Enterprise Navigator

While going through my innumerable files in preparation for our recent office move, I came across an old copy of Murphy's Laws of Combat (don't ask), which lists any number of axioms gleaned from various skirmishes over the years.

As I reacquainted myself with their wisdom, it struck me that sometimes managing a PMO can seem like a battle as well, as you try to win over the hearts and minds of the organization. What follows are corollaries to a handful of these laws for your consideration.

"You are not Superman or Rambo."

In much the same way that you do not really have the uncanny ability to stand out in the open unscathed during a raging battle, the inspirational case study provided by the seminar speaker will be much harder to replicate in actual practice than the session might suggest. Conspicuously absent from most such presentations are the multitude of conflicts, sharp glares and bruised careers that just go along with these initiatives.

"If the enemy is in range, so are you," along with the popular "Tracers work both ways."

Always remember that when using facts and figures to sway opinion or present a case for action, anticipate that that someone will retort with equally convincing and contradictory analysis or data. This also brings to mind, "Liars figure and figures lie."

"Anything you do, including nothing, can get you shot."

This little rule is useful to illustrate how vulnerable most PMOs are within organizations; see chapter 16 of Taming Change for more about that subject. Overachieving can get you shot. Trying and failing can get you shot. But, without question, doing nothing is the fastest way to get shot; snipers love a stationary target. Hardened warriors will tell you that the best way to survive is to keep moving towards your objective without drawing attention to yourself.

"When in doubt, empty the magazine."

When faced with a problem, it is better to attack the issue with all of the energy you can muster, rather than timidly 'almost' resolve it with incremental actions.

"There is always a way -- and the easy way is mined."

This law is a close cousin of, "If it seems too good to be true…" Be suspicious of those who are too quick to agree to your requests; chances are they are simply trying to get you out of their office, with little or no intention of actually taking action. Worse yet, they could be preparing a counter-insurgency.

"Important things are very simple, and simple things are always hard."

This speaks specifically to the need to build a strong but basic foundation of processes, measures and accountability. This is an important and simple, yet very challenging thing to accomplish.

"If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

'Nuf said.

"Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder."

Despite what the selection committee for a new supporting system might recommend, all bets are off once the procurement and contract folks go to work.

"No inspection-ready unit passed combat" and, "No combat ready unit passed inspection."

Worry less about standards and certifications and more about practical application.

"No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy."

If I had a nickel for every time I have used this quote over the years, I would be retired in the Keys. Always stay flexible with your improvement initiatives; apply the Marine approach of adapt and improvise. This also means you have to be vigilant to situational dynamics. To blindly follow a plan come hell or high water is to march right into an ambush. This is further supported by this law: "The enemy diversion you are ignoring is the main attack." Listen to opposing viewpoints! Which leads us to:

"If it's too tough for the enemy to get in, you can't get out."

OK, so your constituents aren't the enemy; but this law speaks volumes about the importance of open, bi-directional lines of communication. Too often PMOs become the organizational equivalent of walled fortresses instead of remembering they are a service provider.

And last, but not least, one final law and universal law to always bear in mind; "Professionals are predictable; it's amateurs who are dangerous."

"Hello it's me, I've thought about us for a long, long time…"

Name that tune.

OK, maybe that's not much of a challenge (duh, given the first three words are the title). How about, name that singer/songwriter/producer?

Yes, it's been a long, long time indeed since my last post, so lots of things to catch you up on.

So, here we are, one month after the publication of Taming Change with Portfolio Management. Most of you probably received an email from me announcing said release and encouraging your purchase. Did I mention lately that marketing a book is at least as much work as writing one? For any potential authors out there, don't forget to consider this as a major aspect of your planning (and budgeting). This also explains why you haven't heard much from me on this page the last few weeks.

We are getting great interest and response from initial readers and reviewers. There are several links on the book website where you can listen to interviews (be sure to check out the two-part interview I did with Cornelius Fichtner on the PM Podcast, Episode 149, read reviews, and download supporting content. We have also started posting excerpts of some videos that Pat and I taped which further explain some of the key topics; find them on the Resources tab.

