eeddiittoorr’’ss nnoottee · learnings from a case study in it projects - madhavan s rao, pmp,...

Thanks and Best Wishes

Soumen De, PMP

[email protected]

Chapter News- Murali

Leadership Corner- Anand Sri Ganesh

PM Article: Managing Stakeholder’s Expectations -

Spotlight: -

Why should you takePMP Certification- Santosh Varma

Key Takeaways fromPMPC 2012- Sridhar Chadalawala

PM Connect- Lt Col (Retd) L. Shri Harsha

The Lighter Side of PM - Rajiv

DID YOU KNOW?

Madhavan S Rao

Karthikeyan Paalankishe

Co

nte

nts

Editor’s NoteEditor’s NoteDear Friends,

Publishing the PMPC edition of PM Essence was a very challenging and yet a fulfilling

experience. We were able to deliver the PM Essence on the final day of the PMPC

conference to ensure that participants had copy of the newsletter along with the key

takeaways from the conference. If you recall, on Day 1 of the conference, we had the

unscheduled BMTC strike among a plethora of challenges that we faced when things did

not go as planned. However, we were able to launch our planned responses and work arounds to make

sure that the conference deliverables were not impacted. On another note, I had the good fortune of

travelling to Chennai to attend the PM Leadership meeting where I met leaders from different Chapters

from the region. I had an opportunity to learn best practices from other PMI chapters. One of the things

that I learnt was that every chapter publishes a newsletter highlighting Chapter events but with different

periodicity and content. However, the common thread across all communication was the passion and

contribution from YOU – members and volunteers. Volunteers determine and steer the content generation

process. The sole sustenance of this newsletter is to share quality PM related articles contributed by the PM

community. I would love to get your inputs to develop rich material and take Essence to the next level. If

we look around, there is a wealth of PM knowledge waiting to be tapped and this comes from some of the

projects that have made an impact in our community and nation. For instance, the Aadhar project is now

being piloted in our country. It would be great if you can take time off to research the Aadhar reports and

share some of the project management principles used in this mega project.

Looking forward to your continued support and encouragement.

Dr. Harish

Hande,

Magsaysay

Award winner

and popularly

known as

Solar man of

Karnataka,

spoke passionately about the

problems faced by India and how we

should address them. Dr. Hande

spoke about the solar power projects

that his company is executing in rural

areas through partial self-funding and

shared his personal experiences in

doing such service. He called upon

the project managers to join hands

and work towards social upliftment.

His emotional speech held the

audience spell-bound and he was

thronged by delegates as he visited

the Rotary Bangalore West Stall.

Continued on Page 6...

Calm after the storm was the

state of activities at the

Chapter after the conference

was over. The team was

recovering from the stress

that they went through

organizing the Project

Management Practitioner's

Conference, 2012 held on

September 14th and 15th which concluded with

resounding success. The September issue of PM

Essence carried lots of photographs and a write

up of the Day 1 of the Conference. The Day 2 of

the Conference was equally interesting with

excellent Keynote speeches and technical papers.

The day started with Mr. P.S. Ravindranath while

recalling that it was the Engineer's Day, a day to

honour Sir M. Visvesvaraya, one of the greatest

engineers of our time who was also an

exemplary Project Manager as he spearheaded

many important projects for India.

The Keynote address from Mr. Manish Gupta,

Director and Chief Technologist from IBM, India,

was focused on the new technologies that are

being discussed that will change our lives in the

future. He touched upon various research

programs in progress that are aimed at providing

us better amenities, better infrastructure, better

environment, creating an interconnected world

that can respond intelligently to the changes.

Chapter News

Editorial Board

Murali Santhanam, PMPRaghavan S.S.V., PMPSoumen De, PMPSowmya Moni, PMP

Volume -1 - Issue 03 October 2012

- Murali Santhanam, PMP

Q. This is a tendency for project

requirements to take more time

and money than anticipated.

What is it?

A lot has been written about

leadership. Professors,

consultants, sociologists,

theologists, politicians,

sportsmen, army-men – all of

them have a point of view on

leadership styles and

leadership impact. Yet we find

a paucity of leadership around

us – in business, in politics, in

our daily lives. In my opinion,

this is not as much because our

leadership models are under-

evolved but more because

leadership is an extremely

personal trait.

