The articles in this newsletter do not necessarily express or represent the views of the PMI Central Indiana Chapter.

All copyrighted material has been republished with the permission of the author(s).

(c) 2008 PMI Central Indiana Chapter. All rights reserved.

PMI CIC Director of Corporate Responsibility
Laura Connelly, PMP

The PMI CIC Board of Directors (BOD) has had a couple dynamic months since the last newsletter.  This article is focused on the chapter’s long-term strategic growth opportunities including member retention, volunteer recruitment, succession planning, organizational structure, strategic goals and the bylaws. 

PMI CIC Director of Programs
Matt Bracher, PMP

The Monthly Programs are an integral part of the Chapters presence in the community.  I took the responsibilities as the Programs Director in January of this year.  Alan Devney was the director last year.  He continued to provide excellent speakers while working with our struggling facility, the Five Seasons.  He did a wonderful job just keeping everything moving.  During the first quarter of this year the job has seen its up and downs.  The chapter has been forced to move locations and we still look to gather volunteers.  On the other hand, attendance has increased by almost 50 attendees and the speakers have been exceptional.

Chapter Events
PMI Central Indiana Chapter

PMI Central Indiana Chapter offers a variety of educational and professional development events relating to the discipline of Project Management.  Our 2-hr Monthly Program Meetings include dinner and a Project Management presentation lasting approximately 1.5 hours.  Our full-day Seminars include breakfast, lunch, and a Project Management training session lasting 6 - 8 hours.  Our Professional Development Day (PDD) and Vendor Fair is a full-day event that includes breakfast, lunch, and several Project Management presentations available in each 1-hr timeslot.

Risk in Scope, Cost, Effort, Duration: Project Results
Lee A. Peters

The first step in achieving great project outcomes is to clearly define the Result, how success will be measured, and what is important to the various stakeholders. This reduces the ambiguity in the Result and in how success is evaluated. This alone dramatically reduces uncertainty throughout the project. The next phase of risk management is to define uncertainty in scope. Just describing what defines Scope is a challenge. Well defined Scope is more than the Work Breakdown Structure, but without the WBS there is great uncertainty. People love to guess at scope rather than do a detailed breakdown – scope in vastly underestimated. There is a driving need to say things are easier than that really are. People do not take the time to plan – to work the project from beginning to the end. There is a ‘and then the miracle happens’ syndrome in project scope. The uncertainty in under or un-estimated scope, seems to me, to be the common cause of project failure.

Who Manages the Project Manager?: The answer may surprise you
Kevin S. Suddeth, PMP

Project Management as defined by PMBOK “is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements”. At the heart of project management is the Project Manager (PM) who is responsible for…well everything. Specifically PMBOK tells us that the PM “is the person responsible for accomplishing the project objectives”, and one of those objectives is the professional responsibility to properly communicate to the stakeholders, customers, organization and the public.

But what if the stakeholders, customers, organization and the public don’t care?

Best Practices with MS Project: Using Multiple Baselines in Iterative Development
George Saich

A baseline is a group of nearly 20 primary reference points (in five categories: start dates, finish dates, durations, work, and cost estimates) that you can set to record the original project plan when that plan is completed and refined. As the project progresses, you can set additional baselines (to a total of 11 for each project) to help measure changes in the plan. For example, if your project has several phases, you can save a separate baseline at the end of each phase, to compare planned values against actual data.Because the baseline provides the reference points against which you compare actual project progress, the baseline should include your best estimates for task duration, start and finish dates, costs, and other project variables that you want to monitor.

In an iterative planning environment there is a recognition that all the facts needed to create an accurate forecast of the entire lifecycle of the project may be unknown; therefore detailed planning is only completed for the phases of the project that are knowable.  Microsoft Project supports the capturing of multiple baselines for use at different phases of the project

Fusion Alliance: What is the 'Word'? - Risk
Kimberle Seale

Wikipedia defines risk as “…a concept that denotes a potential negative impact to an asset or some characteristic of value that may arise from some present process or future event.”  PMBOK defines risk as “an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives.”

Global Knowledge: Four Steps to Building a Successful PMO
Lisa Sipe

The failure rate of large Information Technology (IT) projects is legend. Survey results illustrate that about 50 percent of all projects do not meet original budget or schedule estimates and are missing critical scope elements, while an additional 25 percent are abandoned, never reaching completion at all. Yet according to Gartner, world-class organizations enjoy an IT project success rate closer to 90 percent. What is it they know about delivering business value through project management that nearly triples their success rate? Most of them have established successful project management offices (PMOs). In fact, two-thirds of organizations implementing PMOs report that project success rates have improved significantly as a result.

The Newsletter Editor: Remember to Volunteer
Ronald Lacy, MBA, PMP

Its Memorial Day, barbeques abound, yard work, playing with the kids….then it hits me…. I have to get this newsletter published by the end of the week!  Not only do I need to load the articles into our wonderful new content management system, but I also need to write an editorial.  And I thought to myself, I wish I could drop this PMI CIC newsletter stuff….