A Lesson in Risk Identification, from the Very Worried Walrus

Just got a shipment of old school children's books from my in-laws a few weeks ago (yes, we have kids, I don't just read kid's books for fun or blog material). One of the books is "The Very Worried Walrus", by Richard Hefter. This was one of my husband's favorites, but I had never read it before. So, when I read it to my daughters for the first time, it got me thinking about Risk Identification.

Let me tell the story....

Worried Walrus really wants to ride a bike, but is afraid he'll fall off. He has a conversation with "Positive Pig" about why he's worried...

"If I fall off, I'll get hurt. Then I'll have to go to the doctor. And I'll need medicine orbandages....or...stitches! Ohhhh!"

To which Positive Pig replies, "That's silly, bicycle riding is fun and there is no reason to worry."

The Worried Walrus goes on, "An awful lot can go wrong. You have to steer and pedal and balance. You have to look out in front of you and on both sides and make sure nowone is behind you...and not go too fast...and use your brakes."

Reading further, we understand why the Worried Walrus has his title, "...If I get hurt, they'll have to take me to the hospital in an ambulance. I can see it now, there's a traffic jam on Main Street. The ambulance get's stuck..."

And he ends up in the middle of nowhere walking through the rain in a dark night, wet and hungry and looking for anyone who can help him.

I won't give away the rest of the story, you should pick up the book and find out for yourself!

But, I think this is a great example of Risk Identification. This is the process of discovering, defining and documenting risks before they become a problem in a project. The way I see it, the more creative you can be about it, the better. The project team should sit down and brainstorm on all of the possible risks to the project and get them documented. The document should detail the risk, the severity, impact and contingency plan (here's a sample Risk Management Worksheet from the Gantthead site). At regular intervals throughout the project the team should revisit these risks, add new ones and archive anything that is no longer a risk. I recommend reading "Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects" to find out more about risk management.

The goal of this is not to be worried like the Worried Walrus. Actually the opposite, the more creative thinking you can do in the beginning of the project to identify and then manage the potential risks, the less stress you will have and more sleep you will get at night.

So, I tried to have this same discussion with my 2 and 4 year old after reading the book to them and well...maybe I'll try again in a few more years.

Will the real Project Managers please stand up?

Ok, so I already have that Eminem song in my head and it will be in there for the rest of the day I'm sure. If the least I can do is get that song in your head, than I've accomplished something. But, what this is really about is having an open discussion about all things project management, without the nuisance of spam or other unwanted discussion. I started doing 'Social Media Evangelism' for LiquidPlanner about a month ago and admit I feel like I am constantly struggling with the balance between being an active and valued (atleast I hope, you are all the judge of that) member of the Project Managers on Twitter community and using any available opportunities to express how powerful and amazing the LiquidPlanner project management system is. I am sure this is the same struggle that many people have who are promoting themselves or their products in social media (it's not always about Twitter, there's blogs, LinkedIn, ning sites, Facebook, etc).

Of course, looks like some have already failed. When I was checking out Webworker daily for posts about project management tools, I saw some great posts and then plenty of junk comments. I'm not saying that people shouldn't promote their products, but tell me who you are, and give me some reasons why I might want to use your product. Don't pretend to be a project manager making a recommendation, identify yourself and be open about promoting your product. One of the reasons why I made the post about my relationship with LiquidPlanner was to always have it handy to link back to when I was promoting LiquidPlanner and wanted to identify myself.

I think someone who strikes this balance really well is Charles Seybold from LiquidPlanner (and am I using this opportunity to promote them again? It probably looks like it, but I happened to like what he was doing before I had this whole arrangement with them anyway). His avatar is great, it's got the LiquidPlanner logo in the background and his face in the foreground. He does the same thing in his contributions on Twitter, a mix of product promotion and other interesting stuff. I think more organizat

I've seen many blog posts and articles about how to successfully represent your brand or organization on Twitter and other social media. It's a tricky balance and I don't claim to have found the perfect solution. But at the very least, when you want to talk about your product on project management blogs or via contributions to #PMOT, let us know who you are and why your stuff is so good.

A Tale of Two....Web Based Project Management Tools

I think I've found my new purpose in life. Forget doing good in the world, raising healthy and happy children, making a positive impact in my community....I've become obsessed with project management tools. Granted I don't exactly have days, weeks and months of extra time to spend sampling all of them, and there are a LOT of them. But, I like that I've been able to work with a few and research many more.

