1. Familiar and intuitive.

The Ribbon makes finding and using your favorite tools simpler with new graphical menus and a familiar experience to help you easily create and manage projects. Tooltips and contextual guidance provide information and shortcuts so you can accomplish more in less time. In the new Microsoft® Office Backstage™ view, simply save, share, print, or publish your projects from one location.

2. Save time and effort.

Save time and effort with familiar and essential functions like text wrapping, filtering, auto-complete, scroll and zoom, and more. Insert new columns on the fly—data types are readily identified so that you can quickly and effectively organize and analyze details. Quickly share schedule details through enhanced copy-and-paste, and retain key formatting between Project 2010 and other Microsoft Office applications.

3. Flexible and powerful.

User-controlled scheduling puts you in control and brings together the flexibility and ease of use of a tool like Microsoft Excel® 2010 and the power of the Project 2010 scheduling engine. Create project schedules at the level of detail that’s right for your project. Work with summary data initially or shift to a more detailed approach when it’s convenient. Place notes as reminders of where additional schedule information is needed, or simply add information as it becomes available.

4. Easier to see and share.

With a completely new and visually enhanced timeline view, you’ll have a clearer view of tasks, milestones, and phases. Newly expanded color palettes and text effects help you make every timeline and plan look their best—and help you to swiftly see and share important dates and deliverables.

5. At-a-glance.

(Team Planner – Pro only)

See the right mix of people and resources: simply drag tasks to effectively plan work for your entire team and project. The new Team Planner view in Project Professional 2010 shows resources and work over time, to help you spot problems and resolve issues. New in Project 2010, the Task Inspector offers additional analysis and intuitive guidance to resolve scheduling conflicts derived from a task’s attributes and assigned resources, which you can choose to act upon or not.

6. Control and deliver.

Quickly compare budget versus actual versus forecasted values to measure an initiative’s progress with the flexibility of setting multiple baselines. Create high-level time-phased budgets with user-defined categories for costs and labor. Validate budgets against bottom-up estimates built by using labor, material, and cost resources. Control project costs by comparing budgets to completed tasks and forecasted totals. Use built-in earned-value metrics for predictive analysis and integrated performance management.

7. Evaluate possibilities.

(Inactive Tasks – Pro only)

Often you’ll need to evaluate scenarios and consider options when planning new projects or monitoring ongoing work. Using inactive tasks, new in Project Professional 2010, you can easily experiment with your project plan and perform what-if analysis. A simple toggle removes or inserts one or more tasks, along with their effect on the project schedule. Project 2010 also offers more built-in tools to help support what-if analysis and scenario comparison, including multiple-level undo and change highlighting.

8. Collaborate with others.

(Task Status Updates – Pro only)

Connect your teams by synchronizing with Microsoft SharePoint® Foundation 2010. Using Project Professional 2010, you can synchronize SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Project Professional 2010 project task status updates for you and your team members. You can also save your project files to SharePoint Foundation 2010 team sites to communicate plans and collaborate on progress.

9. Grow capabilities.

(Connect to Project Server 2010 – Pro only)

Realize the power of unified project and portfolio management by combining Project Professional 2010 with Microsoft Project Server 2010. Together, Project Professional 2010 and Project Server 2010 create the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, and deliver end-to-end capabilities to help organizations prioritize investments and optimize resources, gain control of all types of work, and visualize performance by using powerful dashboards.

10. Enhance performance.

Use the 64-bit options of Project 2010 to enhance performance and support very large projects and programs. Project Standard 2010 and Project Professional 2010 are offered in 32-bit and 64-bit options to support a diverse range of project types and sizes. 64-bit options take advantage of the expanded memory and optimized capabilities of the latest processors and of the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Vista. 64-bit Project Professional 2010 also offers enhanced performance and handles extremely large project files with ease when connected to Project Server 2010.

Clothing retailer Arcadia Group has signed a deal with CA for an on-demand software service to support its IT and e-commerce projects.

The group, which owns the Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Burton, Topman, Wallis, Evans, Dorothy Perkins and Outfit brands, is using the CA Clarity Project & Portfolio Manager On-Demand service.

The service provides users with access to project and portfolio management systems, with the aim of delivering projects faster and in a consistent and predictable way.

In many IT organizations, there is one true “religion” that defines how projects are undertaken and managed. The methodology of the day is faithfully adhered to and nonbelievers are pressured to convert. A given IT religion can last a long time, then suddenly be abandoned when people lose faith in its efficacy or its primary evangelist leaves.

When this happens, all the progress made under the prior method is often deemed of little or no value, and reinvention becomes the order of the day.

These abrupt shifts in IT approaches aren’t new. They’ve been going on for more than 40 years and can occur in any number of subsections in the software development life cycle and IT practices, such as enterprise architecture, IT service management, and project and portfolio management. And, of course, software development is particularly prone to it.

