Better software estimation

I wrote earlier about the importance of Software estimation procedure. I would like to highlight the latest research on software estimation and share few tips in this post. Jorgensen, M. published an interesting article titled

"What We Do and Don't Know about Software Development Effort Estimation" in IEEE Software, March-April 2014 issue, where he reviewed the software effort estimation and suggested  the following guidelines

Which one is larger? Relative estimation can introduce biases

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1. Develop and use simple estimation models tailored to local contexts in combination with expert estimation.
2. Use historical estimation error to set minimum-maximum effort intervals.
3. Avoid exposure to misleading and irrelevant estimation information.
4. Use checklists tailored to own organization.
5. Use structured, group-based estimation processes where independence of estimates are assured.
6. Avoid early estimates based on highly incomplete information."

Most of us resort to expert judgment as the method for estimation. In a related research titled "Relative Estimation of Software Development Effort: It Matters with What and How You Compare" (pay walled), he identified the common pitfalls in relative estimation and provided the following guidance.

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1. Make Comparisons to Similar Projects and Use Work Hours
2. Attend to Unique Properties of the Reference Project
3. Attend to Estimation Sequences
4. Avoid Using Small User Stories as References
5. Attend to Request Formats
6. Use Combinations of Independent Estimates"

Going through the above checklists can help you identify areas of improvement.  Make a beginning by reviewing  your recent experience of project estimation against the above guidelines and share your experiences/challenges.

Revisting project success criteria

We are nearing the end of the year. It is a great time to reflect what worked and what did not work. It is time to revise the goals, metrics to prepare for the future. In this context, I  would like to  share findings from  current research and few ideas on revising the project success criteria.

Many project managers have been trained on the idea of the iron traingle of project success, that is delivering the project scope within the agreed  time and cost budgets. We also understand that real project success as understood by the stake holders from the benefit provided to them, is much more than meeting the iron triangle. There have been several studies over the years in relating the project performance to project success. Pedro Serrador and Rodney Turner in their paper "The Relationship Between Project Success and Project Efficiency"  (paywalled) surveyed 1386 projects and concluded project efficiency(meaning the project scope, time and cost goals) correlates moderately strongly  to overall project success with a correlation of 0.6. So there is a need to consider  other project success factors and also monitor project success metric from the point of view of the various stakeholders.

Most organizations measure project metrics like quality, predictability, productivity and customer satisfaction on a monthly basis. They may also have an yearly survey with customers to get their satisfaction levels with past projects and identify potential future business. This may not be specifically mapped to the past projects and used for improvement.  The measure of satisfaction from team, customer/sponsor and organization preparedness for future at periodic intervals and relating them to the past projects can make the organizations better at managing  project portfolios. Trying to measure these could be difficult as the  what, when, who and how need to be defined.  Initially the measurement may not be complete. Once the measurement is started, the results may be useful at a higher hierarchy of the organization at first and overtime, the benefit may be felt at the various levels. So the best time is to start now.

If you  already have a better project success metric, I appreciate if you can  share your experience.

Happy holidays and new year...

Evidence driven Project Management competency improvement

In Large and medium organizations, the competency improvement needs are identified using a top down approach.  This approach  helps in taking the organization to the next set of competencies, based on the process/product/technology road maps and assessment of the current competencies.  The needs so identified  are addressed  through the competency improvement of the individual employee, while addressing his/her career preferences. While this is usually helpful as a first step and results in a set of trainings, this  may not help address the deficiencies fully.  I take project management as an example and present an approach for assessing the competency gaps and tailoring an improvement solution that can be driven by Project Management Office (PMO) or equivalent role.


As we know when a  software projects is challenged, root causes are identified and a solution to address the same is implemented. This is more likely to be adhoc and may fail to address  deficiencies holistically. PMOs can  follow the structured approach below as a better alternative.

1) In the recent review period( last month/quarter/year), identify the challenges faced  by each project,  assigning one or more of  the 22  anti patterns (examples: Detailitis plan, Road to Nowhere, Micro management) compiled and  analysed by Pedro Silva et.al, "Software Project Management Learning from Our Mistakes", IEEE Software, May/June 2015 pp 40-43.  This could be tailored as appropriate.

2) Perform a statistical analysis on the anti patterns to identify the top  anti patterns.

