Mixing agile and classic project management methodologies

In the following link can be found the new post I have written as part of my collaboration with projectmanagers.org

Mixing agile and classic project management methodologies

It is based on my experience in the company I have recently joined, a product centric company that has always managed the projects with agile methodologies, but now that the business model and strategic focus is changing and the products have to be integrated with other vendors and be deployed internationally, I have started to implement a new methodology for managing the projects, taking the strengths of the agile and classic project management methodologies.

Lessons learnt from similar cases are welcomed!!

PMI PDU´s

Recently I´ve got many questions from colleagues asking about what kind of PDU categories exist on PMI, and how can be earned the PDUs in each category.

The information about the categories is in the PMI website, but it is not so easy to find it. 

In the following picture can be seen where the pdf that provides the information about this topic is located. The file is called "PDU Category Caps and Rules".

About how to get PDUs in each category, I will refer to a post written recently by a friend, where he explains many different ways to get easily PDUs. (The post is in spanish)

LINK: How to get PDUs

New Year Propositions

A New Year has arrived, and as in all new years, new propositions come with it!!!

The last year was a busy one where I could not post as much as I wanted, as it was pretty difficult to find time between all my professional and personal activities.

At the end of the year I joined a new company. This company was the number one social network in Spain for several years, beating clearly to Facebook. Now, it is under a transformation plan, moving from a social network to a global virtual operator, and my main task there is to lead all the international projects with the goal of launching as a virtual operator worldwide in an agile mode.

Apart from it, I am one of the members of the Control Systems and Communication
Commision of the Industrial Engineering Association, I am leading a new private club focused on engineering and science, and I keep doing volunteering activities for PMI.

Therefore, I have and I will have many things to post, so I will try my best for getting some time for posting regularly and share experiences with all of you, because, this is one of my new year propositions!!

Let´s make 2015 legendary!!

Talking about mentoring in PMI Madrid

The last week I had the chance to talk in the monthly PMI Madrid meeting about the mentoring program that me, together with other four volunteers, have established for all the PMI Madrid partners.

PMI Madrid monthly meeting

The goal of the presentation was to show to the PMI Madrid partners that the program is available for all of them, acting as mentors or mentees or both, in order to increase the number of participants in the next edition of the program, that will be kicked off the next month of October. For it, I exposed the benefits that a mentoring program provides to the mentors and to the mentees, and a couple of partners who have participated in a previous edition of the program, exposed their personal experience, and the benefits they have achieved going through this mentoring program. 

As a summary of the main benefits for the participants I extract these ones:

Mentors:

• Contribution to the project management profession
• Strenght their leadership skills
• Satisfaction of helping to other colleagues
• Way to get PDUs

Mentees:

• Professional development
• Exposure to new ways of thinking
• Increase their self confidence
• Way to get PDUs

Guide for getting projects back on track (Part 1)

My last assignments have been related to get back on track projects that have been running for several months and they were totally off track from all perspectives. I am going to write a series of posts related to my experience in these assignments, in order to build a guide of recommendations I suggest for getting the projects back on track.

First thing to do when you are assigned to a project that has been running for a while already, even for those ones that are not off-track, is to meet the current PM of that project in order to do a formal handover of the activities.

In that handover meeting I follow a template that is composed of the following sections:

- Project details: In this point of the agenda of the meeting I try to get basic project data like:

• Project name,
• Customer,
• Sponsor,
• Steering group,
• and so on...

- Checklist: The next point in the agenda has as main goal to get detailed information from the following areas:

• Scope,
• Time,
• Cost,
• Quality,
• Human Resources,
• Communication,
• Risks,
• Procurement,
• Customer.

- Additional Comments: As some relevant information of the project may not be covered in the points above, I include in the agenda of the meeting an slot for the PM and for myself to deliver and request additional information.

- Action Points: As during this meeting it may be not possible for the current PM to provide all needed information for the handover, is important to take action points and establish near time deadlines, in order to have all the needed information for managing the project as soon as possible.

Once you have had this meeting, you can have already a good view of why the project is offtrack. Most of the times is because the baseline of the project has not been defined or has not been monitored. You will realize in this meeting if this is the main reason, as you may not get from the PM most of the information you are requesting, or because you see that the documentation that is delivering to you is outdated.

