Posts filed under 'General'
Once upon a time, there was Andy, a technical engineer working for many different IT projects. In each of these projects, Andy worked on the functional and technical design of, let’s say, a Business Intelligence solution. His boss and his project managers were highly impressed with his knowledge and the customers were satisfied. One day, Andy’s boss decided to hand out a promotion. Andy was delighted to hear that he / she was going to be a project manager!
At the first day as project manager, Andy could not wait to start the project and become highly successful. But things went differently, Andy was confronted with a team of people that was not motivated at all to participate in the project. He felt that they were even trying to sabotage things! And the users of the new BI solution: they kept changing their requirements and in the User Acceptance Test they did not even see the brilliant technical design that was made by Andy and his new technical engineer. Andy could not cope with all the misunderstandings, the delay that was caused by the lack of motivation of the team members and the dissatisfied faces of his steering committee. With a burn-out and a lot of disappointment, he quit working at his employer.
This story may sound like a sad fairytale, but it is the reality in many IT projects. Since I saw a few cases from nearby, I started thinking about the cause of this situation. The main problem is that project management is seen as a promotion in the organization in comparison to a technical role. In the contrary, it is nothing like that, it is a different discipline! Why do we take extra time for training and knowledge transfer when we switch from Controlling to Marketing in our organization but leave it behind when somebody switches from Programming to Project Management?
Realizing this, it is no wonder that Andy did not immediately succeed in the new role of project manager. It is a different discipline, in which you must be able to work with many different interests and coordinate the work for and within your team. As a project manager, you leave the content of the work (the technical part) behind: you have to keep the overview and make sure that all parties involved will accept the product that your technical engineers are creating.
In many projects I have seen that the project manager was looking too much into the content of the work, since that was his / her old job and focus, and too less at the overall success of the project. This is not necessarily a flaw in the personality or skills of these people, but lack of experience in an entire new line of work. If we want to professionalize IT projects, we need to start realizing that a technical role and the role of project manager are two widely different disciplines. Starting from this idea, you could still ask a brilliant technician to become a project manager, but you have to take into consideration that he or she will need training and will start as a junior project manager (even though he or she may be a senior technical engineer). This means that in the beginning, the new project manager will need coaching and training-on-the-job, as is normal when someone starts a new position.
When I talk to people about this, everybody agrees on the differences between being an engineer and a project manager. Now it’s time to start implementing this difference in our projects in order to make sure that professional IT Project Management is no longer a fairytale but a reality!
September 15th, 2009
Currently, I am working on a big implementation of MS Project Server for operational and tactical planning. With this tooling, the organization that I am working for wants to create insight into many aspects of one of their programs. Hours spent, resource allocation, forecasts, project statuses, resource calendars: they all are being mentioned as part of the scope of our project. With the recording of the data of many projects and resources, they hope to gain control over the progress and quality of their entire program. An interesting endeavor!
In this phase of the project, we are collecting data from the first projects and sub-programs. And indeed: over allocation of resources and tasks that overlap become apparent! Tomorrow, I will start creating reports based on this data, with the functionality of Microsoft Analysis Services. But I am wondering, what will these reports show and cause? What will the organizational impact and acceptance be? It seems to me that these aspects are currently being forgotten…
In my opinion, introducing a tool for planning is not often seen as a form of performance measurement, while it actually is! You are writing down how many hours you expect to work on a certain assignment and after a while you are judged upon the hours spent and the Estimated Time to Complete. Seeing the implementation of, for example, MS Project Server as a form of performance measurement leaves me with two major question marks.
1. How do we make sure that we measure the correct things?
One of the big problems in performance measurement is that it creates wrong incentives for people to act upon. If one department is for example doing everything in their power too increase their profit, including the charge of higher internal rates too other departments, they are reaching their target at the cost of others (Hood, 2003). One example from literature comes from Schachter (2008):
“Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, the federal department that handles first nations issues, told The Globe and Mail last week that the government had won a victory by settling 54 land claims in the fiscal year that ended yesterday. This beat the 12-month target of 50 set by former Indian Affairs minister Jim Prentice, and was miles ahead of the ministry’s long-term average of settling 14 land claims a year.” (Schachter, 2008, p.1).
Of course, many methods exist to balance the measurement of the performance of your organization in order to prevent these problems. An example is a statement that I found online: “It should be apparent (…) that performance should be measured in a manner that is appropriate for the specific organisation.” (Accaglobal website). But in the project that I am currently working on, we are not using these methods to determine which variables we use in our tool. Do we really want to steer upon the ratio hours planned / hours spent, or do we need to balance this with steering upon quality of deliverables? If any of you have suggestions as to how to implement performance measurement techniques in a planning tool, please let me know!
2. How do we handle the resistance within the organization to the new way of working?
Considering that performance measurement is known for causing a lot of resistance in organization, the same can be expected for the implementation of a planning tool.:
“As with any other organisational change management program, implementing a performance measurement system will encounter resistance especially in large bureaucratic organisations.” (Wikipedia).
