Specifically, it is fascinating that we are coming up with all together new terminology and methodologies for doing something that has been a tradition from the earliest of times. Libraries, or the “collection of useful material for common use”, date back to Ugarit, and progressed through the Hellenic world and Rome.  And looking at how collections have evolved since circa1900 B.C., as well as how librarians deal with collections, should really teach us a thing or two about relevance of information, the unnecessary need for multiple copies of the same or similar thing, and keeping in circulation those things, which are useful to our site visitors.

Thus in the spirit of libraries, I spent several days in my local one, and observed differences since the last time I visited. There are fewer books, many more DVDs and CDs, a slew of computers with online reading resources, and even (here it goes!) an eBook reader. Evolution of this brick and mortar structure is taking place regularly and the librarians are readily ridding (or disposing) of items with marginal relevance to visitors, and updating shelves with things that are connected to our everyday needs. And with thousands upon thousands of items, one would think it is hard to clear and update the information collection, but the librarians assure me it is not. That is, as long as you apply the “weeding technique” and ensure you stay true to it.

Weeding, you see, is the process of cleaning out your information collection in the same way you would your garden. All at once, or periodically. Through special projects, or when a new mandate arises. It doesn’t really matter as long as you do it. Sound familiar? If you have deal with ROT, or if you haven’t, learning to weed will solve your challenge and set you up for success going forward. That way, you will maintain a useful collection of information, relevant to your audience, and join the ranks of history through a well-preserved collection.

So with that in mind, it really is a good idea to marry your team lead, and as with any marriage partner, you should consider a solid set of traits when making that big decision:

1. Positive attitude: there will be ups and there will be downs, but can your partner support the end goal and keep a positive frame of mind to keep fighting the good fight?
2. Good communication skills: your web team lead needs to communicate to those reporting to him/her as well as to executives. You want someone who gets it, can relate, and relay information to those needed audiences
3. Forgiving: the team lead takes a beating. Sorry, it’s the truth! Forgiveness will save your marriage more times than you can count, so rank this high on your list!
4. Common sense and money-wise: yes that CMS or portal platform will meet your needs for the next 10 years. But do you really need that, at a $2.5 million cost? Unlikely a home, your CMS won’t appreciate, so get someone with common sense into your organization and look to have them be money-wise as well.
5. Honesty and respect: needless to say, this is a two way street. You should give it, but also get it back. After all, you and your web team are in this one together!
6. Hard working: this one should be clear, and if your web team lead isn’t willing to sign up for it, hit the dating scene again!
7. Compassionate: you want a lead who will understand and relate to all web stakeholders, from your business users, to the external site visitor, to the development team, and quite frankly you.
8. Faithfulness: steer clear of the individual who will sabotage you or your web initiatives, and who will keep faithful to your strategic objectives. This applies to the relationship with internal folks, as well as external to your organization.
9. A sense of humor: you will go through a lot with your web team lead, including some uncomfortable early-morning calls around server down time and inability to launch the project. What’s important is that through the ups and downs, you have someone that you can laugh with.
10. Ready to commit: you want a partner who is ready to settle down and not use you as a stepping stone to move on for their own career growth or earning potential. By the same token, make certain you pay your web lead well, ensure mentoring and growth opportunities, and show the value the web lead brings to the organization. Promotion potential also helps, but many good web leads are willing to give you the best years of their life as just that – a web team lead!

So whether your site is large, medium, or small, your site (and you!) deserve a lifetime of happiness, whether you see that as making it to your silver wedding anniversary or having someone with you into your golden years.

While the problem may manifest itself in multiple ways and present varying levels of risk to an organization, the root cause usually is found in the lack of strong policies, associated standards and the translation of these into actionable controls.

Software vendors themselves will give you tips to avoiding this problem, such as end user training and education, having an information management plan, and enforcing workflows. However, these tips and many software add-ons won’t solve the underlying problems since any good web governance plan has to be a strong combination of process and technology.