The numerous software development methodologies a company uses represent one community’s articulation of processes and practices. Over time, that process can become inward looking and bloated, with overlapping and inconsistent practices from potentially competing methodologies. As the benefits decline, IT organizations change methodologies, which is one of the most fruitful sources of waste and expense: Each time an organization embraces a new methodology, it triggers a large change management exercise. Within IT, this change typically involves a three-to-five year process that results in the following direct costs for a 1,000-person IT organization:

>> Consulting, training, and mentoring costs to go from novice to competent, and even expert, using Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus’ skill acquisition model. For 1,000 people, this can cost $1 million to $2 million.

>> Knowledge management, to avoid the risk of relying on tacit knowledge in the heads of coaches and consultants. If performed, the capture of standard work, or “our way of working,” results in more than $1 million in costs related to process-related software.

>> Changes in approach that can also trigger the need for new process management tools. Cost can range from free to $1 million or more.

>> Costs related to putting a new software delivery infrastructure in place. Hitting the reset button can cost upward of $5 million.

One hidden cost that frequently exceeds all the other items put together is lost productivity due to employees resisting change because they prefer or are just comfortable with the previous way of doing things. McKinsey’s study “Organizing For Successful Change Management,” on strategic change initiatives, such as TQM, lean, Six Sigma, and business process reengineering, finds that about 70% of the investments in these initiatives fail to achieve the expected outcomes.

Gartner estimates that worldwide IT spending last year was $1.6 trillion, with IT services at $816 billion as the largest component of that figure. Typically, 3% to 10% of the IT services budget allocations can be associated with process improvement initiatives. So we can estimate that $17 billion in spending is doomed to not deliver the intended results (70% of $24.5 billion). That figure doesn’t include opportunity costs associated with failed process improvement and costs associated with lost productivity during the change.

Additionally, some portion of total worldwide IT spending last year was only implicitly allocated to process improvement, which could be thought of as “just-in-time” process improvement during a project. So if we believe that 14% of software engineering efforts are outright failures (see “Dr. Dobbs 2010 IT Project Success Rates,” at information week.com/1298/ddj/success), that’s another uncounted cost.

Software development methodologies are “more akin to fads and fashion than engineering discipline,” according to the Software Engineering Methods and Theory Initiative. And it’s safe to conclude that the hidden and indirect costs associated with these methodologies represent a very large number indeed–one that’s not declining at a discernible pace.

Isolation Vs. Integration

When searching for a solution to the problem of switching among software development methodologies, it’s instructive to look at the history of software development approaches. Software methodologies have endured a high degree of branching and differentiation. The question with all of this history and the explosion of “named” methods that naturally arises is, “Are they really that different?” In fact, there are just three main lineages of modern method development–lean, agile, and unified process.

Over time, each of these branches resulted in various branded methods based on the corporate experiences out of which they emerged. Lean approaches trace their roots back to manufacturing, specifically to the study of the Toyota production and product development system. The unified process is derived primarily from risk-averse environments, such as finance, defense, and aerospace. Agile emerged from a business climate where tight time-to-market expectations and flexible requirements are the norm.

Each branch started from a much smaller set of experiences. Unfortunately, the constant differentiation has resulted in what we have today: a jargon-filled confusion of siloed tribes made up of uncollaborative zealots.

While it’s reasonable to assume that no two software methodologies are exactly the same, it’s equally reasonable that no two are entirely different. One naturally might conclude that common ground does exist. Is there some way to harvest past experience without reinventing the wheel?

A good place to start is by taking one or more practices from each of the three lineages that reasonably deliver value within the software delivery constraints you face. Such an approach should include specialized contributions and focus on harvesting pragmatic experience, not reinventing your process.

A Pragmatic Approach

One approach, which I call SDLC 3.0, provides a pragmatic, experience-based approach for integrating the fragmented methodology landscape by using practices that are methodology- agnostic. It focuses on yielding a useful, context-specific set of standard work advice for real product development.

It also integrates the software development part of IT with the broader enterprise and functions such as enterprise architecture, IT service management, and project and portfolio management. Using lean as the overarching set of principles, SDLC 3.0 starts with the customer and ends with the accrual of value within IT operations. This focus makes sure that small groups don’t try to optimize only their piece of the process, based only on what they know about their roles. Rather, a coherent big-picture view enables traditionally siloed communities to constructively participate rather than get bogged down in in-fighting.

Some will argue that organizational culture is a likely reason for the failure of a new development methodology. This is has been studied most recently in surveys on agile adoption. But there’s not just one single corporate culture. Each practice and pattern of success grew out of various enclaves of corporate experience over the past 40 years, such as a corporate delivery environment, or work within communities or groups that tend to aggregate fragmented experience into bodies of knowledge. Each organization manifests unique environments and cultures, and “the way we do things around here” becomes embedded with the IT corporate subcultures. In other words, these approaches become “adopted” and eventually become the standards. How then to choose new practices that suit the organization?

The figure on p. 35 shows a cultural analysis of the major practices in today’s methodologies that have been harvested from the three primary groups of methodologies. The agile, lean, and unified approaches are placed on a grid that scales vertically from stability to flexibility and horizontally from an internal focus to an external focus. Each quadrant is identified by the kind of organization that its blend of values create, its orientation, and the theory of its effectiveness.

