Papers, tutorials, training Click for more papers, tutorials, workshops, conferences Workshop: Predictable Projects - Delivering the Right Result at the Right Time On demand: in your country or in your company (send email to niels@malotaux.nl) Other examples of training: Evolutionary Project Management, Requirements & Design, Review & Inspection, Project Estimation & Planning, Test Process Planning, Portfolio Management, Reliable Embedded Systems. KVIV - Technologisch Instituut - 21 September - Antwerpen Presentation: Help! We have a QA Problem! APCOSE 2010 - Asia Pacific Systems Engineering Conference - 4-6 October - Keelung, Taiwan Presentation: How Systems Engineers can Save Time and Achieve More Keio University, Graduate School of System Design and Management - Yokohama, Japan 12 Oct: Lecture Predictable Projects - Delivering the Right Result at the Right Time 13-15 Oct: Fast course on: Predictable Projects - Delivering the Right Result at the Right Time UNICOM - 21 October - London (Uxbridge) Workshop: Predictable Projects ExpoQA'10 - 16-18 November - Madrid Spain Tutorial: How to Improve the Result of Reviews and Inspections Presentation: Help! We have a QA Problem! IncoseNL, 27 November - Netherlands Workshop: Predictable Projects The problem with general workshops is that you get a shower of new ideas and the next day you continue just like before. That is not very effective. In stead, we propose a more effective approach: Just In Time Training, combined with coaching. You learn the new methods at the very moment you need them. You start using them, and the coaching helps you to do it right the first time. This way you learn best. Just In Time Training® Requirements is hands-on training en coaching during the fuzzy front end of projects: how to generate efficiently and effectively the correct requirements (relevant - complete - consistent - verifiable) and how to do the right things at the right moment to the right extent for the moment. Keep focus and deliver your project faster. This approach easily saves a month of time in your project. Just In Time Training® Inspections is an introduction and hands-on document-/software Inspection (Gilb method) of a document in 1 or 2 days. We also help installing Inspection- and Review-processes in your organisation. For more information or in-house training: niels @ malotaux.nl

 

Other possible subjects:
Evolutionary Project Management, Requirements & Design, Review & Inspection, Project Estimation & Planning, Test Process Planning, Portfolio Management, Controlling Real Time in Embedded Systems.
If you are interested in in-house training, send an email to niels @ malotaux.nl. We can discuss an arrangement.

Project Success is not really difficult
Delivering the best possible project results in the shortest possible time

In today’s competitive environment, it’s not enough to run a project until it is ready. We must accomplish ever more in less time. This calls for constantly optimizing the way we run projects, beyond what we can learn from basic project management education and even beyond what we normally learn from actually running projects. Not all theory works as expected in practice and our intuition from time to time does fail to make us doing the right things. We cannot ignore that psychological factors play an important role both in individuals, in teams, between interdisciplinary teams and between cultures. Therefore we’ll have to recognize and understand these factors, before we can do something with (not about!) them. In this tutorial we will present methods that have been proven in practice to make projects deliver more successfully in significantly shorter time. These methods are the result of ongoing study of issues we encounter in projects, how we can overcome these issues in the real practice of projects, and how we can most efficiently introduce these methods.
The basic method we use is the time-honoured Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA- or Deming-) cycle, which, if applied properly (that’s the catch!) will help us very quickly to learn what the real requirements and solutions for the project-result are, what the best ways to execute the project are and even how we can optimize the methods used. By introducing “mutations” in the Act-phase of PDCA frequently, keeping what works better and shelving what works less, we force rapid evolution. Therefore we call these methods Evolutionary Project Management Methods (Evo). These methods are taught and coached in actual development projects with remarkable results: Projects start to routinely deliver Quality On Time: What the customer needs, when he needs it, without overrunning the time and money budgets, creating customer success.
Elements of these methods are solving the discipline problem, exploiting our intuition mechanism, continuously balancing priorities, keeping focus, coping with differences in disciplines and cultures, adopting a Zero-Defect attitude and preventing any stakeholder’s complaints. It integrates Planning, Requirements Management and Risk Management into Result Management.
Is it then only positive? No negative points to consider? That’s actually the power of Evo: Evo itself provides the very mechanism to cope with any negative issues: using PDCA, we recognize negative things and do something about them. So, the only remaining negative things are those things we don’t consider important enough to do something about for the moment. Does all this tuning not take a lot of extra time? What extra time? Evo projects are significant faster than other projects. Guaranteed.
At the end of this tutorial I will ask you “Can you afford not to use Evo?”. You will know the answer.