It all started with Microsoft Project, as it probably does for most people. When I began to learn the ropes of project management I learned how to use MS Project to build my gantt chart, dependencies, durations, assign tasks, etc. It was ok for what I was trying to do with it, but I never really loved it. As time went on and I needed more from a project management tool, MS Project was lacking what I needed. I got frustrated when items would randomly gray out and become uneditable, tasks were held to single point durations, updating one task would shift everything else out of control, and worse yet, nobody else on my team could easily view or work with my project file because they didn't have project installed and weren't comfortable working with it anyway. I needed something simpler, something that cut out all the extra unnecessary stuff that I didn't need when I was managing web projects, and something that was highly collaborative.

In walked LiquidPlanner. I won't go into the details of how I started working with LiquidPlanner since I did that in a previous post, but needless to say it quickly met all of my project management needs and with each new feature release, it only gets better! In the process of getting my workplace to adopt LiquidPlanner, I did research on other project management tools (Daptiv, Fogbugz, WebResource, @task, Wrike, 5pmweb) and consistently found that LiquidPlanner was the most practical and feature rich, giving the most bang for the company's buck.

To the point of the post - my research comparing Basecamp to LiquidPlanner. I've been using LiquidPlanner for over a year now and Basecamp for about 6 months. So when I was asked to work on a detailed comparison of the two systems for LiquidPlanner, I had months of personal experience from my own use to go on. The company I've been working at for the last 6 months is pretty married to Basecamp because of the value it adds as a communication and collaboration tool, but I quickly found that it was lacking as a real project management system. Basecamp has no Gantt chart, and from what I hear they have no interest in adding one...ever. Their goal is to keep the tool 'simple', so anyone can use it. I respect that, but then when I need something that will really help me manage projects, Basecamp isn't my solution.

Basecamp will allow you to create a milestone, give it a date and assign it to a resource. But, there is no way to give the milestone a work duration, dependency or specific start date. The Basecamp milestones also will always exist in one big pile in the project, there is no easy way to group milestones together by phase. This might work for very simple projects, but for anything more complicated with many tasks and milestones, Basecamp will get very messy. Also, because there is no work duration attached to Basecamp milestones, there is absolutely no way to see how your project team us over or under-loaded. It is possible to see all of the milestones assigned to each resource, but no way to really tell how many hours of work each resource has and what deadlines are at risk because of overloaded resources.

LiquidPlanner, on the other hand, took all of the smart and useful features from MS Project (and more) and includes them in its task and scheduling system. You create a task, give it a low and high work estimate, give it a 'promise by' date, a 'don't start until' date, attach dependencies, notes and files with a rich text editing system, put it in a project folder/sub folder and task list, and (of course) assign it to someone. Once you hit "Go", LP will then do all the math for you, figuring out if your resource will be able complete this task given all other work already assigned to him/her and flagging the task if it is at risk of not being completed. Tasks can be easily prioritized for your resources with a slick drag and drop interface (hey Basecamp, ever heard of drag & drop?). LP has an excellent Gantt system, using your tasks that have been estimated in ranges (and it's ok to make single point estimates too, buy why would you want to?!) and plotting out probable finish dates for all tasks, project phases, and of course the entire project.

If you had a chance to read my previous post about why I fell in love with LiquidPlanner in the first place, you'll understand why I feel so strongly about making task estimates in ranges. I wasted hours with MS project trying to find a way to do this, with no luck. And of course Basecamp doesn't have this feature. So far I have not found any other project management tool with this important feature, except for LiquidPlanner.

But what about collaboration? Basecamp has a decent collaboration system, all email communication for a project can be passed through and stored on Basecamp. This can be handy I admit, and this is not something that LiquidPlanner offers at the moment. But, the problem with this is that if the email threads are not managed carefully it's very easy for important details to get lost in the clutter of communication. Basecamp does have a search feature but it's pretty basic and lacks filtering and sorting. LiquidPlanner has many different types of collaboration available. Files and links can be posted, detailed notes created (with a beautiful rich text editor), and Twitter-like commenting. All this is available for each task, on any project sub folder, or on the entire project. This will allow the team to more easily attach the important information to the project, rather than loose things in a flood of Basecamp email.