Fundamentally a leader is a

human being, with all of the

virtues and vices as any –

ambition, intellect, greed,

passion, envy. Every leader

harnesses his virtues and vices

– his predispositions – in

responding to circumstances he

is faced with; circumstances

that could call for deep

economic risks, moral

dilemmas, or human impact.

my ability to walk alongside him as he

led us through unprecedented

accomplishments. He set high

expectations, invested in my

development, and cleared

organisational obstacles to allow me to

succeed. Such experiences can often be

career defining.

Let me contrast this with the

characteristics of a leader confronted

with the second scenario. There are

times when organisations are faced

with circumstances unforeseen,

unfathomable. When industries and

companies undergo a change that is

unpredictable, very little of past

experiences seem to matter in making

sense of the present. These are often

crises of confidence, when

organisations go through a phase of

redefinition.

Trust and respect become lynchpins for

the leader. The team develops an

intrinsic faith in the ability and

intentions of the leader. Faced with a

chaotic environment, the leader will

rely heavily on symbolism to build faith

and positivism within his team. The

leader will find

himself confronting

self-doubt, instincts

of self-preservation

or even self-

promotion. A gifted

leader will

overcome the lure

of the safety net

and demonstrate his commitment to

the cause. Teams will often not expect

this of their leader, but if they suspect

its presence, they will hitch their

fortunes to the leader with unflinching

loyalty. Celebrating success and failure

alike become norms for such a leader

as he battles attrition of talent and

energy on the one hand, and stakes

claim to his team's allegiance on the

other.

To experience a leader who can

navigate such trying circumstances is a

rare gift. This is a leader one would

follow blindly through the worst of

terrains. Which brings me back to my

original premise - I believe the leader is

fundamentally an alloy of his virtues

and vices, who brings them to bear in

the circumstances he faces. So a

passionate leader might behave very

differently from an ambitious leader

under the same circumstances; and

woe befalls the team stuck with a

leader who is self-servient.

Anand Sri Ganesh

Leadership Reflections

2 Page

“Anand Sri Ganesh is presently the

SVP of Strategy and new business at

Manthan Systems – a provider of

analytics products and solutions for

the retail and consumer industries.

At Manthan, he is responsible for the

growth levers of the organisation and

incubating new products. Ganesh has

over 16 years of experience across

technology and consumer industries

in sales, marketing and business

leadership roles. He is a post

graduate in management from IIM

Ahmedabad, and graduated in

mechanical engineering from IIT,

Madras.He can be reached at

[email protected]

Leadership Corner


As a practicing and evolving leader, I have found

two broad business situations where leadership

traits are put to test. The first is when the

destination in known but the path is traumatic,

and the second in where one is navigating team

and self through uncertainty. As an analogy, I

would imagine the

former as a general in a

battlefield; and the

latter to a captain

navigating his ship

through a hurricane.

The former is more

commonly observed in

business – dealing with

complex competitive

situations, entering new markets or negotiating

new partnerships. The latter is relatively less

common – when firms go through dramatic

changes because of industry shifts or

organisational upheaval - although something one

is seeing more and more often in the current

economic environment and disruptions caused by

technology.

Both circumstances call classical leadership traits

to the fore, but I think they get harnessed in

different orders of priority. Let me dwell on the

former first. Strategy formulation and decision-

making stand out front-and-centre; the need to

identify choice points, and be willing to make

commitments to the choices and see them

through.

Beyond analytical ability, the leader needs to

demonstrate a willingness to take decisions

through empirical evidence and build consensus

with his teams, peers and influencers. The more

complex the decisions the more difficult the

process is for consensus-building. One of the big

values a leader brings to the table is his ability to

build networks within the company and beyond,

and leverage his relationships for the benefit of

his team. He thus brings in disproportionate

resources to bear to accelerate his team's

progress. The team expects the leader to instil a

sense of stability through systems and structures.

A successful leader will show persistence in the

face of opposition to see his strategy through. His

ability to communicate his vision strongly and

inspire confidence in his team become critical to

the success of the chosen path.

Let me share my experience as a follower in such

a situation, when I found myself facing what I

perceived to be Herculean challenges. My

manager then was one who had a deep faith in

Managing Stakeholder's Expectations -Managing Stakeholder's Expectations -Learnings from a Case Study in IT Projects

- Madhavan S Rao, PMP, CEO, Assurance Consulting, Bengaluru, India

PM Article The Study positioned Assurance Management

as a framework that complements the

traditional practice of Risk Management.