There you will also find a listing of upcoming engagements I'll be doing related to topics from the book, including the following:

Silicon Valley Chapter PMI Annual Symposium
September 20-21, 2010
Santa Clara, CA

Tearing Down the Wall! Integrating Portfolio Management Across the Life Cycle of Change
Ultimate In Success
September 21, 2010
Santa Clara, CA

CampIT Project and Portfolio Management Symposium
September 30, 2010
Chicago, IL

34th Annual Global Conference on Product Innovation Management (PDMA)
October 16-20, 2010
Orlando, FL

Yes, there are two events listed in Santa Clara; I'm not sure yet which day I will be speaking at the PMI symposium, however, for those in the area who are not attending the Silicon Valley chapter event but are interested in portfolio management, Harish Chinai has asked me to do a 90-minute evening presentation and book signing at his facilities. If you are in the San Jose/Bay area and are even remotely involved with project or portfolio management, then you probably know of Harish. It's a free event, so please register and come by (BYOB).

If you have never attended one of the CampIT one-day mini symposiums, I would encourage you to check it out, especially if you are in the midwest; Dan Horwich runs a pretty good program, and it is a great value.  'PDMA' is the Product Development and Management Association 2010 Global Conference on Product Innovation Management; no presentation at this one, but I will be helping out.

I bet some of you are thinking, "Book, schmook. Great info but it's static; what I need is something more interactive where I can go get specific answers to my unique questions." Ah, such a deal I have for you! For readers and those otherwise interested in portfolio management the PMO and business process development, we have launched a LinkedIn Group, titled the same as the book.  The whole purpose of the book is simply to get a conversation started, so the LinkedIn group is where you can "continue the conversation" with others who have the same topical interests as yourself. Please join us, ask questions and share your insights with others.

As for other things going on (that aren't book-related!), if you didn't get a chance to watch it live, please check out the on-demand version of the webcast we did last week with Nick Boxall, the MIS Manager at Best Buy Europe. We explore the topic of how to extract critical information from your PPM system. Hopefully the link will be up on the Resource Center of planview.com by the time you read this, and I think you will find it much more upbeat and informative than a song about almost breaking up with someone over the phone.

We here at Planview are big on custom logo shirts. I remember when I first joined the company over a decade ago that we were in the middle of our Hawaiian shirt phase. Many shirts have since been designed and handed out, some cryptic, some more overt. Here is our latest one:

If I may say, it is an elegant, yet stylish and understated fashion expression that speaks volumes. But, just what does it mean? Look for the 'spot on' press release coming soon from a major analyst group that will help you unravel the mystery of the curious shirt!

As you likely already know all too well, there are a lot of different moving parts to implementing and operating a portfolio management initiative. Great software is certainly an enabling component, but as I have been heard to say on more than one occasion, the sole purpose of business software is to make your processes more effective and efficient. And, those processes are there to make the organization function more effectively and efficiently.

What do organizations consist of? People.

Yep, at some point everything tracks back to what the IT Skeptic humorously refers to as "wetware." And, people are much more complex than any code, processor or network. We realize full well that our customers are not big nameless corporations, government agencies or four letter designators on an account list; our customers are in fact, a half million individual end users.

So, in the interest of helping our customers be successful, we are launching a pair of big investments this week, and they are not part of the Planview Enterprise software platform. They are a significant upgrade to our customer support system, now called Customer Care, and the launch of our new PlanviewPRISMS.com enablement site.

The new Planview Customer Care system is designed for those who administer and manage their Planview Enterprise software platform. The now retired WebFirst help desk system served us well for a decade, but it is time to provide a new generation of capabilities for several hundred system administrators to better interact with our product support team (now officially renamed as Customer Care).

The new Customer Care system is based on the Parature platform, which offers a significant increase in flexibility, ease of use, and new features that we will continue to roll out into the future. I can tell you that lately, Robert Webb (our Director of Customer Care) looks like a kid on Christmas morning, barely able to contain his excitement. He knows what this means for his team and the people they support on a daily basis, so we expect him to sustain his happy dance well into the foreseeable future. Since we are also interfacing it with JIRA, the developers are happy about it, too.

Of interest to another large base of end users is PlanviewPRISMS.com. Many of you historically know of 'Planview PRISMS' as our companion best practices and business processes product. Last year, we leveraged the PRISMS brand recognition to now incorporate everything we do to enhance the ability of our users to be successful, including various learning capabilities, knowledge assets and implementation support. PlanviewPRISMS.com is our new enablement platform to support that move, and also supersedes the Planview Direct site that many customers are familiar with. But there is so much more to PlanviewPRISMS.com than an updated marketing campaign or Website -- it provides an impressive array of capabilities and value designed with the entire end user population in mind.

