collaborang project management for high performanc e...

Feedback: [email protected] Synergy Dec 2014,

December 2014

S Y N E RG Y Collabora�ng Project Management for High Performance Business Insight

201 4

Mind Maps Enhancing Project Team Motivation

PgMP

Annual General Meeting

PMI North India Chapter

Inside

5


Message from the President

Dear Chapter Members & Practitioners,

W elcome to this last quarter magazine of Year 2014 and best wishes to you on Christ-mas and New Year 2015. This quarter has been quite eventful with us getting ap-

proval on revised bylaws (from PMI APAC, Chapter Members and the chapter board), an-nouncement of Chapter Board Elections, appointments of more Chapter Ambassadors, Few chapter events and beta release of Volunteer Registration portal on chapter website. Chapter Governance Team Structure Announced at AGM To provide more formal involvement opportunities to chapter members, more robust Governance structure for the chapter board has been created and announced at the recently concluded AGM

Chapter Board Elections This quarter being the last quarter of current year, we conduct elections every year to Chapter Board and it’s the same this year too. By the time this magazine reaches you, you would have received election communications for chapter board positions. We would like to see good number of chapter members participating – both in terms of filing nominations for various positions and also voting for final selected nominees by the chapter nomination com-mittee for these elections. Chapter Ambassador Connect Program Besides that in continuation to Chapter Board resolve to attract and connect with more and more volunteers with the chapter, we have nominated following additional chapter members to Region Connect & Company Connect Ambassador Programs

Company Connect Ambassador Program Mr. Sridhar Anjanappa – Assoc. PM, M/s Stryker Global Technology Center, Gurgaon Mrs. Paramita Mukherjee- PM Consultant, M/s Wipro Technologies, Gurgaon Mr. Nehar Ranjan – Sr. Engagement Manager, M/s Microsoft Consulting Services, Gurgaon Mr. Vipul Aggarwal – Manager, Accenture, Gurgaon

Manoj K Gupta


Regional Connect Ambassador Program

Mr. Suhail Qadir – Srinagar Region (Works for JKPCC) Mr. Gursharan Gill – Chandigarh Region (Management Consultant – Construction Projects)

Chapter Events

This quarter chapter participated and organized certain events for networking, knowledge sharing and benefits of its members viz.,

1. Chapter participated as speaker in Amity’s 3rd International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Tech-nologies and Optimization (ICRITO 2014) – Oct 8-10, 2014

2. Full Day Agile Tour 2014 – A Day with Scrum Enthusiasts in collaboration with ISEC

3. Half-Day Event at NHPC – Leadership Skills Workshop

4. Chapter AGM in first week of December 2014

Volunteer Registration – Online Application Launched This quarter chapter has also launched beta version of online volunteer registration system which will serve as replacement to existing links for Regional Connect and Company Connect Ambassador Programs under the Volunteer tab of chapter website (www.pminorthindia.org) home page. The new link for volunteer registration is available at http://pminorthindia.org/Account/Signin.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fVolunteers%2fVolunteerProfile.aspx under Volunteer -> My Pro-

file link on home page. For all those volunteers who have submitted their requests on the former Ambassador program links till June 2014 can see their data already uploaded their and for others who have applied subsequently can go and register themselves on this page. After registration you have the flexibility to modify / update your data in terms of de-tails and volunteering preferences online without soliciting any involvement of chapter board and the chapter board will be able to access the latest data for engaging with volunteers directly. For any queries, feel free to get In touch with Major Shobha Madan – VP Volunteer Management directly at [email protected] With best regards Manoj K Gupta President & CEO PMI North India Chapter [email protected]


From the editor’s desk

Hello Members,

A s we feel the sudden drop in temperature and when the chilly winds sends a shiver down in our spine, we know the year end is here. With the year end also comes the appraisal, an interesting cartoon is being done by Piyush on the ap-praisal system

For me year end is also a time for reflection and consolidation, we need to reflect on all what we have done, what are the learnings we can take and most important of all is to reinvent our self from the learning. It is the time for developing our own personal brand and a plan to execute the same. Personal branding is very important in the present com-petitive and knowledge based economy. It is also to look at the knowledge and skill set needed to succeed in the future and in the uncertain time. Please pause from your daily routine and reflect on your personal SWOT and then go all out for your personal branding in 2015 There are interesting article in this issue one describing the practices in distributed Agile world, then to how to handle the risk in the procurement and finally and innovative arti-cle on Mind Map and its uses. Last but not the least there is an interview with Mr. Ajay Shukla from NTPC on their project management practices Wishing you a very Happy new year and hope you have a very pleasant reading. With best regards

Nirmallya Kar Assistant Vice President - Communications PMI North India Chapter

Nirmallya Kar

Knowing

others is

intelligence;

knowing

yourself is

true wisdom.

Mastering

others is

strength;

mastering

yourself is

true power.

- By Lao-tzu


by

Synergy Team


AJAY SHUKLA

Ajay Shukla is power professional and working in NTPC Power Management Institute (PMI) as Addl. General Manager and involved in core competency development of Power sector executives in area of Strategic Project management, Power plant management, Su-per Critical Technology, Power plant Controls. He is heading the PMI Project Management group and leading other strategic institutional development initiative of NTPC. He is expert in area of Power Project Commissioning /Erection and Renovation and Modifications for more than two decades. He was core team member of two major M&A of power plant and played key role in turnaround of both power projects. He has presented many case studies in International /National forum and delivered many guest lectures on project management in many Forum like FICCI/CII/NASA and consulting many external organizations. He is M.TECH from IIT Delhi and presently pursuing PhD from IIT Delhi. He is certified Project Pro-fessional and received certificate on “Intellectual Property” form WIPO Geneva.

Synergy team talked to Mr. Ajay Shukla about project manage-ment in power sector and how NTPC is geared up to take the challenge. Synergy: NTPC has been the prime source of power generation for India, how do you see private players gearing up? Would they pose a challenge due to their aggressive style of working? Ajay Shukla: NTPC is market leader in power generation, and keeps its strategies very dy-namic to maintain it’s leading in challenging environment. NTPC has always adopted very innova-tive but bit risk proof business strategies. During post liberalization, i.e. up to year 2000, as a part of our competitive strategy, we have done many successful M&A of power plants in past, and these plants were totally turn round and created lot is business value. This was done without re-trenching any manpower from acquired plants. Very high profile, but abandoned, Enron (Dabhol) was also acquired, and was running profitably for last 3-4 years, by NTPC through JV of Gail and MSEB. With entry of private players we are looking for more opportunities like above, since many times aggressive style works for short term but for long term results we need proven, robust sys-tem and procedures which avoid many pits falls. We are always calibrating our strategies to have flavour of both i.e. aggressiveness and robustness

NTPC generates power from Coal and Gas.

With an installed capacity of 43,143 MW.

