such collaboration portals allow the new participant to gain access to historical data and documents but require the new member to search on his/her own.

A plan sets consistent processes and well-defined goals.

A plan establishes central authority.

A plan delegates responsibility fairly.

A plan sets up communication patterns everybody enjoys.

A plan builds collaborative relationships between people.

A plan emphasizes the project’s outcome.

Success in teamwork means integrating people who are oriented differently.

• Orientation means “what are they focused on?”
  • What are they trying to maximize?
  • What are they trying to avoid?
  • To what are they paying attention?
  • What are they consistently ignoring?

Micromanagement won’t help a poor operation.

You need to plan.

Task management is the foundation of project management.

The Le Tigre realease will contain web-only functionality to help you store and organise your online activity through the spheers.com Firefox Plugin (Power Plus features) or the browser bookmarklet (Basic features).

• store and organise your bookmarks, blogs, video, notes and messages.
• automatically share your knowledge with your delicious account
• read your favourite blogs
• create a searchable index of everything you consume online
• send it tweets so you dont lose knowledge when you are mobile

The Magnum release will aim to make your spheers.com more socialable. It will include the addition of lifestreaming services and the ability to import/manage your friends from the social networks you use. Yes there are now a million others doing this, friendfeed.com, secondbrain.com, etc (see recent post on techcrunch), so why do it?

Where friendfeed et al are great for keeping up with what your friends are doing, spheers.com is about storing and organising your knowledge. What we’d like to be able to do is not only search your own knowledge, we’d like to be able to search the knowledge of people we trust. So we are looking at attention data, at the Dataportablity project and APML to see how we can help you collate ALL your knowledge and provide a searchable interface to it.

You can’t do business without respect.

Learn how to show respect by seriously listening to people.

Overview: Avenue A | Razorfish is one of the largest interactive agencies in the world and currently have more than 2,000 employees in 20 offices in seven countries (Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) focusing exclusively on digital marketing and technology. Each office is filled with opportunities for people who want to invent the digital future. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a big Internet, and there’s work to be done.

Responsibilities: Position Summary:

A Senior Project Manager leads and manages the successful delivery of large consulting and web development projects through the entire project lifecycle that effectively solve our client’s business problems. This requires a demonstrated mix of balancing scope, time, cost, risk and quality while maintaining a positive environment that promotes a high performance team and manages the client relationship and expectations. The Senior Project Manager has an expert understanding of project management approaches to managing complex, multiphased projects and the flexibility to lead multi-disciplinary, diverse and dynamic teams to deliver integrated digital solutions. Additional responsibilities include defining a project approach, developing an associated project plan, ensuring that profitability objectives are met, and identifying opportunities to grow current business engagements.

Activities:

This position should be able to perform the following activities: • Manage and deliver large projects (10+ members) on-time and on-budget and/or manage multiple smaller projects simultaneously. • Actively provide strategic insight and direction into developing innovative solutions for our clients as well as tactically managing the day to day project operations and communications. • Independently and actively manage all aspects of the project: scope, issues/risks, schedule, budget, quality, communication, team and client relationships on a daily basis. The Senior Project Managers abilities in managing these key aspects of a project are highly sophisticated for projects complex in nature. • Lead the project team to accurately scope work and define/leverage the appropriate project delivery methodology for clients’ specific needs. Manage projects and teams to approved budgets. • Identify effective staffing for project needs and maximize the efficiency and optimization of the team. • Establish and build professional relationships with clients at all organizational levels while ensuring ongoing client satisfaction. Balance the focus of communication between building a strategic client partnership and providing key client stakeholders/decision-makers with day-to-day project contact. • Work closely with the client and team on an ongoing basis to ensure project requirements are clearly defined, met and understood. Oversee the development of project deliverables and ensure they are aligned with project goals. Clearly represent the team’s consensus in all client communications. • Lead, motivate and foster coordination across the multi-disciplinary teams with diverse backgrounds to develop an integrated digital solution. • Ensure the team consistently meets and/or exceeds the client’s expectations and that the client approves & sign-offs on all major deliverables. • Support team in professional development and career mentoring. Conduct individual team project reviews by soliciting feedback from peers and the client. • Partner with the Client Director to drive new business within existing accounts, proactively participates in identifying strategic work for opportunities within projects as well as provide strategic input into growing the client relationship. • Prepare and maintain project documentation: project plan, project charter, status reports, risk assessment plans, change requests, and resource requests.

Organizational Project Operations Activities: • Participate in recruiting and retention activities, where applicable. • Proactively communicate with the company’s internal project support groups such as resource management, finance, and legal. • Provide thought leadership and participate in internally facing meetings and initiatives to build and contribute to the delivery management practice e.g., ongoing improvement practices, knowledge sharing, etc… • Responsible for the project administration such as project setup, ongoing project financials analysis, time and expense approval, internal weekly status reports, project extranet usage, and client invoicing approval.

