PW&WCBA November Keynote: Vincent Cirel

Vincent Cirel

Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer

Norwegian Cruise Line

Vincent Cirel joined Norwegian Cruise Line in March 2008. As Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Cirel is responsible for all aspects of Business and Information Technology, including both tactical operations and strategic planning. Before joining NCL, Cirel served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Regent Seven Seas Cruises. After joining Regent as its first Chief Information Officer, Cirel built a world-class IT organization facilitating the systems and process requirements to fuel the Regent brand expansion. Cirel also served as a key member of the executive team facilitating the Apollo acquisition of Regent. Prior to joining Regent, Cirel served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Grand Expeditions (GEI). As VP/CIO, he was a key contributor to the M&A activities of GEI as a roll-up of eight global luxury travel brands.

About PW&WCBA November 2009

ProjectWorld & the World Congress for Business Analysts - November Event
November 16-18, 2009
Disney's Grand Californian Hotel

www.projectworld.com

PW April Newsletter and Web Seminar

To continue our efforts to keep you up to date on the latest industry news, we’ve created a monthly newsletter that we invite you to view.

View the newsletter

Coming up next week is a complimentary webinar presentation by Ellen Gottesdiener who will describe how agile and requirements combine to form a sound and sensible union. You will learn how business analysis and requirements practices really work on agile projects; ways agile teams represent, verify and validate requirements; and how effective agile teams collaborate around requirements. Join us to learn how agile requirements provide the engine that drives successful delivery of business value.

Register for the webinar
Mention priority code: G1M2120W1BLOG

Use social media to help manage your projects

In a recent article at Untitled1, they look at ways social media can enhance your project management tool set. You can use blogs for project status updates, wikis to help centralize your information, and for larger projects, you can set up online communities. These tools shouldn't replace what you already have, they should enhance the tools you're already using.

Do you use any of these tools when you are managing a project? What benefits have you seen?

Project management for manufacturing

At Technology Evaluation Centers, they look at how project management can help manufacturers with the projects they are working on. Through adopting project management with the current recession, manufacturers can monitor product families and their cost accumulations as well as the shifts in costs over time. Read the full article here.

PW&WCBA June 2009 Speaker Profile: Asif Ahmad

Asif Ahmad
VP Diagnostic Services & CIO,
Duke University Health
System & Duke University
Medical Center

Asif Ahmad is vice president for Diagnostic Services and chief information officer for Duke University Health System and Duke University Medical Center. He provides leadership, direction, and strategic planning for the information technology staff and functions in support of the Health System. Through his leadership the Health System’s diverse technology resources have been united in name and spirit under the moniker Duke Health Technology Solutions (DHTS). As the Vice President Diagnostic Services he is responsible for developing the overall strategy of diagnostic support for DUHS, these services include Radiology and Clinical Labs/Pathology. Mr. Ahmad also provides leadership and direction over medical technology and clinical engineering. Additionally, Mr. Ahmad is responsible for overseeing the Health Information Management group for the health system.

Mr. Ahmad earned a double bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and telecommunications at the University of Engineering and Technology of Lahore, Pakistan, and earned an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering and an M.B.A. at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. He came to Duke by way of The Ohio State University Health System where he received the highest national award for excellence in computerization of the patient record - The Nicholas E. Davies Award. He and DUHS were profiled by InformationWeek magazine in their September 2005 issue as 500 top innovators in the IT Industry (1 of 42 in Healthcare). He also received the 2001, 2002 and 2005 Most Wired Health System Award, which awards the top 100 hospitals nationally, and the 2002 Innovator Award, American Hospitals Association for excellence in wireless and online patient care workflow. He is a board member of the National Alliance Health Information Technology.

For more information about the June 2009 event, please visit our website.

Do project managers need to fail to succeed?

In an interesting article at Tech Republic, Paul Glen believes that beginning project managers need to fail before they succeed. Beginning project managers don't have the ability or know-how to manage the tasks, the people and the risk management the first few projects they manage.

Instead, he believes that project managers need a little bumper room the first few times they manage a project:

• A few big mistakes
• Permission to make those mistakes
• Coaching and introspection to learn from them
  

Do you agree? Are the best project managers the ones that are given room to fail in the beginning?

Gopal Kapur: Six Secrets to Information Technology Project Management Success

We recently ran across this article by Gopal Kapur on GovTech.com that discusses the secrets to information technology project management success. Kapur has six specific secrets that will enable project managers to effectively complete their assignments. According to Kapur,

In the case of CIOs, success is defined as ensuring that IT projects are aligned with agency needs, scuttling half-baked and harebrained ideas, formulating a well balanced and robust project portfolio, accomplishing cross-boundary collaboration, ensuring effective project sponsorship, and completing a project on time and within budget and to the client's satisfaction.

Read Kapur's original article here. Do you have any other secrets of success? We'd like to hear your thoughts.

