Symposium 2010 Gnaedinger Managing (And Leveraging) Information) (3)

PMI OVOC 10th Annual Project Management Symposium

October 12 – 14, 2010

Unleashing the Power ofProject Management

Template V3

Managing (and Leveraging) Information

Project Managing in the Age of InformationRob Gnaedinger – PMP, CITP

3 Key Learning Points

1. “The Way it Was”– Project Managers dealing specifically with information

products have used key concepts of PMI’s “The Standard for Portfolio Management”

2. Trends Affecting the Management of Information– Three key drivers behind the changing nature of

information management

3. Challenges for Project Managers of information– Three key points project managers will need to include in

many information-related project plans going forward

2Presented at PMI OVOC Project Management Symposium 2010

Your Presenter• Rob Gnaedinger – PMP, CITP

• FITT (Forum for International Trade Training) Director, International Trade Resources– Rob Gnaedinger is a Project Management Professional (PMP)

and Certified International Trade Professional (CITP), and is currently the Director of International Trade Resources for FITT—one of the world's leading providers of international trade training.

– Previous to his work with FITT, Rob was a Project Manager in the Telecommunications sector, managing the release of many global projects.


Definition of Information

• Most people define information products as either:1. Documentation (manuals that help users perform specific

tasks)2. Training (courseware that help user understand, and also

to perform specific tasks)

Information is any customer-consumed data that :• Fills a knowledge gap (whether known or unknown)• Viewed as a valuable asset, by both your company

and its customers


“The Way it Was”Section 1

5

How information has been managed

Information has been managed using key concepts of Portfolio Management:

• “A portfolio is a collection of projects or programs and other work that are grouped together to facilitate the effective management of that work to meet strategic business objectives.”

• “These components of a portfolio are quantifiable; that is, they can be measured, ranked and prioritized.”

The Standard for Portfolio Management, 2nd Edition, Project Management Institute, 2006


Portfolio of Information (example)


• Represent investments made or planned by organization• Aligned with organization’s strategic goals and objectives• Quantifiable – they can be measured, ranked, and prioritized

Portfolio Management process groups


The Standard for Portfolio Management, 2nd Edition, Project Management Institute, 2006

Benefits of Portfolio Management

• Optimization of resources• Assigning them to higher priority projects and minimizing the risk of

spending resources on activities with little benefit to the organization• Improve your ability to plan your organization’s schedule

• Everyone is working efficiently, and not jumping from project to project

• Reducing number of projects that have little value• Perhaps eliminating them entirely

• Enabling better alignment with corporate goals• Improving level of professional communication with colleagues in the rest

of the corporation


Barriers to Portfolio Management

• Portfolio management implies taking power away from some people and acquiring it for yourself and your organization

• Need support of executives• Getting the information necessary to make good decisions about the

projects in your portfolio• Changing priorities, with little communication (new projects). Again,

need support of executives• Ability to make tough decisions

• Can’t fit everything in with limited resources. Put scarce resource where they will make the most difference

How do we make the “tough decisions”?


Portfolio Management – prioritizing components

• 4.5 – Prioritize Components• “The purpose of this process is to rank components …according to

established criteria.” For example, a scoring model comprising weighted key criteria

• The Standard for Portfolio Management, 2nd Edition, Project Management Institute, 2006

• Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996

• Business strategy is a set of if-then statements that attempt to predict how changes you may make to your organization and people will result in improved financial performance and customer satisfaction for your corporation.

• Account for a company’s “intangible and intellectual assets…high-quality products and services, motivated and skilled employees, responsive and predictable internal processes, and satisfied and loyal customers”


Balanced Scorecard – four perspectives

1. Financial perspective• Are your actions contributing to the company’s bottom line?

2. Customer perspective• Are your actions contributing to satisfying customers?

3. Internal-business-process perspective• Do you have the best processes in place to contribute to Customer

Satisfaction (CSAT) and the bottom line? Are you creating entirely new processes to create better information products and deliver better service in the future?

4. Learning and growth perspective• Are your actions (with regard to people, systems, and organizational

procedures) creating long-term potential for improving and growing the business?


Balanced Scorecard – four perspectives

• Achieve a proper balance between outcome measures (customers and finances) and future measures (processes and abilities).

