Project Portfolio Management in action: US temporarily halts 45 IT projects (budgeted @$200 million)

As per Demian Entrekin's excellent blog on http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/ppmtoday , the US National CIO Vivek Kundra has embarked on an impressive and BIG IT project portfolio management and reporting initiative ( accessible via http://www.usaspending.gov/ ).

Today (Friday July 17th), a formal announcement on the related blog http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/blog confirms that 45 major federal IT projects are actually being temporarily halted. So the major USA federal PPM initiative is not merely a reporting tool, it is actually being used for taking meaningful and consistent action when project overruns are detected:

"Friday, July 17, 2009

Evidence-based decisionsVivek Kundra, Federal CIO

Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), under the leadership of Secretary Shinseki and VA CIO Roger Baker, announced that it will temporarily halt 45 IT projects which are either behind schedule or over budget and work to determine whether these programs should be continued. We’re not talking about a trivial sum here—the Fiscal Year 2009 combined budget for the 45 projects is approximately $200 million. The worst offender of the bunch was 110% over budget and 17 months behind schedule.

We were able to catch these contracts, in part, thanks to our new tool, the "IT Dashboard” which helped shed light on the performance of projects across the federal government.

During the next few weeks, the VA will audit these 45 projects to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on schedule.

If they can’t be fixed, the projects will be canceled.If you are just hearing about the IT Dashboard for the first time, it allows you to see which IT projects are working and on-schedule (and which are not), offer alternative approaches, and provide direct feedback to the chief information officers at federal agencies.

Given the size and complexity of the federal IT portfolio, the challenges we face are substantial and persistent. The dashboard is not a substitute for good management. Its value comes from leaders who use the information to make tough, evidence-based decisions on the future of IT investments.

The VA’s announcement is part of a broader effort by the Administration to make the federal government more transparent and to boost accountability and drive better performance. From IT accountability to personnel and contracting reforms, the administration is committed to providing better value, efficiency, and effectiveness for taxpayers’ dollars."

Hat tip: http://twitter.com/nytimesbits/statuses/2690095160

Google's Gmail Tasks module graduates from Labs

A nice Google Tasks & Calendar tip in the YouTube demo, courtesy of Official Gmail Blog: Tasks graduates from Gmail Labs , namely:

When entering a new Google Task, simply prepend
MM/DD -
and the date will be auto-entered. And changing the date in Google Calendar will update the corresponding original task record as well :)



IMHO, regardless of whether Tasks has "graduated" from Gmail Labs, it's reassuring to see the well-deserved attention that Gmail tasks is getting within Google :)

(PS - Related technosurfer posts accessible via http://technosurfer.net/search/label/Tasks )

Secure Enterprise Twitter-like microblogging from Socialtext - Webware.com 14-July-2009

I recently discussed whether project managers should use twitter.

With the new Socialtext corporate appliance that runs a Twitter-like app behind the firewall, business use of Twitter (or a similar type of "microblogging" capability) now appears to be a simpler issue. This solution seems especially relevant for large organizations wishing to enhance their internal communication, messaging and overall knowledge management. Nice to see that the issue of backup / DRP is apparently being addressed as well:

Socialtext offers enterprise microblogging in a box | Web Crawler - CNET News: "As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.

Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs and add new features...."

35 Green IT Resources - IT Management

35 Green IT Resources - IT Management: "A number of IT vendors — from PC providers to software manufacturers — are now offering products and services to support environmentally sustainable business operations for companies of all sizes. Below is a roundup of the 35 most accessible, effective and promising green IT resources now available..."