3) Identify the impacted roles and root causes.

4) Based on the above, identify the solution from one or more of the suggested solution types (process/role/technology/training).

5) Work with internal/external solution providers to implement the corrective actions spanning process redesign/training/coaching  etc.

6) Repeat the above steps to see whether  the solution  has yielded results.

In my extensive experience in industry, the first and last steps are  not given due importance with the result that the competency improvement remains weak at best. Do you agree? Share your views.

Compounded Annual Growth Rate of Software

Last week, I attended Software Experts Summit 2014 organized by IEEE Software in Bangalore. Having seen the videos of the previous summit, I thought it is worth investing to understand the advances in Software.  There were several speakers from India and the world who covered various topics like Analytics, Big data, Need for Innovation and Speed, Architecture of Watson. In this blog post I would like to share with you a new metric that I learned. It is called Compounded Annual Growth Rate(CAGR) and was coined by Michiel van Genuchten and Les Hatton, based on the analysis of various software industry reports over the past four years.

Credit:Adapted from Pictofigo , Commons

IEEE Software is a bimonthly publication of IEEE Computer Society. Apart from several articles from academics, this also has a column called  Impact, which features industry reports  highlighting the software  challenges with focus on software growth as reflected in two metrics, namely the Lines of code(LOC) and volume of  units sold. In 2012, based on 10 data points such as Tokyo railway system, Mars Discovery, Higgs Boson discovery, oil and gas simulation, Michiel and Les came up with a "Compounded Annual Growth rate"(CAGR) metric. Based on the LOC metrics provided for the early phase of the application and the recent release, the team computed the CAGR. Median CAGR was found to be 16%. In July 2013 magazine article (paywalled), they recomputed the metric including the additional data from application domains such as Oracle, Airbus, Mars lander. The metric was determined as 17%.

The metric was found to be useful for  determining the hardware platforms of the future to support the future software. It can also be used to determine the health of the organisation as the metric will be low, when the organisation is dealing with bug fixes or addressing technical debt rather than new feature development. So far the metric has proved to be relevant irrespective of the complexity of the application and domain.

Have you tried using this metric or any other innovative metrics? Look forward to hearing from you.

Reading professional magazines on 7" Tablet

 A magazine on Moon+ Epub reader

All through my career, I have been a regular reader of professional magazines. During my student life, I  used to wait for 3-4 months for IEEE Spectrum to arrive by ship from USA.  About 7 years back, the society improved its delivery mechanism to enable Indian readers to receive their copies by the end of the month in  which the magazine is published   or the first week of the following month. Meanwhile digital revolution and increasing access  of high speed  Internet has enabled instant access to the magazine from any part of the world. Professional Societies also have introduced digital subscription at reduced rates. I was reluctant to take them up, till the rupee depreciated a lot, thereby  increasing the cost of my membership fees.

Initial digital versions were in PDF format. Reading these on Desktop PC/laptop has its fair share of problems, as the magazines are printed in multicolumn format. The typical 14" display does not have the resolution to make the entire page readable. The reader has to use zoom function and repeated scrolling to read an article or take a paper print out for comfortable reading at leisure. Though PDF readers have introduced reflow mechanism so that the multi column format is rendered in single column, the physical magazine layout styles such as bigger first letter or boxed items are not laid out properly when the text is reflowed, making the experience not  so pleasant.

Nowadays many  magazines are offered in  digital versions and some of them  are available in Epub format as well. I wanted to buy a tablet to be able to read with the same kind of experience as physical magazines.  I wanted to have 10" tablet, so that a typical magazine in PDF format can be read with ease.  I was lucky to  receive a  7" tablet in a recent conference that I attended.  I tried to read the Epub format on this device. I am pleasantly surprised by the nice display of the magazine and facilities available for searching, making notes and smooth scroll.

There were emails from some professional societies asking the readers to switch to  digital magazine instead of physical one. I would be happy to switch if they can make the Epub edition available.  Going by the pace of change in digital publishing, I am sure that day is not far off.

Zotero - Useful research tool

All netizens  process enormous quantities of  information in our daily lives. We try to recollect the previously processed information and usually try to rely on Google for search. If it is some thing that is on our computer hard disk, we may use search tools available for the operating system.  But these are inadequate, if you need to manage the public information resources  that you come across during your work.

