Last Day at SAP

It is hard to believe that this day has come…but it has.   Monday, 15 June is my last day at SAP. 

I will join Mead Johnson — www.mjn.com — a pediatric nutrition company that was recently carved out of Bristol Myers Squibb.  One of my first areas of focus will be the portfolio of activities required to execute Mead Johnson’s transition into a fully-independent public company.

While my new role will not be SAP-centric, my new company uses SAP solutions as the backbone of its business technology strategy. That means I won’t be far from the SAP ecosystem, so I’m sure that I’ll run into some of you before too long.

I’ve kept Crossderry quiet while I completed my last transition activities at SAP.  However, I plan to start posting again shortly.

PM Quote of the Day — J. W. Schopf

For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum. 

Waterfall, Agile, now “Sim”?

Dan Woods in Forbes (here) highlights one of the emerging trends in development: user-interface simulation.  This takes agile development a step further, because…

[b]y creating a simulation of the user experience, instead of a full-working version, a team can avoid a large amount of work but still get a full test that can confirm requirements. Simulation accelerates the agile cycle by lowering the cost of each iteration and improving the quality of the feedback. At the end of several simulation iterations, designers have a rock-solid sense of what is needed.

Simulation also provides a better way to test the quality of business processes because it improves on the typical flow diagrams that only sophisticated users can understand.

iRise is the vendor that Woods mentions and that I’ve heard of (here).  They have a SAP-oriented solution (here), but I can’t vouch for it yet.

Also, because this piece is in Forbes, I’ll bet that smart c-level folks will soon be asking their PMOs about whether they are incorporating this approach into their methodologies.  Time to crack the “sim” books!

PM Quote of the Day — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything a human being wants can be divided into four components: love, adventure, power and fame. 

CIO job rotation and commitment to IT value

Great interview by Linda Tucci at searchCIO.com (here) with Richard R. “Rick” Roy, CIO at CUNA Mutual Group about his experiences as a line manager and how they’ve transformed his IT leadership approach.  This passage on a shared sense of urgency struck me:

I think the other thing in operations is the sense of urgency. In your customer service centers, the phone rings and you either answer it within your service standards or not; you either resolve the question within your service standards or not, or pass it on to another level of service.

IT operations has that flavor to it, but when you get over into the application development world, it typically doesn’t. They typically are working on projects that can span months, if not quarters, even years. Trying to drive that sense of urgency is probably the other big reminder for me as I have come back into the CIO seat.

Roy also hints at something PMOs need to do better: maintaining the same pace as the business.  A PMO needs processes that are nimble enough to keep up as the business responds to the market, competition, etc. by “adjusting and going perhaps in a different direction.”

PM Quote of the Day — Benjamin Franklin

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing. 

Update: Who exactly is this Benjamin “Frankling“?  Sorry for the typo…

More on stage gates and project reviews

Not stage gate experts...

Per an earlier post (here), it is important to ask how to ensure that stage gates — and project reviews for that matter — are relevant to the project at hand.  It’s pretty simple IMO.

1. Make sure that the stage gates match the project phase.  It is amazing how many gate reviews are conducted with a single set of questions.  There should be a general set of questions as well as a phase-specific set.  The questions in a gate review must match the expected deliverables for that gate.
2. Structure the gate to include sessions that focus on the key capabilities and their associated deliverables.  This approach ties the review more tightly to the expected benefits of the project/program.
3. Have subject matter experts involved during these capability-focused sessions.  We often pair these SMEs with another PM who leads the review.  They jointly review and prepare the questions.  Then the project reviewers ask most of the questions, while the SME jumps in on follow-ups or asks any technically-advanced questions.

PM Quote of the Day — Albert Einstein

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. 

The pleasures of post hoc reasoning

Niall Ferguson had an excellent short column on the financial crisis in this past Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine (here).  I liked the piece, especially where Ferguson punctures some of the conventional wisdom about regulation vs. de-regulation. 

I appreciated Ferguson’s reminder that we have to be very careful when drawing conclusions, especially when the topic is emotionally fraught.  These days of stress and strain seem to emphasize the cognitive biases most of us are prey to:

Human beings are as good at devising ex post facto explanations for big disasters as they are bad at anticipating those disasters. It is indeed impressive how rapidly the economists who failed to predict this crisis — or predicted the wrong crisis (a dollar crash) — have been able to produce such a satisfying story about its origins. 

PM Quote of the Day — Galileo Galilei

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.