This nice list from Lea Hartog of ITManagement.com provides helpful links related to Green IT information related to:

• Consulting Services (eco-consultants)
• Green PCs
• Eco-Loving Laptops
• Addtional Hardware (including info re: the HP Photosmart D5463 Printer and the SPARKLE Calibre P960 Green Power graphics card )
• Sustainable Software Solutions (such as GreenPrint )
• Recycling and Reuse

Hat tip: http://en.itsmportal.net/en/node/16197

Data Center Overload, Tom Vanderbilt, NYTimes 8-Jun-2009

Photograph Attribution: Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times

Known for its bean and spearmint fields, Quincy, Wash., is also home to rows of servers in a 500,000-square-foot data center that Microsoft built in 2006

For those of us already keenly aware of the various business-related and environment-related benefits of reducing datacenter and related power consumption, Tom Vanderbilt's article is a must-read. Published in the recent New York Times Sunday magazine's Architecture Issue, Vanderbilt presents a refreshing and enlightening review of why we should continue to care deeply about these issues, and follow through with practical energy-reducing measures in managing technology and other infrastructure. This is one of the overall best articles on this topic seen by technosurfer in quite some time :)

The Architecture Issue - Data Center Overload - NYTimes.com: "...Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network. The stack of letters becomes the e-mail database on the computer, which gives way to Hotmail or Gmail. The clipping sent to a friend becomes the attached PDF file, which becomes a set of shared bookmarks, hosted offsite. The photos in a box are replaced by JPEGs on a hard drive, then a hosted sharing service like Snapfish. The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?"

“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users. To appreciate the scope of this phenomenon, and its crushing demands on storage capacity, let me sketch just the iceberg’s tip of one average individual digital presence: my own. I have photos on Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, so they reside in a Yahoo data center, probably the one in Wenatchee, Wash.); the Wikipedia entry about me dwells on a database in Tampa, Fla.; the video on YouTube of a talk I delivered at Google’s headquarters might dwell in any one of Google’s data centers, from The Dalles in Oregon to Lenoir, N.C.; my LinkedIn profile most likely sits in an Equinix-run data center in Elk Grove Village, Ill.; and my blog lives at Modwest’s headquarters in Missoula, Mont. If one of these sites happened to be down, I might have Twittered a complaint, my tweet paying a virtual visit to (most likely) NTT America’s data center in Sterling, Va. And in each of these cases, there would be at least one mirror data center somewhere else — the built-environment equivalent of an external hard drive, backing things up.

Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud. Trying to chart the cloud’s geography can be daunting, a task that is further complicated by security concerns. “It’s like ‘Fight Club,’ ” says Rich Miller, whose Web site, Data Center Knowledge, tracks the industry. “The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers.”

Yet as data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society — even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) — the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources. All of which is bringing a new level of attention, and challenges, to a once rather hidden phenomenon. Call it the architecture of search: the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year — often built on, say, a former bean field — that lie behind your Internet queries.

[etc...] As James Hamilton of Amazon Web Services observed recently at a Google-hosted data-center-efficiency summit, there is no Moore’s Law for power — while servers become progressively more powerful (and cheaper to deploy) and software boosts server productivity, the cost of energy (as well as water, needed for cooling) stays constant or rises. Uptime’s Brill notes that while it once took 30 to 50 years for electricity costs to match the cost of the server itself, the electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas.

The huge power draws have spurred innovation in the form factor of the data center itself. For its Chicago center, Microsoft is outfitting half the building with shipping containers packed with servers. “Imagine a data center that’s about 30 megawatts, with standard industry average density numbers you can probably fit 25,000 to 30,000 servers in a facility like that,” says Microsoft’s Chrapaty. “You can do 10 times that in a container-based facility, because the containers offer power density numbers that are very hard to realize in a standard rack-mount environment.”

The containers — which are pre-equipped with racks of servers and thus are essentially what is known in the trade as plug-and-play — are shipped by truck direct from the original equipment manufacturer and attached to a central spine. “You can literally walk into that building on the first floor and you’d be hard pressed to tell that building apart from a truck-logistics depot,” says Manos, who has since left Microsoft to join Digital Realty Trust. “Once the containers get on site, we plug in power, water, network connectivity, and the boxes inside wake up, figure out which property group they belong to and start imaging themselves. There’s very little need for people.”

“Our perspective long term is: It’s not a building, it’s a piece of equipment,” says Daniel Costello, Microsoft’s director of data-center research, “and the enclosure is not there to protect human occupancy; it’s there to protect the equipment.”