As someone who has had a thing or two to do with PRISMS over the years, I proudly tip my hat to Erica Gunn, her Global Solutions Center team and our Web services group for what they have done to take it to the next level -- very, very impressive indeed.

To begin with, all of our offerings are now integrated for a truly a one-stop shopping experience. Imagine standing in the middle of a supermarket and simply yelling, "CHOCOLATE!" to get everything in the store containing chocolate to rush to your beckoning cry. So it is with PlanviewPRISMS.com; you can use its keyword search to return everything we have to offer, whether it is E-learning modules, best practices, user documentation or message threads. Or, if you prefer, search by user role or product feature -- all ranked by relevance and just a mouse click away.

End users can log in to create or view their personal enablement plan, sign up for the multitude of different courses, check on their progress, find test results, or ask questions -- either to our experts or other users, using our new user networking capability. Thinking about migrating to the latest version? Find out what others have to say about it -- what they love, what they like, or what opportunities still remain. Imagine -- everything you love about LinkedIn Groups message boards, except our online user community is directly relevant to your job and the system that you use, it is actively moderated and lacks the irritating 'news bits' of questionable value.

So, there you have it -- for Planview customers, be sure to check out these great new capabilities that are designed to help you to get the most out of your software investment and help you do your job better. For those who are not…well, at least you know a little more about what you are missing.

Along with my anniversary, the dates of my enlistment and honorable discharge from the navy, and the birth of my daughter, the 18th of March will no doubt come to represent yet another major milestone on the shallow arc of my life. A visual of that might look like this:

(Sometimes I crack myself up).

After vocally resisting the very suggestion for some time, it was with no small amount of doubt and trepidation that I officially graced both Twitter and Facebook with my presence. Yep, this groovy dude is once again totally hip to the whole mod scene, man. Far out.

Just call me Twitface.

Now I know all you young bucks are probably giggling at my unfashionably late arrival to the party, and in general 'not getting it.' But, understand that most of my generation was taught growing up not to splay yourself open in front of the mirror, much less to anyone else. If you are to really work it on Twitter, some amount of personal privacy must be set aside (and let's face it, a measure of dignity just because of the name). Bear in mind I am already pretty freaked out by what a Google search returns.

As for Facebook, I've been getting invites to join from relatives for years. Sure enough, before the sun had even set, I had cousins, brothers and sisters all wanting to be my 'friend.' They just came out of the woods like zombies who catch a whiff of a live one.

"Hey, y'all (they're mostly from Kentucky, so just seeing their tiny little pictures made my drawl come back), you all are already blood relatives -- don't that trump 'friend?'"

However, the motivation for all this was not for personal reasons, but for business. While conducting an autopsy on why our PMO webcast was so successful earlier this month, someone mentioned we got a lot of tweets about it. I went exploring, and indeed discovered that a programme and portfolio management group (based in the UK?) was tweeting a Cliff Notes version of the webcast as it was being conducted. Really? Kind of creeped me out at first, but I could start to see the value of it. To make a long story short, we are now following each other.

As for Facebook, hey, that had been on the list of things to do for a while now. Since I publically represent the company, I guess it was inevitable.

But -- before you all start befriending and following me around, just be forewarned I'm not doing diddly as a twitface yet. This will be water I wade into while the tide is out. Besides, the minutia of my professional life is about as captivating as a bag of air right now, and I doubt you care much about how painting the garage is coming along.

Feel free to help the old man out -- tell me in a very few words how you are applying Twitter for business @terrydoerscher. How are you using social media in the realm of the PMO? Are there any PMOs who have a Facebook account?

Perhaps more importantly, can a PMO really have friends? Think about that.

Finally, a quick correction to my previous post, and as a testament to my listening skills; Mark Perry pointed out that the mandate for him to read a business book each week came from his boss in his first executive position with IBM (he had already been there 13 years). Imagine landing your first VP role and being told you had to turn in book reports to prove you did your homework! (Alas, it's like the pride of graduating high school, only to be treated as a dweeby freshman at college.)

In the interest of providing substantive follow-up on how to keep organizations aligned, I got inspired by Mark Perry's podcast 'memo' that preceded the interview mentioned in my last post. If you have not yet listened to it, Mark relates how his first boss at IBM required him to read one business book a week and write a report on it. Like him, I thought that was a bit extreme, but I concur that reading a good book is an easy way to extend your professional horizons.

