Cornell Project Management Methdology - a good way to get going
I have been a great fan of quality and process platforms all along and over the past 25 years, I was involved in engineering / project management methodologies such as SSADM, SEI CMM, ISO & PMI. The disciplines grew in response to two distinct challenges faced by the IT community. One was managing the technology better and the other was managing the technology project better. Pioneers like Ed Yourdon empowered people to look at software development as a scientific process and took it from the realm of pure art to (at least some) science and the software process methodologies empowered people to see that projects can actually be planned and are not totally an ‘act of God’J. Even by mid-80s, too much software was already circling the globe and folks on the inside were already feeling the pain of bloated software and were looking for help and the situation now is of course significantly more acute.
COBIT, ITIL and 17799 (or NIST for federal organizations) took the tool-set to a new level in that it established best practices frameworks to guide projects as well as programs or development as well as operations. With the regulatory compliance reverberating through the corporate world, other frameworks such as COSO have now entered the mix and have performed a very valuable service by taking (mostly) IT projects mainstream within the organizations.
While each of these has performed a valuable role in providing the community with tools to optimize their project planning and execution process, the community’s acceptance of these tools has been painfully slow. I think most organizations and people have outgrown the stage of ‘we don’t need all these fancy tools’ and want to implement methodologies that will enable them to manage their IT better. However, putting them to actual use has been very difficult. These methodologies, in some ways, overlook the natural and basic process of how people absorb and utilize things. People would typically like to start with a small, low-impact project to get a feel and once sure of the implications and results, they would make the investments to apply the organization wide. Most of the tools are not suited for this approach. You have to invest a lot of time and effort to create the minimum platform before you can get going and the effort feels disproportionate to the experiment you want to conduct. Obviously, this is misleading - if people do implement it with rigor and commitment, they will see the benefits but a lot of organizations do not have the resources or patience to go thru this and end up dropping the initiative and sliding back to ‘wild west’ ways of doing things that some people did not want to give up to begin with.
I recently came across Cornell University’s Project Management Methodology (CPMM). Cornell IT created this custom version of project management to meet their specific internal needs and goals and acknowledge it to be based on PMI BoK. I see several merits in this version from a practical adoption perspective. First, it is a simplified implementation (though certainly not simplistic). Anyone who has done projects for a few years would be able to implement it easily. Secondly, the WBS model is at a level where you don’t have to cross-reference things at a granular level. These gives tremendous flexibility to choose the level of detail you wish to have in your implementation without getting bogged down. Thirdly, it uses very little tech-heavy language or notations and you can involve all the stakeholders in the project that gives a real productivity boost as all people talk from the same document. Most templates are in Word and Excel rather than .mpps and .vsds than only programmers know how to load and read. Then there are some powerful guiding principles like SMART, a visual map of the five-phase process, document templates and constant connection to business case and all stakeholders to ensure that the project is not ‘hijacked’ by a dominant stakeholder (U-know-who). And finally, it seems ready to use irrespective of the size of your project. That will be a big plus for organizations starting out on an exploratory journey.
If you have not seen it already, take a look (projectmanagement.cornell.edu). If you are seeking ways to introduce project discipline in your organization without being too expensive or disruptive, you might get some good ideas. If simplifying the project management process and unifying all your stakeholders are your goals, you might be in for some pleasant surprises how much CPMM will deliver.
Buck Kulkarni
COBIT, ITIL and 17799 (or NIST for federal organizations) took the tool-set to a new level in that it established best practices frameworks to guide projects as well as programs or development as well as operations. With the regulatory compliance reverberating through the corporate world, other frameworks such as COSO have now entered the mix and have performed a very valuable service by taking (mostly) IT projects mainstream within the organizations.
While each of these has performed a valuable role in providing the community with tools to optimize their project planning and execution process, the community’s acceptance of these tools has been painfully slow. I think most organizations and people have outgrown the stage of ‘we don’t need all these fancy tools’ and want to implement methodologies that will enable them to manage their IT better. However, putting them to actual use has been very difficult. These methodologies, in some ways, overlook the natural and basic process of how people absorb and utilize things. People would typically like to start with a small, low-impact project to get a feel and once sure of the implications and results, they would make the investments to apply the organization wide. Most of the tools are not suited for this approach. You have to invest a lot of time and effort to create the minimum platform before you can get going and the effort feels disproportionate to the experiment you want to conduct. Obviously, this is misleading - if people do implement it with rigor and commitment, they will see the benefits but a lot of organizations do not have the resources or patience to go thru this and end up dropping the initiative and sliding back to ‘wild west’ ways of doing things that some people did not want to give up to begin with.
I recently came across Cornell University’s Project Management Methodology (CPMM). Cornell IT created this custom version of project management to meet their specific internal needs and goals and acknowledge it to be based on PMI BoK. I see several merits in this version from a practical adoption perspective. First, it is a simplified implementation (though certainly not simplistic). Anyone who has done projects for a few years would be able to implement it easily. Secondly, the WBS model is at a level where you don’t have to cross-reference things at a granular level. These gives tremendous flexibility to choose the level of detail you wish to have in your implementation without getting bogged down. Thirdly, it uses very little tech-heavy language or notations and you can involve all the stakeholders in the project that gives a real productivity boost as all people talk from the same document. Most templates are in Word and Excel rather than .mpps and .vsds than only programmers know how to load and read. Then there are some powerful guiding principles like SMART, a visual map of the five-phase process, document templates and constant connection to business case and all stakeholders to ensure that the project is not ‘hijacked’ by a dominant stakeholder (U-know-who). And finally, it seems ready to use irrespective of the size of your project. That will be a big plus for organizations starting out on an exploratory journey.
If you have not seen it already, take a look (projectmanagement.cornell.edu). If you are seeking ways to introduce project discipline in your organization without being too expensive or disruptive, you might get some good ideas. If simplifying the project management process and unifying all your stakeholders are your goals, you might be in for some pleasant surprises how much CPMM will deliver.
Buck Kulkarni
posted by Buck Kulkarni at 2:34 PM
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