NTPC is the largest power gener-

ating major in the country

Source: http://www.ntpc.co.in


Synergy: How has NTPC transformed over the Years? Has it adopted Project Management techniques to compete with the world, if yes how? Ajay Shukla: NTPC is now entering in 39th year of existence, It started its project construction journey from 1997 i.e. Singrau-li Power project. Construction and delivery of Power project is like creating huge complex Infrastructure project consisting of many sub projects, which are big projects in itself. Like, Green field thermal power project will have 20-30 KM railway siding project, which is full scale Rail project but lower in magnitude. Similarly water system, CHP and Boiler turbine are separate project in itself, to be closely integrated for final delivery a thermal project on time. NTPC has developed robust project managements system and procedures for delivery of complex project like thermal plant. We have benchmarked ourselves with other similar organiza-tions across the world. Synergy: How is the courseware designed at NTPC Power Management Institute? Does it bring in case studies from real world to educate the professionals (students)? Can you cite some examples of the past prob-lems NTPC faced and how the new generation would learn from the past and hope to make a decision such that they are equipped with the knowledge of different challenges in the Power Generation & Distribution world. Ajay Shukla: NTPC Power management Institute is Apex level development centre of company, and has specialised project management group which plays very vital, and strategic role, in organization and people de-velopment through planned intervention. Courseware are designed based on actual challenges and real project case studies for making it immediate usable learning at ground. NTPC has handled many complex project chal-lenges very successfully, and accelerated not only growth of power sector but also helped business restructure of troubled and loss making Steel giants, SAIL, during 1999-2000. All captive power business of SAIL is being done by NSPCL, a JV lead by NTPC. Apart of these projects turnaround, undersigned and many of our core team members were group leaders during actual Power project delivery. So all courseware are blend of academic and derivative of field experience, this is unique combinations and USP of our courseware. Skill and knowledge is transferred through solving real problems in simulated environment.

Synergy: The 12th plan has an aggressive target of 88,000 MW to meet the power requirements? In your opin-ion, what would be the key challenges? And, how can we overcome those? Ajay Shukla: New capacity addition is grappling with manly three issues, staring with land, since infra

NTPC has developed

robust project man-

agements system

and procedures for

delivery of complex

project like thermal

plant

Power management Institute is Apex level devel-

opment centre of company, and has specialised

project management group


project requires land to create various facilities with in plant and outside project like water system and railway siding Fuel system. Land acquisition is big challenge for any Infra company. We require a win-win solutions for all stakeholder for smooth land acquisition processes. Holistic and inclusive development can address this chal-lenge. Secondly, country coal production and other logistic system like fuel transportation could not match is power generation capacity addition, getting fuel at economical prices is also big constraints for any generating compa-ny. It has become imperative to remove all constraint in improving coal production in big way. Third challenge is skilled manpower and experienced project for execution, we are addressing this challenge by creating a pool of skilled manpower by adopting ITIs and injecting new skills. Synergy: Our Non-renewable power plants contribute to 88% of the power generation that we have? Despite off that, many plans stand abandon due to non-supply of coal? Do you foresee the percentage from Non-Renewable to Renewable would improvise? Ajay Shukla: Presently adequate fuel supply is major cause of concerned many power generators. Additionally, Gas based power plant also running idle due in adequate gas supply, and many of new capacity added by few private player in Gas project have not received single MMBTU gas during their entire journey. Coal out of 566 million tons (MT) is not enough to meet demand of over 766 million tons (MT) in 2013-14. Shortage has led to rising coal imports, which pushed the cost of electricity. Non renewable is also getting traction but mainly in solar and wind. Solar plants requires huge land i.e. 5 Acre per MW, New hydro project takes their own time due to complex Himalayan geology. Government has given push to renewable through RPO, but that is also facing challenges due to financial reasons. But renewable is picking up and bound to go northwards. Synergy: There’s a huge gap in the demand and supply of electricity? As per the last report published in 2011, around 30 crore of our population was without electricity, about 1/3rd of villages were without power. As the population on per year is increasing multi-fold, when do you foresee the demand-supply gap to balance off and how? Ajay Shukla: Indian power sector works in very com-plex environment, we have three major interdependent players starting from Generator, Transmission and Dis-tribution (DISCOMS), who is connect to the last mile. Generator and transmission sector has added lot of ca-pacity, and undergone many reforms. However, Distri-bution is still being handled by SEBs, with huge trans-mission and distribution loss. This put strain on their financial conditions since their revenue bucket is always leaking. Thousands of villages has been electrified under various village electrification scheme but many times electricity does not flow due to various issued faced by DISCOMS. We are very optimistic that demand supply gap will reduced drastically and techno economic solu-tion will be developed to ensure continuous supply to villages. Synergy: Can you share some basic work-flows, activities which NTPC works upon when constructing a power plant? Ajay Shukla: NTPC follows very proven processes for setting up a power plant. Firstly, we do the power demand study, and the availability of basic infrastructure for power project, like land, water and fuel. Then detailed study

Courseware are de-

signed based on actual

challenges and real

project case studies

for making it immedi-

ate usable learning at

ground


of project site is carried regarding layout of all logistic and road/air connectivity. Once preliminary work is completed project lay out is made keeping in view minimum disturbance of existing ecology of place, and many times project lay out is also revised so that existing ecology system can be re-tained. Once this is completed we prepare project DPR, covering complete details of project for evaluating long term viability of project, followed by vetting of financial Institute. This is followed by Investment approval and bidding is invited for all packages (sub projects) of project. Then work starts, and it goes on with very close monitoring and controlling project management framework as shown below.

Power Generation in India

Source: http://www.ntpc.co.in


Project Risks & Procurement

By

Ajay Bhargove , PMP®

Managing risks is an important in every part of life. Similarly, It becomes equally important & critical, when or-ganizations are dealing with other organizations for investment reasons which may include but not limited to :

Acquiring another organizations, Procuring services and/ or goods Providing services and/or goods

Today, every organization likes to have more and more repeated business, hence keeping your end customers satisfied is a top priority. In the last two decades there has been hundreds of EPC organization appeared on the map, but most of them could not sustain, reasons bad risk management or its absence. Risk Management becomes very important as organizations operating in EPC environment cannot do everything on their own. EPC organizations have to get themselves involved with organizations of different culture, vision and mission to achieve common goal of completed Project. Therefore, we are not only procuring goods and/or services, rather we are exposing ourselves to risks by involving external organization whereas some of them maybe competitors organization. The paper talks about mitigation, avoiding or transferring the risks on the projects with strategic procurement.

Abstract


Introducon Today, risk management has become a popular knowledge area, so lot is being discussed over risk management. Although, this may appear to be a new subject, but its roots lie in ancient time, when human life going through the stone age, human spices around that time always knew how to make use of stones to safeguard themselves from wild animals. As a professional, we may ask, what has made this knowledge area so important and even prime topic for discussion at the initiation of project or even before that. Only reason for change in approach, is that “No organization wants to have learning by burning.” Because, such burnings may lead to revenue leakages and make holes into your Profits and Loss Statement. Role of Procurement Risks becomes more and more critical as the project progresses from the planning to execution stage and to warranty phase. Even dealing with smaller risks can be costly, requiring endless efforts and indefinite time. The best key to deal with these risks is effective “Procurement” decisions. It is desired from Procurement, that they have good understanding of scope, Logistics parameters, and Le-gal implications, Regulatory Requirements, Statutory, Financial and taxation rules. Organizations do requires Service Level Agreements even with their own manufacturing plants, so that sales people can make commitment to the customers. Any slippages by the external stakeholders on the pro-ject will lead to enormous penalties to the EPC organi-zations. The single largest cost element in any business is pur-chased goods and services and, typically, a company will buy externally between 50% -70% of its sales val-ue. Reducing the costs for bought-in goods and ser-vices makes a direct impact on a company's profit - effective procurement is the most powerful knob to increase a company's EBIT (Earnings before Interest & Taxes), and hence, it's value.