I want to propose a less draconian twist on Mark's challenge: Read a book that is outside of, but next to your area of expertise. Here are some examples:

• If you are a project manager, read a book about the PMO or product management
• If you are a product manager, read a book on marketing
• If you are in IT, read something about product development or strategic planning
• If you are in Operations, borrow a book about portfolio management
• If you are in the PMO, read a book on agile development or accounting

You get the idea. Organizational communications improve immensely when we can visualize things from multiple view points, yet many of us have a tendency to keep drilling deeper and deeper into the same old narrow well of knowledge. Surely we all want to develop depth in our particular discipline, but a little cross-functional pollination every once in a while works wonders and offers a refreshing change of pace.

Here's the reader interaction part: recommend via a comment to this post the one book that you wish your associates in other parts of the organization would read about your particular discipline. I know, in this age of 140-character messaging, asking you to actually read a whole book might be intimidating to some. If a book is too onerous, then suggest or read an in-depth article.

I think you will find that how you normally see your environment is probably not that skewed from the perspective of other disciplines, although they may use different terms or emphasize different aspects. I can almost guarantee that you will find some concept or practice within another discipline that you can make good use of within your own area of interest.

Yes, it's time to clear the baffles again. If you aren't familiar with these terms, either see my August 28, 2008 post for an explanation, or simply trust that this entry includes several unrelated topics in an effort to do some early spring cleaning.

First, we want to welcome new readers that we have picked up via several groups on Linked In. If you are just now discovering the Enterprise Navigator, I encourage you to take some time to explore the more than 100 entries we have posted over the last few years. Also, drop by and visit our Resource Center for lots of useful downloads and on-demand Webcasts in our archive.

If you hurry, you can still register to attend the Webcast we are hosting on March 10th featuring Margo Visitacion of Forrester, entitled "The PMO in 2010 and Beyond." This isn't your normal boring remote PowerPoint lecture format -- we've been getting great feedback on the last few Webcasts we have done using a more casual, conversational approach. In fact, registrations are through the roof for this one. Margo and I will be chatting about some of the latest PMO research that she and her colleagues at Forrester have been doing, and then we will put on our pointy hats to do a little prognostication about what the future of the PMO holds. Margo is always insightful and fun to work with, so I hope you can join us.

"Taming Change With Portfolio Management" is winding its way through the publishing process as we get closer to its release date of July 1st. The Advance Reader Copy version will be in our hands in just a few weeks and marketing efforts will really spin up this month. I have to say, the book is shaping up to be better than I ever imagined and we have gotten very positive feedback from early reviewers, so we are anxious to hear what you think of it.

One of the things we know you will really like about this book (besides the content) is that it will be reasonably priced. I don't know about you, but I think long and hard before I turn loose of north of fifty bucks for a business book. We want you to actually own a copy of it, so we have priced it under $30. This means it is also a title that can be carried through your local retailer. Even though it seems most people buy their business books online these days, for those of you who like to browse through a book before committing to it, or do not trust 'the system,' you should also be able to find it wherever better business books are sold.

If you belong to a group or association that is looking for an engaging speaker for your upcoming meetings or symposiums and think the key messages of the book might a good fit, please let me know (PMO @planview.com) and we can discuss getting you slated on our speaking roster.

Speaking of books, Mark Perry tells me his "Business-Driven PMO Set Up" is doing quite well; if you haven't gotten a copy of that yet, I encourage you to do so.

The new Web site for the Enterprise Management Association - International is now fully operational and accepting initial memberships. For those of you who like the idea of being able to say later, "yeah, I was member number 142" or something like that, by all means we would love to have you join right now. For those who want to hear more first, we'll be doing an introductory Webcast later this month to explain EMA-I (we pronounce it 'eeh-ma') to new and prospective members and answer any questions you may have. Keep checking in here or on the EMA-I site for more details on that. We are also looking for corporate sponsors; Planview is proud to be the first founding sponsor, and we encourage others to follow suit; see the sponsor kit available on the Web site.

Finally, did you attend the virtual launch of Planview Enterprise 10.1 last week? Was that cool, or what! Yes, of course all the new software features, but the platform also proved to be well-suited for such an event. Our manager of Web and Creative Services, Kimberly Stone, is getting lots of inquiries and interest about how we are leveraging virtual platforms to host both the 2009 Horizons event, as well as for the new release launch. For those who did register for the launch event, remember that the platform will remain open for several weeks so you can log in and get information.