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Monthly Archives: December 2012
Project Managing Like Bill Belichick
By Jamey Beland, Project Manager, PMP
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that being a project manager leading a virtualization or IT project is identical to coaching a professional team the way Bill Belichick coaches the Patriots (sorry New Yorkites). Hear me out on this. A project manager and a coach each have the responsibility of delivering on the objectives of the stakeholder and owner. Each plans their strategy and objectives prior to starting the game. Each has to make adjustments to the plan and strategy depending on circumstances and how the project or game progress (sorry Eagles fans). Each has to work with some unique personnel in the project; (Divas don’t just exist in sports.) Each has to lead a multifaceted and talented team to achieve a goal. Ultimately each game is a basic project or at a minimum, a phase in a larger project which is to win the Lombardi trophy.
In coaching and in Project Managing, the key basic principles are the same; setting expectations, having the players or project team provide input, and facilitating communication. My colleague Craig Mullen hit on this in a previous posts: Active Project Management; Facilitate, Don’t Dictate. Think about it, if someone does not know what is expected from him or her, how can they realistically do their job? You can’t win a game if you don’t know the rules. This applies to the coaches knowing their role, just as much as the players knowing their role. A PM’s role is to ensure that the each player clearly understands the expectations of the stakeholders and sponsors, just as a coach must be in sync with the owner and GMs. Furthermore, the PM or coach is responsible for ensuring the players and project members clearly understand their roles and responsibilities; this is done through project charters, project plans, scope objectives, and thorough communication prior to any project execution. This is a key reason the Krafts have done so well owning the Patriots. Each player on the Patriots knows what is expected out of them; as the Pat’s saying goes, “Just Do Your Job.” The ones that get out of line a bit too much, might as well pack their bags (i.e. Randy Moss not playing the Patriot Way)!
Whether football team owners or project owners, the good ones seem to clearly understand the need for good project management and not let a player run the team or an engineer run the project. Just as in the early years of football and professional sports, it was not uncommon to have a player / coach running the team. Similarly, in the earlier and debatably less complicated days of IT projects, it was not uncommon to have a Sr. Engineer double up and also be the project manager.
Just because someone is a great owner/director or engineer/player, it does not make them suitable or capable of coaching a team or managing a project. Robert Kraft is a great football team owner with deep understanding of how the game is played, however, he looks at the bigger picture: the stadium, personnel, marketing and ultimately the bottom line. Thus he has Belichick actually run the team. And it’s why Tom Brady is not put in a player/coach position. Tom may be good at QBing, however, can he realistically coordinate and ensure all positions on offense are focusing on what they need to do as well as his responsibilities? Never mind the Defense, Just as a CIO or Director of IT certainly has an overarching knowledge of the game being played in IT, but to actually direct it would take their eye off of the proverbial ball of the other aspects of the business that needs to be overseen. As any professional knows, focus on your job and do it well; that’s the Patriot’s way.
In a football game the 1st possession and maybe the 2nd possession plays are already predetermined, however, as the game progresses the strategy adjusts based on previous success as well as what the other team is giving you. Just as in a project, you initially setup the work breakdown structure, risk management plan, communication plan, etc. but as the project moves forward there typically needs to be some adjustments made based on progress, issues, new information etc. This is where agile project management is best: being able to plan, execute and monitor and control iterations in a typical waterfall project are key.. If Belichick realizes that the opponent is taking out Wes Welker, Gronk, and the other receivers before they really get off the line and the passing game isn’t there, he and Josh McDaniels (Offensive Coord) will look at moving the ball maybe by running a bit more, or doing screen passes. As in virtualization projects, if there are roadblocks in the initial plan, alternatives need to be determined on how to move that project “ball.” Basically, just as in football, there needs to be flexibility in an IT project.
Each project is a game with a beginning and end. It’s crucial to have someone that not only specializes in working with different players’ needs, but who can also incorporate their input into the game and ensures all players understand their roles and responsibilities. Add to that clear communication, it just becomes a matter of execution to win each game, I mean IT project, and have a successful season.
And though coaching the Patriots and Managing an IT infrastructure project is ALMOST the same, we do need to figure out how to get a project manager paid like Belichick…oh, and maybe some cheerleaders for the project?
Want to learn more about GreenPages Project Management? Email us at projects@greenpages.com
CloudVelocity Takes Off
Perhaps the most significant barrier to a true hybrid cloud operating model is a wide gulf of manual processes required to run existing multi-tier apps and services seamlessly across data centers, colocation facilities and public clouds. That gulf is perhaps the largest barrier to the enterprise adoption of public cloud. As of today there are […]
Cloud Brokers: The eHarmony of Cloud Infrastructure?
A long-lived match made in the cloud will require 
more detail than providers and brokers are currently offering
Buried in blogs around the Internets are references to a research survey conducted by research firm ESG earlier this year on behalf of VMware. While obtaining the full contents require more than my meager pockets contain, the summary data held several nuggets of gold, among them this one on compatibility across cloud and on-premise infrastructure:
Importance of compatibility: 78% of respondents reported that it was also important that their cloud service providers’ infrastructure technologies were compatible with their internal private cloud/virtualized datacenter. 
— New Study Shows Growth of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Adoption
I'm guessing that if they'd used a term more common to networking / infrastructure domains, say interoperability, they may have gotten more ping on this statistic. And yet, I don't think interoperability is exactly what this statistic refers to. Interoperability and compatibility imply some subtle differences. Compatibility implies a level of mutual understanding at the data level which, for infrastructure, means control-plane compatibility. Policy sharing, as an example. Interoperability implies a lower-level of exchange at the data plane, protocol processing and such.