Procurement & Boardroom

The significance of EBIT is that, it show whether the company has generated resources to pay interest to bankers, tax to government, dividends to shareholders, and maybe even repay loans after considering depreci-

ation and amortization – non-cash charge in the profit and loss. Project Manager needs to understand procurement role towards generating earnings and procurement contribution to achieving high rate of earnings after interest if they want to earn a seat in the boardroom. The best way to relate procurement value was to di-vide savings by the current profit margin percentage of sales revenue. The result would be the amount of sales the company would have to generate equivalent to procurement savings that go directly to the bottom line.

Project Procurement Phases

You ask any procurement team, for them project has only three phases: 1. Pre-Award 2. Execution Phase 3. Warranty Phase

Why? Only these three phases, where they have to take utmost care, so that organization not exposed to risks and have maximum profit margins. For example, if Customer requires a warranty and we are not able to get that secured from our sub- supplier, then this should be taken care in advance while bidding and or-ganization should have kept appropriate cost to handle this risk. Similarly, Procurement and Project teams need to sit together to frame the strategy to handle risks during execution phase.

What is a Risk?

Before, we make a deep dive to understand how to manage risks, let’s first define what is a Risk?

The best way to understand the most of the defini-


tions is to convert them to mathematical expressions, so for above definitions:

So, this means more is the uncertainty more will be risks. So an attempt should be made to minimize the uncertainties as far as possible and for definite uncer-tain conditions, risk response plan should be available.

Sources of Risk

We all know that every project is unique and hence risks related to project becomes also unique except the framework to handle the risks. Risks to project exists because of the various reasons some of them are due to Project location, law of lands, applicable local regularization, ever changing customer requirements, changing taxation rules and fluctuating currency. Labour situations like open market (you can hire labour direct from the local market), closed market (labour can be hired from the unions) and mixed market (both options available). This is important to assess before deciding Go/No-Go for bidding the Projects as majority of the labour will be semi-skilled or unskilled and as an organization need to consider this factor carefully. As otherwise if you do not get sup-port from the local market in such a scenario, you need to fly labour from another market, which will definitely increase the cost for executing the projects. Similarly, if you know that project scope is not very clear and have uncertainties, in such cases, we need to work on potential prospective changes (which may come up while executing the scope) up-front, so that we may take cost and efforts required into account in-cluding the cost for such uncertainties. Hence, you need to agree upfront for cost and efforts with your sub-suppliers as well (while they are competing with each other to get the contract from you, which is pre-award phase only). Hence, by making effective use of Procurement, most of the risks can be handled in four possible ways only avoiding, transferring, mitigating or accepting the risks.

Classifying Risks

There can be numerous risks when EPC organizations sign off the Contract with the Project Owner. But broadly these can be categorized in two categories, namely Financial and Execution Risk, though Execution Risks leads to Financial Risks but both can be dealt sep-arately, while preparing the risks response for the pro-ject risks.

Financial Risk Management

Majority of the financial risks can be managed with the help of better evaluation of Vendors and Project Own-er, before signing off below the line with the Project Owner. Responses to Financials Risks can be designed during the pre-award and execution stage itself, like if Project Owner Contract Conditions are stringent and owner is not ready to accept the deviation, then if we don’t have much options available, the best way would be find the vendors who are ready to get these passed on to them.


Apart from the contract conditions, we can hedge the currency for any currency fluctuations on the multi-year projects, So, Currency Fluctuations risks are also addressed.

Execuon Risk Management

It is not necessary that vendor organizations good at executing the works are also financially stable and will not put EPC’s in trouble when they are executing the project. If the organization is not healthy financially, then definitely awarding organization will have to face lot of troubles because of interrupted works. Therefore, it is important that we evaluate the organization from the execution as well as financial perspective. On the contrary if organization is strong financial but having no experience in executing the projects, then also we are inviting a trouble and will have delayed project completion or non-acceptance of the project delivera-bles by the owner of the project. Most of the times execution teams push for highly competent vendor organization for the award of the works, as by doing so, execution would be perfect and there will be lesser risks to be managed during execu-tion of project, but most of the time such vendor or-ganizations charge for owning the project risks. Though lesser execution risks but not justifiable financial cost paid by the awarding the contract to such vendor. Some of us, may say that as every organization have their own approved sets of suppliers with whom they had been working for several years, hence no risk man-agement is required, as being aware about each other’s financial and execution capabilities. This may be true for smaller organizations working locally but definitely not for project based organizations where they are working on multiyear, multi-millions dollar projects. Hence, the best attempts from the procurement pro-fessional should be to award the contract to vendors having back to back arrangement with contract agreed with Project Owner at the least. Procurement Risks are inversely proportional to the level of localizations. If suppliers are local then there would be lesser risks compared, when working with International suppliers, as some of the potential risks will definitely vanish which may include but not limited to Laws of the land, currency fluctuation, payment col-lections, arbitration rules etc.

Takeaway

Only takeaway from this article is that, it is always bet-ter to plan your response for risks as early as possible

on the projects. Procurement plays vital role in man-aging projects risks either by transferring the risks to vendors or not accepting the risks or preparing risk re-sponse plan for accepted risk. Procurement play role in improving P&L statement and require less efforts com-pare to as would be required to have similar EBIT. Procurement Professional should be seen as the key to higher project profits, lesser risks and better P&L State-ment with lesser efforts to generate that much of sale.

About the Author

Ajay is a Project Professional having 10 years of ex-perience in various sectors, which includes Power, Oil & Gas Sectors. Ajay is a self-motivated individual and believes in giving back to the Society. He has worked with construction, infrastructure, com-mercial and Public Private Partnership organizations. Ajay is certified PMP and have other certifications and

titles under his hat including Lead Auditor for OHSAS 18001:2007 from DNV-AS, Chartered Engineer from the Institution of Engineers (India), Management Quali-fication from Symbiosis Pune, and Bache-lor of Engineering in Electrical with Hon-

ors from Chottu Ram State College of Engineering (Murthal), Sonepat, Haryana. He is specialized in Pro-ject Procurement, Contract Management, Planning, Scheduling, and Project Management. He has received multiple written appreciations for his negotiation strat-egies and substantial savings to the organizations. He has been a Lead for Costing Workshop held at Erlangen & Mannheim in Germany for Super Thermal Power Plants. He has authored a popular paper on “Pros & Cons of Negotiation” for PMI-NIC in the past. Currently he is heading the Techno-Commercial & Sourcing at Schnei-der Electric in India.


Mind Maps for

Enhancing Project Team Motivation

By

Maneesh Du , PMP®


The use of mind maps for identifying project benefits can be an eye opening

exercise for the project team.

All projects are about creating something new & unique but do we use sufficient “creativity” while managing projects? This is an important question to ask since creativity is the fuel for us to infuse new energy into all activities so that we do not continue to execute project in an “operations” or with a “run-of the-mill” approach.

Mind maps are increasingly being used for enhancing organizational efficiency across functions by adding the much needed creativity in today’s world. So what is a Mind Map? Mind Map is a simple thinking tool which makes our thoughts visible using a structure which is similar to how the neurons in our brains communicate or link with each other. Thus when we are draw-ing a Mind Map we are in effect using our brain in the way it was designed to be used, discovering our natural operating system and allowing for free flow of ideas. The Mind Map in figure 1 below captures the potential areas where Mind Mapping can be used with exciting results. Mind Maps are useful for dissecting micro level details before arriving at a decision or for developing a macro overview of a subject. This nature of mind maps enabling the macro & facilitating the micro allows for a variety of possible application in Project Management. As an example, for a given change request one could make a sim-ple mind map which captures the positive & negative of both making the change & also of not making the change. This would allow for a more effective decision on whether to accept the change request or not. In this paper we have a close look at an example which exploits the strength of Mind Maps to capture the big or the holistic picture which should be an essential ability of any Project Manager. Lets see how.