So if you are thinking about cleaning up your existing site or migrating to an entirely new platform, this is the time to consider how you will govern your content and the principles around it, from written work to access.  This should help significantly as you gain control and start:

• Controlling site control in order to avoid site creation chaos
• Central administration across multiple SharePoint sites (intranets, extranets, Internet sites)
• Efficient business user behavior (approval of access to various sites and content) as well as proper structures for report generation to business users
• Consistent permissions, authorized access, and compliance reporting

In the room there was a myriad of mostly government folks with varying degrees of experience and time in the public sector. All of them were web managers, with one title or another, but in charge of the same goal: make the agency’s website relevant and useful, supporting of the mission, while leveraging best practices.

Several (still) surprising points:

• How many folks have web governance (whether it is working or not)
• How few folks have written web policies and standards (and how few know how to go about getting this done; but in all fairness, that is why they were at the symposium and that is why I spoke on web policies)
• How many agencies are still exposing themselves to risk, creating sub-par web properties and online presences, when they have very talented people working for them (goes back to not aligning resources well and web governance that may just not working to the best possible extent

While this still surprises me, I was also delighted to hear over lunch strategies and thoughts of individuals not only interest in change, but actively make it, within their agencies. It means that even while we aren’t there yet, we are on our way, to a truly better government with more transparency, more web strategy and governance, and ultimately more and better service to citizens.

In general, I like to have live, guided demos of toolsets. They allow for many questions, the opportunity to challenge vendors, and to learn a lot that I can then feed into my work.  The pre-demo chit-chat is in a way my favorite part. It is telling of how technical the folks are on the call. My tolerance for marketing or sales-only folks had been decreasing as the judging went towards the end, until a complete and utterly sales guy asked: “Why do you think people still don’t adopt CMS?”

Now here is a guy who knows enough to know that he doesn’t know enough. I liked him. I especially liked the fact that he put out there a common truth that most consultants don’t tell clients. Or vendors for that matter. Not that all vendors want to hear the answer…

My experience with content management system (CMS) implementations, which has now spanned some 12 years, has been that folks resist its adoption. They resent not being able to hand-code HTML and thus be one of the only 2 people in the organization that can post content the “right way”. They resist it because they fear their font colors will be limited. Or the picture they took at the last workshop won’t make the page cut, since there is no neat place to put it in a CMS template.

It can be utterly frightening for those who still remember the use of answering machines to trust their written word to a software application such as Microsoft Word, let along a CMS which may take their best ideas and place them in a magic box that can only be opened by a special password.

As the years pass, I realize that all of these folks who are so resistant to the concept of content management and rally against their CMS don’t deserve to be locked out of our processes, our debates, or our new way of getting content out there. But what they need is more handholding, more training, more reassurance, and less technical talk and scare tactics that say they must “or else”. We need to fold them into the process, ensure they have a voice. That they are represented from the time we dream of using a CMS to the time it is deployed, in the know the entire time.

It sounds painful, and it sounds time consuming. It can be! But the benefit of really getting the masses to adopt this technology category that is so promising, and yet so relatively slowly evolving, is immeasurable. The opportunity to actually use content management the way it was intended, to have chunks of content that are properly tagged, reusable, and stored in an industry-standard type of way, should be the norm and not the hope. And when that happens, I will be forever grateful, as the CODiE’s will step it up. And no vendor will ever have to ask again, why do people still not want to use a CMS.

As I looked at it again this morning, I began to wonder why PMPs sign up to “doing what is right and honorable”, but create such a competitive and poor professional environment for PMP colleagues? Goodness knows, I have never met a friendlier bunch than when sitting at a round dinner table during the monthly chapter meeting, but put the same group into a client situation, and it seems the gloves come off just in time to lecture on the proper PMI process or the appropriate documentation approach.

