I am grateful to my colleague, Jim Cumiskey, Manager of our Programme Management Office (PMO) in Trinity College Dublin, for this guest blog post on some lessons shared at the recent conference of the Association of Project Management PMO Special Interest Group last September in Watford, where the main speaker was Mark Price Perry (@markpriceperry).

“The key points are that the PMO should be driven by the needs of the business; that effective leadership is critical to PMO success; that businesses need to establish and continuously evolve a PMO architecture and that the PMO must get to a position where it is viewed as a value-added, purpose-driven business unit.

This means (like all projects, in fact) that there have to be clear objectives for the PMO. The right tools  and techniques need to be available for flexible use at an appropriate level. Support from senior management is essential for the PMO’s success and development. A key aspect of this is to be more focused on business processes and outward-facing, rather than inward.

In the Trinity PMO, we’ve been placing strong emphasis on requirements, stakeholders, communications, business process and change rather than “just” systems delivery. Accordingly, our emphasis is on business benefit and on an approach that is both flexible and scalable depending on the size and demands of different projects.

To do this, it’s important to have a flexible framework that enables different tools and techniques to be brought to bear on different problems as they arise. While this is based on a vision of where we are trying to get to, it has to be very practical with clear and coherent documentation of processes;  training available; adequate staffing (a particular challenge right now) and ongoing assessment of performance.

The idea of having PMO champions in different areas of the business is a very interesting one that we can see benefit from in Trinity.

To be viewed as a value-add, purpose-driven business unit, the PMO has to ensure that projects are delivering better across the organisation (time, cost, quality, scope, customer satisfaction.) The PMO also has to undergo constant and continuous improvement, both in a formal as well as in an informal sense.”

Jim’s points are very relevant to what we are doing in the PMO in Trinity and we hope to include them as part of a self-assessment checklist of our performance and contribution to the college in the future. While we have made significant progress on developing the PMO, we realise that we have more to do and that there will always be challenges to be overcome, not least due to financial, time and resource constraints.

What lessons have you learned from the work of your PMO in your organisation? Are any of the lessons shared here relevant to your organisation? Please leave a comment and let me know.

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About Jim Cumiskey

Jim is a certified PMP and has worked in over 150 organisations for thirty years as a developer, analyst, trainer, project manager and programme manager in both the public and private sectors.

I’ve been working for a while on a policy and associated procedures for Trinity College Dublin to enable us to leverage various cloud technologies and services for the benefit of the college. What has struck me is the complexity of dealing with the topic in a large-scale environment.

As consumers, many of us use cloud services every day; examples are Gmail and Hotmail for email; Amazon Cloud Drive and Dropbox for file storage; Google Docs, Docs.com and Microsoft Skydrive for document processing; Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn for social networking, etc. Many of us tend to use these and other services with little thought being given to security, data protection, privacy, identity theft, ownership of data, etc. When considered from a corporate or business perspective, these issues are significantly more important and take on many complex legal aspects. Yet, in a corporate and, indeed, an educational environment, there is significant pressure to enable these services in the business context, since end users and familiar with them from personal use.

Pursuing another interest of mine this evening – Internet Radio – I came across C-SPAN Radio and just happened to stumble upon the live proceedings of the US Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies, on 6 October 2011, discussing the issue of the security implications of cloud computing. The Committee was addressed by very influential people in the area of information technology, information security, education and regulation:

• The Honorable Richard Spires, 
Chief Information Officer
, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• Dr. David McClure, Ph.D., 
Associate Administrator
, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, 
U.S. General Services Administration
• Mr. Greg Wilshusen, 
Director of Information Security Issues
, Government Accountability Office
• Mr. James W. Sheaffer, 
President
, North American Public Sector
, Computer Sciences Corporation
• Mr. Timothy Brown
, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Security, 
CA Technologies
• Mr. James R. Bottum
, Vice Provost for Computing & Information Technology
 and Chief Information Officer
, Clemson University
• Mr. John Curran
, Chief Executive Officer
, American Registry of Internet Numbers

Each contributor submitted a paper to the Subcommittee and they are all available on the Subcommittee’s website. So if you are looking for what the current areas of concern are in relation to security and cloud computing, why not pick up the papers and listen back to the oral testimony.

Links to the papers (PDF)

• Richard Spires
• David McClure
• Greg Wilshusen
• James W. Sheaffer
• Timothy Brown
• James R. Bottum
• John Curran

What is your organisation doing about security and cloud computing? Do you have a cloud computing policy or are your end users simply using cloud services without regard to existing policy or legislation? Please leave a comment and let me know.

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In my industry talks on Social Media, I mention the challenges presented to organisations by consumer technologies, so-called “shadow IT”, social media and mobile technologies. A new generation of technology users are used to having leading edge, powerful technologies and are not satisfied with the constraints placed by their employers on their technology use, productivity and flexibility. Therefore, many employees (and particularly younger employees) are getting around corporate controls by using personal email accounts, personal hosting services, online storage, Facebook, blogs, etc. The availability of new, powerful consumer technologies and services is putting increasing pressure on corporate IT departments to keep up.