Projects usually start with a feasibility check on whether with the available resources it is possible to achieve the

demands of the stakeholder. Feasibilty check is important for a GO/NO GO decision in projects however beyond the GO decision, the teams needs to be motivated on a continuous basis during the complete lifecycle of the project. We look at how Mind Maps can help the team remain focused and motivated. It is a well known fact that motivation is strongly linked to understanding the “WHY” or the “PURPOSE” behind any activity that we do. If this “WHY” is strong enough then the ‘HOW” is the easy part.

M ind

Map is a simple thinking

tool which makes our

thoughts visible using a

structure which is similar

to how the neurons in our

brains communicate or

link with each other.


The WHY of any project is the benefit that it provides to all the stakeholders. This can easily be captured on a Mind Map as shown in figure 2. The Mind Map has the stakeholders listed on the main branch which include Customer, Management, Project Team & End User. In addition we also include the competition & any other stakeholder on two additional main branches. On each of the branch we capture the benefit that the projects has for the respective stakeholders. Lets look at

each of the branches one by one.

First the customer as the most im-portant stakeholder could be gaining some technical, price or functional advantage as a result of the project. It could also be a combination of these elements or a single element from this or it could just be a first mover (hence timeline) advantage for him. When there are multiple elements, it can be a good idea to get a feeler from the customer if he wants to prioritise one benefit over another. The benefits from the perspective of the management of the project team are captured on the next branch. The obvious benefits could be profits or the revenue being generated as a result of the project. Many a times the pro-ject team (especially in development projects) is unaware of the actual monetary impact of the project on their organisation. In such situations the Project Manager should make an extra effort to determine & communicate this amongst the team. Apart from profit & revenue benefits there could be some strategic or tactical advantage with the project such as the first of kinds with reference to a new technology or the first for a customer in a new geographical location. It is easy to miss these additional benefits if not purposely focused upon. The next main branch focuses on the benefits the project is bringing to the team. This is one of the most ignored aspects in projects even though it can have the maximum impact in motivating the project team. This could comprise skill enhancement, recognition and additional specific items to the team or the individuals. The team alongwith the project manager should spend sufficient time on discovering the items on this branch which can be extremely critical for the uncovering even unknown individual motivation factors. Next we consider the end user’s perspective when this stakeholder happens to be different from the customer for whom the project is being executed. This may usually be true for many business to business (B2B) kind of projects and could as a consequence provide fresh insight into the project benefits from this angle. The benefit to the competition is a different view altogether wherein if the project is resulting in an unusual ben-efit for the competition then additional mitigation actions would be necessary. This could inlcude decisions to be taken to protect the know-how/intellectual property in the project.

M ind

Maps are useful for

dissecting micro level

details before arriving

at a decision or for de-

veloping a macro

overview of a subject


Finally there could be certain benefits for other stakeholders who play a role or participate in the project in a larger context. This may include factors such as social, political, environ-mental, health, safety which may uncover an hitherto benefit missed oth-erwise. It is important that this exercise is done with the involvement of the com-plete project team and additional stakeholders can also be invited at the discretion of the Project Manager. The Key benefit of this Mind Map is that it helps to connect the project to a bigger reality such as how an organisation or the society at large is get-ting benefited from the project end results. On the other hand the same Mind Map can also be detailed to capture the benefit to an individual team member. Once this mind map is complete it provides you with a number of “WHY”’s for executing the project and every member of the project team can be motivated by seeing how their efforts would impact the internal organisation & the external stakeholders. This can be a wonderful moti-vator for the whole team. It is recommended that the Project team display this mind map in an ap-propriate size where it can be seen on a daily basis by each member & thus reinforce the sense of purpose for the project & thereby keeping the team motivated throughout the project lifecycle. Go ahead and try this out with your ongoing projects also and you will be surprised to discover additional rea-sons for making your project a success!

About the Author

Maneesh DUTT ([email protected]); (www.inlightenconsultancy.com)

Maneesh Dutt, is a B.Tech from IIT-D and a MBA from ENI University, Italy. He is a certified PMP, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Think Buzan Licensed Instructor (TLI) for Mind Maps and Lead Auditor for OHSAS 18001

standards. He is Founder, Inlighten Consultancy which focuses on providing high value add workshops around Project Management & Mind Mapping. He has 20 years of experience in the industry working with various organisations across sectors. In his last assignment he was Head, Business Excellence & Innovation for STMicroelectronics India operations.

T he Key benefit

of this Mind Map is that it

helps to connect the pro-

ject to a bigger reality such

as how an organisation or

the society at large is get-

ting benefited from the

project end results


Good Practices in Distributed Agile

Team

By

ALOK SRIVASTAVA

A leading Australian Insurance was interested to execute a project using Agile Methodology with a distribut-ed Agile team. To facilitate the Process, it partnered with a service provider which had resources in India. During project implementation, team encountered numerous challenges which they successfully overcame which made the project a great success. This essay endeavors to discuss about delivery of project by distributed Agile team, tools and technology used, challenges faced and end product delivered to customer. This essay also analyzes and recommends best practices for Distributed Agile teams.

Abstract


Guiding Principles For The Project

A leading Australian Insurance envisioned that they would reap the benefit of cost saving via Offshor-ing as well as reducing their huge existing expenditures by decommissioning their Legacy system. This would be a win-win situation and manifest as a financial gain even above the migration cost. To execute this vision, team came up with following guiding principles for this project.

a. Deliver end products using strong Agile principles and methodology b. Use geographically distributed scalable team. c. Incremental Delivery d. Secure connectivity all over location. e. Test automation – consider & spike test automation where appropriate to reduce manual testing f. Cost savings to maximum extent

Business Challenges - Distributed Agile Team Implementing Agile principles in an offshore model is very complex and challenging. Some of the Agile funda-mentals are completely in conflict when working from Offshore. For example, Agile required frequent face to face communication, welcome identified changes, modulate the nuances of software(a measure for continual project progress) and delivering the software frequently which is a challenge when the team works in onshore-offshore model. The challenges, so identified can be listed as under:-

(a) Working in Agile offshore – onshore (b) Team Building (c) Setup Project Infrastructure.

Challenges in Agile- Offshore This project is being implemented by multiple location development teams based in Australia and India, thus the mode and frequency of communication posed a major obstacle in ensuring the smooth execution of the project. Care had to be exercised in time zone differential between the locations. The undermentioned picture summarizes challenges in working in onshore –offshore Agile team.


Challenges in Team Building As per the project framework, first step was to work from different locations. Thereafter, the next step was to understand how to build a team, as to whether it be a collaborative collocated team or a distributed team? Collaborative collocated teams have the required skills and can work independently from their location, and from time to time they collaborate and coordinate with other team. However in a distributed team, individual team members from different location work together as a one team. Looking into these aspects, it was found that for this project distributed team structure was most suitable; however there were many challenges such as coher-ence, communication, coordination, resolving dependencies among teams, scheduling common team meetings for different time zones locations etc. A pictorial representation is as under:-

Infrastructure Challenges

There were many infrastructural challenges in a geographically divided team. There was a need to connect Cus-tomer who is based at Australia to the Service Provider who is in India. This connectivity needed to be on a se-cure network because Customer and Service Provider both are bound by regulators for data security and privacy. The next challenge was hosting and accessing of collaboration tools from all locations. Customer was already using various collaboration tools viz. Jira Agile, Share point, Mindmap, Confluence etc, thus it made sense to use the same tools for Service Provider’s team as well. To establish seamless communication, it was essential to have Continuous Audio/Video streaming where teams could talk to each other. In Agile Methodology, physical story boards are used to display work progress in meetings. Customer was al-ready using them in various projects. But for Service Provider, using these boards was a new way of working.