Qualifications: Skills/Experience:

Project Management: • Minimum 9 years of project management experience in managing multi-phased, complex internet development and/or software & system development. • Experience managing a large technology team within a PMO structure. • Experience with managing web application development in a J2EE environment. • Experience with Content Management Systems is a must; experience with the Interwoven CMS is preferred. • Experience as a hands-on Technical Project Manager with a solid understanding of Web technologies. • Experience as a solution-oriented technical project manager and strong ability to drive technology teams to meet aggressive timelines. • Candidate can be based in San Francisco or Los Angeles; initial project work will be in Los Angeles for the remainder of the year. • Candidate must have successfully managed large sized projects in a consulting environment through the entire development lifecycle from requirements definition to system deployment. • Candidate must be able to demonstrate the proven ability to manage strategic projects with Fortune 500 clients. • Expertise knowledge of Project Management principles, methods & techniques: Scope management, risk/issue management, change management, team communication, cost management, project planning, financial (budgeting, forecasting, tracking, reporting).

Delivery Methodology: • Experience and knowledge with systems development methodologies and toolsets, such as waterfall, RUP, Agile, etc. • Experience in identifying which delivery methodology is applicable to each client’s situation as well as adapting the methodologies where necessary.

Solution Management/Definition: • Experience managing multiple tracks of a project as an integrated program, with differing timelines, deliverables and expectations. • Ability to effectively balance longer-term strategic issues with day to day tactical project issues

Client Management/Development: • Solution selling capabilities. • Experience working in matrixed organized client and vendor engagement model. (e.g., integrated client/consultant team, multiple vendors, etc…) • Provide high levels of client satisfaction during delivery.

Team Management: • Experience leading and motivating a cross-functional project team within budget and schedule constraints while meeting or exceeding client’s expectations.

Knowledge: • Ensure the use of “best practices” and apply lessons learned from previous projects. • Knowledge of Avenue A/Razorfish capabilities and ability to determine how these services can benefit our clients. • Expert knowledge of all facets of web development including strategies, design, implementation, and user adoption. • Knowledge of user experience and research methodologies and how it drives technology. • Working knowledge of MS Project and Microsoft Office

Other: • Experience managing a variety of solutions involving web application development, creative/user experience design and marketing strategy, preferable • Highly developed communication, presentation, leadership, facilitation & negotiation skills • Highly organized • Flexible, ability to adapt to unique situations and projects • Able to thrive in a changing, dynamic environment • Professional, high degree of diplomacy and business acumen • Willingness to work onsite at the client • Requires a BS with business experience; MS and/or MBA a plus • PMP certification, desirable

Please follow this link to apply: https://jobs-aquantive.icims.com/aquantive_jobs/jobs/candidate/login.jsp?jobid=4209

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Youre the kind of person You meet at certain dismal dull affairs. Center of a crowd, talking much too loud Running up and down the stairs. Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years. And though youve tried you just cant hide Your eyes are edged with tears.

You better stop Look around Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown.

When you were a child You were treated kind But you were never brought up right. You were always spoiled with a thousand toys But still you cried all night. Your mother who neglected you Owes a million dollars tax. And your fathers still perfecting ways of making ceiling wax.

You better stop, look around Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes Here comes your nilne-teenth nervous breakdown.

Oh, whos to blame, that girls just insane. Well nothing I do dont seem to work, It only seems to make matters worse. oh please.

You were still in school When you had that fool Who really messed your mind. And after that you turned your back On treating people kind. On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind. But after while I realized you were disarranging mine.

You better stop, look around Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown. Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown

List everything you need to do to finish the big chunk of work.

• I include any infrastructure work such as setting up branches in the source control system.

Estimate each item on that list.

• This initial estimate will help you see how long it might take to complete the entire task.

Now, look to see how long each item on that list will take to finish.

• If you have a task longer than one day, break that task into smaller pieces.
• Breaking larger tasks into these inch-pebbles is critical for escaping the 90% Done syndrome.

Determine a way to show visible status to anyone who’s interested.

• If you’re the person doing the work, what would you have to do to show your status to your manager?
• If you’re the manager, what do you need to see?
• You might need to see lists of test cases or a demo or something else that shows you visible progress.
• Since you’ve got one-day or smaller tasks, you can track your progress daily.
• I like to keep a chart or list of the tasks, my initial estimated end time and the actual end time for each task.
• This is especially important for you managers, so you can see if the person is being interrupted and therefore is multitasking.

decisions create motivation.

all projects consist of actions that enforce a decision already made.

therefore the decision is a key output of any brainstorming session.

Top 10 lists are everywhere this time of year, so why not one more? Here are 10 time-tested, widely recognized truths for project management success. Sometimes, it’s best to simplify.

Many projects fail because of the simplest of causes. You don’t have to be a genius to deliver a project on time, nor do you have to be steeped in a mystical project management methodology to be a project manager. To help you get started here are 10 self-evident truths.

In a knowledge organization, communication is the currency of the realm.”

project members should be able to customize their tactics in order to better further the overall goal.