While Risk Management deals with

uncertainties in a project, Assurance

Management focuses on “enhancing the

leadership mindset by visualizing and

utilizing all opportunity to the fullest

potential in a real-time manner to steer

projects to success.”

The Case Study delivered a disciplined

approach to implement Project Assurance

Management in form of four principles:

1. Seeding: Any activity performed to create

opportunities that positively affect the

project outcome and also the customer

relationship.

2. Ecosystem Engineering: Focused

modification of project conditions through

perception management, real-time

ecosystem scanning and implementing

dynamic methodologies to achieve

stakeholder buy-in.

3. Pre-emption: Deliberate creation of the

right circumstances that will pre-empt or

negate any troubled situation arising in the

project. This proactively takes into account

the human frailties that lead to many project

challenges.

4. Innovative Paradigms: Having a

framework in place that enables stakeholders

to break out of the existing paradigm of

doing things.

Having the mindset to introduce perceptions

allows us to expand on the opportunity

spaces to steer perceptions. Once we have

managed the perception of the stakeholders,

we would have achieved the management of

the stakeholders themselves more

collaboratively and collectively. Just to test

your perception management skills Try to list

today 5 action points you have triggered,

that are not part of the action points from

Processes or the Project Plans. If you can

arrive at new ones every day for 2 weeks,

you are on the fast track to become a

'Perception Manager' and not restricted to

remain as a 'Process Application Manager'.

This is indeed a Mindset shift. The Project

Manager thinking of himself / herself as a

'Perception Manager' to steer the success of

Projects is a 'break-through' that has to be

experienced to be believed. Are you ready?

Book Reference - “Steering Project Success –

What More is Possible?” by Madhavan S Rao

Mid-way, we discovered that managing

expectations is not enough, we need to pro-

actively and pre-emptively introduce

expectations. This was called seeding. This

evolved to doing 'ecosystem engineering' so that

stakeholders would be open to new ideas and

suggestions, when required in the future.

The final 'thinking framework' was evolved (over

several iterations) as a framework of 7 Mantras

to deliver the required 'Assurance', to

stakeholders on an ongoing basis.

It required Project Managers to think through

these 7 Mantras and arrive at the action points

for steering expectations. We preferred the word

'Steering' instead of 'Managing'.

These Seven Mantras were:

1. Foreseeing the Bigger Picture

2. Investing in Customer and Team Education

3. Information Seeding

4. Perception Management

5. Learning to say a Positive NO/ Conditional YES

6. Steering Comfort Levels

7. Thinking $£€` for Stakeholders

It is evident from the above list that all these

Mantras deal with softer aspects of a project viz;

people management, interpersonal relationship,

and entrepreneurial thinking.

Learning as to how the action points from

thinking through these 7 mantras can effectively

combat the common project vulnerabilities

associated with ambiguous requirements, scope

creep, shared development, new

domain/technology, hardware or software

infrastructure, human resource issues (skill

availability, motivation/morale, attrition, idle

time), incorrect estimates, undocumented/

unshared assumptions, unshared commitments,

differences in perception delayed feedback etc.

was the essence of the pilot phase of the case

study.

To practically test this out, the project managers

were asked to apply these insights after an initial

workshop and bring out authenticated case

studies of benefit illustrations. These case

studies were appropriately mapped to Project

Management Knowledge Areas and Process as

defined by PMI (Project Management Institute)

and also to the relevant SDLC (Software

Development Lifecycle) phase.

Seeing the successful outcomes of steering

projects by empowering the PM's with The Seven

Mantras - we graduated from redefining the term

'expectations management' as “Assurance

Management”.

Managing IT projects in

an environment of rapidly

changing customer

requirements, uncertain

business scenario and

umpteen numbers of risks

and vulnerabilities is a real

challenge.

More than 60 % projects

are either highly

challenged or are failures

(Chaos Report 2011).

Clearly there needs to be a

better way of managing

the projects in today's

environment.

A study was undertaken to

arrive at a framework that

would supplement and

complement the current

processes and best

practices for managing

Projects.

A common learning

articulated by most Project

Managers, was that

'Managing Stakeholder's

Expectations’ in a better

way was the real

challenge. The case study

involved 5000 Project

Managers in multi-

geographic scenario,

executing Projects for

various clients, who were

bought into the idea of

experimenting with a

unique entrepreneurial

approach in addition to

application of known

Processes and

Methodologies. These

Project Managers were

empowered with a

'thinking framework', that

would deliver to them

additional action points.