How We Did it?

Project Team Structure All Business users, Product owner, Project managers and Stakeholders and technical experts were geographically spread over. Apropos, there was a need to have members from all locations to form a Core Team. A distributed team was identified to be the optimum solution to the problem. To smoothen the Process, coach and provide consultancy to each location, an Iteration Manager was appointed. The project was divided into two main streams – Data Conversion Stream and Enablement Stream. The re-sources were split into two groups to work on either stream, and were so named as Conversion Team and Ena-blement Team. (i) Data conversion Team – The objective of said Team was to extract data from Source system; transform

data into acceptable format and finally load data into target System (j) Enablement Team- The objective of the enablement process was to make necessary changes in the Target

system so that policies migrated from Source system could be fully administered in the Target system and all external interfaces to/from target system were amended to cater for the new life assurance products im-ported from Source System.

In Agile, since there is more focus on frequent conversation among the teams instead of extensive documenta-tion, thereby it was important to have optimum shared working hours in which team members could communi-cate with each other. An overview of the team structure is as below:


Collaboraon Tools

In distributed Agile team, it was required to have tools for continuous video streaming, collaboration and Screen sharing to help teams to work coherently. Continuous video streaming enabled Face-to-Face communication between the teams, while Screen sharing acted as a very effective pairing and collaboration tool where effective conversations about design and code could be done.

Microsoft Lync TV was used for Continuous video streaming and screen sharing while Jira Agile, SharePoint, Mindmap, Confluence etc were used for effective collaboration.

The undermentioned figure summarizes various tools used in the project) (All are connected over network to access these tools):-

Dedicated and Secure Network Connecvity There was an imperative need to connect Customer to the Service provider, accordingly a 2/4 MBPS dedicated and secure VPN tunnel was established between both the Parties. VPN connectivity allowed teams to log into Customer Network and access Target system and collaboration employing tools of MS Lync, Jira Agile and SharePoint etc.


Story Board Every location had its own story board which was maintained by the local team, these boards were always in sync with Story boards of other locations. A variety of boards were used in the project such as iteration story boards, planning board, iteration Retro board and Triage board. An Iteration Story Board is used to for each iteration/Sprint. It has all planned stories for particular itera-tion. Daily standup uses this story board. A Planning Board is basically to show high level planning of product backlog items. It shows what are sto-ries planned in which iteration based on their priorities.

Triage Board is used as a store house of stories which are open for user’s discussion and not very critical for project. Post discussion with users, these can be either prioritized or discarded. Retro Board is for retrospection wherein team lists out as to what augured well, things which didn’t work as envisaged and was puzzling them. That is the area for Process improvement. Risk &Issue Board is used to manage and track Project Risks. Story boards acted as a main information radiator for project and anyone who was interested to know about project could walk to story wall which mundanely illustrated the progress of the project.

Product Backlog The product backlog is a prioritized, living master list of all the features and functionalities required to complete the project. Product backlogs commonly include requirements/ user stories e.g. requirements, bugs, research tasks (spikes) and engineering improvements. These items are estimated in abstract units that are often called story points. Product Backlog is maintained both on Jira Agile and physical Planning board. SCRUM board in Jira Agile views as to what is in store for the iteration (Product owner is responsible for Product Backlog management). Jira Agile is very useful tool to manage stories and its movement from one stage to other. It also offers dash-board to see project health. It can give project velocity, Burndown/up charts etc. In our project one product backlog was maintained for both the streams.

Product Backlog Grooming

The team and stakeholders are involved in creating and managing the product backlog, but the product owner has ultimate responsibility for it. Product backlog grooming must happen regularly. Scrum team should spend 5-15% of its time in any iteration in grooming activities. This helps team to understand what’s coming up and what’s changing. Product backlog grooming exercise happened during iteration planning session.


During a typical grooming meeting, the product owner presents what’s new, what’s changed, and his/her plan for the next few iterations. At the end of each grooming meeting, the product owner should publish the changes to the stakeholders and customers so that everyone can see what’s new, what’s coming up and the updated release plan. These updates are shared in Showcases.

Esmaon

By definition, estimating is imprecise. However, you can become much better at creating relatively accurate es-timates with time, practice, and the participation of the entire team The first step is to gather the team to pro-vide estimates on the product backlog items. When the team estimates each story, they give it a relative size estimate with an abstract unit of measurement, called a story point. Estimates are essential for two reasons:

(a) They help answer the question, “When will we be done?” (b) They help the product owner determine each item’s priority.

Estimates give the product owner and the team an idea of a particular story’s cost, which, in turn, helps the product owner, prioritizes the stories relative to each other. The bigger the item’s estimate, the more expensive it will be to implement in terms of time and resources. Therefore, an item that might have been high on a prod-uct owner’s wish list might decrease in priority if it comes at a high cost. In this project Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, and 8) were used for story points. Story point estimation is done using relative sizing by comparing one story with a sample set of previously sized stories. Relative sizing across stories tends to be much more accurate over a larger sample, than trying to estimate each individual story for the effort involved.

Various Ceremonies We were doing various ceremonies in line with Agile principle and all meetings conducted in overlap hours over the Lync TV. These ceremonies address many challenges which team could have faced.

Release Planning

Every 6-8 weeks of a project, stakeholder and Product Owner meet to discuss big picture of the project. In this meeting, group discusses project vision and sees as to how team can address user’s expectation. This meeting helps to shape iteration planning. Entire cross function team is participant for this event. Current Team velocity is taken as a key input for release plan. In our case, release cycle was 6 months so typically 13-14 iterations were scheduled per release.


Iteraon Planning

Iteration planning meeting is to plan as to what the team will build and how the team will build it in the upcom-ing iteration? Product Owner has the opportunity to describe a desired set of stories to the team. This is a deep-dive session on what portion of the stories is being addressed. All three team come in front of MS Lync in mutually agreed time and discuss about stories to be picked for next iteration.

Daily Standup

Daily Standup is time box meeting over MS Lync TV to share commitments, communicate status and identify obstacles. In general 15 minutes should be allocated to the entire standup. All team members including Iteration Manager must need to attend this short meeting. Product Owner is required as and when required. In our project both the enablement team and conversion team had separate standup with common Iteration Manager.


Iteraon Review/Business Signoff The iteration review is a process which gives an opportunity for the entire scrum team (product owner, Iteration Manager and development team) to discuss the accomplishment of this iteration, respond to queries and bene-fit by the feedback. Iteration review meeting is platform to take business signoff from users. This project used screen sharing facility of Microsoft Lync for demo session.

Showcase

All stakeholders of the project are participants for this meeting. They come together and talk about project pro-gress. Product owner/project Manager talks about project progress using Burndown charts, epics charts, and ve-locity chart. Team specific update is shared by respective team.

Iteraon Retrospecve

Iteration Retrospective happens at the end of the iteration. It basically providing an opportunity to the team to look back at the process being followed and suggest improvements in the Process opportunity. Retrospectively, there are three questions to be answered by a team:-

- (i) What worked well? - (ii) What didn’t work well? - (iii) What still puzzles the team?


