You must get PMP certification

People who are thinking about getting PMP certified, I recommend them to stop thinking and start acting. You should not spend more time in thinking because the decision is very simple and you have to get certified.

For further clarification I summarize the top seven reasons for making PMP certification your number one priority for this year:

 1.  PMP certification has become mandatory for many Project Management jobs and preferable choice for the rest. If you search for any Project Management related job, you will find PMP as a mandatory requirement in many cases. So get certified, get qualified for future project management jobs.

 2.  PMP demonstrates your commitment towards Project Management profession. Does PMP certification ensure whether the person is a good project manager? No, we can have good uncertified project managers who can perform as per expectations where some certified project managers might not perform, but the certification guarantees that the person is committed to project management profession. So get certified and demonstrate your commitment to project management skill.

 3.  If you are working as a Project Manager or you aspire to be Project Manager then you do not have any reason for not doing it. And yes, it requires some investment of money and time but the payback period is also very short sometimes less than a year. So this investment doesn't only have short payback period but also has high Internal Rate of Return, so go for it.

 4.  PMP is also getting very popular as a Qualification for the Project Managers. On an average, 5000 people are getting certified every month. If you want to be a part of such an elite group of project managers, so go for it.

 5.  Preparation for PMP certification will expose you to mainstream thinking on project management standards, techniques, best practices, and current trends. It is especially helpful for the people who are from technical background and working as project managers.  So if you want to know what matters the most while managing projects and what are the available or required tools and techniques for this? So go for it.

 6.  PMP certification process also introduces you to many networking opportunities and once you get certified you will also get the access to many more networking platforms.  It depends on you that how much you grab out of this. It’s a proven fact that networking helps people to grow in their professional life. So go for it.

 7. PMP will also boost your self-confidence and differentiate YOU from other project managers.

Hopefully you are convinced for getting certified but may be thinking about how to go for it? For this, we are organizing one event “How to crack PMP smartly” on 26 Feb 2012 in Delhi. People from NCR region (Delhi, Gurgaon and NOIDA) can easily participate and for the rest we are open to share our presentation material. It’s a free event and it will help you in making project plan for your PMP certification goal. Take action Register NOW.

Why it is difficult to run the last mile?

I was running the half marathon last month; my third thus far, and as I advanced towards the finish line, a certain realization struck me. On all the three occasions, I had always found it difficult to run the last mile.

My marathon experience has raised some serious questions- It is not that I can’t run long distances, in fact the thrill, the pace, and most importantly the gratification of running for a purpose has always propelled me to participate. But irrespective of the distance, running the last mile has always been formidable, uncomfortable.

Is finishing a job always this difficult? And if yes, does it have to do with the expectation of outcomes? Or is it that we are too exhausted and stressed towards the end that we tend to lose focus and our sense of purpose.

As I as struggle to find answers, I will reason and ponder on each point separately and apply it to the marathon analogy.  Let me first talk about expectations of outcome. Assuming that I have already run twelve out of the thirteen miles that will lead me to the finish line, this is when I tend to become distracted. I start thinking about the post run events and it diverts my mind from the current race to future events, this in turn generates desperation of finishing the race, anyhow.

When I apply this analogy to a project situation, I realize that during the last phase of the project our focus seems to dissipate, we are low on accountability, prioritize lesser, and tend to slacken our hold because the goal appears closer. We start talking and thinking about upcoming projects, and enquiring about possible future opportunities. This diverts our attention from the current project and when we get distracted, even for a moment; it takes several minutes to regain our focus. Distractions, large or small, kill productivity and the main task i.e. the completion of the WHOLE project is hampered.

Towards the end, we sometimes feel less energetic and stressed out and when the situation demands our utmost focus and control, we seem lost.  I would probably attribute this to burning out caused by excessive stress and pressure conditions during the various phases of the project cycle. We expend energy too much too soon and feel rather snowed under as the end approaches.

In a project scenario we work overtime to control the schedules, avoid taking any leaves despite the fact that they actually help us reenergise, and fail to develop clear boundaries between work and personal life. As a result, when we reach completion, we feel enervated and helpless to handle stress and it becomes difficult to proceed with the same speed.

I think for successfully finishing a long race in a given timeframe we need to control both these factors, we need to spend our energy carefully and focus on the present rather than dreaming about future.

Become a Generalizing Specialist or T-Shaped

A generalizing specialist is someone with one or more technical specialties who actively seeks to gain new skills in both his or her existing specialties and other areas. A generalizing specialist is more than just a generalist. A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few.