Recent research commissioned by Mimecast, a UK-based email management company, highlights the risks that organisations face from their employees using non-corporate IT to circumvent controls. Carried out by Loudhouse Research, based in London, England, the research found that knowledgeable employees, familiar with social media and frustrated with corporate controls, are compromising corporate data and intellectual property.

Employees have become dissatisfied with the constraints of corporate email rules and mailbox size limitations. To get around these problems, more and more employees are adopting “a slapdash attitude to company intellectual property (IP)” and use personal email accounts to store corporate information on public servers, outside the control of the organisation. The research found that 85% of under 25s admitted that they send work-related emails or documents to or from personal email accounts.

The “Generation Gmail” research also found that:

• 36% of incoming email to work inboxes is not work related;
• Over 300 work-related emails are sent per person via personal accounts each year;
• Typically around half of these emails contain attachments, meaning that the average employee under 25 will send approximately three emails a week containing corporate IP and potentially sensitive information outside of their corporate environment, and
• Generation Gmail is particularly predisposed to personal email; 52 per cent rated it as better than work email in terms of mailbox size, compared to just 29 per cent of over 55s.

Working in an academic environment, I am very familiar with these challenges and with many more as well. Younger and well-educated people have come to expect that corporate IT services should be as good as what they can get for free on the Internet and they are impatient when this is not the case. However, it is difficult for organisations to respond either quickly enough or with a similar range of technologies to satisfy the expectations of employees and – in academia – students, researchers and academics.

How can corporate IT respond to these challenges? Are policies and procedures enough? What controls should or can be put in place to ensure that corporate information and IP are safeguarded? Is this even possible in the age of the iPhone, 3G, netbooks, tablets, high-capacity storage and other wireless devices?

It seems to me that the response to these challenges must be  try to give users what they expect, no matter how difficult this might seem. Perhaps corporate IT can never be as fast as the giants of the Internet like Facebook, Microsoft and Google but it should look for ways, nevertheless, to provide what it can. This could mean developing a Social Media strategy that identifies how you will provide the communications, collaboration and information sharing technologies that people now expect. Where can you use third parties to deliver services? What partners might you work with? Can you use Facebook or Yammer to enable sharing and collaboration? What about Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress or Typepad for blogging? Are your policies, procedures, controls and security constraints still appropriate for the current environment and expectations of users?

We grapple with these issues every day in Trinity College and, to be truthful, we are probably always going to lag behind our users, because that is the nature of the organisation and it reflects the modern experience of technology innovation. Nevertheless, we have tried to meet expectations where we can. We have adopted Google Mail and Google Docs for our students; we are trialling Yammer as a collaboration platform for the college; we recently completed the rollout of internally-hosted Microsoft Exchange for staff; we are implementing SharePoint 2010 as an enterprise collaboration platform; we offer podcasting services and publish material with iTunes and iTunesU; we are about to release WordPress as a blogging platform for all users; and we use Microsoft Enterprise Project Management for project collaboration. We are also working on defining our needs for XaaS and Cloud Computing.

It is a start, and we know we have a long way to go. But if we can meet the expectations of our users, perhaps we can discourage them from using other technologies that might put the enterprise at risk.

What do you think? Are you dealing with these problems as well? Are you giving your users the technologies they want? What solutions have you found and how have you implemented them? This is a challenge that no organisation can avoid, so how are you approaching it? Please leave a comment and let me know your views.

Finally, Mimecast’s Chief Scientist, Nathaniel Borenstein and Cloud Strategist, Justin Pirie; and CEO of First Base Technologies ISACA, Peter Wood will host a webinar at 10 a.m. GMT on 8 March 2011 with the title ‘Generation Gmail: Is business email at risk?’. You can take part in the seminar at http://mediazone.brighttalk.com/event/infosecurity/79cc30c735-4820-intro?TID=MC.

And very lastly, if you would like to talk to me about the use of Social Media in your organisation, please feel free to contact me.

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I live about 200 metres from Baldongan Castle where, in June 1642, a 200-strong garrison of Irish rebels were put to the sword by English Parliamentary forces. The events surrounding the massacre stem from the Irish Rebellion of 1641, an uprising initiated in a time of deteriorating conditions in Ireland, which was under English rule, and a breakdown in relations between the English king, Charles I, and the English parliament. The 1641 rebellion in Ireland was undertaken in support of the king against the parliament, as the Irish feared that they would lose property and status if the powers of the king were limited and parliament prevailed. The parliament included a man who would be remembered in infamy in many parts of Ireland, Oliver Cromwell, prior to his brutal conquest of Ireland, which began in 1649 with the infamous Drogheda Massacre.

Trinity College Dublin has just opened an exhibition in the Long Room of its Old Library entitled ‘Ireland in Turmoil: the 1641 Depositions’ concerning this bloody period in Irish history. The President of Ireland, Mary McAleese opened the exhibition. Also attending was Lord Bannside (formerly Dr. Ian Paisley). A website concerning the period has also been launched. It is a free resource and contains the transcribed and digitised 1641 Depositions, which are witness testimonies of the violent massacres of the 1641 Irish Rebellion. The project was a joint undertaking between Trinity College Dublin, the University of Aberdeen and the University of Cambridge.