From here, it is easy to imagine gradually doing away with the building itself, and its cooling requirements, which is, in part, what Microsoft is doing next, with its Gen 4 data center in Dublin. One section of the facility consists of a series of containers, essentially parked and stacked amid other modular equipment — with no roof or walls. It will use outside air for cooling. On our drive to Tukwila, Manos gestured to an electrical substation, a collection of transformers grouped behind a chain-link fence. “We’re at the beginning of the information utility,” he said. “The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow.”


Tom Vanderbilt is the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).”

The doctor in your pocket & Health in the palm of your hand

Neil Seeman is the director and primary investigator of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell, based at Massey College at the University of Toronto. He has recently authored two excellent articles in the National Post, which IMHO suggest some very important uses of mobile technology in relatively simple ways, than can achieve quite meaningful healthcare improvements around the world:

• Health in the palm of your hand , which is a follow-up to his earlier
• The doctor in your pocket

Just 1 excellent examples among the many mentioned:

"Last summer, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service started a protocol to transmit electrocardiogram readings of their patients to cardiologists' mobile phones. The approach--Winnipeg EMS is part of the Strategic Reperfusion Early After Myocardial Infarction, or "STREAM" study -- allows doctors to work closely with paramedics through life-saving decisions as patients are transported by ambulance. It is reportedly lowering mortality rates and speeding up treatment times."

You can read more great ideas from Seeman and his colleagues (and share your own!) on the new myhealthinnovation.com website, designed for those who wish to "share, vote, and say thanks for low-cost, low-tech health ideas".

Safire: Who is a 'Straw Man'? vs. Brooks: 'Pilot System'

William Safire has penned an excellent piece regarding the phrase "Straw Man", in his New York Times "On Language" column, On Language - Who is a 'Straw Man'? - NYTimes.com:

"Accepting the Democratic nomination in a huge football stadium way back in the presidential campaign of ’08, Senator Barack Obama displayed his oratorical talent by using one of his favorite tried-and-true devices in argument: “Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country!”

Who was telling him that? To be sure, his opponents were claiming that a Republican administration would be stronger on defense, but nobody was telling him or the voters that Democrats preferred abject surrender. At the time, reviewing that speech, I noted the rhetorical technique: “By escalating criticism, he knocked down a straw man, the oldest speechifying trick in the book.”..."

Safire explains these fascinating origins of "Straw Man" in the context of political speeches. Those of us involved in technology and other business projects, know that a "Straw Man" can also be used in a business context, typically to refer to the first attempt at documenting a project's initial charter and/or requirements, or even a preliminary prototype of a proposed new or enhanced system's user interface.

As explained nicely on mindtools.com:

"When you begin a project or start looking into a problem, you often have incomplete information to work with. So you can spend time gathering facts and data until you are ready to build a really strong argument or plan, or, you can get going straight away and jump in with a not-so-complete solution, with the intention of finding a much better one, as you learn more and more.

That's the premise behind building a straw man - creating a first draft for criticism and testing, and then using the feedback you receive to develop a final outcome that is rock solid..."

A similar, and very concise definition of "Straw Man" can be found in J. LeRoy Ward's excellent Dictionary of Project Management Terms :

"Working draft copy circulated for comments or suggested changes."

Finally, I would like to suggest a connection between the idea behind a "Straw Man" in business and technology, to the very similar concept in Software Engineering, as originally explained brilliantly in the classic Fred Brooks work: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition):

"The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that [anyway]."

Thus, Brooks suggests that one may wish to "plan to throw one away", since it is quite possible that you will, anyhow. And by building this "pilot system" into the plan as an explicit milestone, communication is simpler, and expectations are more realistic from the start.

So perhaps, although not identical, Safire's "straw man" and Brooks' "pilot system" are both trying to capture the same notion: That we sometimes need to start with something we know is imperfect, in order to be able to proceed from there to a truly excellent result.