These action points were

on the soft track and

resulted in steering

stakeholder's expectations

in a more organized and

structured way.


4 Page

Spotlight

Roughly how many hours per week do you typically spend for PM

volunteering?

About 1000 hours from 2011 till date.

About two hours a week to sometimes 8 hours on the weekend.

What motivates you to volunteer for PMI?

It gives me an opportunity to network and learn from fellow project

practitioners. It gives me a sense of satisfaction of doing something different

from the regular office work and gives me the opportunity to give back to the

project management community.

What is the hardest thing about doing volunteer work?

The hardest thing at times is to juggle between my commitments be it

personal or official and finding time for the volunteering work.

PMI Volunteering, Professional commitment, Personal commitment -

How do you balance the three?

I prioritize things on a daily basis and spend time based on the priority and

urgency. I strongly advocate the fact that all the three are essential for an

overall grooming of the personality.

Name any 1-2 best volunteering experience?

Involvement in the PM Footprints and the PMPC 2012 events gave me an

immense sense of ownership and satisfaction.

Tell us your hobbies, or things you are passionate about, other than

volunteering at PMI?

My hobbies are playing Tabla and enjoy any sort of percussion instruments

What will be your message for your fellow volunteers?

PMI Bangalore Chapter has various opportunities for volunteering and these

opportunities really help one to groom his/her professional life.

These volunteering opportunities provide you the view of the other side of the

coin.

What is your thought on recognizing volunteers?

Recognition of the volunteers in an open forum:

- It would be nice to carry his/her picture on the website.

- A nice volunteering memento like a watch/shirt/pen would be a good idea.

Karthikeyan Paalankishe is presently working as Program Manager,

India at Lifesize Communications. He has been associated with the

PMI Bangalore India Chapter as a volunteer since April 2009. He has been

taking increasing responsibility and currently involved end to end in one of

the Flagship events of the chapter which is PM Footprints. Karthikeyan has also

contributed during the Project Management Conference. He has got various awards from the

Chapter for his volunteering contributions. Some of the recognitions are Champions award for the

contribution for the PMPC-2011, Gold Star award for Volunteering the year 2011-2012. He holds a

Bachelors in Engineering along with an MBA and is a PMP credential holder since 2008.

Karthikeyan Paalankishe, PMP


A. Feature creep (sometimes known as

requirements creep or scope creep) is a

tendency for product or project requirements

to increase during development beyond those

originally foreseen. Feature creep may be

driven by a client's growing "wish list" or by

developers themselves as they see opportunity

for improving the product. To control feature

creep, project management tools, such as the

requirements stability index (RSI), are

sometimes advocated. While RSI MONITORS

the stability of the features and the extent of

avoidance of the Creep, the CONTROL is made

by rigidly following the Change Control Board

(CCB) protocol. One useful guideline is the

Acceptance Criteria. Whatever is needed to

fulfill the Acceptance Criteria is not to be

considered a creep, but within the scope, and

whatever is not needed to satisfy the

Acceptance Criteria should necessarily be

processed through the CCB.

[source – Internet & SSV]

Why should you take PMP Certification

Why should you take PMP Certification

Two to three years ago, it was

my main and ONLY aim of my

life to be PMP Certified. Such

was the craze and trend during

that time that I was carried

away by this new fantasy in

town.

PMP Certification is one of the

most sought after certification

among professionals, be it IT or

manufacturing or any field of

profession. On this basis, and for

my future aspects, I also

decided that this was the time to

take on this certification. I came

to understand that anyone

having 4 years IT experience is

eligible to write PMP Certification

Examination. As long as the role

involves any process of a

project, anyone can go ahead

and appear for this exam. I

knew that passing out this exam

would be a Herculean task,

considering that I did not have full time project

management experience and was a bit nervous

about taking the examination. However I was

confident with myself that I can clear this

certification, if I study and understand the PM

concepts and take the help of other PMP

professionals and managers in my company.

PMP Certification basically tests the different

phases of Project life cycle eg. Initiation,

Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Controlling

and Closure. It is not necessary for one to have

experience in all of these phases, but at least

knowledge in all these areas is required and this

can be obtained by reading PMBOK and other

PMP related books.

My primary focus of this article would be to

provide my perspective on the following often-

asked questions :-

• As an individual / Project Manager, why should

I be PMP Certified ?

