Project Planning Templates For The Cio: Fill & Download for Free

There is a confusion here about what sort of document you need and you might think it is just terminological, but it is important. You will need a project plan (at least) for an IT project and you will need a business case for an IT project, but it is most unlikely that a business plan would be at all helpful.The business case will focus on the numbers from what may be one or more perspectives, which will certainly include return on investment (RoI). By spending this amount of money on an IT project will it generate more profit - or perhaps reduce losses - by more than the cost of the project?You can get templates for free from the web for a business case and eliminate the headings that you don’t need - or we have a book on developing an effective business case. The subtitle probably tells you most of what you need to keep in mind: Making a Persuasive Case out of Your Numbers. The key word is persuasive because most people creating a business case tend to lose sight of the purpose of the document, and merely create what appears to them to be a good solid case in terms of numbers and they can overlook some of the real issues. Just to add some colour, don’t fall into the trap of assuming that just because you achieve a real RoI in your projected numbers that this is in any way persuasive. (I’ve spent hours and hours dealing with this, so it’s a trap that people fall into unwittingly.) To be persuasive, even if you are achieving a respectable RoI, you have to demonstrate why the project is a more valuable way of using the money to be invested - you might achieve a 5% RoI, but if, for example, money is costing you 7% to borrow that is a net loss or if, for another example, you can achieve a much higher RoI by doing something different, you are missing a trick. This isn’t quite an opportunity cost - but it is so similar as to bear thinking about.In making your business case persuasive, remember something that is vital. In a professional survey of CTOs and CIOs - technology and information respectively - 87% of them thought that the business cases they produced were solely there to gain board approval for pet projects. In case you think that is overly cynical, my own view is that the remaining 13% were hopelessly out of touch.