Zotero icon(Credit:Zotero)

As people use multiple devices like desktop/laptop/tablet, the need for access to our files  has  led to popularization  of cloud storage sharing tools like Dropbox and also cloud applications like Google apps. However for research purposes Zotero is a special  free add-on to Firefox and other browsers, that helps to maintain your own card catalogue , have it portable through cloud and also lets  you stories copies of the important articles for offline use.

I became aware of this tool recently through Shyamal, an avid wikipedia contributor  who trained a batch of young wikipedians, on how they can take its help to improve Wikipedia citations.  I started using it  and It has become an essential tool for me. Do give it a try, if you have not tried this category of applications that can simplify you research/study work.

PMI ‌‌‌‌Bangalore Chapter's Footprints 7th Anniversary

I attended PMI ‌Bangalore Chapters' 7th Anniversary session of PM Footprints at Hotel Atria on 9 Nov 2013.  The event included a session titled  Agile development: Cultural Nuances by Sivan Menon, CTO - SW, GE Healthcare India, John F Welch Technology Center and  another one titled Meandering Musings by Siva Vajjhala, CEO & MD Advanced Business &Healthcare Solutions India.  It is a wonder that a program of this nature where a speaker presents on a topic  every two weeks  had recorded a total of 213 sessions without missing a beat over seven years.  The speakers who contributed to making this happen during 2012-13  were also recognized with a certificate and a small gift on the occasion.  I also felt  happy to have been a speaker for the session on Risk management few months back.

PM Footprints Logo

The event  provided an occasion to get to know Murali Santhanam and Vijay C Paul, who have taken over as President, Secretary respectively of PMI Bangalore Center.  BG Jayaram, past President thanked Amar Bhaskar for the program initiation and wished that it would evolve  to support virtual sessions and failure stories which will be of great help for professionals. The "Recognition of Excellence" award received by PMI Bangalore Chapter from PMI was presented to the audience by Vijay Paul. 

Sivan explained how Software development evolved over the years towards  Agile development with the Internet era. He explained that  human resource processes needed to change to support this transformation. He said that simple techniques like  empowering the teams to participate in selecting new team members or using 360 degree feedback for  appraisals are helpful in the cultural change. He spoke  about how he has seen Agile work even in a well regulated domain like medical products, by engaging more with customer has been beneficial and how these can be extended to other industries.

Siva focused on more down to earth matters like the common pit falls in pre-sales processes and use of human intelligence and triangulation to identify potential problems in early stages can be helpful based on his experiences at Mindtree. He also talked about  group dynamics and introduced the dangers of group think and group shift and how they can be avoided by  simple techniques like step ladder technique where individual group recommendations are combined  in a sequential manner with those from other groups.

During the Q&A session, T. R. Anand, Management Consultant & Advisor  opined that organizations need to develop skills to handle unstated scope, which may lead to risks/opportunities.

Rakesh who served as the anchor for the program and other speakers made the entire evening entertaining by humorous remarks.

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Cloud based project management

Awareness of Project Management and its impact on business success  is increasing day by day, thanks to the advocacy of Project Management Organizations and also adverse publicity in the media about challenges in  delivering large and complex projects. Many companies have set up or planning to setup project management offices to help improve Project management maturity with appropriate focus on process, people and tools.

A project app(Credit:BiH via Commons)

Simple project management tools over the last decade have become more powerful  to be able to support project portfolio management. Another trend is that more tools are becoming available on cloud, which promotes  access to all project stakeholders  wherever they are physically.  Smart phone support is also increasing so that people can still access their projects even if they are on the move.   Integration of Social media like features and integration with other tools like email enables people  to collaborate better.


The above trends will enable more and more traditional companies to become better at project management as they move from ad-hoc and non Internet based processes to Internet based processes. While proprietary software like Microsoft Project 2013 has advanced features, several competitors are emerging,  offering solutions at various price points.  Traditional issue management software like Bugzilla are also evolving  to support  scrum teams,(Scrumbugz) while several collaboration tool vendors and Web 2.0 are offering enhanced support for project management.   New tools, developed from scratch to support agile development needs  are also available (Trello).