And there's even more great stuff happening. LiquidPlanner just released it's client portal system, making it even more valuable as a collaborating and showcase tool. I might need to do a part 2 of this comparison, but I think it's pretty clear from this post what tool is my favorite.

The story of my (never ending) love affair with LiquidPlanner

Don't worry, this post is appropriate for children...

It all began about a year and a half ago, when I got slammed by the boss for a web project that was about to enter the development phase and was being projected by the programmers to take about double the amount of time that it was originally estimated. I kept my head up and went back to look more closely at the original estimate and what we knew about scope at that time. Well, we knew very little, practically nothing. And, I remembered that the estimate was made months earlier and my client said to me "just give me a rough ballpark, we'll figure the rest out later". So, that's what I did. Well, I won't get into the details of how that drama continued, but what I will say is that the experience led me to start doing my own research on estimates and how to make them more accurate. I was stunned by the experience, by the idea that I was being held to a number that was calculated before any of us had any idea of what the project was really going to be. It was an estimate, a guess... a really rough guess.

My reading and research just backed up my position even more, that estimates made at the very beginning are subject to a high degree of error (anywhere from .25x lower to 4x higher). I got this and much more great information from a book by Steve McConnell, titled "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (2006)". I wrote about this idea, and the importance of presenting estimates in ranges on my company's blog. You can find the same post copied here, where I compare the uncertainty of software project tasks with the challenges of herding toddlers around in the morning.

From that point on I was on a crusade to make sure that all estimates my team produced were in ranges. It took a little while to get the programmers into that mode, after the Director of Technology read the same estimation book, he also helped me get the programmers to think of their estimates in terms of best case and worst case. Nobody wants to think that way at first, you always want to think that everything will go smoothly and nothing will be confusing or unclear, but the reality is that things are not always what they seem and we need to allow the extra room to figure things out sometimes.

So, by this point you're probably getting impatient and wondering where the juicy details about the love story with LiquidPlanner starts. It's coming very soon...I promise.

I don't remember the exact order of things, but I know I was pretty frustrated with Microsoft Project. I was a true believer in ranged estimates and I couldn't figure out any good way to get those worked into my MS project schedules. I experimented with new fields and was really unhappy with the lack of flexibility. I wanted to have a tool that showed my schedule in terms of best and worst case so that project stakeholders would have a range to work with and not expect a commitment to an exact date and exact number of hours of work (especially so early on).

Then, that one magical day, I was contacted by Liz Pearce from LiquidPlanner. She had read my blog post about including uncertainty in project estimates and wanted to tell me more about their web based project management tool. It was love at first sight, I was sold pretty quickly just based upon the fact that I could make my task estimates in ranges. Then, as I did more research I saw how LiquidPlanner was going to solve more of my problems. Our office was not using MS Project server so there was no central workspace for project plans, we all worked isolated on our own files and one project manager never knew when the other one needed her resource (yes, all project managers were women at that company at that time...go us!). By having the entire production team on Liquid Planner (for a much lower price than Project Server of course), we could easily see when a resource was overbooked. I also was thrilled to see a project management system that had such great collaboration tools, I was not going to have to rely on saving important emails to folders or logging the information in a shared file, we could all go to LiquidPlanner to see all important discussions and files related to our project. As I researched more about the company, I saw that Steve McConnell was on the advisory board. He is the author of the book I referenced above and many other great software project books that I have read since. One more reason I know LP was for me.

I've been using LiquidPlanner for about a year now, and have never thought of turning back. I recently moved to a new company and have brought LiquidPlanner with me. I've found that the scheduling system has proven an invaluable tool for my resource management challenges in my new workplace. And all this time, I've kept up the relationship with the good people at LiquidPlanner. I like them and believe in their mission so much, that I found myself bragging about their product on project management blogs and twitter posts, LinkedIn and other social media outlets.

After a few months of this, LiquidPlanner and I decided to make it official. I am now a part-time "Social Media Evangelist" (that's the best title I've heard so far, hope I live up to it!) for LiquidPlanner. So....if you see me out there listing off all the advantages to using LiquidPlanner to manage your projects, now you know why. I hope our relationship continues to thrive, and if you haven't checked them out....well, what are you waiting for?!

Making some buzz about blogging for PDUs!

