Here in Australia the iPhone is pretty new. Just being introduced a couple of month ago with according to the iPhone 3G introduction and almost a year later than in other countries like the US.

So I am still approached and asked by others about my iPhone that i bought after my John Muir Trail spending almost 4 weeks outside the civilisation. Yes, its a phone and it does other things really smart and the user interface is mind blowing and setting new standards.

How ever, what really makes it, are the almost 10.000 Applications available for this device and many more hit the AppStore every day.

Google has just recently introduced the Mobile Operating System Android and the first phone has been introduced, the G1. Of course only available in America so far.

This is another application that is a real killer. Look at the video and you understand what I am saying. These are the applications that will rule the mobil market.

via BasicThinking

Cornelius Fichter, The Host of the PMpodcast, is chairing the 2008 PMO Summit in Coconut Grove Florida.
As the chair he was asked to open the summit with a short keynote (Good on you, Cornelius), and he decided on the theme “The Value of PMOs”. To get an understanding about the perception out there he asked his audience to participate in a survey and to complete 5 questions.

Here is the survey and my answers.

1) Where do you think that PMOs provide the most value?
In Portfolio mgmt, Project tracking & status reporting, General PM support & training, Improved resource mgmt, Improved scope mgmt, Knowledge leverage & re usage, Projects finish on time, Reduced delivery cost, Proactive issue & risk mgmt, Company wide PM standardisation

For me its the following:
Provides Most Value - in General PM support & training
Provides Second Most Value - in for Project tracking & status reporting
Provides Third Most Value - in for Company wide PM standardisation

2) Is the value of your PMO understood by senior management?
There was the answer options “yes”, “no”, “the Company does not have a PMO”, “Other”
Everybody needs to answer that based on her / his specific situation.

3) What do you see as the latest PMO trends? (For instance a specific type of software, a management concept or PMO certification. I’d like to learn what you see at the horizon for us.)
My Answer: The trend we have seen in the past is from centralisation to decentralisation. I f a PMO is becoming to big (number of resources), strong facilitator of a specific method and stage gates etc. and is being perceived as a bottle neck for companies innovation, flexibility and time to market it will be decentralised. After some time, new PMOs show up in the company, different shapes of specific project methods get developed and worst case different Tools to support the method. The key question is, whether a PMO is an admin function (resource Facilitation & Training, Project Method & Tools provisioning) or whether it has the operational responsibility to deliver a project (profit & loss) because than governance including health checks, status reporting, Quality Management procedures and a flexible standardised approach plays a much bigger role.

4) What makes a PMO successful in it’s day to day operations?
My Answer: Effective support in benefit realisation to the business by supporting the well skilled selected PMs to apply a flexible method, supported by an easy to use Tool. Its not about strict rules and guidelines. Its about flexible application of these to be able to realise business benefits in time to market.

5) Do you have any further comments in regards to PMOs or this quick survey?
My Answer: Enjoy your keynote and the conference. Looking forward to a podcast on that experience and the lessons learnt from that conference including some new trends in that space.

It will be interesting what Cornelius is coming back with.
What are the new trends? I havent seen many new things in that space. Prince 2 is getting stronger here in Australia and PMI/PMBOK have to suffer a little bit from the Governance call to support Prince2 (The Government see it as the silver bullet

Another question would be, what happens to PMOs and PM in the current market climate (Recession or here in Australia the D-Word which means deficit)?
Are project methods been reassessed and made smaller and more effective?
Does the project register (that any PMO should have) becomes great value for transparency, re-prioritisation and re-assessment of particular projects?
Are PMs layed off?
Are PMOs decentralised and the PMs moved back into the business?

What is happening out there (Remember, we are on an island here, a BIG island, but still an island) !

Cornelius, we are looking for the answers!

Karine Simard, an author on a Project Management Blog, called PMstudent.com,created an excel sheet to highlight the input and output parameters on each process within each of the 9 Process Groups and has released it on the internet.

One Commenter mentioned that it would be usefull to add the Tools and Techniques and that it would help to flowchart the inputs and outputs using MindMap or Visio.

How ever, when I passed my PMP exam around 3 years ago the table based approach helped a lot to understand the principal and to get it into my head.

via PMstudent.com

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings … We as Project Manager’s have to facilitate heeps of them. If you need to understand some ground rules how to open up and start a meeting you should look at this website and listen to the tips.

via Manager Tools

The National Intelligence Council has just released its Global Trends 2025 Study. Some of the key highlights addressed in this study talk about

The whole international system—as constructed following WWII—will be revolutionized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Russia, India and China— have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.
The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

One key aspect is significant and needs to be mentioned. The political and economic influencing power of the US will go down dramatically. The US Dollar is loosing its dominant role as the key currency. Food and resource shortages are becoming bigger. If was referring to that in my Key Note at the Project Risk Management conference and talked about the impact for Project Managers.

All that supports our strategy applied for the last couple of years. To have as many work options as possible. Not from an industry or profession perspective, but from a country perspective. If a nation is rising and you have the option to work there is mitigating your risk to suffer during the crises.

You can download the full Study here.

Another great book to read about the reasons why former nations have risen and fallen is The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes.