What is next after this meeting??: It will depend on the outcome of it. From my experience, for projects that are offtrack you will not get from the PM most of the information requested in this meeting, and then you will have to create a new baseline starting from the planning phase, while you in parallel try to overcome the most urgent isssues that have already been escalated by the customer.

Project Management, a temporary fashion, or a need?

Project management, a temporary fashion or a need..... IS THIS STATEMENT TRUE?

Let´s make some research in order to check if we can consider that project management is a temporary fashion.

One metric that could make us think that project management is a temporary fashion could be the number of persons that belong to a project management organization or have a project management certification. Let´s look at the numbers in PMI, as the biggest project management organization with ones of the most worldwide accepted certifications.

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In the WORLD: (31/01/2012)

• PMI members: 377.589 
• PMP certified: 471.437

In the world: (31/01/2014)

• PMI members: 450.713 
• PMP certified: 603.216

This means a 19% increase of PMI members and 28% increase in the number of PMPs.

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If we check the same metrics for Spain: 

In SPAIN: (31/01/2012)

• PMI members: 2.638
• PMP certified: 2.831

In Spain: (31/01/2014)

• PMI members: 5.270 
• PMP certified: 5.984

We find a 99% increase in the number of PMIs!! and 111% in the number of PMPs!!!

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And if we check the number of members that belong to the PMI Madrid Chapter for the same period:

We see that the the number of members has increased by 66%.

Looking at these figures is clear that something is making the people in Spain to join project management organizations and getting certified. 

But.... which one could be the reasons for this impressive increase??

If we search in Google "more demanded certifications", what it calls my attention first is that most of the links are related to IT certifications, but in order to not to be focused in just one particular area, i check the link that says 15 Top-paying certifications for 2014, for finding out in the 5th position:

•  Project Management Professional (PMP®) - $108,525

On the other hand, checking data at INE, we can see that in Spain we had a 24.44% unemployment rate in March 2012, and 26.07% in December 2013.

And adding another component to the equation, there are companies, like the one I work for, where is mandatory to be PMP certified in order to be recognized as a project manager, what means that there are companies that are moving to a project driven mode as they have seen the competitive advantage that project management brings to the companies. (My company belongs to the IT & Telecom area).

What can we conclude from all these data??:

It´s clear that there is an impressive increase in the number of people joining organizations like PMI and getting certified, but is not possible to know which one is the main reason while not having data like unemployment rate in the project management profession, percentage of companies demanding project management certifications, percentage of companies working on a project driven mode, and so on....

Based on this, I can not say if project management is a temporary fashion...

But I can confirm that project management is a NEED, just for one simple reason: Project Management impacts directly the bottom line of the companies financial statements, and as consequence in the shareholder value.

Project management is everywhere: Two events attended yesterday

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend two different events. In the morning one organized by Oracle titled "How to transform your business with Big Data Analytics", and in the evening one organized by the IE Alumni (Instituto de Empresa Business School) titled "Keys for an effective negotiation".

What seems at a first glance to have both events in common? Reading the titles, you see that one is related to Technology and the another one is related to Human Skills. In the first case, you use the technology for the transformation of your business, and in the second one you enhance your human skills for making business. Therefore, BUSINESS may be what most of the people would say that was common in both events.

But once you attend both events, you find out that there is another common thing in both, and are the PROJECTS, and the project management. Let´s see why, going briefly into the content of both.

Nowadays, the world if full of data. The amount of data is so huge, that we do not have the capacity of processing all and make use of it. With big data technologies, not only you can handle all the data, if not that you can add intelligence on the processing, being able to get answers to questions that we have not formulated before. This area has an impressive future, and it would take many posts to be able to present it. Anyway, as this is a project management blog, I will jump directly in the agenda of the event to the presentation done by Luis Esteban, Chief Data Officer of CaixaBank, "Innovation for customer service".

His presentation was about what is CaixaBank doing with big data analytics for improving their customer´s satisfaction. He is CDO, C-level, and I was impressed by the fact that he was all the time in his speech talking about PROJECTS!. They work in a project driven mode for achieving their business goals. And as it happens everywhere (as far as I know), he mentioned that all transformation projects face resistance in the organization, but they overcome it mainly with these two points:

• Involving the final users in the project
• Having as sponsor of the project the CEO

How many companies around the world have this project orientation???...

