that the first case discussed here was a retail case, because there is no industry where cost management is so essential. The traditional thin margins of retail make cost management a way of live and not just something you do in hard times.

But if you now think “glad I did not choose a career in retail”, I have to disappoint you. Fortune magazine described it eloquently in this month’s “My (recovery) Playbook” article. It is time to end the waiting game. The economy we have today, is the economy we have. Any plans need to start from here. High unemployment, low GDP growth and almost impossible to obtain credit is not an anecdote we will tell our grand kids about, it is the economy our kids will grow up in. So let’s see what can we learn from this retail case.

Major European retailer Debenhams announced this week they managed to improve in store customer service while at the same time reducing support related cost by 25%. As in most modern retailer every aspect of Debenhams’ business is supported by IT — from point of sale transactions and its website to the supply chain, warehousing and general ledger. This means a lot of the companies investments and change efforts involve IT. Earlier this year the organization implemented a Project and Portfolio solution to reduce costs and prevent wasting resources on unprofitable or ineffective projects and to boost the success rate of its IT projects. In addition they started formal tracking of 60 separate change programs across the company.

The increased efficiency that PPM brought increased the capacity for delivering more IT projects. Bringing greater value to the business and ultimately Debenhams’ customers. Following the success in IT, the organization started extending Project and Portfolio management to other areas such as training and store planning.

But running projects to create new services is only a part of the total cost and enterprise incurs. Many are familiar with the statistic that only 30% of the average budget can be spend discretionary while about 70% is needed to just “keep the lights on”, or -in service management terms - on delivering the services we created last year. So in a true Service Portfolio Management spirit, this organization expanded their improvements efforts to incorporate their existing services, starting with the support cost of these services. Quit fittingly for a retail organization they leveraged the idea of self service extensively. A whopping 15% of issues now are resolved without any human intervention. This did not only reduce the overall cost of rendering support by 25% but at the same time accommodated another major retail goal. Allowing in-store staff to spend the majority of their time actually interacting with customers , and not on filling out forms or holding on the phone while waiting for the helpdesk.

This organization adopted and adapted ITIL (as it was intended) and took a truly integral approach to Service Management (if you like Service Portfolio Management). After having formalized the creation of new services through Project and Portfolio Management and the support of existing services through Service Operations (Service Support) management, they now are looking at more tightly managing the full life cycle of these services by further maturing the change processes around bringing new services live, maintaining running services and decommission retired services.

Is this all Debenhams did to maintain their margins and bottom line in today’s lean times? No, other new projects and services, where some aspect IT was involved, included opening new stores in multiple countries, introducing a beauty card loyalty scheme, moving consumer preference from (lower margin) concession brands to higher margin “Own bought” brands and integrating in-store and online channels through innovative concepts such as “Click and Collect”, “Track and Trace” and “In-store ordering”. Illustrating that one improvement –in today’s economy – is not enough to maintain the bottom line.

This however means that today’s management needs to be able to cope with the increased complexity of fighting multiple wars at multiple (new and existing) fronts, all at the same time, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of their current “keeping the lights on” operations. Something IT can play a major supporting - or even guiding - role in.