Now, this is all such generalization, and (albeit quietly) I will admit to having been guilty of the behavior myself, it seems to be prevalent in the PMP community. Is it just that PMPs are competitive by nature? A-type personalities?

Either way, it seems to me that the professional courtesy (or common good behavior) needs to begin to prevail within projects and organizations employing PMPs.

So what about a scoring system? Not for bad behavior… that would be somewhat negative, open to misuse, and potentially perpetuate existing actions (i.e. you make me angry, so I will report your bad behavior). But what about a star-rating system? A personal testament tracker, to the best PMPs? It could function much as LinkedIn, and as you come into choices about projects and jobs, you could see which PMPs you will be surrounded by and whether you really want to work with them. The system could be used by employers to verify the ultimate – behavior – of PMPs, not just skill sets.

Regardless of system, or approach, I hope that we will discover some way to hold ourselves to higher standards and to begin living the code of “doing what is right and honorable” not just for projects, but for our fellow PMPs.

For the past few weeks I have been having a different experience. I have not been holding back, but I have also not fully stepped up to answer the call of my internal PM. I have let others have the opportunity to take charge, to define what they think needs to be done, and to see how things unfold. The outcome hasn’t been disastrous, but it has also not been all that great. What it has been, though, is a great learning experience for me. So here are several major observations, while I try to process the remainder of the event and impact:

1. Absence of the PM is immediately reflected in individuals performing their job and self-assigned tasks, without a unified product or outcome. This is more emphasized when there is a belief of a common goal at the outset of the effort, or an expectation that a PM will be actively involved.

2. The lack of a PM to coordinate and communicate is the best example of a “connect the dots exercise” gone awry. The dependencies are unknown or not shared by the team, resulting in unintended outcomes and a significant amount of overwork.

3. There is no central owner for status reporting or coordination, leaving management or clients in the dark when it comes to status, utilization/staffing, or any other project health metric. The tendency to look to the perceived “in-the-loop” individual (or run around from person to person trying to determine status) is associated with this phenomenon.

4. For those inherently predisposed to project management, it is increasingly challenging to mind their own business in this scenario, and usually requires self-discipline coupled with a sore throat, to keep one from opening the mouth and taking on the quasi-role.

5. A group of über-consultants can be convened to work together, but unless there is a project manager to corral them into a unified direction, it will be a still result in a über mess.

I am taking this opportunity to review my own personality bend within this context, but am also going to be looking to other individuals’ experiences. Have you been on a successful project that has not had a project manager? The definition of a project can be your own (I am subscribing to the tried and tested “with a start and an end”…) but let me know if you have some tips and thoughts… wonders or otherwise.

What is nice, though, is having an entire infrastructure in place. Turn key really. And wouldn’t it be cool if someone (perhaps Google, perhaps not) could do the same for us with web governance and social media? It has started to offer some capacities to this extent, of course, as exemplified in Google Docs, Blogs, etc. But I mean, what if as an organization, Google could offer me an out of the box, turn key solution that has everyone using a social media platform throughout the enterprise to folks-tag content, rate pages, and collaborate efficiently. Or if it enabled externally the opportunity to do even more with the organization’s audience? What a cool concept!

So this morning I started brainstorming with a colleague about the turn key infrastructure for organizational web governance. While nothing new (i.e. consultants readily reproduce documents for clients from templates), the reality is that web governance too has a pattern and the permutations are ample but exhaustive. Cultural (i.e. transnational, multinational, local, and organizational) patterns can be segmented and to a great degree aligned with the models that best suit the organization, and with the exception of wanting to tweak things here and there, tends to work across the board.

Certainly, the argument will be that governance is a process not a means to an end, but the reality is that by the time that your organization has decided to use an out-of-the-box governance model, a lot of the buy-in has already taken place. Those who do not want to use the toolset, are likely going to need professional services help beyond governance anyway, so perhaps this idea could work. Could float.

Do you have thoughts? Think this could work or should work? Have a better idea? I am seriously considering using my Google Phone account again, so just call me.