Regarding the event organized by the IE, driven by Pilar Galeote (IE professor), the relationship with the projects is inmediate. How many negotiations (internal and external) do you have in every project you lead? Negotiations are in all the life cycle of the project, since the opportunity is detected, till the the deliverables of the project are handed over to the customer.

Briefly, the session was driven by the method case used by most of the business schools, and it was around the negotiation based on principles/interests. This event could take an additional post, therefore i will not expand the matter here.

As can be seen, projects are everywhere, therefore the project management should not be considered a fashion, if not a need, but about this I will write more in my next post, under the initiative promoted by PMideas, where more than 30 bloggers will write about "Project Management, a Fashion or a Need?" on the 24th of April.

Using Earned Value Management Indexes as a team development factor and compensation tool

The last week I attended a webinar organized by the PMI CoP Earned Value Management titled "Using EVM for Team Compensation" or in his longest version "Using Earned Value Management Indexes as a team development factor and compensation tool".

The webinar was provided by Ricardo Vargas, who is very well known in the project management world. For those of you who have not heard about him yet, I copy an extract of his Bio:

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Ricardo is a project, portfolio and risk management specialist. During the past 15 years, He was responsible for over 80 major projects in several countries in areas of petroleum, energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, IT and finance, comprising an investment portfolio of over 18 billion dollars.

Currently he is the director of the Project Management Practice Group at UNOPS and live in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work is focused on improving the management of humanitarian, peace-building and infrastructure development projects in dozens of countries, such as Haiti, Afghanistan, I

Iraq and South Sudan.

He is a previous Chairman of the Board for the Project Management Institute (PMI), the first Latin American volunteer to be elected to such position.

He is the author of twelve books on project management, published in Portuguese, English and Spanish, which have sold over 250,000 copies throughout the world.

Ricardo is a chemical engineer and I hold a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais). He also holds a Master Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University and he is a Project Management Professional (PMP), Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP) and Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP) by PMI. He is also certified as a Programme, Project Management and PRINCE2® Registered Consultant (P2RC) and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) Practitioner by the UK Office of Government and Commerce (OGC) and as Certified Scrum Master (CSM) by the Scrum Alliance. He attended the Program on Negotiation for Executives at Harvard Law School and has an executive formation in Strategy and Innovation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

His twitter is @rvvargas

His specialties are:
Project, Portfolio and Risk Management
Negotiations
Crisis Management
Troubled Projects
Microsoft Project 2013
Coaching and mentoring
Leadership

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The objective of this presentation was to present the main components of the development of a project team, the motivational characteristics inherent to the team work and an interrelation proposal between the earned value analysis and team development through the SPI and CPI indexes obtained by the tool and team development models and the compensation and reward in the project, allowing to reduce the evaluation subjectiveness of the human resource in the project.

The presentation presents a brief report about the team development and compensation policies, as well as an introduction to the earned value concept aiming to align the approached concepts.

The main learning objectives were:

1. Understand the main components of the development of a project team, the motivational characteristics inherent to the team work

2. Understand the interrelation proposal between the earned value analysis and team development through the SPI and CPI indexes

3. Briefly understand about team development and compensation policies concept. Also get basic understandings of the earned value concept aiming to align to team development.

You can get more details in the paper he published for this topic that can be found at his website:

www.ricardo-vargas.com

The webminar was very well conducted, and it was explained in a way that helped to understand perfectly all the concepts and formulas used for obtaining the HPI - Human Performance Index.

My point of view about this new index, HPI, are:

- As it is linked to EVM, it can not be obtained in projects where for their nature EVM can not be implemented.

- It does not take into consideration dependencies that may be causing deviations on time or cost to that specific task.

- Baseline cost may not be correctly estimated and that will impact the compensation of the resources/teams assigned to that task.

- Baseline scheduled may not be correctly estimated and that will impact the compensation of the resources/teams assigned to that task.

- It may impact the team collaboration as they will be more focused on trying to achive their individual tasks rather than helping to the other project team members.

It is remarkable the innovation attitude from Ricardo, trying to bring new indexes in techniques like EVM, helping to develop the project management profession. I recommend all of you to check his website and follow him in twitter.

PM Agility Survey

Some weeks ago I contributed to this survey from MIT and PMI Global Research Alliance which goal is to explore the theory of Agility in the project and program management perspective.