Empower them to change procedures as long as the changes are agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders.

We need to understand the work needs of our staff, and strive to meet these needs.

Unless workers have their work needs met, they will be unable to work at full production capacity.

• you shouldn’t have a situation where decisions are made but reversed by higher-ups.
• commitment and signalling are key ways for the top level executives to impact a project.

the nature of conflict is based in human emotion.

It sounds obvious but if you don’t have an end-point in mind, you’ll never get there. You must be able to clearly state the goal of your project so that anyone can understand it. If you can’t adequately describe your goal in a single sentence then your chances of achieving it are pretty slim.

• Step in quickly to get everyone calmed down.
• Give control back to those who feel hurt.
  • Usually disputes result from a feeling of lack of control.
• Don’t ever gloat.
• Agree on a PLAN OF ACTION to solve the dispute.
• Go the extra mile – try to overdeliver on the solution so people take you even more seriously next time.

Every dispute is an OPPORTUNITY TO LEAD.

• you need to schedule all of your followups.
• you need to make following up a priority.
• nothing says “i don’t care” like not following up.

• make sure the outcome is measurable

• Take a look around at the workspace of the complaining parties.
• Is there anything they need in order to really live?
• Is the workplace throttling or constricting them?

Creative endeavors demand creative workspaces.

Your team is the most important resource you have available and their enthusiastic contribution will make or break your project. Look after them and make sure the team operates as a unit and not as a collection of individuals. Communications are vital. Invest time in promoting trust and ensuring that everyone knows what they have to contribute to the bigger picture. Dish out reward as well as criticism, provide superior working conditions and lead by example.

However, task lists, issues management and project milestones are not typically incorporated in these solutions. The team is still left to manage the overall processes and repository of information, again relying on key users to manage documents, and the use of email for communication of progress, status and issues.

Some problems need to be solved sequentially.

This means you have to solve one problem before you can even work on the next.

Other problems can be delegated amongst team members or otherwise tackled simultaneously.

Therefore one of the key challenges with many of the existing collaboration software solutions is that they often do not support the management and communication of some critical information for any user to successfully collaborate such as:

What is the current status of the work that has to be done?

What are the steps that need to be executed to get the document or deliverable as a result?

A big mistake traditionally committed on projects is to leap before you’re ready. When you’re under pressure to deliver, the temptation is to “get the ball rolling.” The ball, however, is big and heavy and it’s very, very difficult to change its direction once it gets moving. You need to spend time deciding exactly how you’re going to solve your problem in the most efficient and elegant way.

Lastly, one of the major disadvantages of all these collaboration tools – specifically for new members we have to collaborate with, is that the new member doesn’t have access to any historical information.

Telephone calls that happened in the past are not accessible for a new member of the team; whiteboards got erased a long time ago; and emails are still available but have to be sent again (which in reality rarely happens).

Web-conferencing minutes or issues information is often not available and dependent on the team to track, manage and to communicate to the new member.

Lastly, one of the major disadvantages of all these collaboration tools – specifically for new members we have to collaborate with, is that the new member doesn’t have access to any historical information.

Telephone calls that happened in the past are not accessible for a new member of the team; whiteboards got erased a long time ago; and emails are still available but have to be sent again (which in reality rarely happens).

Web-conferencing minutes or issues information is often not available and dependent on the team to track, manage and to communicate to the new member.

Critical Chain Project Management is a great idea, or really a great collection of ideas. It has similarities to the Critical Path Method in that it focuses on the critical path tasks for managing the project. But there are several innovative ideas that distinguish critical chain from critical path, and some unique hurdles to implementation.

Here are some of the key ideas behind critical chain project management:

• Have team members estimate duration for their tasks – then cut the estimate in half.
• Figure a risk factor, and build in buffer based on a percentage, but add the buffer to the end of the project.
• Eliminate multi-tasking and simply let workers focus on one task at a time until complete.
• Establish a culture that accepts early delivery, but and also is not intolerant of late delivery when delays are due to occurrence of risks and use some buffer.
• Manage the critical chain tasks only, like critical path. But unlike Earned Value, only recognize completion of critical chain tasks.
• Monitor closely the buffer taken for each task, and % of total buffer to date for all tasks on the whole project. Manage based on the flag of excessive overall buffer being taken, and based upon tasks which are eating up the buffer.

The biggest issue here is culture in a number of ways. Allowing team members to concentrate on one task at a time will take some serious discipline and some changes to work styles. A great deal of trust will be required in order to develop estimates that are realistic, and for team members to trust the process of cutting the estimates in half! A shift toward getting one piece of work done well and done early also seems like a great counter-cultural challenge. Finally, changes such as single tasking, cutting estimate times, and getting team members to deliver tasks early, where possible, are difficult to implement if they co-exist with a culture that does not permit this, so sweeping change must be made, or the project team needs to be quite isolated and insulated from the rest of the organization.

One of the things I like best about the idea of Critical Chain Project Management is that it plays on natural human tendencies such as “Student Syndrome” (see Dealing with “Student Syndrome” ) and “Parkinson’s Law” (see Coping with Parkinson’s Law ).