Assuming that what these 614 global respondents – all IT managers with budget responsibility – were considering important is really mobility of infrastructure service application, i.e. operational consistency, across infrastructure, this leads to an interesting question. How does one know whether a cloud offers such compatibility or not?
Cloud Brokers: Catalogs
Most discussions on cloud brokers today continue to focus on establishing matches between consumers of cloud and providers via characteristics like price and location and sometimes performance. But rarely do we see a requirement for matching infrastructure service capabilities (and thus compatibility) across environments. Most cloud providers do offer catalogs of a sort from which services can be selected and provisioned, but these are not very shareable, if you will. They aren't in a neat, publicly accessible list that can be compared against other providers' lists.
Much in the same way registries were central to the notion of enabling the success of service-oriented architectures, cloud catalogs will be central to the success of cloud broker services' ability to compare and contrast offerings. Like profiles in on-line match making services, cloud catalogs will enable the process of matching consumers with providers based not only on simple characteristics like price and performance, but on deeper more critical capabilities like security and data integrity services, acceleration and optimization, and application-layer networking.
But it's not just about listing out services. To really get to the heart of compatibility, if what we're desiring is operational consistency, we need not only a more standard method of describing infrastructure policies (rule sets, processing directives, etc…) but the means to determine whether a given infrastructure service is capable of not only accepting but creating such a policy. Such policies must be abstract, they cannot be specific to any given environment. We need a way to describe the rules used to configure Amazon Security Groups, for example, such that they can be consumed and implemented by Rackspace, or BlueLock or an OpenStack-based private cloud framework.
While there are certainly efforts around describing aspects of cloud – virtual machines, applications, and even layer 2-3 networking – in a standards-based format, there's very little in the way of efforts to do so at the infrastructure service layers. Organizations for whom infrastructure compatibility is an important factor in the provider decision making process need exactly this kind of information to aid in their transition from private to hybrid and public architectures.
Cloud brokers could provide this level of metadata, if providers recognize the importance of disseminating that information in a way that's easily consumable and are willing to offer the data organizations need to make their decisions.
Making a compatible match between two people requires a lot more detail than just age, gender, and hobbies. It's also going to take a lot more detail than just price and location to make a compatible match between cloud consumers and providers when critical business functions are on the line.
Dell Announces Private Cloud Built on OpenStack
“This year we’ve seen enterprises turn increasingly to Dell Services to help modernize and adapt their IT environments to manage the growing challenges and opportunities presented by these disruptive forces,” said Suresh Vaswani, president, Dell Services, as Dell’s CEO Michael Dell used his keynote at this year’s Dell World conference in Austin, Texas to unveil a technical preview of its private cloud.
CA To Get New CEO
After a six-month search, CA Technologies, one of the biggest American
software companies, has hired Michael Gregoire, the former CEO of Taleo,
the cloud-based talent management ISV that Oracle bought in April for $1.9
million, to replace its retiring CEO Bill McCracken next year.
McCracken, 70, will leave the board on January 7 and formally retire March
31.
Will Audiogalaxy buyout move Dropbox into a cloud music service?
There have been intriguing developments in terms of utilising the cloud as an entertainment vehicle during the past 24 hours, with Dropbox acquiring personal music streaming service Audiogalaxy and Amazon’s Cloud Player arriving on Samsung Smart TVs.
The acquisition of Audiogalaxy by cloud storage expert Dropbox may be a sign of things to come. Dropbox already allows limited music streaming as part of its cloud storage solution, and with Audiogalaxy’s expertise in that area, it seems like a match made in heaven.
In a blog post entitled “Hello, Dropbox” the three founders of Audiogalaxy, Michael Merhej, Tom Kleinpeter and Viraj Mody, wrote: “Over the last few years we’ve built a wonderful music experience on the web and mobile devices, attracting loyal users from all over the world.
“Today, we are thrilled to announce our team is joining Dropbox!” the blog continues, adding: “We are excited about the …
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Cloud Identity Management
“Companies today have customers and employees that require access to internal applications as well as cloud applications and that creates a challenge for IT. How do you manage the users who want access to those applications across multiple domains and Ping Identity solves that problem – it has a solution that helps you manage identities,” explained Mike Desai, senior director at Ping Identity, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Computing: How to Stop Being Afraid & Learn to Love the Public Cloud
CloudVelocity emerged from stealth mode Wednesday with a new name, a $5 million A round from the Mayfield Fund, and a hybrid cloud automation platform meant to entice the enterprise to push its multi-tier application into the scary public cloud as a seamless extension of its private data center.
It claims it can do it safely and without modification or performance degradation. Heady stuff if true.
Mayfield Fund managing director Navin Chaddha goes further and claims, “CloudVelocity will have the same impact on public cloud adoption as VMware did on the adoption of server virtualization by making public clouds look like internal data centers.” Mayfield incubated the start-up for the last couple of years.
This Is Not Just ERP, This Is Two-Tier ERP
The rise of Big Data and the monolithic systems that are now being built on increasingly cloud-based data models is a reality we cannot ignore.
This reality has popularized discussions relating to the core component mechanics of many firms’ IT stacks.
Key among these technologies is ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning to afford it its full moniker. The term can be taken to be a relatively broad expression as it encompasses software applications that oversee the management of suppliers, customer service, order tracking and all manner of demand and supply-related indicators…
… or to put it more simply, ERP systems look after companies’ “systems of record” data.