It seems they have opened again the survey till the 12th of March. I copy their communication and what you can get if you collaborate and fill out the survey just in case you are intested to contributed to the study.

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Survey Invitation

We kindly invite you to participate in a joint global survey related to Agile Program and Project Management. This survey is part of a research program conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the Consortium for Engineering Program Excellence (CEPE) and has collaboration of researchers from University of São Paulo, São Carlos School of Engineering.

The Project Management Institute – PMI is supporting this research as an alliance partner with MIT. You can also check the survey invitation as posted at PMI.org in the session "Participate in a survey": http://www.pmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Academic-Research/Surveys.aspx

Your collaboration matters!
This survey will help with the development of Agility concept for Project and Program Management. Your experience and contributions will help us to identify the relationships between management practices, organizational factors, and agility performance, with their impacts on project and product performance.

We expect this research to ultimately help companies to identify the most suitable combination of agile management practices to achieve better project and product performance, innovation, customer value, and business performance.

What are the near-term benefits/results to you?
At the completion of the study, all participants will be eligible to access and download an exclusive executive summary report containing the results and main findings of the study. This report will be available within 60 days after survey completion and data analysis. It will be useful for:

• Gaining a better understanding of Agility Theory and how to build agile organizational competences to improve program and project performance and results;
• Understanding what practices and organizational factors, and their combinations, are more likely to improve Agility Performance as well as the project and product performance;
• Gaining a broad perspective of how to improve project and program management processes to foster greater Agility Performance.

Who is eligible to participate?
All certified or non-certified professionals are eligible to participate, including: Project or Program Managers, Portfolio Mangers, Chief Systems Engineers, R&D Managers, Product Development Managers, Scrum Masters, Team Members from different business sectors or industries.

How do I participate?
The survey takes about 30 minutes to complete. We ask you to complete the survey from the perspective of a single project with which you are familiar that is already completed or is in the last phase of execution. You can complete the survey multiple times for different projects in your organization if you wish, or may also ask for your colleagues complete the survey for their projects.

Your participation is highly appreciated! Thank You!

Follow this link to the Survey:
Take the Survey

Or copy and paste the URL below into your internet browser:
https://mitlai.qualtrics.com/WRQualtricsSurveyEngine/?Q_SS=3E6enG7uPkjakfz_8eTKiCTsoR8a8Hb&_=1

Leadership: It´s a Marathon not a Sprint

It has been a while since my last post. Almost one year....

One year where I have been very busy with work assignments, but where I have managed to keep saving time as well for attending webinars, seminars, reading books, checking tweets, and so on, related to project management, that I will publish in this blog in the next weeks.

This week, Gordon Tredgold sent me a copy of his book: "Leadership: It´s a Marathon not a Sprint", that I am planning to start reading as soon as I am able to open prc files in my laptop.

The title of the book attracted me at the first glance due to these two words: LEADERSHIP and MARATHON.

Leadership is a key skill every project manager should master on for being a great project manager, and on the other hand, I am avid marathon runner, that tries to run one marathon every year in a different city of the world. (Prague is the city chosen for this year).

With these two words I was already convinced for reading the book, but when I have checked in Gordon´s blog the history behind this book, and I have seen that all started due to the plague of our century, cancer, my motivation to read it and share it has increased even more.

I will post my feedback about the book in a few weeks here, but in the meantime if you want to know more about the book and about Gordon, please check his blog.

http://www.leadership-principles.com/en/2013/06/21/leadership-its-a-marathon-not-a-sprint/

ISO 21500 - A revolution for the PM world??

A few weeks ago I attended a seminar in Madrid about the changes in PMBOK version 5 compared to the previous version 4, and during the seminar, it was mentioned the key role that the ISO 21500 is expected to have in the near future in the project management world. In order to get a deeper knowledge of what is the ISO 21500 about and which one are the changes that it could bring to the project management world, I have attended some other specifics seminars about this topic and here I collect some notes and my conclusion.

First of all, what is ISO 21500?

ISO 21500:2012 provides guidance for project management and can be used by any type of organization, including public, private or community organizations, and for any type of project, irrespective of complexity, size or duration.

Its main goal is to provide project management best practices in order to increase the efficiency and maximize the return of investments made by the companies, which means that the focus of this Standard are the companies, and not the project managers, a significant different to the PMBOK for example.