Critical Chain Project Management is new to me, and I was quite impressed with the idea. I learned about it orignally by listen to Cornelius Fichtner’s Project Management Podcast interview entitled “Critical Chain Project Management” with Allen Elder, PMP of www.nolimitsleadership.com. Also recommended is the book on Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints.

With the introduction of the Internet, web-based collaboration solutions became available to support collaboration. Typically they come in two forms:

1) ‘Meeting- based’ tools providing team members secured access to conduct virtual meetings or ‘web-conferencing’ to share documents, discuss issues or status; or

2) ’Document- or deliverable-centric’ tools, allowing participants to share documents and deliverables between each other.

Projects usually involve creative disciplines loaded with assumptions and mistakes. The only way to eliminate errors is through testing. Sure you can do a lot of valuable work to prevent these mistakes being introduced, but to err is human and some of those errors will make it into your finished product code. Testing is the only way to find and eliminate errors.

Be flexible. The essential outcome is delivery of the finished project to a customer who is satisfied with the result. Any means necessary can be used to achieve this and every rule listed above can be broken in the right circumstances, for the right reasons. Don’t get locked into an ideology if the circumstances dictate otherwise. Don’t get blinded by methodology. Focus on delivering the project and use all the tools and people available to you. Keep an eye on the schedule and adjust your expectations and your plan to suit the conditions. Deliver the finished product, promote its use, celebrate your success, and then move on to the next project.

The top reasons for failure of most collaborative efforts are:

Lack of assigning clear objectives and milestones

Communication breakdown – not knowing the status of progress or issues pending

Not following up with issues in a timely manner

Spend time with your stakeholders. Stakeholders will either contribute expert knowledge to the project or will offer their political or commercial endorsement, which will be essential to success. Shake hands and kiss babies as necessary and grease the wheels of the bureaucratic machine so that your project has the smoothest ride possible.

Try and deliver happy surprises and not unpleasant ones. By promising low (understating your goals) and delivering high (delivering more than your promised) you:

• Build confidence in yourself, the project and the team
• Buy yourself contingency in the event that things go wrong
• Generate a positive and receptive atmosphere

Consider this: if you finish early everyone will be happy; if something goes wrong you might still finish on time and everyone will still be happy; if things goes really badly you might still not deliver what you anticipated but it will still be better than if you over-promised.

Most problems worth solving are too big to swallow in one lump. Any serious project will require some kind of decomposition of the problem in order to solve it. This works but only with close attention to how each piece is analyzed and resolved and how the whole fits together. Without a systematic approach you end up with a hundred different solutions instead of one big one.

Project managers may not have much influence in determining which projects get the green light, but understanding how and why your project was valued is a critical part of your job. An informal discovery process can do more than clarify why the project was undertaken; it can shed light on how to best manage the expectations and complexities you’ll be facing. This is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of The Principles of Project Management (SitePoint Pty. Ltd.; March 2008).

Projects don’t just spring from nowhere. Although many project managers only get involved when it’s already been decided that a project will be undertaken to achieve some end, there is, of course, a phase before this: discovery. Discovery is the process by which the organization reviews the available opportunities and decides which of them will become projects in due course.

Ideally, the discovery process should ensure that the best opportunities are pursued — not just those that were mentioned first, or those that have the loudest supporters. Where this process is undertaken, it’s usually combined with some sort of portfolio planning through which the potential projects are matched against the resources or capabilities of the organization itself. The eventual result is a list of projects that are truly the top priorities.

The sad reality is that in many cases, there’s either no process at all for discovery and portfolio planning, or the process that’s in place doesn’t result in the selection of projects that will deliver the most value. It’s also true that as a project manager, your influence may be very limited at this stage — after all, in many cases, you won’t even know about the potential projects until one is assigned to you!

However, understanding what has been discovered, and how the project that you’re managing came to be started, is very important. It can tell you whether the project is truly of high value to the organization for which you’re working (either as an employee, contractor, or service provider) or whether its potential value still needs to be ascertained. It may also give you early insight into the complexities you might have to face during the project.

If you find that little or no discovery work has been done, don’t despair — do it yourself! Find out why people in the organization think your project is important. Understand what they’re expecting the project to deliver — try to focus on what it means to them, not the nuts and bolts of what will be built. If their answers suggest that they don’t think the project matters, find out where they think the time and effort would be better spent.

Your first instinct will be to protect your project, but you might find an opportunity for another project that will deliver even more value. Even if you don’t end up jettisoning the original project and taking on the new one instead, bringing it to the attention of the stakeholders within the organization will make you stand out as a project manager who really cares about the good of the company, not just your own projects.