• What advantage would I have over Non-PMP

Certified Project Manager ?

• What is the marketability opportunity of any

PMP Manager?

The following explanations would try to explain

the above concerns.

PMP is a credential offered by PMI (Project

Management Institute) . To pick up the details

from Wikipedia,

• As of 31 July 2010, there were 393,413 active

PMP certified individuals worldwide.

Government, commercial and other

organizations employ PMP certified managers in

an attempt to improve the success rate of their

projects in all areas of knowledge, by applying

standard project management principles. A

professional with PMP Certification is recognized

worldwide to handle projects with confidence /

professional and constructive approach. It

certifies his/her expertise in Project

Understanding, Risk management, Stakeholder

management, Time management, Cost

management, Quality control, Leadership ,

Budgeting, Communication and Documentation.

Projects managed by people who are not PMP

certified project managers have only 25%

success rate in contrast to 75% success rate of

projects handled by PMP certified managers,

according to a survey by Foote Partners LLC, an

IT workforce research company.

Santosh Varma, PMP

PM Article

Projects managed by

people who are not

PMP certified project

managers have only

25% success rate in

contrast to 75%

success rate of projects

handled by PMP

certified managers.


As we know Project Management

processes help in improving

existing processes and in

mitigating the challenges at the

right time. There were of course

failures and success in projects

before PMI introduced these

processes, but once PMP

certification became widely

adopted, the way to approach the

failures and success of any project

drastically improved. The

challenges were now getting

mitigated at the right time, using a

very professional and process

driven approach.

As I see it, a typical PMP manager

adopts the following processes with

passion and sincere diligence for

managing his/her project.

• Project status reporting

• Project schedule management

• Conducting regular project

status meetings

• Coordinating all project

communications

• Formal and informal meetings

• Project budget and resource

management

To me this set of processes brings

in many advantages, not only to

the project, but to the overall

Organization. Many people have

argued with me saying that they as

Project managers have succeeded

without doing PMP Certification and

their projects have also succeeded

without actually following any

processes. I am not here to

advocate PMP Certification, but I

would definitely like to advocate

that the processes / guidelines /

standards, if adopted will positively

influence the projects which will

result in vastly improved quality of

the project deliverables. Market will

definitely look for, hire and nurture

those kind of project managers.

Not only they deliver the 'scope' of

the project, they deliver the 'value'

to their clients, their organization

and to themselves.

Key takeaways

from PMPC 2012

6 Page

Mr. Elango, Chief VP and HR

Officer, Mphasis, gave a

perspective of how project

managers should make

personal improvements in

their leadership skills and

related to how his son, helped

him realize some of these

important principles. He also

interacted with the audience

and answered a few questions. His hilarious examples

made the session live.

The valedictory speech was provided by Padma Bhushan

Dr. V S Ramamurthy, Director, National Institute of

Advance Studies, who took the audience through the

significance of the discovery of the God Particle and how

India has participated in

one of the greatest

discoveries of recent times.

His address enthralled the

audience inspired them to

aim for excellence in their

work, and made the

conference end on a very

positive note.

The feedback from the

delegates was positive.

The Seventh Annual Conference is therefore another

success story in Chapter's history.

Here is the team that made this happen, all volunteering

to create a yet-another memorable conference:

Is the conference making its impact on the practitioners?

We are yet to find out. However, we seem to have

impacted the

routine of Adigas,

the food and

catering vendors

for PMPC, who

have started

applying PM

principles in their

delivery. Here is

the team engaged in a daily stand-in meeting to review

and plan the day.

After the conference, life in the chapter has returned to

routine as the Chapter held the PM Footprints program on

September 27, where the Authors of the Technical Paper

“Managing Virtual Teams: A Global Marketing Program

Manager's Perspective”, led by Rashmi K presented the

challenges faced by marketing program managers and

made recommendations for effectively managing virtual

teams working on global marketing program.

Inaugural Address

Industry Perspective of Project Management

Trends

Presented by Dr. Prajapati Trivedi

Secretary, Government of India - Cabinet Secretariat

The conference kicked off with power packed

speech of Dr. Trivedi which has set a right mood

and given right nutrient for the conference.

Dr. Trivedi's speech on the “Performance

Monitoring and Evaluation” in government has

changed the perception we currently have with

respect to the government projects and initiatives.