It's still not official yet, but people are talking about it! See my interview on the "Stepping into Project Management" blog. Thanks Soma B!

It all started with a tweet...PDUs for blogs!

Well, it's not official yet. But, the discussion has begun, and what better place than the Project Managers on Twitter (#PMOT) group. This has become my new favorite go-to place for the latest ideas, thoughts, and link sharing of all things project management. The group is growing, tweets becoming more frequent. If you're not sure what this hashtag thing is all about, at least for the project management scene, I recommend checking out this post over at Raven's Brain: Project Management Hash Tags on Twitter.

So, anyway, it all started one day when Vincent Birlouez said this:


And then Kelvin Zhao replied with this:

And that's when I saw the tweet and got in on the conversation. I won't continue to paste the screenshots of how the discussion continued, but it seems that there is a good handful of social media savvy project managers who would like to earn PDUs for their project management related blogs.

And why not? We enjoy what we do, we enjoy reading and learning about what we do and how to do it better, and if we want to invest the time into maintaining a project management related blog, why not get some credit for it?! I have to admit, my own blog posts have slowed down in the last couple months, I've started to contribute to a non project management blog (gasp!), which requires me to post twice a month. I also try to post on my company's blog every so often, so my blogging energy gets diverted somewhat. But anyway, if it's on your mind and you enjoy participating in the discussion of all things project management, only makes sense to get some PDUs out of it.

The PMP handbook describes a PDU as this:

" The professional development units (PDUs) is the measuring unit used to quantify approved learning and professional service activities. Typically, one PDU is earned for every one hour spent in a planned, strcutured learning experience or activity. "

And there are 5 categories under which PDUs can be claimed:

1. Formal Academic Education
2. Professional Activities and Self-directed Learning
3. Courses offered by PMI Registered Education Providers/PMI Components
4. Courses offered by Other Education Providers
5. Volunteer Service to Professional or Community Organizations

So, after some research and twitter discussion, seems like the category that PM blogs fits into is category 2, Professional Activities and Self-directed Learning. Within this category are two areas that seem the most relevant:

2B - Author or coauthor of an article pertaining to project and/or program management published in a non-referreed journal (e.g., PM Network)

2-SDL
- Self directed learning activities are individualized learning events involving personally conducted research or study. Learning may include informal activites such as discussions or coaching sessions with colleagues, coworkers, clients or consultants. It may include articles, books, instructional manuals, videos...etc.

Thanks to some PMOT friends (@andystitt829, @GKonProjMgt, @pm4girls ) who are helping me connect to the right PMI people, the movement to get blog posts to formally qualify for PDUs has begun! The initial response from a Certification Standards Associate at PMI was that while there are no current plans to create a separate category for PM blogs,

"PMPs can report the research done for the blogs under Category 2SDL - Self Directed Learning. Under this category, 15 PDUs can be reported per cycle for any personally conducted self study or research regarding project management. Since blogs often required research on the subject matter, any research that would apply to this categories requirements could be reported."

I doubt that I could use this post to claim PDUs, but the idea has been planted. Looks like there's a way to get PDUs within the current system, and I would just love to see the word 'blog' added to the PMP handbook in that category 2 area. I mean, I'm sure blogs didn't even exist at the time the handbook was written, much less being used by so many of us PMs to share ideas about project management.

So, if/when PDUs for blogs becomes official...how should it work?

Should we submit our blog post to PMI for review and approval? Can we have a peer review system and earn the PDUs that way? Can we earn 1 PDU for each qualifying post, or cap at 15 each year the same way PMI does currently?

If we're going to nudge PMI into the social media world, than shouldn't we also be able to earn PDUs from participating in discussions on Project Management social networking sites like PPMNG, Gantthead, or LinkedIn? And of course, you must not forget Twitter. I have no idea how it would be quantified, but makes perfect sense to me that participating in the PMOT discussion should earn PDUs.

Stay tuned, I'm going to go onto the PMI website and register my 2SDL PDUs for my blog and the reading/research I've done in making my posts. We'll see how it goes, and meantime, it would be great to start the discussion of how we can move PMI into the web 2.o world.

More on project requirements - on Horn Group's Brass Tacks

The importance of gathering, defining and confirming project requirements, and the risks involved with making changes later in the project. Read more about it...here:

"If you don't have time to do it right, when do you have time to do it over?"