Hello and Welcome!!!  

NEW!!!  PM Maturity test: CLS has developed a short questionnaire that will estimate the maturity of your organization.  Try it out!    

CLS plans EPM and Business Intelligence Seminar:

Jackson, MS, December 1, 2006.  CLS will be hosting an EPM "Lunch and Learn" seminar from 11:00-1:00, CST.  If you will be in Jackson, MS, you won't want to miss it!  CLICK HERE!!!

If you know someone who might be interested in receiving this newsletter, please email the Subject Line "Subscribe" to newsletter@clsassociates.com with the e-mail address in the message body.

Here are the top 10 ways the Office Project Server 2007 together with its clients, Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Project Web Access, can help you intelligently manage your organization’s work:

Enhance your business intelligence.
Office Project Server 2007 helps you monitor performance, visualize trends, manage risks, and identify investment gaps. Use Reporting Data Services to share information through common business reporting tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The pre-built data cubes are extensible, and it provides a data link for building scorecards and dashboards to facilitate informed decisions about existing projects, tradeoffs, and new opportunities.

Collaborate and coordinate easily.
Ensuring teams share common goals and work together effectively becomes more vital as organizations become more geographically and culturally diverse. Project Web Access provides Web-based access to timely, business-critical project information stored by Office Project Server 2007, so teams can share knowledge, collaborate smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables, and adjust activities quickly to accommodate project changes and updates.

Manage resources effectively.
Many organizations struggle to deploy resources effectively, leading to higher costs and project delays. Office Project Server 2007 helps you accurately assess needs to effectively deploy resources today and create future plans across your organization — so you have the right people on your high-priority projects for optimal delivery. You can track availability, utilization, and work progress through time sheets.

Manage the entire project lifecycle.
Propose and initiate projects in Project Web Access. Promote these proposals to operational projects, and then manage them through completion and maintenance. You can get a comprehensive view of your organization's work at all stages of the lifecycle for better decision-making.

Manage the simple and the complex.
For one-time projects, you can use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Project Web Access. As these gain approval or grow into more strategically important initiatives, you can then “promote” them to the centralized Office Project Server 2007 for tracking of budgets and resources that might otherwise go unnoticed. For large scale “programs,” you can easily manage multiple sub-projects and their dependencies in a coordinated fashion.

Promote continuous improvement.
Organizations are increasingly standardizing their processes to improve operational efficiencies and more effectively manage project complexity. Office Project Server 2007 enables you to implement repeatable processes as templates, refine them based on your best practices, and capture these improved processes within a custom Project Guide. You can apply an automated workflow, resulting in lowered costs, faster cycle times, and increased quality.

Hire strategically.
Without understanding long-term workloads and capacity, companies can experience inefficient hire-fire cycles, resulting in higher overhead, lost knowledge, and poor employee morale. By providing visibility into overall work commitments and resource capabilities, Office Project Server 2007 helps you create resource plans to align your strategic recruiting and outsourcing with your long-term business objectives.

Get more from existing technology investments.
Office Project Server 2007 leverages Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Windows SharePoint Services, so you can get the most out of your organization’s skills in these Microsoft technologies. Office Project Server 2007 also includes pre-built integration with the Microsoft Office system, ERP applications, the Microsoft collaboration platform, and Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007. The well defined Office Project Server API, Eventing Model, and other tools make this a flexible and extensible platform to manage your work.

Drive real return on investment.
By enabling increased employee productivity, faster cycle times, reduced costs, and improved time management, Office Project Server 2007 and its clients provide a positive and sustainable return on your investment. In IT portfolio management, software can cut costs 2-5 percent, improve productivity 25-20 percent, and shift 10-15 percent of budgets to more-strategic projects. In developing and bringing new products to market, the best performers — those who have applied rigorous process and technology to their research and development and go-to-market activities — can reduce time to market by more than 30 percent.

Gain a complete Office EPM Solution.
You can form the complete Office EPM Solution and gain additional portfolio management functionality using the bi-directional Project Gateway. This allows you to use Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 to complement Office Project Server 2007. This expands the value of the solution beyond operational management into strategic decisions on alignment of investments with business.

The preceding article was written for Google Groups.  The article in its original format can be found at:

Top 10 Benefits of Project Server 2007. 

