How Do You Define Work Packages in MetaTeam?

What is a “work package”, and if it’s not from Amazon why should I care?

To answer that, let’s get technical.

According to the PMBOK, a project’s planned work is “contained within the lowest level WBS components, which are called work packages.”

Ok, but what is a WBS?  

A WBS is a work breakdown structure. It is a tree structure of decomposed deliverables.  Basically a WBS is a straightforward way of splitting up deliverables into manageable packages. Work packages.  

Here's a quick example. Say your deliverable is a fully setup copy of XMLSpy.  You can break that work down to four work packages:

1. The computer, 
2. The installer, 
3. The license, and 
4. The installed application. 

Obviously it’s a trivial example, but you get the idea.

Notice that I said package one is “the computer”, not “go ask IT for a computer”.

Why is that?  Well, the PMBOK goes on to say: “A work package… refers to work products or deliverables that are the result of effort and not to the effort itself.”

By now you’re probably asking yourself, what does this have to do with MetaTeam?

I’m glad you asked.  Read on for the low-down and a handy work packages cheat sheet!

http://xkcd.com/576/ + http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Work_View_of_the_Architecture.jpg

New Project Management Features

This week we are introducing a slate of new project management features.

Now you can define work more tightly, track progress more quickly, and make your project team into high performance rock stars.

This post breaks out the greatest hits, including: 

• A interactive Gantt chart
• Microsoft Project integration
• Completion criteria
• Improved work package definition

These features have been the most requested over the past 6 months.  Read on to see how MetaTeam integrates familiar project tools into a complete project information solution.  

Rolling Your Own Team Roles

Roles are a huge part of work life.  They come under more than a few headings, including: 

• Security roles (mainly for networks and key cards)
• Process roles (e.g. specified by ITIL, Scrum, Lean or Prince2)
• And especially, general business roles

Examples of common roles include:

• Scrum Master (from the Scrum methodology, of course)
• Business Analyst and Project Manager (common to most projects, as well as being professions)
• Change Manager (from ITIL)
• Black Belt (Six Sigma, as well as various martial arts)
• Lunch Coordinator (common to many offices, including ours)

Unfortunately, however, there is no real standard for defining roles.  And the many processes that specify roles typically leave the details up to the reader.  

Even methodologies like Scrum and Prince2 that rely heavily on very specific business roles don’t say much about how to implement and organize them.

Unlike other tools, MetaTeam makes a focus of using business roles as a scaffolding for more effective team organization. 

MetaTeam gives you a way to manage the information, assignments and interrelationships that help make roles valuable. And rather than adding overhead, we think MetaTeam does all that with a light touch.

How does MetaTeam pull this off?  And how can you?

Read on for screenshots and a PDF cheat sheet!

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PSF-scroll.png

Zen and the Art of Organizational Networks

We dug deep into the barrel and came up with another interesting presentation on teams to share with you.

This one takes a light-hearted look at the common problems of teams as networks.  And it offers some ideas for how to tackle them.

As you read, think a bit on the bifurcation between the mechanics of organizing teams vs. the more empathic soft skills.  Could be that while team life is organic, good team organization is not?

You can often see degrees affinity for one or the other in the tools team leaders prefer. Some like the social networks free for all side of things, other prefer highly structured tools like Microsoft Project or Salesforce.

I’m a big fan of both organizational structure and social collaboration. My own feeling is that the two work best together.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs, they keep each others negative tendencies in check. Or as a startup CEO once said to me, “Structure in collaboration is important. Unstructured collaboration is simply counterproductive”.

Take a look and let me know what you think. And if you like what you see, take a look at MetaTeam.

Also, if you like these slides, we put a page on altova.com where you can find links to all of the MetaTeam presentations we have made public.

A Relational PMP Study Aid, Part 2

The other week I posted a SQL schema and data to help PMP candidates prepare for the certification test. The data primarily follows the PMBOK, along with other well-known concepts, most of which are referred to in the PMBOK.  

The database is a great learning tool and may be useful for other purposes.  As well as for exam prep, we also use it to help catalog how MetaTeam follows standards.  For those who don't know it, Altova MetaTeam is our project management, collaborative decision-making and team performance management tool.

We had requests for an Microsoft Access version of the database.  Something that could be used without any setup.  That seemed like a good idea so I ginned one up.  

(For those who are impatient, the links to the goods are at the bottom of this post).

Access has a slightly different syntax from MySQL. The main changes were to the auto increment primary keys.

