Project Management 101 : The Need

The Need: It doesn’t mater the size of your IT shop, users will always need your services, if it’s a simple macro for a spreadsheet or a full blown system.

In order to satisfy the “customer” you need to understand his needs and this obligates you and your team to know the business. If you are unable to have a good understanding of the business then you can’t understand the need and most importantly, you can’t understand the impact this new development will have.

As an example, I was once approached because an application was needed to help reduce the time it took to create a given report. The solution was simple, take the original spreadsheet, dump it in SQL and then run the report with the filters in the SQL. But knowing the business, the real problem was not the report, it was the data itself. So the real solution was to take the original data source, the one that was used by several people for reporting and load this data into SQL.

This solution not only helped the department that came to me, but also helped two other departments.

You need to take time, understand the problem, what it means, who and what it impacts, is it a real problem? Or is the problem the way things are done? Is this a simple isolated thing? Or is it part of a bigger problem and need to be taken care of as a department/company wide application.

The other detail regarding the “customers” needs is that there is a big difference between WANT and NEED. Users rarely know what they need, but they are convinced of what they want. The trick is to turn the wants into needs. To do this, you need to spend some time understanding the requirements of the project.

The next post will cover the requirements.

George,

The Captain.

Project Management 101

I have read my good set of books regarding project management in college and at work to know most of the text books are just that. Oscar Soto a Microsoft Professional that owns his own company (ActiveTainer) that I work with on special projects gave me the idea to write a book. I am not sure if this book material but at least it might help resolve the Project Management dilemma.

So what I propose is to in several posts touch each important subject that covers Project Management and most important, using real life examples.

Step 1. - Form a Team: No mater how many people are in the development side of your IT department, you must have a team well defined. It is very important that you define your team, you need to know who to talk to on your side, and your internal customers need to know who to talk to and your own people need to what their role is in the project. This may seem obvious, but it is not. If your internal customer doesn't understand the structure of the team, the will start talking to everybody, and that will cause confusion, changes to the specs without proper documentation, and at the end this will put and jeopardy the project.

As an example of this, when my Development team was working on a project some time ago, it was clear for me that one of the developers was the team leader but the internal customer would every so often talk to the other developer. This would create problems in the team it self, things that where not in the original specs would get in the project and therefore the timeline got bumped without an official acceptance by the customer and at the end I would get the heat from upper management for the delays, delays that up to some point I was not total clear why they had happened.

So, if the team that will be working on the project has more than one member it must be very clear to everyone what their roles in the project are.

George.
The Captain.

IT’s role in internal projects

This could be a tuff one to cover, but I am going to “impose” my vision.


When it comes to Internal projects, IT has a key role. Why? It’s because IT is omnipresent in the organization. IT should be aware of all (or most) of the business process and therefore is the “guardian” of the business.

So if your organization has decided to migrate to a new Sales Application, or a new financial package, IT must be the leader of this project, even if this migration is done by a third party.

The steps should be these:

Requirements: IT Should talk with the users and understand what they need (not what they want) and create a draft document that will serve as the basis for the project.

Find a partner: IT should “shop around” and find a third party for this project. The draft will be the foundation for this. The first meeting should be IT only, remember you are shopping around.

Involve the customer: Once you have narrowed down to 2 or 3 partners, get you internal customer involved. There should be ONE official project leader from the customer’s side. Try the find the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Supervise: Never leave the customer and the partner alone! If you do…. you will pay for it. Because the user has no clue what he needs and you can end up with a white elephant.

Feet on the ground: Your job is at all stages to keep the feet on the ground.

Make sure testing is done correctly: Once the project is “done” there must be a well-designed testing phase where “everything” must be tested and checked and signed off by the team leaders and until every business unit that is touched by the project has given the written OK you CANT NOT go live.

There are more details to this but this is the bulk of the steps. I am open for comments or debate.

George.
The Captain

Keep your Hardware updated

It’s very important to keep you hardware updated. Why? Well, every now and then, the hardware integrator will upload updated to the firmware and to the drivers for the OS.

Some would say why fix it if it’s not broken, but in general the updates fix problems that can bring down your Data Center. Let’s check what happened to me this weekend.

Scenario: 4 DELL R610 (Intel 5520s) running “the latest” DELL build of VMware ESXi 4, all connected to a DELL MD3000i.

The problem: Every 30mins (give or take) one of the Virtual Machines (VM) would loose connectivity for a few seconds.