1. Don’t bother prioritizing your organization's overall project load. After all, if there’s a free-for-all approach to your overall program management (i.e., “survival of the fittest”), then the projects that survive will be those that were destined to survive. In the meantime, senior management need not trouble themselves aligning projects with strategic goals or facing the logical imperative that people simply cannot have 12 number one priorities! (See my online article What's Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Why Should Project Managers Care About It?)

2. Encourage sponsors and key stakeholders to take a passive role on the project team. Let them assert their authority to reject deliverables at random, without participating in defining project outcomes in a high-resolution fashion. And above all, don’t bother project sponsors when their constituents (such as key SMEs and reviewers) drop the ball and miss their deadlines.

3. Set up ongoing committees focusing on management process (such as TQM groups, etc.) and make project team members participate in frequent meetings and write lots of reports… preferably when critical project deadlines are coming due.

4. Interrupt team members relentlessly … preferably during their time off. Find all sorts of trivial issues that "need to be addressed," then keep their beepers and cell phones ringing and bury them in emails to keep them off balance.

5. Create a culture in which project managers are expected to “roll over” and take it when substantive new deliverables are added halfway through the project. (After all, only a tradesperson like a plumber or electrician would demand more money or more time for additional services; our people are “professionals” and should be prepared to be “flexible.”)

6. Half way through the project, when most of the deliverables have begun to take shape, add a whole bunch of previously unnamed stakeholders and ask them for their opinions about the project and its deliverables.

7. Encourage the sponsor to approve deliverables informally (with nods, smiles, and verbal praise); never force sponsors to stand behind their approvals with a formal sign-off. (In other words, give ‘em plenty of room to weasel out of agreements!)

8. Make sure project managers have lots of responsibilities and deadlines, but no authority whatsoever to acquire or remove people from the project; to get enough money, materials, or facilities; or insist on timely participation of SMEs and key reviewers.

9. Describe project deliverables in the vaguest possible terms so sponsors and reviewers have plenty of leeway to reinvent the project outputs repeatedly as the project unfolds.

10. Get projects up and running as quickly as possible – don’t worry about documenting agreements in a formal project charter, clearly describing team roles/responsibilities, or doing a thorough work breakdown analysis. After all, we know what we’re doing and we trust each other. So let’s get to it without a pesky audit trail!

To view this article in its original format, please follow this link:

Ten guaranteed ways to screw up any project.

Goshen, IN, November 8, 2006 – A new study conducted by the Aberdeen Group and sponsored by Hertzler Systems Inc., "The Lean Six Sigma Benchmark", finds that companies using technology to support their Six Sigma efforts are much more successful in lowering defect rates. The report examines the strategies, enablers, and technologies used by best-in-class Lean Six Sigma manufacturers in their pursuit of perfection. More than 400 companies participated in the study, including Boeing, Glaxo SmithKline, Rexam, Tyco Electronics, EMC, GE, and GM.

According to Evan Miller, President & CEO of Hertzler Systems, the report is significant because it takes a hard look at the underlying systems that enable successful Six Sigma deployment. "This benchmark report is unique because it looks deeper into the best practices of Lean Six Sigma companies. Everyone in the Six Sigma community is familiar with the importance of training and using the right tools and good leadership. But this report shows that when you need to develop a data-driven culture, it is absolutely critical that your people have easy access to reliable, clean, actionable data in real time. All the training in the world won't make you data driven if your best people can't get their hands on the data."

According to Cindy Jutras, Vice President, Aberdeen Group, "Adapting to the rigors of Six Sigma requires significant culture change for most companies and many find it a challenge. In fact this was reported as the top challenge faced by our participants. Yet not all challenges are cultural. Six Sigma methodologies are dependent on data, so data collection can present significant obstacles. Automated data collection and IT solutions can play a key role in resolving these obstacles," Yet report findings show a misalignment of responses to these challenges, with only 19% of participants responding by implementing automated data collection and 27% deploying IT solutions in support of quality initiatives.

Based on the findings of the report, Jutras offers these recommendations:

• Apply metrics of DPMO (Defects Per Million Opportunities) across all business processes in all industries, not just manufactured products and parts.
• Identify and prioritize business impact projects according to anticipated savings and improved throughput. Look first for low hanging fruit and act now for immediate benefit.
• Integrate data collection with analysis – connect disparate sources of data and alarm users.

To view this article in its original format, follow this link:

iSixSigma, Technology use and lower defect rates, Novemeber 8, 2006