The online publication of the 1641 Depositions was funded by the Irish Research Council of the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), Trinity College Dublin and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)  in the UK. The exhibition ‘Ireland in Turmoil: The 1641 Depositions’ runs until April 3rd 2011 in the Long Room, Old Library, Trinity College Dublin. I’ve spent some hours on the website already and discovered some fascinating information and harrowing tales. I recommend it to readers.

Links:

University of Aberdeen News Release

University of Cambridge News Release

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I am speaking at a Microsoft and PM Centrix event tomorrow on Trinity College’s experience of implementing Microsoft Project and Project Server in the Information Systems Department. The title of the event is “Microsoft Project: An Intuitive and Easier Way to Complete Projects” and takes place in the Westbury Hotel, Grafton Street, Dublin. Registration begins at 08.30 and admission is free. Click here for further details of the event.

The slides from the above presentation have now been uploaded to slideshare here:

Below are my slides from the presentation to the CIO-Connect event on Social Media on 20 May last in Dublin. You can also find them on SlideShare.

Feedback to the presentation was very positive and I’d particularly like to thank Barbara Dosseter, Delivery Director of CIO-Connect for this very generous comment, which she posted on her LinkedIn profile:

“In Dublin’s fair city where… I saw the BEST presentation/discussion on Social Media yet. Given by John Lawlor of Trinity College at the CIO Connect lunch – Creating Collaborative Conversations. Practical and as a tenured IT person John dealt with the realities and concerns. His factors for success – Speed & Flexibility, Ease of Use, Demand Driven and Individual Value First. I am going to revisit the presentation because there was soooooo much meat in it. Thank you John, you’re a true advocate and truly inspiring.”

If you would like to discuss Social Media for your organisation, please contact me directly; if you’d like to share your own experience of implementing or championing Social Media, please leave a comment below.

If you liked this post, you might also like:

Gary Hamel’s Interesting Take on Social Media in Organisations

Social Media Revolution? What’s Your View?

Social Networking – Irish Above Average

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I went along this evening to a pretty full lecture theatre in Trinity College’s Science Gallery to listen to Venky Narayanamurti of the Harvard Kennedy School speaking on the subject of science, technology and society. He is a man clearly passionate about his topic and spoke with conviction, vigour, animation and not a little humour. Venky spoke about the great inventors – Edison, Watt, Einstein, Pasteur- and how invention and innovation come from applied science, research, experimentation, use cases and what he termed “grand challenges”. He spoke passionately about the need for an understanding of science among our leaders and hailed Obama’s commitment to the sciences in his inaugural speech:

“We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.”

Vekny spoke about how innovation does not always have to come from inventing something new, but can also come from finding new and imaginative ways of using something that already exists. He cited the case of Ushahidi, an open source, ”crowdsourcing” system that uses simple mobile technology, such as phone, SMS, and web, combined with geolocation and mapping software on the Internet to track emergency and crisis information. Ushahidi is a fantastic example of how collaboration and innovation, coupled with existing technology, can come together to solve real world problems. It was used in Kenya to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phone after the 2008 elections. It was used in India to monitor elections and it was used in Washington DC to deal with the aftermath of their snow this year. It is now being used to monitor the crisis in Haiti after the earthquake.

In question and answer following his speech, Venky’s answer to one question stuck with me. Asked about invention and about how and whether people should focus their efforts, Venky said, ” You can’t be everywhere, because then you are nowhere.” How true.

It was a wonderful evening in the Science Gallery and I look forward to attending more lectures there. The lecture was recorded, so I hope it will find its way to YouTube or iTunesU.

If you were at Venky’s lecture and would like to add your thoughts, please leave a comment and add to the record.  If you have used Ushahidi, or know about the application, I’d also love to hear from you. And, finally, if you have had experience of crowdsourcing, please share your thoughts and experience here.

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This surely is a big question, some answers to which I look forward to hearing at Trinity College’s Science Gallery next Wednesday, 24 March 2010, at 18.00 UTC/GMT.

Professor Venkatesh Narayanamurti, Harvard Kennedy School Director of Science, Technology and Public Policy will speak on “The Role of Science and Technology in Meeting Societal Grand Challenges” in the Science Gallery’s Culture of Science lecture series. The lecture is presented in association with the TCD/UCD Innovation Aliance, which is a partnership between both Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin that will work with the education sector, the State and its agencies and the business and venture capital communities to develop a world-class ecosystem for innovation that will drive enterprise development and the creation of sustainable high value jobs. Wow!

Entrance is free for members (SG members and on production of a valid TCD and UCD id card) and a mere €5 euros for other guests.

You can keep up with events at the Science Gallery on their website, follow them on Twitter @sciencegallery, or join their 740+ fans on Facebook.

Trinity College is also on Twitter @tcdublin and has many sites on Facebook.

If you’d like to connect with me, check out the contact details on the right.

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Inspiring Talk by Venky Narayanamurti at Science Gallery

Social Media: Creating Collaborative Conversations

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