Dealing with black/gray swans

A black swan  in a complex system, as popularized by Nassim Taleb  is a metaphor for a large impact, rare event that comes as a complete surprise to all stakeholders. A gray scan is a metaphor for an event with large impact  with very low probability, with the result that most stake holders ignore.  Usual risk management practices deal with known knowns where the adverse event occurrence as well as impact are both predictable.

Credit:Arjuna based on Marek Szczepanek(Wikimedia)

As the world is more digitized and interconnected and is dependent on large complex information systems,  stakeholders are increasingly facing  black/gray swans.  The impact increases as most of these are unique, connected and closed systems like mobile phone network, power grid and applications based on Internet.  The glitches and shutdowns are regularly chronicled in IEEE Spectrum risk factor blog.

In an excellent paper "Management of Hidden risks", IEEE Computer, January 2013, (paywall)  the author Kjell Jorgen Hole recommends few suggestions to deal with gray swans based on the experiences from the outages in Norwegian Mobile phones, Electronic voting systems, and bank payment authorization systems based on public key infrastructure. The suggestions include  identifying the dependencies between systems and ensuring that the system can continue to run for a minimum period by using back up system (for Mobile networks), providing an alternative mechanism (like paper based ballot for e-ballot) and alternative authentication mechanisms and confirmation messages (for banks). It is useful for project/engineering managers to learn from these and  plan for  dealing with gray swans.

Supply and demand for Project Management skills in India

The recently released report by  KPMG-PMI on  Schedule and Cost overruns on Infrastructure projects in India  is interesting to read. The summary is that lack of qualified project manager and other engineering resources along with  external issues such as regulatory delays,  site handover, poor scope management are the major causes for Schedule overrun.   Poor resource,  procurement and scope  management are identified as some of  the major issues causing cost overrun.  As per the report, these  can be addressed easily  by improving the PM capability of the organization.

Credit:KPMG In India & PMG Study

Lack of skilled manpower, impacting schedule  is felt deeply in  Coal, Steel sectors followed by Power, Roads&Highways and then by Railways, Telecommunication. Scope creep, Design change, Environmental safety are major causes affecting cost overrun in Steel and Civil Aviation sectors. Telecom sector seemed did no have cost overrun.

86% of survey participants have  expressed the need for  PMOs to address the Schedule and Cost overruns and some have already established an internal PMO/engaged an external PMO. 56%  have reported use of Risk Management practices and  76% stated that their Risk management is effective.  Therefore, the conclusion that  poor risk  practice could be the reason,  based on the fact that 53% are behind schedule and 34% overspend seemed a bit surprising, though the report  covered various issues that impacted the project in the preceding chapters.

Taking the case of construction sector, the demand for project managers is estimated at 70,000 in 2010 moving to 2,27,500 by 2022.  Supply was projected to be 1,20,000 as per the twelfth five year plan. As the number of civil engineering seats have not grown well in the past(possibly due to the lure of CS/IT), it was recommended to introduce PM as a subject in Civil Engineering.

The report also provides a set of recommendations to expedite infrastructure projects. Three tier PMO (National,State, Implementation level) and setting up internal Project Academy in each organization as was done successfully by  IT industry are some of the recommendations. The report also had few case studies on how different organizations are dealing with the challenges. While the report looks good overall,  it could have been improved by use of visuals from Indian construction scene, rather than some stock photography of western country infrastructure projects. 

When I joined  engineering 29 years back, I opted for Electronics & Communication Engineering, which was least popular. I was glad that I  was able to land a government job through campus placements, when I finished the course. My civil engineering friends  had a hard time getting jobs. Some of them moved to Computer Science(CS)/Information Technology(IT) for their  post graduation course and  had made a good career subsequently.  Looks like what is required is the reverse now, as there is a glut of CS/IT engineers, many of whom could be easily trained for Project Management through short term bridge courses, which the report authors  seem to have missed.

Dealing with poor reliability issues

While a project faces several issues during its lifecycle, poor reliability issues are  critical as these can lead to failed projects. These are also difficult to resolve. If the functionality does not work, then it is possible to find the root cause and implement corrective action. If the problem is intermittent, then it is a big challenge to  even diagnose the problem.

"Blue Screen of Death"  (Credit:Masem Via Commons)

I would like to highlight two  instances of poor reliability  and the corrective action that helped.