The way of working and the way the steering happens will be different for all involved. Not everybody likes to have someone looking over their shoulder, especially when these measurements come back to ‘haunt’ you. Many different methods apply when change management is needed, but are they always considered when the implementation of a planning tool is started? In the project that I am working on, this component is left aside.
It is time to start using the many methods and approaches that are already thought of for performance measurement for the implementation of planning tools, especially because with these tools you actually measure performance!
Literature
- Hood, Christoper, (2003), “Control, bargains, and cheating: the politics of public-service reform,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 12(3).
- Schacter, Mark (2008) When Performance Targets Miss the Mark. The Globe and Mail, March 31. http://schacterconsulting.com/documents/targets.pdf.
- Accaglobal website. Retrieved December 4, 2008, on: http://www.accaglobal.com/students/publications/finance_matters/archive/2007/70/2923430
- Wikipedia. Retrieved December 4, 2008, on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_measurement#Change_management_practices
December 16th, 2008
How many times have you attended a meeting where the other attendants brought their own Excel-sheet showing conflicting figures? Probably way too many times… You wish for everybody to use one source, one definition, and maybe even one report or dashboard for their information needs in this meeting. Eventually a small business intelligence project is started to make some of these reports, but along the way you discover that the information quality is not okay, sources have to be integrated, uniform definitions have to be made and so on. The project scope is creeping and the budget is overrun… Familiar?
Especially when the BI project is initiated top down and organized centrally, information between different information islands (applications, business units or processes) have to and will be shared and exchanged. Both socially and technologically this can enable many consequences in the organization that are all too often not anticipated in the beginning of the project. There is more to the eye than meets the eye…
This is where information logistics come in. A couple of years ago I wrote a master thesis on the role of information in supply chain management. As you might know information is exchanged between buyers and suppliers in the supply chain in order to move goods as efficient and effective as possible to the end-consumer [1]. Besides efficiency and effectivity, exchanging information in a supply chain has many more consequences, but also needs some prerequisites… To start with the exchange of information between buyers and suppliers is only done when a certain amount of trust and collaboration is in place between the involved parties.
While on another level, it is here I see an analogy to aforementioned information islands in an organization that kick started the BI project. Just like organizations in a supply chain, information islands in the organization can be considered as business entities that exchange information in order to operate as efficient and effective as possible. The model I developed for my thesis can be put to good use here.
Namely, these islands will only share information with each other when they have a collaborational relationship and trust each other [1,3]. When they exchange information, transparency is created between them (and possibly other business units). Another side effect is that so-called white spots appear. Some information is not available, or of poor quality. To improve on this, information has to be integrated in uniform definitions or by introducing organizational or industry standards (such as XBRL) [1]. In addition, this can result in information systems that are integrated (in this case for example a datawarehouse, datamart or reporting layer) [2]. Because organizational units are gearing their activities to one another as a result business business process integration takes place which in turn will lead to increased collaboration and trust (in each other and the information) [3]. In doing so a reinforcing loop comes into existence.
So, going back to the BI project, why is it more often than not more encompassing then anticipated? Simply, because it is often not anticipated that initiating a similar project not only creates centralized reports, but as information is the lifeblood of an organization it has both technological, social and organizational effects.
Please let me know if you would like more information on the model or the thesis.
[1] Lee, H. L. and S. Whang (2000). “Information Sharing in a Supply Chain.” International Journal of Technology Management 20(3/4): 373-387.
[2] Aubert, B. A., B. Vandenbosch, et al. (2003). Towards the measurement of process integration. Scientific series. Montreal, CIRANO (Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en Analyse des Organisations.
[3] Premkumar, P. K. (2000). “Interorganization systems and Supply Chain management: an information processing perspective.” Information Systems Management 17(3): 56-69.
October 29th, 2008
After XBRL was already marked as a major trend during the Gartner BI Summit in Februari 2008, - provided it would become an obligation -, NuZakelijk.nl reported last month that the Securities & Exchange Commission wants to oblige this reporting standard in the U.S. to all publicly traded companies.
Very many large organizations will be influenced by this government obligation in the way they carry out their (financial) reporting. All of a sudden XBRL will get the critical mass to become the de facto standard.
Potentially, this decision has far-reaching implications for BI. In particular, the simple exchange of information is, in my opinion the most important next step in the maturity of BI, namely interorganizational BI or Business to Business Intelligence (B2BI). Besides organizational conditions like trust and type of relationship, the XBRL standard can provide organizations with the most important technical condition for B2BI. Namely, it would finally be efficient and easy to exchange reports between different organizations (or business units). Like for example, EDI that caused the widespread exchange of data between companies, I foresee that XBRL will play this role for B2BI. In a way organizations can finally exchange information after data in an easy (=broadly accepted) way.
What do you think? Will B2BI take off with XBRL? Or will it be driven by another standard?
More information on XBRL (in Dutch).
July 11th, 2008
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