Imagine there’s a team at a company you’re working with that deals with customer orders. The team members have identified a number of opportunities:

__ Remove manual work from current processes. Many in the team feel that they spend almost all their time shuffling paper, rather than actually dealing with the customers. __ Speed up inventory checking. When a customer places an order, the team members have to call up the inventory team to find out whether the goods are in stock or not. Making this process faster would improve their efficiency greatly. __ Improve tracking of customer orders, queries and complaints. Currently, all tracking of customer interactions is done manually. There’s actually one person in the team whose full-time job is collecting the information and putting it in an Excel spreadsheet! __ Allow customers to interact in more ways. A number of customers have signaled that they’d like to be able to email the team as a whole, or to input queries and complaints online.

As you might have guessed, the opportunities above are ordered in terms of importance. The team feels that reducing their manual work is most important, with the inventory tracking improvements and customer tracking automation coming a close second. Once these fundamental issues have been fixed, the team feels that it can start work on items that will really benefit the customer — introducing a web site and email addresses so they can log orders, queries, and so on.

When people from elsewhere in the organization get involved, however, they get very focused on the web site for the customers. Marketing can see that this will be a real selling point and the sales teams think that it will delight their contacts. They don’t realize that in order for the customer web site to be successful, the team needs to have all the other opportunities addressed first.

The first you know about any of this, however, is when you’re brought in to build the new customer website. You get started working on it, but are finding that the people from the team who deal with the orders are very difficult to work with: they won’t answer questions clearly, don’t turn up to meetings that you’ve organized, and don’t answer emails unless they’re reminded to again and again. You’re sensing hostility, but you have no idea why — you’ve only been there a week. Surely you can’t have offended them already?

You get in touch with some of the IT guys that you know from the last project you worked on for this company and ask them what’s up. They explain about the other projects that this team identified … and that the team actually thought those other projects were more important. However, someone in the marketing team, having heard about the possibility of the web site being developed, promised one of the big customers that it would be ready soon, so management decided to prioritize this project over the improvement of the systems.

Now you understand why the team is so unresponsive! They’re upset because their own needs have been ignored, and now you’re working on the project that they’ve been forced into prematurely.

At this point, it can be very easy to get depressed or start panicking. What if the team continues to sabotage the project and you get blamed when it isn’t delivered? You don’t have the power to go back and work on the project they really wanted to happen, so perhaps you should just give up now.

The point, though, is that now you understand what was causing the team to be unhelpful and unresponsive. Armed with that knowledge, you can do something about it!

As we’ve already discussed, often the project manager won’t be involved in deciding which projects will be undertaken. In this particular situation, however, you can try to mitigate some of the impacts of the website project being prioritized over that of updating the existing systems.

Firstly, you have a discussion with Pamela, the team member who’s been the main cause of friction so far. You explain that you understand there were originally other projects on the cards, and ask her to clarify for you what they would have entailed. As she talks, you realize that some of the elements of the existing manual process are going to be problematic for your project as well — for instance, it won’t be possible to determine whether or not an item is in stock without someone making a phone call.

In this particular example, there’s an obvious route forward — help to identify the modernizations of the existing system that are required for the web site project to be a real success. Then push either for these to be brought into the scope of your own project, or for a separate team to be set up to deal with those issues in parallel.

However, even if you won’t be able to influence the organization to work on the productivity improvements as well as the site, just having spoken to Pamela seems to have improved relations immensely. She commented that you were the first one of the “techie guys” who had taken the time to really understand why the team is so frustrated. She has started responding to your queries and emails and even seems to have told the rest of the team that they should help you out as well.

The point is that without understanding where your project’s roots lie, you’re flying blind. By investing some time to find out a little more about how the discovery work was or wasn’t done, and how the decisions were made, you can gain a valuable insight into the challenges you might face, day to day, on the project. This approach can also give you an early warning of any office politics that might make your life difficult!

The focal point of collaboration is to jointly accomplish a goal. It involves a team that wants to work together to complete key activities or milestones, produce deliverables in a timely manner, and resolve issues as they execute their plan. This type of collaboration can be referred to as Project-Aligned Collaboration. It is based around the reality that people not only want to exchange documents and deliverables but also need to know WHO does WHAT at any given time. In addition to the WHO does WHAT information, participants also need to know about the current status of tasks. Progress can be better understood if all members could see the key tasks that have to be executed to finish the project (e.g. produce the document/deliverable/etc.).

Project-Aligned Collaboration concentrates on providing users with a solution to focus the collaboration processes around goals and objectives, projects and

milestones, and tasks that have to be successfully executed to achieve a successful delivery of any project and initiative on time, on budget and within project limitations. It facilitates good project management and execution processes by ensuring the team defines their goals and objectives. Commitments are defined and owned by an individual to ensure accountability, and progress updates are always visible providing for focused reviews on potential issues. The open environment promotes clear communication.

Project-Aligned solutions support processes and act as information repositories for teams to manage and track their objectives, projects, milestones, tasks, discussions and documents easily. While participants will prefer various collaboration tools to support their processes, it is important to recognize key elements that will be critical to the success of the collaboration processes. Virtual or face-to-face meetings will continue to happen. Conversations will certainly be required. However, it is critical to incorporate processes and a supporting solution to have the team on the same page on the goals, objectives, milestones, timeline, progress and issues.