It is quite remarkable that although there are already some Standards for Risk Management (ISO 31000) and for Quality Management (ISO 10006), this is the first Standard covering all the Project Management areas.

As of now, this Standard cannot be used for certification purposes. In the near future (around June 2013) it will be available for the certification of individual projects and the certification of portfolios and programs, but it will not available for the certification of companies.
 
New opportunities that could arise due to the ISO 21500

These are some of the possible new opportunities that may come due to the introduction of the ISO 21500.

• Higher recognition of the project management value for the organizations, as a way to maximize the return of investments made by the companies. This could bring as well a higher recognition of the value of the Project Managers as key elements for the success of the projects.

• The companies could start a transformation into “project oriented" companies once acknowledged the benefits of the project management excellence. As well, this could mean more and better rewarded job opportunities for the project managers.

• It could be possible that in order to be able to bid for a contract, the companies will have to be compliant with the ISO 21500 which it means that there will be a lot of new opportunities in the market for implementing ISO 21500 in the companies. 

• This ISO would help to have an universal "language" that would be used in the relationships between customers and providers. This would allow to the companies to have less entry barriers into other markets in the world.

• As the projects will be able to be certificated by this Standard, new job opportunities as ISO 21500 certifiers will be available.

As main conclusion, this new Standard could mean a revolution in the project management world and in the companies, establishing a change in the ways of working towards achieving the company goals, and a change in the relationships between the companies, meaning for the project managers a higher recognition and rewards, and the creation of thousands of new job opportunities.

Hopefully the ISO will be widely implemented and accepted and all these things will happen! Let´s see!!

Metrics visibility to the project team members

Today going through the posts of the people/organizations I follow in Twitter I have found one from Harvard Business Review titled "Project Managers should share their stress". Inmediately it has caught my attention and I have clicked it for reading it.

The article is based on the assumption that the project managers use to hide the information to the rest of the team members, keeping all the metrics for them and the sponsors, creating this an additional stress to us, PMs, as we feel we are the only one responsibles for the results. The suggestion in the article is to have weekly meetings with all the members of the team in order to show them the percentage of work completed and detailed financial information of the project.

From my point of view, this should be a common practice in all the project oriented companies. It is one of the basic points if we want  the team members to feel that they are not only just resources in an spreadsheet or a timeplan, if not that they are key for the success of the project. Moreover, apart from these metrics, we should present to the team members the big picture and how the project you are managing fits in the strategy of the company. In this way, the people working on the project will be able to realize the importance of the tasks they are performing and increase their accountability.

Not only progress and financial status should be visible to them, I use to share as well information like customer perception and satisfaction, steering management action points, sponsors feedback on the status of the project, escalations received, and so on. Basically all the information that will help them to feel more accountable.

A tool very helpful for sharing information are the project sharepoints. From my experience, when a sharepoint is implemented for first time in a project, the only ones who accesses it and shares information is the project manager. It takes sometime till the project team members start to check it on a regular basis. And more time, for making them to upload and share information on it, but at the end is proven to be worthy the time invested in "selling" to them the tool, mostly if the project team members are distributed in different locations and countries and it boosts the communication between all of us.

Networking workshop focused in projects

This week I have attended a workshop organized by the PMI Madrid Chapter, related to networking from a project management perspective, in order to find out if our networking skills are helping or damaging our projects, and how to improve our skills. The workshop was given by Pino Bethencourt, senior advisor to top leadership and founder of "Hill of Tara foundation".

The event took place in the meeting room of a hotel where there were several round tables. Just after Pino introduced herself, she asked: "Please stand up all of you who are sitting down in a table where you already know someone from before". Not surprisingly, in all the tables stood up at least 2 persons. This is something very common in Spain. We always sit nearby someone we already know even if we are attending a networking event where we should meet new people!! Of course, Pino requested to everybody to move to tables where we did not know anybody else.