One of the paradigm used by the Economist as “A

blind man looking for black cat in dark room” is

not only humorous but a thought provoking fact.

It is sometimes true in the project management

paradigm also as most of the times we try to

understand the real scope/requirement of a

project in the above sense.

Few of this below mentioned thoughts is very

relevant to any project manager in any age of

project management

Presented by Mr. Bhaskar Bhat,

Managing Director, TITAN Industries Limited

Mr. Bhaskar Bhat has given us a clear insight of

“how we can make challenges for you, instead of

you working for challenges”. Especially in

managing the upward and downward trend of

their retail jewellery stores “Tanishq” is truly

inspiring.

To achieve a success in any field of expertise one

must “Dare to Try” and failure doesn't always

mean we are not successful but it actually means

that we have tried something new and we have

not attained perfection in making it success.

• Top down accountability works more than the

bottom up accountability

• We need to get rid of “Not me syndrome”.

• Communicate the status- It makes stakeholder

feel better

• Performance depends primarily on “20% of skills

of the person and 80% on the System and

processes that have been adopted”.

• Take ownership.

• Ask relevant questions – revalidate.


Chapter News ... continued from Page 1

... continued on Page 8

Key takeaways

from PMPC 2012Sridhar Chadalawala, PMP

Basics of

Critical Chain Project Management& Theory of Constraints

activity duration defined is inclusive of the

reserve. As a result, at a work package

level buffers disproportionate to the actual

requirements have been created

inadvertently. During execution, the

execution team is unaware of these

buffers, consumes the time and it

becomes very difficult to track these

buffers at every activity level.

As a process improvement, when the CPM

was analyzed, it was identified that buffers

were actually getting consumed at activity

levels, irrespective of whether the risk

events occurred or not, and monitoring

was not effective. This deficiency in the

CPM technique gave rise to the “Critical

Chain Project Management” method of

developing schedules. The only change

that was done over the CPM method was

to combine all the time reserves and

group them separately under the Work

package. The data will now look like this:-

Schedule Data – Critical Chain Project

Management

that has occurred without

magnifying. Therefore, it

calls for effective

management of the chain

for restoring the situation

to the original plan. This

will doubly ensure that the

delay is not carried

forward to all activities in

the future and facilitate

corrections at every stage

of the project. The

advantages of this

approach are:-

• Reserves, which are

needed only in case of

risk events occurring,

are segregated from

activity duration;

thereby ensuring that

realistic time estimates

are communicated to the

team.

• Ensures that time

reserves are consumed

only on occurrence of

risk events, not as a

routine, and easily

identifiable for effective

tracking.

• Identification of reserve

utilization facilitates

better root cause

analysis of risk events

and improvement of

processes, which may

also include

reassessment of

planning parameters.

• In case risk events did

not occur up to a

particular point of time,

there is no necessity of

these reserves in the

future, which earlier was

inadvertently carried

forward in the system.

Hence, forecasts made

during periodic reviews

dropped these buffers

and were realistic.

As I sat through the talk on “Theory of

Constraints – Applicability in Critical

Chain Project Management and Agile”

during the Footprints session on 19 Jul

2012, two thoughts crossed my mind.

One, linking two topics which need in-

depth explanation to the “generalists”

of today is not a wise approach for a

talk with a limited time period,

something which I hope future

speakers at Footprints will keep in

mind. Second, that I should make an

attempt to simplify the subject for

better assimilation, which I am trying

now and hope that I succeed.

Though the speaker did his best to

clarify doubts, to the best of his ability

within the constraints of time and

words which he could muster to

explain, I guessed many left the venue

with a hope that they could have

understood the concepts better.

Critical Chain Project Management

Most of us are conversant with the

Critical Path Method (CPM). Just to

recapitulate, as part of time

management, we identify activities,

sequence them, estimate resources

and durations, and finally develop the

schedule, which we then analyse by

using CPM. At the end of this process,

we will have the schedule data in a

form, something similar to this.

Schedule Data – Critical Path

Method


PM Connect Lt Col (Retd) L. Shri Harsha, PgMP, PMP

Critical Chain Project Management& Theory of Constraints

... continued on Page 8

WBSItem

Activity

Dependency

Predecessor

Successor

ResourcesEstimates

DurationEstimates

Reservetime

ActivityDuration

WorkPackage 1

A 1 Man

Material

Machine

Man Machine

A 2

A 3

A 4

WBSItem

Activity

Dependency

Predecessor

Successor

ResourcesEstimate

DurationEstimate

ActivityDuration

Reservetime

WorkPackage 1

A 1 Man Material

Machine

Man Machine

A 2A 3A 4

Total work package duration and time reserves

In this method, based on the risks at

activity levels we estimate the

additional time required to complete

the activity and keep it as a reserve.