During all Friday night and the entire weekend, I got alerts every 30mins that this VM was off line. This was driving me nuts. Once I connected to the office, I could ping the VM, I could login via Remote Desktop, I could view logs.. all normal… so what was wrong?

A bug in the “latest” build of ESXi. If you delete a LUN from the MD3000i and you do not refresh the Storage Adapter in ESXi, you will get a strange error. Every 30min, ESXi checks the LUNs and if it cant find one, it will check the other path (if there is one) for the LUN, and because its not there, it brings down the server for a few seconds and this will make some VMs disconnect from the NIC.

The solution: Update ESXi to the real new build from DELL. This update avoids the NICs to disconnect.

So the real question is how to deal with this dilemma. How do you keep up to date with your updates? To be honest? No idea……

Today was a “fix the problem” day. Tomorrow will be “avoid this to happen again” day.

George.
The Captain.

Presentation 101 or how to make a good powerpoint!

I am not an expert in makeing presentations, but I have seen to many bad ones to know by now what to do and what not, so here are some tips that might help you on your next presentation.

Format:
Use the company’s newest presentation format. Normally companies have a standard presentation format and you should always use it.

If at a special meeting, us this meetings format (if there is one). There is nothing worse than showing a presentation with a different format. The message you are sending is that you are not part of the team.

Audience:
Always know your audience. This makes a tremendous difference when it comes to your presentation. Not everybody understands your lingo, therefore you may not come across. You must talk the audience’s language.

Know what you are talking about:
This may seem a no brainer, but I have seen so many presentations where the slides are simply read. That is a big mistake. You must explain with your own words what is on the slide. The text on the slide is a guide for you. You are the presentation. If for some reason the projector lamp dies, you must be able to deliver the same presentation, so you must know it.

Slide content:
A spreadsheet with 40 columns and 20 rows is impossible to read so why show it. Just show the important parts and if all is important, divide into several slides, use animation to make “zooms” to different sections.

Images:
An image speaks for itself. If you use a good image to represent an idea or concept do it. It will save you time and effort to explain your point. Today the web is full of images or clip art you can use, but pick wisely.. it is so easy to make a cheesy presentation, remember this is business, not your sons 4th grade dissertation.

Spelling:
Wouldn’t it be obvious? It’s not. With today’s spell checkers, some things are spelt correctly but it’s the wrong word, and if you are making a presentation in a different language than your native one…. You need to double check.

Test run:
I am sure that very few people test their presentation on a projector. What looks nice on the computer screen not always looks the same on the big screen. Contrast can play a big surprise, colors can be off, so if you can, test your presentation.

Last minute = poor presentation:
If given sufficient time to make the presentation, use it. If you rush at the last moment to make your presentation people will notice. Common errors are all the above plus your number will not be right, most likely things will sum 102%, charts will have the wrong year.... Take your time!

If you keep all of this in mind for your next presentation you will be fine, and as you go it will get to be part of you.

Again, this is all based on to many bad presentations I have seen over the years. Keep it simple and fun and the most important thing know what you are talking about!

George
The Captain.

Know your CPUs

I remember the days when all your needed to know if your 486 was SX or DX. Now? You have Dual Core, Core Duo, Pentium, Core 2, and bla bla bla.

Why is it important to know your CPUs? I will use another example that happened to me!

While on medical leave we bought 4 DELL R610 (Last week of March). During the first week of April I was invited to a breakfast hosted by Intel Chile. At this presentation Eduardo Godoy did a fantastic job in explaining what was new at Intel. One of the new things was the new 5600 family of CPUs.

The next day, I went to another breakfast but this time hosted by DELL Chile. It was in part the same sales line. The new CPUs that were available in Chile as of March 18th. I was then very happy because we had purchased the Servers after this date so I had the new 5600s! This was perfect because the Servers were for the new VMWare Farm and according to Intel the new 5600s had a 29% better performance with Virtualization!

But to my surprise we were sold the 5500s! Sniff!

What was the lesson? Find out what is in the pipeline so you can plan your purchases, and if you can wait a few weeks or months do it! According to Intel the policy is to launch the new CPU at the same price of the retiring CPU.

Also! Go to all your vendors events (even if they are not your vendors or the band you buy), you will be up to date with Technology and Software, you will know what the trend is and best of all, you will have all the tools you need to make better decisions.

Just to mention, this week I am attending a Microsoft event (where my friend Oscar Soto from ActiveTrainer), a Symantec event and Novared a local vendors event.

Have fun!

The Captain.