Retrospectives are usually held at the end of an iteration to identify ways to improve the next iteration. For non-software development teams, a retrospective can be conducted post-implementation of a significant event and/or a deliverable. When conducting a retrospective, the topics raised should ideally be solved within the room and not by ‘breaking-out’. As a way to focus discussion, after team members have shared their feedback the team can then vote on the topics for further discussion to ensure that the team focuses on what is most valuable to the entire team, not a specific sub-set of individuals.

Social Contract Social Contract is set of rules the team agrees. There rules are beyond team’s basic project roles and responsibil-ities. This is a platform to acknowledge cultural differences of the team establish shared vision & agree on work-ing agreements.


Team temperature

Team temperature is basically to know how the team member feels about project progress. Every team member needs to choose a number from 1 to 10 where 1 being poor and 10 being good. Data should be captured anony-mously so to get clear picture of team feelings. Iteration Manager can use team temperature to see the issues raised in the Retrospective. If team temperature is towards red then Iteration Manager motivates team to raise their voice in various ceremonies. Generally team asked to give temperature before Iteration Retrospective And during retrospective Iteration Manager disclosed average team temperature with the whole team and encour-age them to highlight any process improvement suggestions. This is captured over the intranet/internet link.

Ambassador Program

This is an important program where a team member and Agile coach are rotated across different location. This will provide an opportunity to the team to know each other. This will also help to build trust among team. Agile coach helps to disperse Agile culture among the team. Noida and Brisbane team came down to Sydney in the beginning of the project. Initial three iterations whole team worked from same location (Sydney) and they got to know each other and at the same time they learnt way of working.

Automated Tesng

Test automation is the use of software to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes. This is a core Agile practice. Test automation is a cost effective and efficient mechanism to continuously execute unit, regression, performance or integration tests. It significantly reduces manual repet-itive effort. During this project various life Insurance processes had been automated. They were receipting, modify client, Modify agent, Single premium top up, Agent change, billing change, Billing frequency/mode change and Modify Component. Automation test script was written on Java and results were captured in excel which were manually reviewed and validated later.

QUALITY Control In Agile

Quality is a multi-dimensional measure to describe how a IT System fulfill business requirement in an efficient manner. Agile project delivery relies on continuous attention to technical quality, to delivering working software with every iteration and quality is built into the development process i.e. continuous test execution and test au-tomation. Agile project Quality relies on roles of all teams, shared understanding of required quality, more importance being on understanding over documentation; helping others to understand and care about quality, creating Specific quality metrics . Some key quality attributes which are keys areas of attention to Agile developments team are correctness, relia-bility, robustness, integrity, efficiency, portability, reusability, interoperability, maintainability, flexibility, testa-bility, easy install ability, availability survivability and usability.


In the project, all team members having been advised about Agile quality practices, each team member had fo-cus on quality from inception. Concurrently, a dashboard for quality matrices was also maintained.

Track And Visualize Progress Tracking and visualizing progress involves the measurement, presentation and reporting of key information re-

lated to the work. Project progresses are presented in Showcase and steering committee meeting. Physical Story boards are also pinned up with Burn up chart, Progress by Epic charts, Defects Counts etc.

Scaling Agile Team

Ramp up and down of the team during a project execution is a big challenge for any project as it poses a risk to the quality as well as timeline. This is because getting a team member with required skill set in short notice is very difficult. To increase the iteration velocity, sometimes resources are required in between. Agile teams are required to be self sufficient, so the productivity ex-pected from the additional team member is always at par with the existing members. There is a recommended best practice in Agile called as “Pair Programming” which means that production software is written by two programmers, sitting side by side, at the same machine. Thus Pair Programming enabled swift sharing of knowledge with the new member joining the team. In this project, two weeks of pairing effort proved fruitful for the team. Story Burnup rate increased and at the same time new team member got to know the project.

Epic Chart Burn up Chart


Risk Management

Risk management is crucial for software development projects. It is used for project planning, project execution and successful delivery. In our project we do have risk profiling tool which is run on excel. It allows project team to capture risk category, Risk Name, Risk Owner, Risk Likelihood, Risk Control, Action Plan, Target date and Action Plan status. Risk and issue has been discussed at the end of iteration and captured on Risk and issue board. Generally meet-ing was scheduled after Retro.

Agile Pracce Retrospecve

Agile process retrospective gave opportunity for teams to assess the maturity of Agile practices in relation to Operations and projects processes regardless of work type. Assessment results formed the basis for identifying areas for improvement and the necessary actions and it was retained for comparison and for guidance action planning. Maturity is generally ascribed to as Regressive, Emerging Growing, Excelling and Innovating. There are a wide range of Agile practices that are used for training and maturity assessment namely Quality, Track & Visualize progress, Engage Customer, Standard Approach, Work Breakdown, Work Prioritization, Work Estimation, Adaptive Planning, Stand-ups , Retrospectives etc. Agile process retrospective was conducted every quarter in the project. Key Learning from Project

A) As the project was initiated, the team started working on Agile Offshore-onshore model. Although this phase was filled with many challenges and roadblocks, the team still managed to work coherently and diligently to successfully complete the project on time. Phase 1 went live on 07thOct2013 and ’Phase 2 went live on 3rd May’2014(The system has been up and running without any issues, since).

Thus as we gaze back, it is interesting to note as to how each obstacle was turned into an achieved milestone.

The solutions were implemented at different stages such as:- i) In order to prevent misunderstanding of work getting stacked in multiple locations, it was considered to edu-cate the distributed Agile team on the Bigger Picture (of Work in pipeline).Accordingly, one product backlog for entire project was maintained and shared across global teams. There was logical partition between Conversion and enablement team. In Jira, Tool stories were tagged for respective area. ii) Each location was provided an Iteration Manager who interacted with their counterparts on a regular basis and took care of their teams at respective locations. This helped to reduce any impediment in communication among the distributed teams, hence less risk in the project. iii) Separate Daily standups and iteration planning sessions were planned for each stream. However a common iteration retrospective was done so that process improvement discussion is more robust and beneficial for team. iv) Separate project statistics Burndown and velocity charts were displayed on iteration story board. The key learning’s/solution implemented for each challenge is summarized :-


Cost And Benefits

Agile offers almost 40% more cost advantage over waterfall model as observed by comparison of Agile pro-jects with similar sized projects which ran in waterfall model. Using Agile coupled with Multi Location low cost teams added even more cost saving to the project. This is due to the fact that as a thumb rule, offshore teams gave a 50% cost advantage. Agile offers more customer interaction at each stage of the project than the Waterfall model, thus making sure that the deliverables are accurate and completely as desired by the customer, which adds Business Value to customer. The vendor organization was also greatly benefitted as they could provide services to clients in different types of software development methodologies. Thus, it is like adding new feather in their cap, enhancing their offer-ings portfolio.

Return on Investment

This project was a win-win situation for both the customer as well as the Service providers as it gave them both a unique experience in Offshore Distributed Agile which was still a relatively untouched domain in Agile. This

experience will be a key learning for them to apply in future similar projects with rewarding profits. For the customer, investment on collaboration tools are well offset by offshore cost saving.

