Learning Curve

It has been weeks since I met with a former co worker. We discussed an important issue that seemed to hit me. Learning curve. In light of today's economic environment, these questions seem to beg answers (more so for project managers seeking employment):
1. Is your PMO willing to invest time and money to train a project manager, i.e., needed for more complex projects that require a more technical PM role ,
2. If yes, how much time is your company or PMO willing to invest time wise,
3. If no, why not?
4. How does one measure ROI in training a PM or a functional manager?
5. What is a reasonable amount of time to train a PM or any employee for that manner?

I remember a media article that companies nowadays are sitting on a pile of cash; that managers and executives are still wary of ramping up hiring to meet increase in business volume.

Having been in this role as well, I was leery of hiring someone not trained nor had the experience in my industry, nor someone who had done project management in the past. It becomes a catch 22 for most seeking employment. They won't get hired if hiring companies are loathe to invest in worker training nor see the value in hiring someone from another industry (and thus will not invest in worker training either for a new technology nor application). Further, I doubt companies nowadays still provide the benefit of tuition reimbursement (for employees working on a college degree or master's program).

Am looking, or most are looking forward to normalcy whereby employers see the benefit of worker's training, education, and employee retention. There's more at stake here but I will address them for later, e.g., business continuity, CRM, customer satisfaction, and plain workers sense of happiness at their jobs.

Or is this the new normal whereby no one sees the ROI on workers training and education?

Disaster Preparedness and Risk Management

This is the latest news regarding the disaster unfolding in Louisiana. Excerpted from Foxnews.com. "British Petroleum downplayed the possibility of a catastrophic accident at an offshore rig that exploded, causing the worst U.S. spill in decades along the Gulf coast and endangering shoreline habitat.

In its 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis for the well, BP suggested it was unlikely, or virtually impossible, for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill and serious damage to beaches, fish, mammals and fisheries.

BP's plan filed with the federal Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, says repeatedly that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities."

And while the company conceded that a spill would impact beaches, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas, it argued that "due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected."

There will be more questions about risk projection, risk assessment, risk assessment, risk analysis, and finally--the person who signed off on the Risk Assessment Report. I am not surprised there wasn't a disaster preparedness plan. There wasn't any probability of a disaster occurring in the first place.

Oil Spill from offshore rig off Louisiana

This week, the news on explosion, sinking of an oil rig off the cost of Louisiana, loss of lives, an unfolding environmental disaster--has been at the forefront of network news. MSNBC reported on 4/29th: "The oil leak triggered by a deadly rig blast off the coast of Louisiana has the potential to cause more environmental damage than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, one of the largest ecological disasters ever recorded, some observers say." Beyond the ecological impact, the total economic impact needs to be considered as well. "Experts said the spill could also destroy the livelihood of commercial fishermen and shrimp catchers and impact recreational fishermen. According to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the state’s fishing industry is worth $265 billion at dockside and has a total economic impact of $2.3 trillion."

BP was operating the Deepwater Horizon, which was drilling in 5,000 feet of water about 40 miles offshore when it exploded last week. Eleven crew members are missing and presumed dead, and the government says 5,000 barrels of oil a day are spewing from the well underneath it. Right now, the focus has been on capping the oil head, prevention of oil slick or oil from reaching shoreline--the blame game has not begun. I can just imagine what is going through BP's Risk Managers' mind, as they conduct meetings and come up with quick resolutions on how to mitigate this unfolding disasters. It is easy to pose the following questions, 1) how did this happen? 2) was this human error or was this equipment failure? 3) where in the mitigation plan did we fail? 4) how many back up or redundant systems do we currently have, both human and automated processes? 5) at the government policy level, does this change our policy to continue and open offshore drilling within US territory, knowing the risks to wildlife and ecology, at what cost? 6) to the BP Risk Managers and US COO, can we statistically predict offshore drilling disasters given past historical data? Beyond these questions, what do you tell the surviving family members for BP employees and contractors who lost loved ones.

Easy questions to pose. Harder to answer these questions.

project milestone tracking

So for the past two months, I have been involved with larger scale, longer duration projects. I have been wrestling with our current project reporting and status reporting from the field. I have seen varied customer types. Some want detailed reporting on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Some want just the end-result in a master database or spreadsheet. Some want daily detailed reporting. If the project reviewer is higher up the "food-chain" or "chain of command", typically the level of detail is looser or lost to some degree. The more complex the project (no, we have not been using Microsoft Project which complicates my situation even more), the more quantity of projects one is juggling at a given time, the lesser project monitoring is done.

This is just a function of capacity and human bandwidth. The dilemma then becomes, do you monitor a project status quantitatively or qualitatively. Being a melancholy by nature, I prefer the quantitative measurement of milestones hit and achieved. Instead of a descriptive text-type reporting of project status, issues log, project reporting, I have come up with a template (simple Microsoft Excel template) for the field engineer or field technician to populate. It is a simple yes or no, for specific milestones completed/not completed. This will be a weekly report to be submitted to the PMO. As a project manager for a different industry, what is your preference? What industry are you in, and what type of reporting do you prefer?