Presumably you have an end goal in mind. Maybe it’s your job, maybe your business depends upon it, or maybe you’re going to revolutionize the world with the next Google. If this is the case you need to work methodically towards a goal and provide leadership (make decisions). This applies whether you’re a senior project manager running a team of 20 or you’re a lone web developer. You need to learn to use tools like schedules and budgets to keep on track.

We live in a changing world. As your project progresses the temptation to deviate from the plan will become irresistible. Stakeholders will come up with new and “interesting” ideas, your team will bolt down all kinds of rat holes and your original goal will have all the permanence of a snowflake in quicksand. Scope creep or drift is a major source of project failure and you need to manage or control changes if you want to succeed.

This doesn’t imply that there should be single, immutable plan, and all other ideas must be stifled. You need to build a flexible approach that allows you to accommodate changes as they arise. It’s a happy medium you’re striving for — if you are too flexible your project will meander like a horse without a rider and if you are too rigid your project will shatter like a pane of glass the first time a stakeholder tosses you a new requirement.

The best way to handle this is to have a plan, to update it regularly and make sure everyone is following it and pointing in the same direction.

One way that many companies have attempted to build in these best practices is to install an idea-to-launch process or Stage-Gate system. This process helps to ensure that better information is available at gates

• 1) by defining what key tasks — for example, what market research, concept test, or technical assessment — should be undertaken in each of the stages of the project, and
• 2) by specifying deliverables: What information is really needed at each gate?

Initial idea screening, preliminary market, technical and operations assessments, market research, concept testing and financial analysis are key best-practice activities in the front-end of a project — tasks that are typically executed poorly, yet make the difference between winning and losing. Make sure that these are built into your idea-to-launch process.

A second pay-off of installing a stage-and-gate system is the existence of gates. Gates are much more than just a project review or milestone checkpoint. Rather gates are the “bet points” or Go/Kill decision points in the process when resources are allocated to the positive projects, which then move forward. Equally important, gates identify weak projects, which can then be culled before additional resources are wasted.

To ensure more effective gates, we recommend the following practices, again based on observations in better companies:

• Make the gates visible in your idea-to-launch process. Typically there are about four or five gates in a major project. P&G’s SIMPL process, for example, features four well-defined gates from “project establishment” to “launch authorization.”
• Ensure that the right gatekeepers are at the gate meeting. Gatekeepers are typically a cross-functional decision-team of senior managers who own the resources required for the project to move forward. Single department gatekeeping groups, or worse yet, single gatekeepers, don’t work; they miss many of the nuances and multi-functional input required in a complex project.
• The full project team should also be at the gate meeting, especially for larger and important projects, making their project presentation and dealing with questions from the gatekeepers. This should be a transparent decision-making process.
• Make the decision-Go or Kill-and commit the resources, right at the meeting. The project leader should leave the gate meeting with a decision; and if Go, a check cut!
• Use a gate facilitator-a referee or process manager-to ensure focus and that a decision is really made that day.
• Consider using rapid gates, electronic gates, or even self-managed gates for lower risk, fast projects.

The best project-selection system in the world is worthless unless the data are sound. As one executive cynically remarked about his firm’s adoption of an elaborate financial evaluation tool, “They’re trying to measure a soft banana with a micrometer,” noting that the precision of the tool far exceeded the quality of the data on projects.

The lack of good, early information plagues many companies’ new product projects. Only one firm in five has good information on customer price sensitivity (what customers are prepared to pay for the new product); three-quarters of businesses lack data on customer reaction to the new product (for example, via a concept test); and almost two-thirds of firms do not have reliable data on market size and forecasted sales revenue from the new product, according to the APQC study.

Fact-based decision making in NPD pays off. Businesses that spend proportionately more effort in the early phases of a project — for example, seeking and obtaining better market information — are rewarded with much higher performing NPD efforts. Best performing businesses are twice as likely as the worst performers to obtain solid information on market size and market potential prior to development; they are three times as likely to get good price sensitivity information; and they are four times more likely to have good insights on customer reaction to the proposed product before development begins.

The first step to getting better data for more effective project-selection is to make sure information needs are defined for each of the Go/Kill decision points or gates. As one executive put it, “If the expectations are clear, there is a much better chance that project teams will deliver.” But too often project teams are uncertain about just what information is required — what they should deliver — to enable the executives to make Go/Kill decisions. If senior management needs to know “expected sales” or the “target price” to plus-or-minus 10 percent, then make that requirement loud and clear to project teams. These information requirements should be spelled out in the form of gate deliverables for each of the gates in the business’s gating process.

Next, front-end load your projects — that is, move the center of gravity of the work effort forward. This translates into placing much more management emphasis on doing the up-front or front-end homework before a project moves into the development phase. At Toyota, where a front-loaded process is one of its seven principles of effective NPD: Early engineering rigor, problem solving and designed-in countermeasures, along with true cross-functional participation, are key to maximizing the effectiveness of the Product Development process. By effectively segregating this inherently ‘noisy’ phase of the Product Development process from the execution phase, Toyota is able to minimize downstream process variation that is crucial to both speed and quality.