Start by examining what kind of IT organization you have, what you value, and what needs the company has. By considering that against the widely accepted universe of practices, it’s possible to choose the practices from the diagram that fit your needs and incrementally change the organization in an intelligent manner. This avoids culture clashes that result from imposing new methodologies.

Think about where your company falls in the four culture quadrants in the diagram. These include:

>> Clan/Family Culture: Here you have a culture that emphasizes collaboration. Your leaders tend to be facilitators and team builders, who value commitment and communication. They think effectiveness is driven by developing people and spurring participation.

>> Adhocracy Culture: Your company emphasizes creativity and has leaders who are entrepreneurial innovators, who value transformation and agility, and have a high level of risk tolerance. They think that innovation and vision are the best paths to effectiveness.

>> Market Culture: Here the orientation is competition. Your leaders are hard-driving competitors, who emphasize goal achievement, market share, and profitability. Customer focus and aggressive competition lead to effectiveness.

>> Hierarchy/Bureaucracy Culture: Your company tends to focus on control, with leaders who coordinate, monitor, and organize. Efficiency, timeliness, consistency, and risk aversion are the watchwords. Control and efficiency are seen as the best path to effectiveness.

In reality, improving an IT organization’s software delivery capability isn’t about building the perfect “method mousetrap.” There isn’t one perfect methodology. It has more to do with successfully changing “the way things are done around here.” Properly done, this avoids the branding, competitive differentiation, cultural division, and iterative wars for a particular development approach–with all their attendant costs. Instead, it focuses on what has and always will be the overriding truth: that software development is about people and what their organizations value.

Mark Kennaley is president and principal consultant at Fourth Medium Consulting, a Canadian IT management consultancy. His book, “SDLC 3.0: Beyond A Tacit Understanding Of Agile,” won the Dr. Dobb’s 2010 Jolt Award. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.

By Rob Preston InformationWeek
April 23, 2011 00:00 AM

Karen Garcia’s experience speaks to what’s going well and not so well with IT project and portfolio management. A former programmer and program manager, Garcia recently was promoted to the new role of “chief of staff” for BMC Software’s IT organization, where she’s responsible for applying more operational discipline. All good. But because Garcia’s job requires her to bring more rigor to budgeting, purchasing, vendor oversight, timekeeping, asset management, compliance, and other areas, she faced a lot of early resistance from her IT peers, relates Chris Murphy in our annual salary survey magazine cover story. “If you think you’re going to get something knocked out in a very short time, you’re going to get frustrated,” Garcia says. “I got frustrated.”

Despite the dot-com bust and the Great Recession of 2008-2009, many IT organizations–not just BMC’s–still have a long way to go when it comes to functioning like a well-oiled machine. On a positive note, 70 percent of the 684 business technology pros who responded to our recent survey on IT project management said their organizations have adopted formal PM methodologies. Among those who have, their top reasons are to prioritize projects across the enterprise (64 percent), standardize their approach to projects (55 percent), and provide project visibility to the leadership team (34 percent). Among the less common reasons are ones related to project success: track and report on project finances (22 percent), manage risk (22 percent), and track and report on customer satisfaction (2 percent). Those need to be higher priorities.

In his in-depth Enterprise Project Management report, InformationWeek Analytics contributor Jonathan Feldman, a leathery veteran who’s now director of IT services for a city in North Carolina, noted that IT organizations tend to have a firm grip on large, expensive projects (runaway projects like the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid notwithstanding). Where they often stumble is in managing their myriad smaller projects, which can end up grabbing much of the IT budget and resources.

Hewlett-Packard, which cut about a billion dollars a year from its annual IT spending thanks to an overhaul of infrastructure and operations, requires its business unit leaders to rank their IT projects–just as 64 percent of the respondents to our survey do. In addition, at the behest of executive VP and CIO Randy Mott, HP’s business unit leaders and their controllers must sign off on a cost-benefit analysis of every single IT project, so they’re not only assigning hard cost numbers to every project, but they’re also estimating the “revenue of IT” to be generated from them. As a result, fewer IT projects make the cut, but HP is assigning more people to each project and requiring faster delivery amid intensifying time-to-market pressures.

Project management and IT discipline isn’t just a budgetary and compliance exercise. It extends to contract negotiation and legal due diligence. Lawyer and consultant Kenneth Richard, in a recent guest column for InformationWeek, related his experiences representing mostly enterprise software vendors in scores of lawsuits brought by customers who simply didn’t pay enough attention to the terms of the contracts they were signing. “Customers that don’t have the foresight to protect themselves invariably want to talk about everything but the contract,” he wrote. (And their lawsuits generally go nowhere.)

Whether your organization needs a Leo McGarry-like chief of staff to hold everything together or just better management processes that start at the CIO and are reinforced on down, consistency is key. But organizational and process change takes time, so hang in there.