But after making those minor adjustments I ran into something I hadn’t expected: Access didn’t like the multi-insert statements.  For example:

insert into deliverable_or_asset 
(id, name, type, component_of_id )
values 
('project_charter', 'Project Charter', 'Project document', null),
('project_mgmt_plan', 'Project Management Plan', 'Plan', null),
('change_mgmt_plan', 'Change Management Plan', 'Plan', 'project_mgmt_plan'),
('communications_mgmt_plan', 'Communications Management Plan', 'Plan', 'project_mgmt_plan'),
…
 
That may sound like a simple problem, but changing hundreds of inserts totally didn’t appeal to me — obviously!  

On the one hand, that’s a lot of cutting and pasting.  And on the other, afterwards I would have two SQL files, not one.

But then I hit on a very simple solution.  Typically enough the solution involved Altova's DatabaseSpy!  

DatabaseSpy came to the rescue with its schema comparison and data merge capabilities—in 2 minutes I had my new database. 

Heres how it worked…

Same note as last time: the image is of the 3rd edition, but the database follows the 4th edition.  How'd that happen?

 

Boundaries and Team Productivity: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Occasionally we pull together a presentation for a meeting that takes on a life of its own.  This deck was one of those:

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors — The Importance of Team Boundaries (SlideShare)

Team boundaries are an important concept.  Studies have found that many, if not most, teams have fuzzy boundaries. The result is a lack of clarity about who is part of the effort.  That can have significant productivity effects – not good ones!

For most of us “team boundaries” is not a familiar phrase.  But consider Scrum, more familiar ground for many readers.

Scrum is very much centered on team roles and processes.  And one of those roles, the Scrum Master, maintains the team’s boundaries as a primary responsibility.

Scrum's concern with boundaries is primarily in preventing interference from outside the team.  But another consideration is this: if you don't know a person is on your team you can't ask them for information.  And searching for information is a very costly activity.

From these quick examples, I think we can agree that most of us have run across this topic under some or other headline. 

Take a look at the slides and let me know what you think!

(Note: SlideShare is a great tool, but it's PowerPoint conversion is imperfect. For the best viewing, download the slides and open in PowerPoint).

Using MetaTeam to Track and Manage Risks

If 50% of risk management is identification and awareness of risks, the first thing your team needs is a tool for risk management.  

And believe me, planning for risks and mitigations is important for projects both large and small.  Managing risk doesn't necessarily have to be a big formal process, but it does need to be done.

To paraphrase Robert Redford, when did Noah build the Ark?  Before the rain.

Capturing risk information using risk management software, rather then Excel, is a good idea. And MetaTeam’s Decisions module is an effective way to begin organizing risk responses.

Call us biased, but we think using MetaTeam for risk management nicely lowers the cost of getting started with a quality set of features.

Read on to see how MetaTeam's collaborative decision-making capability enables you to define risks and plan mitigation efforts…

Recent Reads

Let’s take a leisurely weekend ramble through a some recent reads. 

There is a lot of great stuff on Collaborative Decision Making, Project Management and Team Performance Management appearing all the time.  And of course a huge back catalog.  

Who can keep up with it?  Maybe we can help.  Here's some of what we're reading.

Tying Up Todo Lists and Decisions

Have you ever had one of those “why are we deciding this again?” moments? 

You find yourself in a heated discussion with a room full of smart people.  Suddenly you realize the “what” has come unmoored from the “why”? 

Well, anyway I certainly have.

Teams often wind up in one of these unfortunate  situations.  

They know:

• What to do, but can’t line up the decisions and make them, or
• They know what decisions needs to be made, but forget why

And there are times when we reach a decision about an Important Thing, but then lose track of what we have to do next to implement the decision. 

Depending on the context, an unimplemented decision can be as bad for teams as a decision that can't be made.

Luckily MetaTeam has a drop-dead simple way to help you address this problem by tying your tasks and decisions together.

Read on! 

Effective Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) requires teams to tie decisions to triggers and outcomes. 

A Relational PMP Study Aid

MetaTeam is project management software for high performance team collaboration.

We created MetaTeam to be simple and friendly enough for anyone.  And we have been pleased to see people with a wide range of skills use MetaTeam for all kinds of purposes.

But MetaTeam is also designed to support project teams following formal standards like the PMBOK (the Project Management Body of Knowledge), and to work well alongside advanced Critical Path scheduling tools like Microsoft Project or ProjectLibre.

Serious stuff indeed!

Because of this we encourage our team to be certified as Project Management Professionals (PMP).

As many of the readers of this blog know, preparing for the PMP exam is a non-trivial exercise in learning the details, processes and standard language of project management.

We would like to offer a free tool we use internally to help other PMP candidates in their studies.


NOTE: Part 2 of this post is now up. It offers a ready-to-go Access version of the database.

Update: a reader points out that the image is of the PMBOK 3rd Edition. My bad! The database includes information from the 4th Edition, not the 3rd. Thank you for pointing this out.