The first exercise of the workshop consisted on discussing in each table which one are the benefits and disadvantages of networking from our point of view. In my table, and I guess in most of the other tables as well, we had never thought about networking in a project context, as we assumed that it was embedded in the communication plan of the project. After some brainstorming we chose these ones:

• Benefits:
• Increase the commitment of the project team members
• Facilitates the professional relationships (key to have a first face to face meeting with each member)
• Having a good network helps to get quick access to subject matters expert

• Disadvantages:
• It can create internal groups inside the project trying to influence to the others
• Inequality in the team members may happen, getting the ones who are networked benefits
• Informal relationships could be not alligned to the project communication plan

After putting in common our thoughts we got from Pino her definition for networking:

"Networking is the art of starting and developing mutual beneficial relationships in an strategic way".

It is key to remark, that both persons must get benefits from the relationship. Networking in one way, trying to get something from the another person, not offering anything in change, it does not work.

Recently I have heard about a scientific experiment where it has been measured that the human beings get higher levels of personal happinnes when we try to make happy to other people. This could be related to the law of attraction: Whatever you give, you get it back.

The workshop concluded with an exercise where we had to get introduced to other people in the room that we did not know from before, and then get and provide feedback about the verbal and non-verbal communication and feelings experienced when talking to the other person.

In conclusion, a very interesting workshop where we got some basics for networking, that helped us to perceive what is networking from different angles and perspectives.

The benefits of Mentoring for Mentors and Mentees

Mentoring is a practice that is becoming quite popular in these last years all around the world as the benefits for the Mentors and Mentees are quite significant, The companies have measured and recognized the value of it, and are working on internal and external initiatives for spreading its use.

Mentoring has been used since the old times of our history. In fact, the name of mentoring comes from the old greek mythology. (Mentor was a close friend of Ulises who acted as a Mentor for his son Telemaco).

When talking to different people about what is mentoring, I have seen quite confussion between what is mentoring and what is coaching. I believe this is due to the popularity of the word Coaching and the role of the Coach in comparison to the less known word Mentoring and the role of the Mentor. Due to this, let me expose some of the "hundreds" of definitions available:

Mentoring: is a two-way mutually beneficial learning situation where the mentor provides advice, shares knowledge and experiences, and teaches using a low pressure, self-discovery approach. Mentors in either a formal mentoring program or informal relationship focus on the person, their career and support for individual growth and maturity. The Mentor has a deep personal interest, personally involved—a friend who cares about you and your long term development. As the Mentor is usually a more experienced individual, he/she can more easily facilitate reflection and problem solving, but generally refrains from giving direct advice or skill/knowledge transfer. 

The Mentor is both a source of information/knowledge and acts as a "Friend, Philosopher and Guide" towards the Mentee.

Coaching is a process whereby an individual gets support while learning to achieve a specific personal or professional result or goal. A Coach facilitates the development of specific skills for the task, challenges and performance expectations at work. The individual getting coached may be referred to as the client, the mentee or coachee, or they may be in an intern or apprenticeship relationship with the person coaching them.

Coaching may also happen in an informal relationship between one individual who has greater experience and expertise than another and offers advice and guidance, as the other goes through a learning process.

And the best way to see the differences between both are with examples:

Typical mentoring situations:

• To support/advice for professional development over the long term (e.g. career exploration, moving around the organization, feedback on goals setting or gaining perspective on the organization, etc)
• Guide the learner to grow in maturity / seniority
• To give advise, for discussion and give feedback on a variety of sensitive issues (e.g. change in behavior, cultural/gender/racial awareness, etc) situations)

Typical coaching situations:

• Developing a learner new in a position, new in a role or new at the company
• Building skills within technical/business areas, methods and for specifically defined competencies
• Individual career planning – what is the next step

The benefits for the Mentees are described above, but which one are the benefits for the Mentors? Why should I spend time doing this, that by the way, is a non-profit activity from an economical point of view?

Well, some of the benefits are:

• Get visibility in the organization and in the community
• Get recognition
• Expand your network
• Enhance your communication skills
• Develops active listening
• Helps you to review your past experiences and knowledge

And last but not least, in fact for me the most important, is the satisfation of helping to other people.

I have had the chance of experiencing the benefits of Mentoring from both sides, as a Mentor and as a Mentee. First inside my company, and later on as a volunteer in the PMI Information Systems Community of Practice.

Nowadays, as I strongly believe in the benefits of mentoring, I keep acting as a Mentor in my company, and I have recently joined the initiative launched by the PMI Madrid Chapter where I will work together with other colleagues of the chapter in the management of the mentoring program, trying to apply my own experiences, and the lessons learnt in similar programs by our colleagues from the Montreal Chapter and the Information Systems CoP.