Best Pracces For Mul Locaon Agile Team

During this project various Best Practices have been discovered which are highly recommended to be followed while working on geographically divided teams. Collaboration tool – Collaboration tools are a must. They will help team to feel like working next to each other and help bridging any communication impediments. Ambassador Program – In this program team members are rotated across locations. This will provide an op-portunity for multi-location teams to know each other, help to build team bonding and trust among teams. Iteration Manager for each team –Iteration Managers will help their respective teams to resolve issues locally. They will interact with their counterparts in other teams on regular basis so that necessary information can be


shared with all. Shared working hours - It is highly advisable to have shared working hours so that all necessary meetings and conversations happen over video conference. Cross Functional Team –Every location team should be cross functional. Team members should have skills and knowledge that are both deep and broad and capable enough to resolve issues independently. Information radiators – Story Wall, Retro, Team velocity, Burndown chart should be maintained at every loca-tion. Anyone who is interested in project status can walk down to boards and see the progress. No Multitasking -Avoid multi-tasking by team members. This implies that one team member cannot have multiple tasks in hand at one point of time. Multitasking leads to low productivity and poor quality work. Common Agile practice –Team at all locations should follow same Agile practice. This will help to avoid misunderstanding of project artifacts. Everyone on the team should have same understanding for Agile Values - Individuals and interactions over process and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, cus-tomer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. Agile Coach can play an important role here to impart common Agile belief among team members. He can be a part time visitor to the project meetings. Self-organizing team- The team approaches a project and based on the project at hand, decides how best to allocate its resources to take advantage of each team member's various strengths. Each Team member applies his or her expertise to all of the problems. The synergy that results improves the entire Team’s overall efficiency and effectiveness. Automated testing – Test Automation is a core of Agile. During development a significant effort was put into developing an automated test suite that could be configured to drive unit, smoke, regression, performance and volume testing. Integration Team –The job of this team is to get the changes into production ready environment at the end of the iteration. This team moves the changes into actual production environment as per the release cycle. This can be a virtual team with a part time partner. For large projects it can be a full time team. This team is playing a very important role when project size is big and many Agile team works for the project. Scrum of Scrum –When there are multiple distributed teams working on a project, then it becomes challeng-ing to address dependencies. Scrum of Scrum meeting is a solution to this problem. In this meeting one or two representatives from every team discuss their respective team work to negate overlapping areas. Social Contract – It is a set of rules the team agrees. These rules are above and beyond team’s basic pro-ject roles and responsibilities. This is a platform to acknowledge cultural difference of the team and establish shared vision & working agreements. Agile practice Retrospective – Agile practice is reviewed every quarter and discussed with the stakeholders as to how to improve Agile practices i.e. Quality, Track & Visualize progress, Engage Customer, Standard Ap-proach, Work Breakdown, Work Prioritization, Work Estimation, Adaptive Planning, Standup , Retrospectives etc. Team temperature– Team temperature is basically a way know how team members feel about project progress. Every team member need to choose a number from 1 to 10 where 1 being poor and 10 being good. Data should be captured anonymously so as to get clear picture of team feelings. Risk & Issues - All team members should meet at the end of every iteration for 15-20 minutes to discuss risk and issues. Iteration Manager need to maintain Risk and issue board at every location which need to consolidat-ed from every location so that each and every team is aware of project risk. Risk profiling should be done and risk should be tracked in collaboration with all location teams.

Business Opportunity

The distributed Agile experience has been a great success and the best practices learnt can be leveraged to oth-er customers who are keen on using Agile practices. It will give an edge to service provider in future as most IT


managers of big/small Corporation are showing keen interest towards Agile.

Summary/Conclusion

Looking back at this project experience, it can be summarized as the most motivating and challenging oppor-tunity wherein multiple location teams worked together in synergy by adopting a completely new methodolo-gy and making the Project an enormous success. It is worth mentioning that during this phase the entire team worked coherently to overcome all obstacles. The key learnings noted during project execution were a unique experience and these can be considered as Best practices to be applied into other similar projects. In current scenario, where companies are racing against each other to work on latest technology and project management methodologies, every IT organization is inclined towards Agile methodology. Agile with distributed team is an even more attractive proposition for them due to the additional cost benefit being transferred to the custom-ers. Thus, we can safely say that the Distributed Agile practice is the future of Agile methodology and compa-nies which are gaining the knowledge of these principles shall delight their customers and stand out abreast of their competitors IT companies.

References

Scaling Agile @spotify with tribes , Squad ,Chapters & Guild - www.crisp.se Navigating Risks and improving effective project delivery through Agile – Deloitte Consulting India Pvt Ltd. Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin http://www.Mountaingoat software.com [Accessed 27/06/2014] Agile Academy Website http://www.Agileacademy.com.au/Agile/about_Agile [Accessed 01/07/2014] www.brighthubpm.com [Accessed 10/07/2014] http://martinfowler.com [Accessed 11/07/2014] http://www.leadingAgile.com[Accessed 01/07/2014] www.pwc.com/us/insurance[Accessed 07/07/2014] http://www.collab.net/products[Accessed 12/07/2014] http://www.csus.edu/indiv/v/velianitis/161/ChaosReport.pdf[Accessed 01/07/2014] http://Agilemanifesto.org/[Accessed 20/06/2014] http://www.Agilehardware.com [Accessed 17/07/2014]

Glossary

Velocity - the sum of the story points for delivered stories in iteration i.e. stories that are developed, tested and signed off by the customer. Burnup Charts - a simple way to track delivery based on velocity showing the time the required scope will be delivered in. Agile – Agile Software development Process.

About Author

Author Alok Srivastava has 13+ years of rich experience in delivery of IT Application and maintenance projects. He is presently working with Computer Sciences Corporation India Pvt Ltd as Agile Iteration Manager and Agile Coach. He can be reached at [email protected] or ph – 9654269407.


Certification Corner

A brief note on PgMP Certification

By

Ramani S and Shivender Vats


S uccessful program management – How PgMP® cerfica-

on can facilitate it? Programs are the highest level of work done in an enterprise to manage and control temporary change initia-tives. As per PMI, “A Program is a group of related projects, sub-programs and program activities managed in a

coordinated way to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually” Typically a program includes multiple interrelated projects. However, one critical difference between project management and program management is that program management can also include an element of work, which involves overseeing of related operational work to achieve the benefits and outcomes, which cannot be obtained by managing the change initiative as per a project lifecycle. Illustration – for example the government’s education depart-ment wants to raise the literacy levels of target groups in a community. The department may need to launch multiple in-terdependent projects to achieve this objective. These projects may include, say, building of new educational institutions, launching new curricula, recruiting the faculty and enrolling the participants from the target group. It may also need to measure the benefit (in this case, en-hanced literacy levels) to ensure that the program has achieved its objective. In such scenarios, programs typically run for years, whereas the projects may usually get completed in couple of months. Benefits management and governance control are two key aspects of program management. The stakehold-er engagement and communications/ risk management performed in a program are at much higher level, as compared to, say in project management. Other examples, National Highway Golden quadrilateral program, Aadhar program, Delhi Metro, Improving the health care of the population (being undertaken by many other countries), Delhi Mumbai Industrial Cor-ridor, Building and launching a fighter jet/ aircraft carrier etc. Cost -The Program Management Professional (PgMP®) certification from PMI is a premier certification tar-geting professional program managers. The Certification has become quite popular- especially in the past one year – due to reduction in fees by the PMI and restructuring the examination. Currently there are about 1100+ PgMP Certificants globally, with USA, Canada and India having top three representations. For current PMI members, the PgMP exam fees is USD 800.