A generalizing specialist does one kind of job very well and some other jobs adequately. With generalizing specialists your teams enjoy the benefits of high productivity, while lowering the risk of bottlenecks, and retaining flexibility. There is another similar concept called T-shaped people:

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they’re willing to try to do what you do. We call them “T-shaped people.” They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they’re mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. - Tim Brown, “Strategy by Design”

There are many benefits of having T-Shaped people in team

• Better communication even with less documentation, if someone has an enthusiasm or curiosity about many different subjects and disciplines, then they can be more flexible, more empathetic, and more engaged with the world
• Better bottlenecks management, as T-shaped person can do other jobs adequately, he can contribute in other jobs if required.
• Better solution of the problem , If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. ~ Abraham Maslow , The T-shaped person can explore the problem from many different perspectives and that helps in driving better solutions.

How to become T-Shaped person? You need to find your own answer, some suggestions

• Reading is a good method: There are some great books and Web-based resources available; you need only to invest time to take advantage of them, follow some good blog, one need to read more than just technical publications.
• Participate in community activities, thanks to internet and many popular social media sites ,its easy to participate in online and face to face community activities , join some good groups 
• Do some experimental projects in your non core areas, say if you are C# expert, try to make something on python.
• Share your knowledge , if you do this other will also follow and that will help you in acquiring new skills
• Find a mentor for a target skill, mentor could be junior to you…but he has to be expert in the skill you want to acquire  

Avoid making people Indispensable

Every individual in a team has a important role to play, but in the interest of individual, project and organization, leaders should not allow people to become indispensable. Lots of career articles have been written about “How to make yourself Indispensable..” the tips like doing more than expectation is essential for professional growth but it should not let person become indispensable. The important part is we should motivate people to become more knowledgeable, productive, friendly and professional but not indispensable.

Indispensability can create issues like 

• Poor Team Productivity , the person become too busy and as a result there may be many tasks kept waiting ,and because of his queue other may not be able to start their activities
• Create Risk for project timeline, if the person is not available because of any reason it puts project timelines on risk
• Monotonous work, as he can only do some of the work, people keep coming to him only for the same work.

Some of the measures Project team can take to avoid Indispensability

• Continuous knowledge sharing, team should create environment of knowledge sharing. 
• Task rotation, we should keep rotating people between modules, so there should be more than one developer who codes for one use case.
• Educate team to become more professional, the growth in career happens by sharing knowledge not by keeping secrets.
• Put process in place, process like one codes and other does the review, one codes and other fixes the bug, peer programming and group design can institutionalize the knowledge sharing. 

Earned Value Management (EVM)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate usage of EVM in one of my project.

Before we start let us refresh EVM. What is EVM? NASA describes it.”EVM is an integrated management control system for assessing, understanding and quantifying what a contractor or field activity is achieving with program dollars”.

Some Key Terms:

Planned Value, PV describes how far along project work is supposed to be at any point in the project schedule. It is a numeric reflection of the budgeted work that is scheduled to be performed.

Earned Value, EV is a snapshot of work progress at a given point in time, it reflects the amount of work that has actually been accomplished to date.

Actual Cost, AC is an indication of the level of resources that have been expended to achieve the actual work performed to date.

Let us get back to my project. My goal was to check project heath and take remedial actions. We did Use Case based size estimation at Initial Stage of this Project. Based on Management priority and nature of the project we made the resource allocation plan. My first task was to convert that planning in planned value terms.

·         The total project effort which we calculated using UCP and productivity becomes Total planned value of the project

·         The resource plan we made gave us planned value graph against time.

Month	1	2	3	4	5	6
Number of Allocated Resource	11	15	15	12	12	11
Cumulative Person Months	11	26	41	53	64	75

So the line graph of PV looks like

We calculated the Actual cost, by counting the number of person months we have spent on this project till now (at the end of month three)

The trickiest part of the calculation was the earned value, here we had to identify the estimated value of the finished work. It was easy to identify earned value of finished Use Cases but for the one not finished I had to go by some judgment. On Such Use Cases I applied the Percentage Completing technique, I used objective indicators like test build sent, design completed for arriving at the percentage completion figure. I calculated this figure for last three months and the complete picture looks like below

 

So what does this mean?

It means we have done work worth 27 person months by spending 33 person months at the end of month three of the project. Originally we planned to do 41 person months worth work by this time.

Some EVM indicators:

Project Question	EVM indicator	For my Project
Are we ahead or behind schedule?	Schedule Variance ,  SV = EV-PV	27 - 41  = -14
How efficiently are we using time?	Schedule Performance Index , SPI = EV / PV	27 / 41 = .65
Are we under or over Budget?	Cost Variance, CV = EV- AC	27 – 33 = -6
How efficiently are we using our resources?	Cost Performance Index ,  CPI = EV / AC	27 / 33  = .81

I think EVM metrics add good value in project management. Now I have to work to get my project back on track….. I need to use time efficiently…. Resource utilization is still ok considering the holiday season we have been through.