The evidence on front-end loading is very strong. For example, only 18 percent of businesses execute the front-end market research well; and only one company in four develops a proficient business case for its development projects. What stands out, however, is how much better the top performers execute the Front End of the project. Due-diligence pays off.

If your financial advisor uses the same criteria to evaluate and select different categories of investments-stocks, bonds, and real estate-then you should get another advisor. Quite clearly, these are different types of investments and require the use of quite different investment criteria for each. The same is true of development projects. There are huge differences between small incremental projects, genuine new products, and platform developments. Yet too often we see a failure to recognize the differences and handle each differently.

The solution is to categorize your developments projects into buckets, such as:

• New products
• Platforms and technology developments
• Improvements, modifications, and extensions
• Customer requests.

These four types of projects are as different from each other as stocks are from bonds. So use different criteria for different buckets. For example, employ financial criteria (profitability or payback) for relatively predictable projects, such as improvements and modifications; but use more qualitative and strategic criteria in the form of a scorecard for platform developments or innovative new products.

This is analogous to buying a series of options on a property. In order to manage risk, purchase an option to buy; the cost of the option is low, usually a small fraction of the full investment. Then investigate the property further, and buy a further option; and finally decide whether or not to make the full investment. The mistake that a lot of management makes is to make an irrevocable “Go decision” on a NPD project very early in the project when relatively little is known, and then never seriously consider stopping or killing the project once past this initial Go decision.

As one executive put it: “In our company, projects are like express trains. Once underway, they pick up speed. They may slow down at the stations, but never intend to stop until they reach the final destination, the marketplace.” The result in this business was a rapid process that yielded a lot of speedy failures!

Your idea-to-launch process must be an incremental commitment process. At the idea screen, don’t bet the farm! Rather place a small bet-commit enough resources to have a look at the project. With better information at successive gates, increase the size of the bets. The goal is to build in a series of Go/Kill decision points, with each successive gate involving more and more resource commitments, much like the poker game of Texas Hold’em. As resource commitments increase at successive gates, information is better and uncertainties are reduced; hence, risk is managed.

Although scorecards are not the most popular Go/Kill decision tool, they produce surprisingly good results in terms of the resulting portfolio of projects. For example, scorecards yield higher value portfolios and more balanced portfolios. Moreover, of all selection methods, they fit management’s style the best and are rated by users as the most efficient and effective of all methods, yielding the right decisions without being too burdensome. By contrast, financial tools, by far the most popular, yield inferior portfolios on a number of metrics, including portfolio value, balance, and strategic fit.

The proponents of the scorecard approach argue that many qualitative factors are known drivers of success in NPD. For example, new product projects that leverage the business’s core competencies, sell into an attractive market, and boast sustainable competitive advantage, have higher success rates and make more money. The theory is that if you can explain success, then you can predict success. Thus, construct a scorecard using these same factors that are known drivers of success, and use the scorecard at your gate meetings to rate and rank projects. That is, the gatekeepers (not the project team) score the project on six to ten key evaluative criteria. The resulting scores are then combined to yield an overall project attractiveness score. This scoring exercise and final score become key inputs to the Go/Kill decision (although many users of this approach claim that it’s the process — a senior decision-making group going though a set of key questions, debating their scores, and reaching closure on each — that provides the real value, and not so much the final score itself).

A second selection method and one employed with considerable success at firms, such as P&G, is the use of success criteria. P&G relies primarily on success criteria to help make better Go/Kill decisions on projects.

Specific success criteria for each gate relevant to that stage are defined for each project and are agreed to by the project team and management at each gate.

• These success criteria are then used to evaluate the project at successive gates and are also key evaluation criteria at the post-launch review.
  • Did the project team achieve what was agreed to?
• In addition, a number of businesses have developed general screening tools and scorecard methods to assist the leadership team in selecting ideas that will enter the SIMPL process.

Success criteria typically include metrics on profitability, first year sales, launch date, and even expected interim metrics, such as test market results. The method allows the project team to custom-tailor criteria to suit the nature of its project. Further, it forces the team to make much more realistic and accurate sales, costs, and time projections, which provide better data for management to make the Go/Kill decision. The method has the added benefit of instilling project team accountability. At the post-launch review, the project’s results are compared against the original projections made by the team. A word of caution here: This success criteria method does have risks; and its use should be reserved for businesses with considerable experience with gating systems and a solid track record of making realistic sales, cost, time, and profit estimates.

Most financial people concur that the NPV (Net Present Value) is the correct method for capital budgeting and hence for making Go/Kill decisions. NPV recognizes that money has a time value. It places progressively less weight on future and distant revenue estimates; and because it is a cash flow method, it avoids many of the problems inherent in accounting or accrual methods. But there are some important caveats when using NPV.