Just received an interesting email from Dominic Siow one of the great presenters in the Australian Project Land. He also run’s the website www.avantgardelife.com.au. In his email he is providing tips on how to provide and give and receive ‘feedback’.

Dominic mentions that …

… feedback is “the breakfast of champions”. Indeed it is one of the most powerful tools you can use to influence and reinforce change. This can apply to an employee, project stakeholder, child or even a friend!

The key tips are summarized and paraphrased by Dominic out of the Book ‘Top Performance’ by ‘Zig Ziglar’:

TIP #1: Be observant and on the constant look-out for the good in others. Reinforce positive behaviour and changes, however small, immediately. Feedback is most effective when it’s timely.

TIP #2: Offer feedback that is specific and sincere.

TIP #3: Use the “feedback sandwich”.

TIP #4: Criticize the performance, praise the performer.

TIP #5: The most important measure of the effectiveness of your feedback piece is - what emotional state have you left the recipient?

Read Dominic’s weekly distributed tips here.

After ‘Groups’ now ‘Applications’ have arrived at LinkedIn. Offered by other Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn has started its own integrated application option. First Steps in that area are integrated applications like Slideshare, Wordpress and Amazon. The focus of these baby steps are articulated in the promotion email:

… it’s a new way to create projects and collaborate, share information, customize your profile, or gain key insights …

First impression looking into these options could be expressed as a very basic but useful integration. Lots of us do publish slides on slideshare.net and the only way to show these to your target audiences is to integrated them in your blog (if you have one) or sending them a link to your slideshare profile or to link to your profile out of LinkedIn. Now there is a more visible option available. Just activate the Slideshare application (full guidance on that could be found here) and link to your slideshare profile. After you have done that your last three slides presentations published on slideshare do show up in your LinkedIn Profile.

The same applies to the Wordpress application. As it would be great to integrate your posts from your blog in LinkedIn and publish your posts there (at least the teasers) and make them aware to your LinkedIn profile visitors. After activating this application the result looks like this.

Finally applications arrived at LinkedIn. In the european market leader they havent arrived yet, but I am sure that the guys at XING.com are waorking on it. How ever, there are more than 5000 applications on Facebook (the innovator in that field) so the offerings to date are just a starting point and it will be fun to watch what is coming up. For now its an optimiyed way to publish your assets (presentations, blog entries etc.) in an easy into your LinkedIn profile and attract your visitors even more.

It has been a while back that we looked into the series how to present a risk profile to an audience.

The last time we discussed and looked at the standard way of presenting by the two axes likelihood and consequence. This time its about the “Heat Map“, an approach we have learned from Liam Wallace at the IQPC Project Risk Management Conference.

He uses the following picture to express a risk profile.

Its especially capable to show the level of risk in specific areas (eg. Human Resources, Financials etc.). As the two dimensions are “project” and “area” it can be used if you are managing a Programme of Work or a Portfolio or you are Manager of a PMO.

The key benefits are that you are able to identify areas of common risk in most of the projects.  For Example you have a financial risk in amber or red in most of your projects and all other areas are more or less green. That would clearly show that you have a common problem in the financial area.

You are also able to do the same on a project level. If one project has higher risks in most of the areas and all other projects show more or less green then there might be something wrong with that particular project.

The People attending the conference had very positive feedback on that chart as it is very powerful because of the reasons mentioned above.

Cornelius, just returned from Denver from the PMI Global Congress 2008, is rolling again. He has just released Podcast 106 where he explains how to deal with jerks in your project team (who hasnt had this kind of people in their team and had to call them “your greatest teacher”) and now he is coming back from Denver with a great new episode.

Cornelius Fichter interviewed Brantlee Underhill, she heads up the PMI’s Virtual Communities Project.

In a nutshell, this project aims at creating a unified and centralized infrastructure for all SIG activities. The bold step that the PMI is taking in creating this centralized approach is that the independent SIGs will be dissolved and reintegrated into the PMI itself.

As you can imagine, there are many viewpoints on such a move depending on which side of the fence you are on. Some think it’s a good idea and some don’t.

So, lets hear what Brantlee has to say about this new approach.

How ever, working in an organisation like PMI, whether its the Board or a special interest group, and a web that becomes more and more dominated by cloud computing and colaboration, the way how the chapters and SIGs have to work in nower days (at least here in Australia) could be called the stone age. I just have look into how we have to maintain our Queensland Chapter Website ….

Enjoy the talk and listen to it here or go to the PM Podcast website directly.

Update: Part 2 with a different opinion has just been released by Cornelius with Derry Simmel, who is the PMO SIG’s Vice Chair Membership. Listen to this episode here.

As i mentioned  in my keynote at the Project Risk Management conference this year, the world is changing, its becoming more complex and we have to stay on top, as project managers and individuals, to be able to ’survive’ and to be ’successful’ in that environment. 

Paola Antonelli, a MOMA design curator and a presenter at the famous ‘TED - Ideas worth spreading‘ events, held a presentation about “Design and the Elastic Mind” in December 2007 and it just got posted on the Ted.com website. The abstract reads like this:

MOMA design curator Paola Antonelli walks through the groundbreaking show “Design and the Elastic Mind” — full of ideas, products and designs that reflect the multi-tasking, quickly shifting way we think now. 

Watch the video here or go to the ted.com website.