Complimentary Webinar: Agile Requirements (Not an Oxymoron)

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/810361744
Please mention code: G1M2120W1BLOG

Traditional approaches of requirements seem to contradict how agile teams might approach requirements. Misconceptions abound about how agile projects develop requirements and whether they even do analysis. In practice, agile projects use requirements as the basis for planning, development and delivering business value.

In this Webinar, requirements expert and agile coach Ellen Gottesdiener will describe how agile and requirements combine to form a sound and sensible union. You will learn how business analysis and requirements practices really work on agile projects; ways agile teams represent, verify and validate requirements; and how effective agile teams collaborate around requirements. Join us to learn how agile requirements provide the engine that drives successful delivery of business value.

What you will learn:
•Understand the agile method of developing requirements
•Describe business analysis and requirements practices that change on agile projects
•Understand agile adaptations to “traditional” requirements practices
•Appreciate the value of requirements analysis on agile projects
•Enumerate the ways requirements form the basis for planning on agile projects

Speaker:
Ellen Gottesdiener, Principal Consultant and Founder of EBG Consulting, is an internationally recognized trainer, facilitator, speaker, and expert on collaborative requirements development. Ellen’s company provides high-value training, facilitation, and consulting services to agile and traditional teams. An agile coach and trainer with a passion for agile requirements, Ellen works with large, complex products and helps teams elicit just enough requirements to achieve iteration and product goals.

Ellen’s book Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs describes how to use multiple models to elicit requirements in collaborative workshops. Her second book, The Software Requirements Memory Jogger, is the “go-to” industry guide for requirements good practices.


Title: Agile Requirements (Not an Oxymoron)

Date: Thursday, April 30, 2009

Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT


After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Project management in today's world

A recent article by Cindy Waxer discusses how project management around the world and around the office have come of age with the online technologies that are available now. Anyone logged into the system can see schedules around the world. It has also left spread sheets and word documents in the dust. Teliznet Communications shares their story of adopting to digital project management here.

PMO value to a mid-sized organization – Charanya Girish

Editor’s Note: This issue is brought written by Charanya Girish. Charanya is the Director, Project Management at MESSA (Michigan Special Services Assoc.). She is a certified PMP with over 17 years experience in Project & Program Mgmt and PMOs. She is a member of the PMIGLC Advanced Topics Seminar team, WiPM and the Communications team, PMO SIG. Thanks, Charanya!


A disciplined approach to project execution is recognized as an essential factor for project success in organizations, large and small. The steady growth of Project Management Offices (PMOs) over the last few years in mid-sized enterprises proves that these businesses recognize the value Project Management (PM) can provide.

PMOs come in different flavors depending on their authority and the projects under their purview. At one book-end is the PMO that only provides methodology support for project managers. On the other end they have significant authority over prioritization and management of projects. Mid–sized organizations often do not have deep pockets and so will benefit from a PMO that is more than a mere methodology support arm. A three layered approach proposed below ensures enduring success for the organization.

In the formative stage, it is best to start with a conservative approach with the PMO as the owner of PM standards and methodology. Repeatable best practices are built up over time so that more successful projects flow through to the bottom line, helping build a strong foundation for future phases.

In the second phase the focus is on Project & Portfolio management (PPM) where the department serves as a source of information on all projects contained in the portfolio. The PMO now becomes a bi-faceted department and has to build a strong governance structure to select, prioritize and monitor project investments. Rigorous change control procedures are put in place with a watchful eye on risk and issue management. Metrics tracking takes place for the portfolio and the information is disseminated among all the stake holders. Thresholds are established to determine which projects need to be monitored by the PMO. The portfolio need not track smaller projects as strict adherence to methodology in its entirety for such projects can be an over kill. Thus as a portfolio manager this Office ensures the methodology is adhered to, projects selected have strong business value and well thought-out plans with committed resources.
The third step is part of an emerging trend that positions the PMO as an entity that influences the strategic direction of the enterprise, while continuing its traditional focus on PPM and methodology. In such circumstances the PMO helps align projects to corporate goals through an integrated enterprise project management process. These set of processes enables the Enterprise Governance Board to accelerate, delay or terminate projects so that the portfolio stays continuously aligned to corporate objectives. The PMO helps in organizational change management by setting up procedures that enable the business units to implement the organization's business strategies.
Realizing benefits from such a transformation is not an overnight phenomenon. Each organization differs in its willingness and ability to adapt to change. Returns can be quantifiable over time by reduction in rework and project life cycles coupled with improved quality. Many establishments have little patience for the alterations a PMO ushers in and initial reactions can be heart breaking, despite strong senior management support. The temptation to do a ‘big bang’ change in a short time should be resisted unless the organization can handle it. Applying the right change leadership steps and having a realistic timeline ensures long term success. Such an evolution makes sure the PMO becomes a powerful catalyst for fostering innovation and delivering value to the enterprise.