P rogram is a group of related pro-

jects, sub-programs and program activities

managed in a coordinated way to obtain

benefits not available from managing them

individually


Experience - The candidates for the PgMP examination need to portray minimum four years and 6000 hours of project management experience AND four years and 6000 hours of program management experi-ence in their PgMP application form (if you have 4 years degree/ equivalent) else seven years and 10500 hours of program management experience keeping former the same, with Secondary diploma/ associate de-gree. All Project & Program management experience must have been accrued in last 15 consecutive years. All applications go through a rigorous panel review, where the application is assessed to understand if the appli-cant, under very limited supervision, has been responsible for the coordinated management of multiple, re-lated component projects directed towards a common organizational objective. Exam - On clearing this review, the candidates need to take a four hour objective examination (consisting of 170 questions) to obtain the PgMP credential. The rigor of the examination and its pre-requisites have been appealing to the program managers, who would like to distinguish themselves in the PM profession. Prior PMP credential is not mandatory for taking the PgMP examination – though familiarity with the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) is needed from the examination perspective. Whereas every company or institution may follow their own program management model, the Standard for Program management ( and the PgMP examination) have been facilitating better program management across corporate and non-profit organizations.

About Author

Ramani S PfMP, PgMP, PMP, MoP, MSP

Shivender Vats PMP, CDCP, MBA, BE

Computer Based Test (CBT)

PMI Member $ 800

PMI Non- Member $ 1000

Paper Based Test (PBT)*

PMI Member $ 700

PMI Non- Member $ 900


6th Dec 2014

Source: www.123rf.com


T he North India Chapter of PMI held its AGM on 6th of Dec 2014 at Hotel Rangoli, East Patel Na-gar, New Delhi. The morning started with the President sharing the over all agenda and achieve-

ment of the chapter which was followed by the sharing of the progress of each portfolio by the respective board members or their delegates.

OverallStatus:Updates (Since Last AGM – October 2012)

♦ Won Hosting Rights for PM National Conference 2013 and hosting a very suc-cessful National Conference in NCR

♦ New Volunteer Management (Beta) Rolled out

♦ Work with the board to institutionalize new 2nd Layer of Volunteers – AVP’s for each portfolio

♦ New Bylaws rolled out

♦ New Positions of Volunteers 15-20 rolled out across different portfolios

♦ New Board Structure being rolled out from Jan 2015

♦ Made institutional foray into various educational institutions for advocacy like AIM, IMI, Amity etc Manoj K Gupta

64.4 PDU Opportunities was generat-ed since last AGM in 2012


O utreach Government outreach: Focus Area

♦ Construction and Engineering Sector

♦ Educational Institutions

Current Status

Detailed discussions conducted with following organizations for events and MOUs of associa-tion

♦ IRCON, DMRC, Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd., and RICS India Pvt. Ltd

Corporate outreach: Focus Area

Volunteer: Feb 8, 2012 – PM and infrastruc-ture and IT- in collaboration with ESIC.

Speaker: Sep 01, 2012 – Structuring projects to ensure success – in collaboration with Asia- Pacific Institute of management

Panelist: Oct 12, 2012 – Managing Troubled Projects – an evening with PM veterans at IBM Noida

M embership

Sectors include IT/ITES, PSU, Banking, Insurance, Infrastructure, Telecom, Power etc.

Total members as on 30th Nov = 883 Achieved in 2014

Engage members through volunteer opportunities

Formation of Regional Best Practice Taskforce – (Webinars)

Conducted awareness campaigns

Chapter Membership Guest Pass (PMI Initiative)

Region/City Mem-

NCR 798

Dehradun 18

Chandigarh 14

Jaipur 6

Lucknow 5

Others 42


V olunteer Pre requisites

Member of PMI + Member of PMI NIC

Team Behind Successful delivery

of Project Management National Conference 2013

C ommunication

Future

Responsive Website to meet mobile desktop world

Reach out expansion through

social media i.e. LinkedIn, Face-book , twitter etc.


C hapter Bylaws amendment voting results Amendment Approval Requirements:

♦ Minimum of 10% members need to vote - 87

♦ 2/3 of voting members need approve the changes - 58

O verview Amendment Approval Requirements:

♦ Second major modification of Chapter Bylaws

♦ Key Changes

♦ Introduction of Operations Board

♦ Alignment of Chapter Board with PMI Volunteer Role Delineation Study

♦ Setup of new Chapter Leaders Guide for its Officers

♦ 3 months of deliberation within PMI NIC Board, and PMI

The Team Audience

Audience

Audience

Felicitation


On 4th December 2014, a day with PMI veterans was organized at NHPC Faridabad office. NHPC IT has whole enthusiastically supported this initiative. The credit for organizing and supporting this initiative goes to Mr. Amiya Paul – Executive Direct, Mr. Ravinder Saxena – GM (IT) and Ms. Savitri Srivastav – Chief (IT). PMI North India chapter thanks NHPC officials for their kind support. The presentations were well appreciated by the both NHPC officials and PMI members, who attended the event.

A Day with PM Veterans @ NHPC Faridabad

4th Dec 2014


The sessions were conducted by the prominent speakers. 1st session on “TRUST – More Trust, More Speed” was conducted by Mr. Raju Taneja. Mr. Raju Taneja is a commerce graduate from 1976 batch of Delhi University and is professionally trained in areas of Quality, Quality Training, Personal Effectiveness Training, Benchmarking, Information Mapping, Business Continuity Planning and Process Audits (Lead Assessor). Raju is an independent consultant in the area of quality management and an acclaimed trainer & mentor in quality and personal effectiveness. In his role as a trainer, Raju has trained and mentored individuals in the area of quality and process improvement over last 23 years besides training man-agement teams of organizations in the area of quality manage-ment. His trainings and process improvement initiatives are largely based on Philip B Crosby’s concept of quality and his trainings on personal effectiveness are influenced by Steven Cov-ey’s writings. Raju brings with him 36 years of work experience in organizations like NIIT Limited, EXL Service and Escorts Group (Manufacturing) among others. He has managed corporate training and education centers, besides having han-dled corporate roles in the area of quality and delivery management.

T he credit for organizing and supporting this initiative goes to Mr. Amiya Paul – Executive Director, Mr. Ravinder Saxena – GM (IT) and Ms. Savitri Srivastav – Chief (IT).

S ession on “TRUST – More Trust, More Speed” was conducted by Mr. Raju Taneja


The 2nd sessions was equally interesting and the subject was “Leaders vs Managers”. This session was conduct-ed by Mr. Vijay Verma – (PMI Fellow, PMP, M.B.A. P.Eng). Mr. Vijay K. Verma is an internationally-renowned speaker and an author. He is a professional engineer and holds an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from DalTech, Halifax and an MBA from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He began his career as an electri-cal engineer and later on, developed a project-management system to effectively manage a programme of re-search facilities and complex projects in different fields. Mr. Verma has been honoured with several interna-tional awards in the field of project management.

The session ended by the vote of thanks by Mr. Praveen Anand – Vice President Programs, PMI North India Chapter.

T he session ended by the vote of thanks by Mr. Praveen Anand – Vice President Programs, PMI North India Chapter

S ession on “Leaders vs Managers” was con-ducted by Mr. Vijay Verma.


Abhijit Kumar Ajay Bhargove Hemant Seigell

Kumar Saurabh Neelima Chakara Nirmallya Kar

Parul Choudhary Prashant Malhotra

Shashank Neppalli

Pooja Kapoor

collaborang project management for high performanc e...

Documents