What you will learn:

• You will be more aware of psychological factors that make us not always do the right things. Understanding these factors is a first step in doing something about it.

• You will learn how to effectively deal with the risks of being late in your daily work, by using methods you can start using immediately, with immediate results: next week already you will work more relaxed, while producing more. Unbelievable? That’s what many people thought, until they did it.

• You will learn details crucial for success and pitfalls to avoid. Developers will learn how to organize their work, project managers how to get real control, and management how to quickly gauge the health of the project.

• You will have organized your own work of the coming week the Evo way and we will discuss how this compares with how you would have organized your work without Evo (full day tutorial only).

Duration

Full day, optionally: half day. In case of half day, the hands-on exercises will be skipped

Outline/agenda

• The goal of a project

• Quality On Time: what is quality, what is time?

• Issues, psychological factors, typical patterns, theory that doesn’t work as expected

• Evo elements: TaskCycle, DeliveryCycle, TimeLine, Evo Requirements management

• Evo practice: how do we apply the elements in real practice to make it work

• How to change a project into an Evo project

• The ETA (Evo Task Administrator) tool for planning the weekly TaskCycles

• Planning our next week’s work. Two volunteers will plan their work on screen (on my computer). Those who bring their laptop computer with MS-Access (2000 or later) can do their planning with the ETA tool on their own computer. Others plan on paper. During this session many small but important details of Evo planning will fall into place.

• Discussion

Targeted audience

• Higher management, responsible for the results of their organization.

• R&D managers, responsible for the results of their department.

• Project managers, responsible for the results of their project.

• Project team members, responsible for the results of their work.

• Quality management, responsible for optimizing the quality of the results.

• Testers and auditors, responsible for measuring the quality of the results.

Prerequisites

• Ascertain that you definitely have an ambition to deliver the best possible results in the shortest possible time. Evo is going for Gold. If you don’t mind, don’t attend.

• Study the booklet “Evolutionary Project Management Methods”.

• Study the booklet “How Quality is Assured by Evolutionary Methods”.

• Study the booklet “Controlling Project Risk by Design”.

• Study the booklet "TimeLine: Getting and Keeping Control voer your Project".

• List what absolutely has to be accomplished the coming weeks in your own work and why this is so important.

• List how many real working hours you have available the coming weeks for this work.

Audiovisual requirements

• LCD projector 1024 x 768 or better (I can bring my own)

• Whiteboard (if possible)

• I will bring the presentation material on a CD and on a USB stick as back-up

• I will bring my computer

• I will bring copies of my booklets

Testimonials

• Software Group Leader:
  I had many project management courses in my life. They all skipped issues like the personal and personnel level regarding discipline, focus, permanent application of the PDCA cycle, creating stakeholder value in short cycles, and consciously generating feed-back. All the problems Evo addresses are mentioned in books, which seek solutions in numerous kinds of formal control mechanisms which do not address the issues at the root of the problems. Evo does and succeeds. (Evo is now their preferred project management process).

• Software Project Manager:
  First we tried Agile (XP) development. Result: over budget and over time due to informal and direct communication between stakeholders (wish list was too long and unmanaged).
  Then we tried Waterfall with extensive initial documentation (CMM). Result: over budget and over time due to planning problems and changed requirements on delivery.
  Finally we tried Evo. Result: implementation in an unusual short period of time; stakeholder participation much better; end result closer to stakeholder expectations. We keep using Evo.

• Web-design Project Manager:
  We delivered successfully on time, thanks to Evo.

• Embedded Systems Project Manager:
  We should have used Evo much earlier in the project: it would have saved us even more time. The next project we’ll use Evo right from the start.

• Research Group Leader:
  Applying these methods to my own activities, I became 40% more productive instantly.

Niels Malotaux

Niels Malotaux is an independent Project Coach specializing in optimizing project performance. He has over 34 years experience in designing hardware and software systems, at Delft University, in the Dutch Army, at Philips Electronics and 20 years leading his own systems design company. Since 1998 he devotes his expertise to helping projects to deliver Quality On Time: delivering what the customer needs, when he needs it, to enable customer success. To this effect, Niels developed an approach for effectively teaching Evolutionary Project Management (Evo) Methods, Requirements Engineering, and Review and Inspection techniques. Since 2001, he taught and coached over 100 projects in 25+ organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, Ireland, India, Israel, Japan, Romania, South Africa and the US, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better and which work less well in practice. He is a frequent speaker at conferences.

Upon request we deliver in-company workshops and training. The language can be Dutch or English. All materials are in English.

Are you interested? We will keep you informed if you send mail.