As information managers, how can we know we are contributing equally to both outcome measures and future measures?– By understanding customer needs, requirements and

expectations. How do we do that? By developing “User Scenarios”


Developing user scenarios

• Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Scott D. Anthony, “Six Keys to Creating New-Growth Businesses”, Harvard Management Update, January 2003

• “Instead of designing products and services that dictate consumers’ behaviour, let the tasks people are trying to get done inform your design.”

• Build a set of user profiles and user scenarios to understand the necessary information-using agendas

• User profile – describe key characteristics of members of your user community

• User scenarios – describe how the members use your information to get their jobs done


Developing user scenarios

• To develop information properly, you need to do the following:• Determine the most likely jobs and roles users will perform• Confirm any preconceptions with real data surveying, interviewing,

and visiting users in their actual locations• Based on the results of user investigations, develop user profiles that

accurately describe the users as real people • Armed with sound user profiles, create overall scenarios that support

the user’s agendas• Develop delivery solutions that will help users access the information

quickly and easily


Looking forward

• Does this model of managing information still work given current user profiles?

• The Standard for Portfolio Management is still an excellent resource for all Project/Portfolio Managers, but we more and more look at information products less as a collection of individual projects or programs, and more so as a single compendium of information. This does change some aspects of managing information.


Trends Affecting the Management of Information

Section 2

17

Trends affecting management of information

1. Amount of information being created/managed/accessed

– Increasing exponentially

2. Technological advancements for storing and accessing information

– Increasing exponentially

3. User expectations– Increasing exponentially (due to Trend #1 and Trend #2)


Trend #1 – Amount of Information

The sheer amount of information that we are being asked to manage is increasing.

Some examples:• “When the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in

2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy”

• “A study in 2004 suggested that in epidemiology alone it would take 21 hours of a workday just to stay current.”



• Google CEO Eric Schmidt – Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe (August 4, 2010)– “Every two days now we create as much information

as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003… That’s something like five exabytes of data”.

• An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes

– “The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.



• University of California at Berkeley. “How Much Information?” (http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/summary.html)

– A study that attempted to measure how much information is produced in the world each year

• The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every person on earth.

– Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total.


Trend #2 - Technology

Advancements in technology have allowed for the storage and retrieval of information:

• MIT researchers have discovered how to use nanotechnology to significantly shrink computer chips, making them cheaper and more powerful.

• The new technique will enable manufacturers to produce 25-nanometer (one millionth of a millimeter) chips, which is a huge leap considering that late last year, Intel Corp. made its first move from a 65nm process to 45nm.


Trend #2 - Technology

OpenCyc or Cyc (syke)• Cyc is an artificial intelligence project that attempts

to use ‘structured content’ on the web with the goal of enabling computers to perform human-like reasoning.


Examples of Technological Advancements in Information Management:

Intel Handheld Unit

Real-time content aggregation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgZLD0XCXw

Trend #3 – Customer Expectations

Based on Trend #1 and Trend #2, have customer expectations changed with respect to access to, and relevance of, information?– YES!

Customers are now expecting instantaneous ability to fill specific knowledge gaps (known or unknown), output in a way that is most convenient to them

Does this change the way we manage information?– YES!!


Today’s Information Demands

• Move from an ‘event’ to real time, on the job performance support.– Including advances in networking to find subject matter expertise

Use advances in web technology to provide context sensitive instruction–Network training into work environment


Change in information structure

• Yesterday • Today….Tomorrow


FITT’s Body of Knowledge in

Int’l Trade

FITT’s Body of Knowledge in

Int’l Trade

• Information is no longer viewed, and managed, as individual components of a portfolio. Rather, information is now viewed, and managed, as a compendium of existing, available information (“Body of Knowledge”)

Evolution in information flow


Leveraging the Body of Knowledge (and associated Learning Tools) to meet the diverse needs of customers and

business partners.

Old information flow New information flow

Example of new Information Structure

Library of Congress demo• Task: The Library of Congress wanted to create a

system that enabled teachers to create their own curriculum and learning materials, without the “constraints” of existing curricula

• Thousands of American school teachers incorporate Library of Congress media objects into their curricula


http://www.loc.gov/teachers




Knowledge Management

For the system to work, knowledge and content management are critical

As part of an overall project plan, we need a system to:• extract knowledge from the minds of experts• classify and contextualize that knowledge• update existing content (to ensure constant

relevance in the face of changing environment)• output information in an appropriate format


Knowledge Management – Reporting and Review

3.2.2.1 – Portfolio Reporting and Review– “The purpose of this process is to gather performance

indicators, provide reporting on them, and review the portfolio at an appropriate predetermined frequency, to ensure both alignment with the organizational strategy and effective resource utilization.”