In the first case, a Personal Computer (PC) running Microsoft Windows 95 was used along with an custom built add-on card to  provide interactive audio video services over cable television system.  The services were disrupted sometimes and the reason was that PC crashed.  The service could be restored only by rebooting the computer. As there were several software components,  a careful check of the  application software  did not reveal a problem, the fault was assumed to lie with operating system software. The short term fix was to detect the PC crash  and provide a hardware trigger to reset the PC. The long term fix was done by moving to an embedded hardware  with reliable real time operating system.

In the second instance, the PCMCIA modem that worked with laptops for Wireless Internet connectivity  was used in an embedded environment for transferring equipment health data.  During the tests, it was  found that the modem operation was intermittent. We tried to reproduce the error in the laptop environment apart from contacting the vendor for advice.  The vendor suggested using a new version of the modem cards. After extensive debugging with alternate wire-line modems, which had high reliability, we traced the problem to  bugs in the TCP/IP stack supplied by the real time OS vendor.  As these problems surfaced during the later part of project, this led to crisis situation, requiring fire fighting actions which are costly and detrimental.

In both the above cases, the issues resulted from trying to use Commercial Off The Shelf  (COTS) HW/SW for aggressive time to market  and low cost product needs, while  ignoring the reliability issues. By focusing on the reliability requirements  during the requirements phase and ensuring appropriate design choices as well as early prototyping to find out any reliability issues, projects can handle such issues effectively.

Making sense of state of Project Management

Several professional and consulting organizations  publish surveys of  Project Management  every year.  I used to be a  big believer in the past  but became skeptical  in the recent years, as there seems to be weaknesses/bias  in the survey design, administration and analysis.  I give couple of examples  to  support my change in belief and suggest the need for  organization relevant surveys.

Standish Groups' CHAOS study is famous for  painting a bleak picture of software due to high rates reported in its survey findings. In 1994, it was reported that  a shocking 16 percent projects were  successful, another 53 percent of the projects were challenged, and 31 percent failed outright. While the numbers improved in subsequent years, still the  issue highlighted remained the same that software projects are out of control. In 2010, J. Laurenz Eveleens and Chris Verhoef of  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam published "The Rise and Fall of the Chaos Report Figures"(PDF opens in a new window), which highlighted the major flaws in the study and its impact based on an independent database  of Projects while following the methodology of Standish Group. The  research concluded  that the Standish definitions of successful and challenged projects  are misleading, one-sided, pervert the estimation practice, and result in meaningless figures.


Recently I have come across PMI 2013 Pulse of the Profession report (PDF opens in a new window) and read with interest the claim that  organizations risk, on average, $135 million for every billion dollars spent. Low-performing organizations, however, risk 14 times more money than their high-performing counterparts, Talent management, Standardization of practices and tools and Strategic alignment were identified as key focus areas to become high maturity organisations, which have reported 90% project success. In order to investigate the survey in more detail and I accessed the question wise responses in Pulse Interactive Report (accessible to members). 

Based on my preliminary analysis, I  found that the definition for success used for the survey is delivering the project's initial scope  within the   initial time and budget estimates. When I looked at the reasons for failure, I found  "Overall Change in organization's priorities" and "Inaccurate requirements gathering" as top ranked. This is not surprising if the triple constraint is the  one driving the survey design. In order to apply the findings, the question that needs to be asked is whether your organization is still  following the triple constraint.  The PMBOK 4th Edition leaves out the  definition of  the project success. In the fifth edition it is defined  in relation to last baselines approved by authorized stakeholders. As the survey participants may not have consistent idea of project success, the responses may not be consistent. The survey findings need to be taken with a pinch of salt, if your project is exploratory and software intensive.

As we enter the last quarter of the year, this is right time to assess the project performance  during the preceding twelve months within your organisation with a custom survey designed to identify the strengths and improvement areas of interest  to plan for  the next  year. Even if the number of projects is small, the results will be much more relevant and useful.

What has been your experience with relating to the surveys and also in house surveys? Please share the same.

Customer focus in product development

Goal of any business is to provide  product/services that delight its customers. When designing a new product/service, businesses put lot of efforts  to understand customer needs.  Interviews, Surveys, Focus groups are some of the techniques that are used. While the insight of  the development team, if they also happen to be the customers as in the case of  IT products in Social media space may be helpful, real test of the new product/service happens when it is deployed.  If the product is entirely new, customer may be ignorant whether a feature would be useful or not or may not  be able to express his needs clearly. In such a case use of prototypes and evolutionary development  would be helpful. In this post, I would share few examples of customer focus and how they can provide unexpected benefits as well.