Though the reserve is not to be

considered while developing the

schedule, invariably it gets merged

with the duration estimates and the

The last two columns change position.

This ensures that for the project team,

the activity duration is what they are

entitled to execute the activity. This

grouping of activities of a Work

package is called a “Chain” since they

are interdependent and one weak link,

i.e. delays in execution, delays the

complete chain of activities. This

technique is called the “Critical Chain

Project Management”.

Based on the risks identified, which

may or may not occur, the complete

chain of activities will be affected. As

project managers we should be aware

that the delay in execution of one

activity will delay completion of only

that particular activity, and only impact

the start and finish of succeeding

activities to the extent of the delay

PM Connect

8 Page


PMI Bangalore India Chapter# 13, Suryastan Apartments, Andree Road, Shanthi Nagar,Bangalore - 560 027, Karnataka, India

[email protected] +91 80 6583 3671, +91 80 2211 5772, +91 98868 14078http://www.pmibangalorechapter.org

Print: ValueWorks; [email protected]

PM Essence

Disclaimer

“The mission of PM Essence is to facilitate the exchange of information among professionals in the field of

project and program management, provide them with practical tools and techniques, and serve as a

forum for discussion of emerging trends and issues in project management. PM Essence is YOUR

Newsletter and Bangalore Chapter welcomes story ideas and/or suggestions to make it still better. More

information can be found on the Chapter's website.”

All articles in PM Essence are the views of the authors and not necessarily those of PMI or PMI Bangalore

India Chapter. Unless otherwise specified, it is assumed that the senders have done due diligence in

getting necessary copyright and official clearance in respect of all letters and articles sent to PM Essence

for publication. PMI Bangalore India Chapter is not responsible for loss, damage, or any other injury to

unsolicited manuscripts or other material.

• Consumption of reserves up to the completion of a particular

work package would caution the team that there are no

more reserves for future activities in the chain and that belts

have to be tightened to ensure that the rest of the activities

go as per plan.

• Monitoring and controlling is more effective and proactive.

On a personal note, I have found this technique to be

definitely better than the CPM technique. Though it involves

some minimal additional work during the planning stage, it

simplifies life to a great extent during the execution stage.

Critical Chain Project Management ... continued from Page 7

Key takeaways ... continued from Page 6

Case Study - Implementation of Sevottam Seva and Project

Arrow

Definition of Done

What does cloud computing mean to project managers?

Presented by Mr. Rajinder Kashyap, Deputy Director General

(PG, QA & Inspection) and

Mr. Prannoy Sharma, OSD to Secretary Posts

This was a real eye opener to all of the audiences in this

presentation which has changed the entire perception on the

“India Post”. With the advent of internet and many other

communication tools one can challenge the existence of postal

services in the future but this has changed the entire perception of

many (including myself). The important take away from the

presentation is that it is not enough for us to implement a system

but more important is to “monitor and control” it in order to make

it effective and sustainable.

Presented by Mr. Naveen Nanjundappa, Agile Coach

This is another unique presentation which has given real insight for

the definition of “Done” in three important areas namely the

product quality, business value to customer, and software best

practices. Also the definition should address not just the functional

but also the non-functional requirements and standards like

usability, performance, capacity & maintainability.

Mr. Deepak Vijayaragavan, Sr. Delivery Manager, Aditi Technologies

Project Management is taking a paradigm shift with the evolution

of “Cloud” based applications. Project management skills and

competencies are an important part of the framework for this

paradigm shift. Cloud computing for a Project Manager, means a

more green, less costly, and more carefree processing environment

for the customer.

The Lighter Side of PM

We like to hear what you think!!

Please complete the sentence below with

your thoughts in 10-15 words and send

them to .

The best entry will win attractive goodies

from PMI Bangalore India Chapter.

The structured approach to manage any

project, as propounded in PMBOK, helps

me to ...

[email protected]

eeddiittoorr’’ss nnoottee · learnings from a case study in it projects - madhavan s rao, pmp,...

Documents