• As part of overall project plan, we need to update existing performance indicators:

• # of information searches, # of information retrievals, knowledge gaps filled, tracking performance based on knowledge gaps filled


Challenges for Information ManagersSection 3

31

Challenges for Managers of Information

1. Pre-Assessments– How do you know what you don’t know?

2. Localization– How many languages are/is English?

3. Digital rights management– They create it, how do I protect it?


Pre-Assessments

• To accommodate the requirements for clients that require customized “on-demand” content, assessments must be created that allow an appropriate level of detail to be retrieved

• How do you know what you don’t know?• Focus on Psychometrics

– The theory and technique of educational measurement, including the measurement of knowledge and abilities

– Deals mostly with the construction and validation of measurement instruments


Pre-Assessments

In the development of a pre-assessment strategy, there are several key steps that should be included in your overall Project Plan:

1. Structure requirements in your item bank to accommodate creation of assessment

2. Assessment (“test”) specifications must be created3. Assembly of tests and their subsequent validation4. Reporting/feedback requirements of clients with

respect to the overall competence and relativity of the topics generated


Pre-Assessments Workflow

1. Items tagged with specific Competencies included in a pre-defined Competency Profile

2. Customer selects Competency Categories for training (and assessment)

3. Customer rates importance of Competencies selected from categories (Step 2)

4. Creation of “ideal” test blueprint5. Assembly of pre-assessment using automated test

assembly


Pre-Assessments Workflow (continued)

6. Test report, validation, and sample test account provided to client

7. Pre-assessment available to client’s candidate8. Based on report generated by pre-assessment,

specific information product generated


Localization

• How many languages is/are English?• When doing business internationally, not only must

your information products be in the appropriate language (translation), but they must also be adapted to account for differences in distinct markets (even countries that have the “same” language).

• Localization includes a comprehensive study of the target market/culture in order to adapt the product to local requirements.


Localization – language tags

ISO specifies both two- and three-letter codes to represent languages in standards ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2, respectively. Project plan must include…


Localization

• As part of project plan and user profile, contact your foreign partners to find out precisely what is needed.

• In 1999 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered a “Creole” translation of an 8-page brochure. They meant “Haitian Creole.” the text was erroneously translated into Jamaican-style patois.


Localization

• “Total garbage, of no use to anyone in the Caribbean,” said a Jamaican Embassy spokesman in Washington. All Jamaican government documents are printed in standard English. “We find this extremely offensive,” he added.

• Speak your readers’ language. Put yourself in their shoes and zero in on how your products and services can serve their needs. Be concrete. Be specific. Be accurate!


Protection of Intellectual Properties

Question: In an environment where are content is generated dynamically (specific to the user generating the content), in various electronic formats, how is information protected?– How can companies ensure their greatest asset and

intellectual property (information) is protected?


Digital Rights Management

• DRM is a software-based system that enables a publisher of documents to permit some users to open those files, while denying that privilege to other users.

• The system works by performing three processes: – Encryption of Documents – Identification of Users – Selective decryption of Documents based on

User/Document/Group association



One important note is that DRM systems require that both the Publisher and End User install the software. The End User plug-in is distributed to the User by the publisher by a variety of methods: – by linking to the plug-in installer from the publisher’s website– by email attachment– by sending physical software file

If the plug-in is not delivered directly to the User, in most cases the viewer will link Users to the install page



• DRM is not an implementation of copyright law, it is a system for the protection of digital works.– The rights or grants in these licenses will not look like the

rights we have under copyright law; they will look like the grants that can be expressed in a computer environment.

• It is still vitally important to express your copyright on all digital output. For example, when downloading a PMI standard from PMI.org:– Licensed to: Rob Gnaedinger PMI Member ID: 796443– This copy is a PMI Member benefit, not for distribution, sale

or reproduction.44Presented at PMI OVOC Project Management Symposium 2010

For more information…

• Thank you for your participation today!• For more information on the contents of this

presentation, please feel free to contact me as follows:Rob Gnaedinger – PMP, CITPFITT - The Professional Path to Global [email protected], ext. 110


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