First, some projects are simply too small or too short term to merit a full-fledged financial analysis involving NPV. For these smaller projects, such as Sales Requests, use a simpler financial index (perhaps a Sales-to-Cost ratio) or a very simple scorecard.

For new product projects, which involve uncertainty and risk, consider using a probability-adjusted NPV. For example, the Expected Commercial Value method based on decision-tree analysis and the Monte Carlo simulation approach both effectively deal with risk, uncertainty and probabilities.

Use the Productivity Index, an extension of NPV, as well. At some point, projects must be prioritized simply because resources are constrained. The Productivity Index is a financial approach based on the theory of constraints. The argument here is that in order to maximize the value of your portfolio subject to a constraining resource, take the factor that you are trying to maximize — for example the NPV — and divide it by your constraining resource; for example: the person-days (or costs) required to complete the project. Then rank your projects according to this index, until you run out of resources. Those projects at the top of the list are Go projects, are resourced, and are accelerated to market. Those projects beyond the resource limit are placed on hold. The method is designed to maximize the productivity of your portfolio yet stay within a resource limit.

In wartime when intelligence officers attempt to determine the accurate location of an enemy radio signal, they triangulate. They set up three listening posts and hone in on the correct location, simply because one listening post cannot provide the total answer. Similarly, in NPD, when trying to make the correct Go/Kill decision, recognize that all methods are somewhat unreliable; so consider using multiple selection methods in combination and hone in on the correct decision. Use as many as three different selection methods to make the tougher decisions (for example, in the case of new products or new platform developments). Best performing businesses rely on an average of 2.4 new product selection methods per firm, simply because one alone won’t do the job.

The professional gambler knows, “When to hold them, when to fold them, when to run, and when to walk away,” as the Kenny Rogers’ song goes. Sadly, in too many firms in spite of building in gates throughout the process, management simply lacks the will or the mechanism to kill bad projects. As one senior executive remarked, “We never kill projects … we just wound them,” an admission of his management team’s inability to stop a bad project. The point is that Go/Kill meetings must yield some kills; and unless some projects are stopped, the gatekeepers are not doing their job. Also, like the poker player wisely folding his hand, management must recognize that a correct kill is a success — it just saved the company a bag of money and a heap of trouble.

What are the secrets to those businesses that achieve superior NPD results? Here are 10 best practices that leading companies were found to use to improve their project selection methods.

1. Focus on data integrity; front-end load the project

2. Install a systematic idea-to-launch process and make the gates work

3. Adopt an incremental commitment or “options” approach

4. Know when to walk away

5. One size does not fit all

6. There is no one best way to pick projects, so triangulate

7. Try scorecards, one of the top-rated but overlooked methods

8. Use success criteria, too

9. Use the right financial approaches

10. Build in periodic portfolio reviews to force rank your projects

Setting up a gating process is an excellent first step, but it’s not enough. One problem is that projects are evaluated one at a time at gates, but are never compared against other projects; nor are resource constraints considered when projects are viewed in isolation at gates. So it becomes too easy to say “yes” to every project at a gate, the result being pipeline gridlock, too many projects for the limited resources available.

To correct this yea-saying tendency, use portfolio reviews in conjunction with gates. Here the focus of a portfolio review is on the entire portfolio of projects-ensuring that your business has the correct set of Go projects, the right mix and balance of projects, the right priorities of projects, and sufficient resources to undertake these Go projects. Portfolio reviews are typically held about four times per year.

At a typical portfolio review, all projects initially are in the auction. Many companies start by categorizing their projects into buckets. Next the “must do” projects are highlighted in each bucket — projects that are strategically essential, are almost completed and are still good ones, or meet a key customer commitment. These “must do” projects are removed from the auction, are designated as top priority, and their resources are protected.

Next, the remaining projects are prioritized within each bucket.

Be sure to prioritize within buckets, not across buckets, so that you never compare apples and oranges; use different criteria for different project types or buckets; and use multiple criteria. For example, in the “New Product” bucket, rank your new product projects by using a combination of the scorecard score (from the most recent gate meeting) and the Productivity Index in order to prioritize the projects. Projects are ranked until they are out of resources in each bucket. (As part of the development of an innovation strategy, management should have already made a strategic decision regarding how many resources go to each type of project or bucket using a Strategic Buckets approach).

Check for balance.

That is, estimate the proportion of resources going to projects across relevant dimensions, such as the split by market, by project type, by business area, or by risk level. Pie charts and bubble diagrams are a convenient way to display these resource splits.

Finally, practice discipline

Picking the right portfolio of projects is paramount to maximizing your NPD productivity, so move forward. Design your portfolio management system by following the guidelines above, experiment with it, get the gatekeepers to endorse and commit to using it, and then stick to it. While none of the portfolio or project selection tools is perfect, most yield fairly good results. The worst situation is employing no system — a gut feeling, a political decision, or a shoot-from-the-hip approach. In short, any portfolio system is better than no system at all.