Ketsana's aftermath

Hopefully  by now you have read all the news and video footages of the recent flooding in metropolitan Manila and norther Luzon provinces. For comparison, the rainfall amount in 12 hours was a lot more (measured in mm and not in inches) than what we experienced with Katrina. I have not kept up with the death toll, and scores of people missing. The financial costs of this calamity is still to be determined. We do have to count our blessings in light of the recent earthquake, more lives lost in the recent massive earthquake in Sumatra (that just occurred this week, and flooding in American Samoa).

The easy part is finger pointing and doing the blame game. The following questions do need to be answered:

1. What happened to the study done by Urban Planner Palafox regarding the risks of flooding (I will get the reference page on this study, this was done years ago)?
2. How much of the damaged settlements, e.g., parts of Marikina Valley, or population actually built and settled in 20, 50, or 100-year floodplains?
3. Where was the Disaster Relief and Emergency Response System? Why is there no FEMA-like agency?
4. Why haven't local government units organized even volunteer or non government associations to organize Disaster Preparedness and Local Emergency Response Teams?
5. How much of the flooding caused, or indirectly caused by garbage-choke rivers and estuaries?
6. Are any of the private developments, or buildings insured when these are built on flood plains? Where did they purchase insurance, or were these properties insured, who insured them?

All of these questions are classic PMBOK questions and key project management input variables, or process groups:

• Risk management,
• Proper project planning,
• Risk mitigation,
• Project implementation,
• Budgeting,
• Disaster preparedness, and 
• Disaster response and recovery.

What project are you working on? What are the potential risks? What are the payoffs? Are you prepared for a major catastrophe? What are your risk mitigation plans, and disaster response systems? Easy to ask, very difficult to implement.

Fishing and being seasick

Today being my birthday, I was inundated with greetings (both on the Wall and personal messages via e-mail) on Facebook. (Thanks to the calendar reminder on Facebook, even your 2nd grade classmate remembered to greet me on my birthday.) The common (courteous) question I was asked apart from the greeting, "what kind of fun stuff did you do today?" And I tell the entire story.

This was a trip that had long been planned by my Sales Director, won from a fund raising auction at World Relief back in spring of this year. Due to schedule conflicts and marine forecast, the fishing trip had to be re scheduled a couple of times. Then the day finally came. We are going fishing at 7 am from Winthrop Harbor North Point Marina, on a Saturday. Woke up at 4 am, got out at past 5 am and made the trek from Warrenville to Winthrop Harbor, Illinois. While waiting for someone else, my Sales Director asked me, "so, Bobby, do you ever have problems with sea sickness?" "Bill, I grew up in the Philippines, of course not!" I have been paddling on canoes on mild rivers, rode in canoes with outriggers in Mindanao Sea, have taken a passenger (overnight) cruise ship from Manila back to Butuan, a ferry from Playa del Carmen to Cozumel--of course I have never had problems with sea sickness. (I did remember Captain mention that the waves farther out would be far better than the waves' height further inland.) So I thought I hope we catch Salmon and Trout today, lots and lots of them.

One and half hour after venturing out, and having half eaten a bagel with lox and cream cheese, I started feeling sick. Not wanting to ruin the trip for everyone, I did my best not to lose my breakfast. And the three and a half foot waves felt like ten foot (or more waves, like the Perfect Storm, or it felt like it for me), and this went on for four hours. When the captain finally saw me puking three times, he said "let's head back in" and started to pull the poles. A ruined trip and no Salmon caught. Disappointing, and I felt bad for both Bill and Paul. And the captain has to clean the sides of his boat.

Not sure if it was over confidence or oversight on my part about the risks involved with this trip, the Dramamine might have help prevent nausea and motion sickness. I took two tablets after attempting to reel in the line (thinking we had caught something about two hours into the trip). Pretty obvious it was too late. Lesson learned: what possible risks could come up with a trip or a project. Identify it, take steps to mitigate it, or plain avoid it. With the marine forecast of 3.5 and less than 5 foot waves, it was safe to venture out and go fishing. But it is not for the faint of stomach.

shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables at Jenny's Fruit Stand

My wife and I spent last weekend or Labor Day weekend in Sawyer Michigan. Although I have lived here in the states for almost 20 years now, I cannot help but notice the differences between how "production" (collective term) works between here and the Philippines. (I wanted to post photos of my wife shopping at the fruit stand but I lost those digital photos. That is a whole different story.)

This fruit stand was not manned, sat in a corner of a street, in a private property. It had a wooden cash box (i.e., cash and check payment only), chained to the structure. It had three security cameras (more than likely with motion detector), one of which had a short antenna (I can only imagine it works off 802.11 protocol). I noticed that the power adaptors were plugged to an outlet and did not seem secure (someone can just unplug them, if someone really intended to abscond the fruits, vegetables, organic honey, and the cash box). On a white board, the following works were scribed: "Smile, you are on candid camera. Thou shall not steal."

Where is this all leading to? What I can conclude are the following. Any production business process that can be automated or outsourced, whereby there is significant cost savings to labor cost--such solution needs to be examined and implemented. A lot of our economic "transaction" is based on honesty. (A fudged resume can be discovered. A dishonest time sheet will be caught. A dishonest tax return will be audited. A substandard part replacement discovered. This is very true in the US. Sadly, I cannot speak the same about the Philippines. It may be different now.) Thus, such automation and BPO (business process outsourcing) ought not to be ruled out when trying to cut production cost. Then again, this might be stating what is now too obvious.