First let us consider the production of digital magazines. As we all know digital magazines try to mimic the look and feel of print magazines. So they provide two up views, nice animation of page turning, but as the resolution of most computer monitors is poor, they provide  zoom levels of one or two, which may not be sufficient.  One new vendor (Example: Digital DNA epaper) has come up with a feature where the selected article is provided in HTML, where the  text size would be much easier to read.

As a second example, let us consider the publishing of podcasts. If this is just an audio file, it needs to be downloaded and played. Alternatively it can be streamed.  As our rate of reading is much faster than our rate of listening and also provides opportunities for skipping content,  providing a transcript of audio would benefit customer a lot. (Ex:Steven Cherry's Computing podcast on IEEE Spectrum)  It is also helpful if the accent of the presenter is  not familiar to the customer.

As a third example, let us see how the audiovisual recording of conference sessions are being served. Most of these are just served as streaming video files, may be some times with timeline table of contents.  The presentation slides used by the speaker usually are not mixed or provided with the video.  This product will delight the customer, when customer can access the content in different ways like read the slides, read the transcript, listen to only audio and  view the video recording. (Example: GUADEC 2013 Conf sessions by SuperLectures)

While providing the multimodal features is a challenge because of the additional effort needed,  there will be significant benefits in terms of attracting more customers. Not only that, providing the contents in multiple formats particularly text formats also helps the content accessible to search engines and thereby increase their accessibility.

Tool integration Kaizen

As per Wikipedia, "Kaizen" (改善) is   Japanese for "improvement", or "change for the better". It  refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, and business management.  This word  became popular with Toyota Production System, though the word originated when Americans started training Japanese with a program called "Training in Industry" post second world war.    

Kaizen  is started when a problem is noticed in an operation. It is also used  as a first step in implementing productivity improvement initiatives in an organization. As team members can easily participate in the idea generation and implementation, this initiative is easily adopted.  Though IT tools are widely used in  organizations
, there is usually lot of manual work required when putting together  progress and/or review reports.  The improvement required may not be priority for the organization, hence some sort of a kaizen is called for.  I illustrate the same with a simple example from Earned Value measurement exercise.

When I worked as a Project Manager for a product development, we used MS Project for planning and tracking. For Earned Value computation for a task we need PV, EV and AC. PV stands for Planned value, i.e the amount planned for a task (it is expressed in person hours rather than  money, as the project was contracted based on a Time and material model). EV stands for Earned Value, which is an indication of the progress on the outcome of the task. AC is the Actual cost  incurred for the task.  Effort spent by team members is captured in a separate tool, which was developed to cater to the project and its life cycle phases. User's entries with respect to task are also captured in a field.   As a team member can work on multiple tasks and a  task can be worked on by mutiple team members, it is not possible to find the actual effort that was incurred for a specific task. Asking team members to update the data in both tools led to consistency issues.  So the tracking consisted of more of the variance in the planned effort versus actual effort at the project level.

The kaizen that I proposed and implemented  consisted of adding a custom field(task number) to Microsoft Project and using that to map the team members efforts in the time sheet tool, by having the team enter the task number followed by the description of the tasks.   Microsoft Excel was used to process the exported  time sheet data  and MS Project data. The updated date was finally imported into Microsoft Project. This along with improved definition for EV of  a task  and manual updates from the members allowed us to compute Schedule Performance Index(SPI), Cost Performance Index (CPI) metrics at a task level.  Traffic light representation of these metrics made the project status more visible to every one thereby improving the tracking and ultimately the project performance.

Modern tools provide support for tool integrations or provide open interfaces.  Do take a look at the various tools that your team uses and identify how the lack of integration is impacting the work. Start an integration  kaizen to improve the productivity. 