I recommend of all you to promote these mentoring initiatives inside your companies and your associations, as the benefits for the persons involved, the companies, and at last, the whole society, are clearly significant and remarkable.

PMI´s Pulse of the Profession

PMI has delivered this week the PMI´s Pulse of the Profession 2013. PMI's annual Pulse of the Profession charts the major trends for project management - now and in the future. It features original market research that reports feedback and insights from project, program and portfolio managers, along with an analysis of third-party data.

Many interesting conclusions can be extracted from this year´s report. Some of them are:

 - Organizations undervalue project management and put inadequate focus on talent development
 - Project success rates are declining
 - Only a small percentage of companies (~15%) report to have high maturity project management practices
 - Training and development in project management is declining
 - Only four of ten project managers say there is a defined career path for project management within their organization

Do you feel identified with these results?....

For access to the report:

PMI´s Pulse of the Profession 2013

First Steps MS Project Online

As mentioned in the previous post, MS Project Online is already available. Microsoft has launched an agressive market campaign, as it can be seen in several ads published in different medias these days.

Project Online is based on the Cloud. This has allowed to reduce the price of the license dramatically, and it has made possible to offer a more flexible licensing model, based in use per month per user.

In the following link it can be seen a video where a demo is performed describing the first steps on MS Project Online. Unfortunately it is only available on spanish.

Primeros Pasos Microsoft Project Online

One of the most remarkable features is the integration of Project Server with SharePoint what it facilitates the management of all the resources of the organization under the whole project portfolio of the company.

Most of the companies manage the projects independently having each project manager his own project plan in the MS Project Client. The move from this way of working towards the integration of the whole company project portfolio must be done in different phases based on the project management maturity of the company.

February PMI Madrid Chapter meeting

Yesterday afternoon took place the PMI Madrid Chapter meeting that is hold on a monthly basis.

In the meeting, two main topics were covered:

- Microsoft Project Online and Project 365 (highlights of the main new features and a demo)
- Volunteering opportunities for working in "microprojects"

I will elaborate more the content of both topics in future posts.

In the meantime, more information about Project Online and Project 365 can be found in this link:

Project Online and Project 365 - MS

What is OSS/BSS?

Last year I have been extremely busy leading an MVNO deployment for an operator in Spain and that is the reason why I have not been able to keep posting information in this blog. Once that project has been succesfully concluded, I will keep updating the blog with information that I think could be relevant for the PM´s.

My experience is mostly based in managing projects in the BSS and OSS area. For those of you who don´t know what is OSS/BSS, this video is very interesting!

What is OSS/BSS?

PMBOK 5th edition release

A new release of the PMBOK (5th edition) is already available for all PMI members. It can be downloaded at www.pmi.org.

The Fifth Edition continues to reflect the evolving knowledge within the profession of project management. Like previous editions it represents generally recognized good practice in the profession.

The major updates to the Fifth Edition are summarized below:

■ The content from Section 3 “The Standard for Project Management of a Project” has been
moved to Annex A1.  The new Section 3 addresses project management processes and Process
Groups as in previous editions.

■ A new Knowledge Area has been created called “Project Stakeholder Management” that
increases the focus on identifying and engaging stakeholders. This increases the number of
Knowledge Areas from nine to ten.

■ Four planning processes have been added to reinforce the concept that each major Knowledge
Area has a planning process focusing on how that area will be planned and executed.

A comparison between both releases can be found in these links:

PMBOK v5 - 47 processes

PMBOK v4 - 42 processes

Hybrid twists on agile

Agile is becoming more and more popular in the PM world, mainly in the IT development projects, and it can be used together with other methodologies making agile hybrids.

What is Agile in a few words?

- Agile: Short iterations of work are delivered with little upfront documentation of specs or requirements. Frequent delivery aims to ensure visibility of progress, creating opportunities for real-time feedback and changes in scope throughout the life cycle.

Other methodologies that are used combined with Agile are:

- Kanban
- Scrum
- Rapid Application Development
- Waterfall

According to a survey performed by Analysis.Net and VersionOne, of 4770 respondents from 91 countries, 90% said they use some form of agile:

• 27% use only one type of agile
• 35% mix agile with waterfall
• 39% mix agile with Scrum