So I have neglected my blog as project life has taken over, and all I have been doing as of late is living and breathing CPIC, PMO, and on odd days, legacy systems and a COBOL mainframe evaluation. Time for a vacation really!

But all of the stuff is interesting, and certainly going on because of people doing good things (BTW, the equation of good in my book goes something like this:  right thing + smart thing = good thing). And while that does not surprise me, it does make me happy and excited to be working on these projects. The mainframe one is unique, mostly because my web ways (full of web governance, web 2.0, social media, and open source) don’t compare to thing like COBOL, a 50 year old language that still accounts for 80% of the currently active computer code (i.e. 250 billion lines of it) worldwide. I honestly feel like I have entered a parallel universe. In its own right, COBOL certainly seems to be.

I get that COBOL was revolutionary, easy to use and allowed the business process to be the leading act. I don’t get why it has been allowed to become its own ecosystem where all was well until an imbalance occurs. And now with a huge portion of the COBOL workforce retiring (i.e. baby boomers) there is a sense of panic as the ecosystem is threatened by a looming shortage of staff and a scramble to snatch up those few green screen programmers remaining. So here are my questions: Did nobody see this coming? Was anybody paying attention? And what lessons will we learn from this that we can apply to our own little ecosystems of java, PHP, Ruby, and .NET?

For me this has been a case study supporting the argument for planning, analyzing, and most importantly managing our ecosystems. We should focus on project management for our project releases, upgrades and enhancements, but we must have a capital planning aspect to our investments, and we must apply a management technique (i.e. Application Portfolio Management, or APM) to understand whether we are in balance, or whether our applications will go the way of COBOL with that sudden threat to their existence and a need for immediate reaction.

So, here are some suggestions of what to consider around APM:

1. Build an inventory of all of your applications, including the platforms, requirements details, and priority and business value from your stakeholders’ perspective (for a detailed discussion on what to collect see the Application Portfolio Management site at http://www.applicationportfoliomanagement.com/).
2. Start collecting and understanding the costs associated with the inventory of applications you have built, ensuring you have a mechanism in place for monitoring the changes and understanding what increases or decreases the cost.
3. Build out a business process (light and with low overhead) to measure the business value from the applications you have in house, and tie them back to the triggers for increasing or decreasing the cost (as described in #2).
4. Benchmark your portfolio against industry standards, or at the very least, understand at what point your costs are going to start outweighing the benefits, and consider what your response plan will be to that scenario. In essence, you are building a risk pattern and preparing to mitigate for those risks.
5. Analyze your portfolio (every six months or year, or whatever frequency makes sense based on the changes of cost and value you are noticing) in order to start your application portfolio management journey.

Good projects are really about good people. They are the smart, talented folks who may never have even studied project management, but inherently, they know what needs to be done. Regardless of their technical background or business acumen, they understand that good people and good projects are all about rolling up the sleeves and going to bat. They are a synergy that forms as a result of the right people coming together at the right time. It is almost a spiritual bonding, where nothing explicitly must be said, because it all comes together.

This trait, this blend, this melding if you will, is the core of a good project. Teams on such projects can work miracles. They can implement a large-scale portal solution with software that is still in beta within 90 calendar days, to include hardware acquisition.  These folks can implement terabytes of data storage with a BI reporting tool in a matter of weeks. These are the folks who can do the undoable, they are the A team.

If you have been part of a good project team, you know exactly what I am getting at here. If you have not experienced this firsthand, but have heard stories, you might want to take another look at your project team and staffing practices. Do you create your team based on personality? Does your team share the passion and vision for delivery that you do? Do you invite the team to participate in defining and living the project with you? Or do you rely on the project management knowledge areas and hope that this will lead to success? I say knowing this difference and proactively charting your course will make the difference between a marginal and highly successful project. Moreover, it will make for a good project team that you won’t forget about that easily. Nor will your client!