Managing digital Subscriptions

As professionals, we all need to keep up to date with industry knowledge through professional and trade publications. Few years back, the paper publications are the norm and one can always file them and study them when one gets free time.  Nowadays, institutions have started offering digital publications, with advantage of lower price and fastest delivery(over Internet) and  availability in multiple formats.  Unfortunately for people habituated to reading paper copies,  switching over to electronic magazine does feel cumbersome. While magazine publishers have tried to mimic the feel for a paper copy, by providing 2 up views (two pages view),  giving animation of turning a page, user has to play with zoom settings and scroll settings  to be able to read an article.  I feel most comfortable when I can read the article in HTML format, though I have to click on Figures to be able to read and understand them. Unfortunately not all publishers provide HTML views of articles (IEEE is an exception)

Feed icon

Another aspect is about  keeping up with latest issues of magazines . Institutions send out an email when the new issue is ready. You may file it in a 'Read and Reference folder'. If you subscribe to several magazines, websites, blogs, it becomes very difficult to manage the flow. Recently I switched over to using Feedly  Newsreader as a way to  get to the feeds  from all the sites of interest.  It makes it easier to browse the feeds  and read articles of interest. Still you may need to select some for later reading, in which case, you can use the newsreader 'save for later' feature.

BTW, if you would like to keep up with updates on my website,  you can click on the feed icon on the top left of my website and add the URL you get into your newsreader.  


The applications also  allow you to share articles of interest using social media.   Do you have any other tips? Please share by commenting on the blog or where you see the reference to this in Social media. Thanks

Making Project Inquiries effective for knowledge transfer

Every project team would like to learn from their past experience and use that learning to improve the future. Other project teams also would like to learn from the experiences of past projects in order to do a better job.  While each project is unique, there are common characteristics among a set of projects undertaken, with respect to technology, client, end customer etc that can yield useful lessons.

Project teams usually conduct these inquiry meetings at the end of a phase. In this, the relevant metrics for the previous phase are presented and the reasons for successes and setbacks are gathered through brain storming and captured in an document. The templates used for the project inquiries are  usually not appealing as they simply consist of tables and numbers. Usually, the document is put into a repository and  it  is not likely that the lessons learned would be used by other teams. I suggest few practices  that will increase the value from project inquires.

• Compare actual Productivity metrics with the estimates used for planning and update plans for the next phase of work.
• Capture the lessons learned  in the form of an engaging stories with pictures, drawings and  have it shared on-line and off-line internally.  Consider the structure for capturing these stories by  assessing the project from project management  phases (Initiation, Planning, Execution and Control, closure) as well project management knowledge areas (Scope Schedule, Cost etc) .
• Encourage the project team  to also share the findings in appropriate industry forums as these are great opportunities  to learn from outside the organization.

Benefits of Open source practices in corporates

Having had experience with open source and  corporates, I am interested in exploring how open source practices are helpful for  corporates. I share couple of  examples and  ideas on how organizations can adopt these practices.

Photo:Auregann

The first example I share is about experiencing autonomy. Motivation is  one of the keys for accomplishment. While Industry typically utilises monetary and other rewards for motivation, Open source does not offer much scope for it. So what motivates Open Source Volunteers?  It is autonomy, the freedom to contribute to an area of interest. By being an active volunteer they may get recognition in due course. Fedex days, a 24 hour hackathon, which gives  freedom for employees to build a piece of software that delivers benefits is a practice that has caught on in the industry.

The second example that I share is about having a open tool eco system which includes version control, issue tracker, mailing list, forum,  task management, and wikis. etc  to support  software development and making it publicly available inside the company for other colleagues to participate. This is called 'inner source'.  I came across an excellent paper "Open collaboration within corporations using software forges" by Prof. Dirk Riehle et.al, which described the analysis from SAP, Microsoft, IBM,HP.  Upto 7.5% of relevant employee population participated in these initiatives in 10 to 18 months of launch. The benefits of these include attracting volunteer and motivated contributors, better quality, utilisation of experts, better support and easier transition from Research to Product engineering.

Fedex-days can easily be tried  by Indian software or engineering companies of any size. While 24 hours may be good enough for simple ideas to be transformed to working demo,  other ideas may require second or third instance of  the initiative or  optionally can be taken up by the research team.

For Inner source,  a company or its business groups  with 100+ employees would have better chance of success. As innovation becomes key for excellence,  these practices can be great enablers.

How does open collaboration work  in your organization? If you need help or would like to discuss more, do get in touch.

Managing Cognitive biases

I picked up Rolf Dobelli's book called "The art of thinking clearly" recently at a book store.  After reading several chapters, I liked it very much, as  I can relate each chapter to my life own experiences. As an example, consider Reciprocity bias, which plays out usually in our lives. In one example,  people are triggered  to  donate to Charities when they receive a small  free gift. I have been a donor to few charities. But the sight of a free gift mostly weighed my action.  I was able to break out of this bias, when I became aware of this bias,  and was able to stick to my  specific objectives related to my donations.

Rolf's book  lists 99 biases, though it does not aim to be comprehensive. The main point from his book is that we are wired to be intutive and it takes lot more energy to think well for making a decision. He advises us to use the intutive decision making for  the circle of competence and use the checklist  of cognitive biases for any decision with major consequences. Of course, we need to be aware of the  feature positive effect (which is one more bias), when using checklists, as we give more weight to what is on the checklist than to what is not.

How can we use this to be better at  our professional roles.  For each decision making  situation it is advisable to look for one potential bias from the book and then use the first level cross references listed at the end of the chapter for other biases. So when we are submitting a project proposal, we know that we may be over confident in our estimates. So look up over confidence in the index. which leads us to  Overconfidence Effect and then to Illusion of skill, Forecast illusion, Strategic misrepresentation, Incentive Super response Tendency and Self Serving biases cross referenced from that chapter. By reviewing these, we may be able to make a better decision.

In an organization with mature processes, the decision making step would be preceded by various information gathering and analysis steps, involving more number of people, which could act to counter the cognitive biases to a large extent.

How visual is your Schedule?

Recently I attended the annual Wikipedian gathering called Wikimania in Hongkong. One session I particularly liked was called Imagine Wikipedia in 2022. The lead presenter shared the forecast  that  Wikipedia will become personal, linked up and Visual by 2022. We are increasingly living in digital world and visual content is becoming more common in  our social media circles.  That set me thinking about the nature of use of visuals in Project Management.

When I was the program manager several years back, I remember making a huge schedule. Even after printing on A0 size plotter, it was too detailed  and relating the gantt chart to the task text is  difficult, as connecting lines spread across vertically or horizontally. I reverted to  use of digital  schedule and emailing the same to project team, with occasional display of printed schedule for major meetings. The closest way to make a presentable schedule was to show the summary tasks along with their status. Later I switched to  detailed schedule till the  upcoming milestone and a gross schedule for subsequent tasks, which helped bring down the complexity.

Edward Tufte, who is notable for his  thoughts on Information Design and data visualisation, has a page on  Visualisation of Schedule on his website   which is worth reviewing. He recommended  presenting the big picture and then showing the detailed view of the relevant segment.  Microsoft Project  never implemented it as an off the shelf graphic feature. Some software add-ons or independent software were realized  to support this requirement.

With the availability of Smartphones, the problem severity increases because of the small screen. The availability of touch screen can help in  providing the necessary detail for the selected part of the schedule.

The agile camp side stepped the problem by introducing short time boxed sprints which has small number of tasks. The task status is sometimes represented  visually using Kanban cards. 

How do you handle complex schedules? Share your views.

Improving the effectiveness of Project Health Check

Project Managers  are critical resources in any project driven organization. Usual career development plans  focusing on training programs are not sufficient for project managers.

Photo: Mashup of Images from Commons

Improvement opportunities for Project management arise from different stake holders such as customers, manager, team and also from activities such as  quality audits/ retrospectives.  These improvements are identified at a surface level rather than from a detailed in depth understanding of practices. Usual management review process tends to focus more on project rather than the project manager as an Individual.

Project health check is a practice, where an experienced project specialist  works with Project manager and uses an  assessment methodology to assess the project performance.  This also identifies opportunities for improvement. Where the improvements relate to the competencies of Project manager, mentoring by the specialist will be of great help. While the specialist can be drawn from with in organisation, an external specialist will be more effective as such an individual can work without any bias and constraints on time. For mentoring to be effective, both  the management and project manager need to have faith in the mentoring process and the external specialist.

As organizations are forced to  move from time and material business models to fixed price/outcome based models, due to the business dynamics,  the expectation on PMs are increasing. Institutionalization of  Project health checks and mentoring will be a worthwhile investment.

What has been your experience with mentoring of project managers?