I have had two bugs that were rather satisfying to solve. The first was at my first job as a test developer, we had to script batches of automated tests to run against the build each day and pick up on what was broken by the dev team in that days build. The software was at the countries biggest dev house for legal conveyancing software, they had and still have a complete monopoly on the market so it was a well funded company, literally printing money. I was on a new project for a new debt collection system, so it was a legal accounting package which had been released for about three years in the market already. Problem was that at their biggest client, they had a massive bug that would make the balance sheet go un-balanced, every month-end batch run. It then involved a massive amount of SQL scripting to fix everything and get the balance sheet to balance again. This had been going on for three years and would only effect this particular client, they were the biggest client so the loudest to complain each month. So everyone was always on edge at month end. They knew round about where the bug was, just no one could find it and spot where the issue was.Enter Kent stage left (on his first day) as the new rookie on the team (350 people), so the project manager assigns this three year old bug to me to resolve as it’s the 1st of the month - it happened again the previous day - my first day and no one has time to waste with showing a newbie the ropes around the office, so she throws me in at the deep end. Anyway, so I find it and call my test manager over and show him. “Check this out it doesn’t look right” I say. He chuckles and shakes his head and I can see what he’s thinking, he moves over and takes a look at what I show him and he immediately points to the business rules document and says “nope that’s not it, it’s doing what the business rules say it should”. He says it loudly and makes a big fuss and over explains to me like I am an idiot, that the business rules document should be my first point of call and that I am wasting his time and don’t know what I am talking about or doing and should wait until he has more time later in the week to orientate me and that I should read the Intranet and learn what the company colours are in hexadecimal. They all had a good laugh at me, so I put my tail between my legs and left it alone as I didn’t want to piss off my manager on the first day. I was never again assigned the “big bug” as it had been done in jest to rib me on my first day. There were a number of crazy theories running around the office about what was causing this bug at the client, the best I heard was it must be SQL Express 2005 vs SQL Server 2005 as that was the only difference they could see at that client. They were the only ones using SQL Server 2005, yup that’s how desperate things were there, they were about to start blaming the aliens.It was a few weeks later, that I happened to be in the same part of the code again (I had avoided it since, after being humiliated on my first day). I had revised all my accounting textbooks so was fairly up to speed with how debt collection accounting systems needed to work (debt collection accounting is a little more complex than the run of the mill accounting systems). And there it was again, as clear as day, the software was posting a one sided transaction in the code. So I log it and call my manager over, “look this is posting a single sided transaction I have just logged it”. He comes over and looks at it, but can’t understand a thing about debit and credit, so has to find the page in the business rules document to check it against. “No” he says, “it’s right, it’s doing exactly what the business rules say it should.” “Well then the business rules are wrong” I say. He laughs at me and rejects it. So I log it again and escalate it to the build manager this time. Understand that it was considered anarchy to be doing that in this environment as everyone would just sit in perfect silence at their desks with earphones on pretending to be coding and in deep concentration on some major complex task. An office full of “yes people”. So it caused a few heads to turn and take notice, so then the exact same thing happens with the build manager. He rejects the bug, I go over to his desk and ask why, “it’s posting a one sided transaction I say.” I say it loud enough so that the other side of the office can all hear that something is up. He points to the business rules document and says “the code is doing what the business rules say it should, this document was written and signed off by a team of 12 accountants from Deloitte. You mean to tell me you know better than 12 accountants? There’s no bug.” I was like “I don’t care what the business rules say or who they were written by, the code is posting a single sided transaction. If the business rules say that, then the document is wrong too.” So I go sit down at my desk, log it as a bug in the business rules and escalate it again, this time to the project manager.She read it and luckily understood accounting systems so didn’t reject it and the three year old balance sheet bug was finally fixed. It was a bug by the accountants who signed off on the business rules document, so no-one ever questioned that they could ever make a mistake. Out of tens of thousands of bugs and fixes in the logging software it was the only one logged as a business rule bug.I did get a round of applause at the next days scrum meeting. I resigned shortly after as I felt I was under appreciated, even after they offered me the build manager role as he resigned shortly after that episode too.The second satisfying bug was at my next job. I was managing the SQL replication environment for the companies investment modelling tool, we had around 150 databases spread around the country all replicating back to our main head office. We were going to upgrade the entire environment to SQL 2008 R2 using the web replication, they were still on SQL 2000 and using Nokia Intellisync for replication. Microsoft had just bought Nokia and stopped the licencing of Intellisync to get everyone to move over to using their web replication. The SQL web replication was a pain in the arse to set up and get running compared to Intellisync, but I managed to get it to run properly with the investment modelling software and have a full test environment to use as the template for the IT team to see that it worked and won’t bring down the entire environment every time someone replicates, which would happen on SQL 2000. I did have a very skilled consultant helping me set everything up and use as a sounding board for all the ideas that I had with the upgrade project. He taught me everything I knew when I first started, so was my mentor essentially.As we were approaching the deadline to begin the upgrade project, the test environment suddenly stopped replicating in full. The consultant had been fiddling inside there, so I didn’t think much of it as I was soon off seeing clients to explain what was going to happen and just to ensure that their environments were suitable for the upgrade. I also had to spend some time in the one new clients labs as their IT team refused to allow us in the door saying that they had experience of SQL replication and that it was banned from their infrastructure as it would destroy the network while replicating. So I was out of the office for around 6 weeks over this period and didn’t think much of the test environment suddenly not working properly. At the feedback meetings to the CIO and CEO I placed the blame on the consultant as he was the only other person allowed into the test environment. He assured everyone that it would soon be fixed and running again, SQL 2008 R2 Web Replication is 100% safe and works well he’d say. So I went off on my travels prepping everyone and getting it approved in the lab of the big client. I figured he’d soon have it running again on the test environment, ready for us to simply copy and paste it into production. He sat on it for four weeks and couldn’t fix it, he had contacts at Microsoft in Atlanta that he escalated the issue to, and they were like… we don’t know, we can’t see anything wrong with it and don’t know why it’s not fully replicating. It was a difficult bug to spot as not all data would fail, only a subset of the data was being lost when each test machine replicated. The deadline was drawing closer and closer and we were literally ten days away from kicking off the upgrade project. The rumour at the company was that I didn’t have a clue about this new technology and was sending the company over a cliff. The consultant was a very respected individual at the company so no one really believed my explanation that he must have broken it. “Kent’s a cowboy and in way over his head here, the upgrade project needs to be called off” was the feeling I got from everyone when I returned from all my travels around the country.So I remember it clearly, it was a Monday afternoon and after an emergency meeting on the Friday with the IT team, the consultant had claimed to have a manual fix for the issue, so the IT manager knowing nothing just told him to go right ahead and apply the fix into production so that the upgrade could go ahead as planned. So I was back in the office now and I see the consultant sitting at one of the hot desks after lunch. I walk up to him and ask him why he’s there, he explains that the IT manager approved his fix on Friday and that he needed to apply it ASAP onto the production machine as the upgrade was going ahead as planned. It was a SQL script he was going to apply that would take 6 hours to run. “What?!” I say “Over my dead body you going to run that on my database.” So he gets quite agitated at me, as I say he’s taking an axe to fix a simple problem and that his homemade SQL script will create more issues then it will solve. Admittedly, he was the expert in the country on SQL replication so was the guy to do it if there ever was one, hence why he got a little annoyed with me. “OK, so lets try fix this then, let me show you what we’re dealing with” he says. I sit down next to him and he opens up SQL Management studio and off we go into the replication scripts and triggers. Places I didn’t even know existed, and we all of a suddenly deep into a massive ugly piece of SQL all written in lower case by some Microsoft engineer with an Asian sounding name. The replication script was hard to follow and read as it was all in lower case, we get some lines down and hit a function call, he opens the function and it’s like another 500 lines of SQL and we into yet another function call, this goes on for around three hours and then we were back at the original function call, needing to check and follow the next line now, which was going to send us on the wild goose chase again. At this point he turned to me and said “Look at how many more lines we are going to have to do the same thing with, it will take us years to finish this”. There were like thousands of lines in this script alone, so it was an impossible task to complete before the deadline. So I stop and think a bit. “This thing was working when I left four weeks ago, now it’s not, what has changed?” I ask him, he shrugs his shoulders and says “Microsoft don’t know either, my script will work and fixes it.”I was shell shocked and sitting in stunned silence considering what nightmare consequences his script could cause to the environment in the future. I was staring at his laptop screen and looking at the first function call and reading all the variables in the parameters when I noticed something strange, it was a particular variable that I had seen in the front end during the install process and thought it shouldn’t be in this particular function call. If it is here I think, then the install was done wrong, but I did this install and I would never make that mistake. Whoever has installed this has forgotten to tick a checkbox on the set-up. What he’d done was run a repair on the test environment which he does whenever he logs onto a new box, he never mentioned it to me and had forgotten to tick a simple checkbox that part of the data relied on to be replicated correctly. Problem solved, project wasn’t delayed and my reputation stayed intact at the firm.

Apple had a spreadsheet program called Numbers and it released several years ago. It came with every Mac, so it wasn’t technically ‘free’. I tried it for a while - and it’s really simple until you tried to create a difficult calculation or formula - it probably had the functionality but I couldn’t find it quickly. It was just too easy just to switch back to Excel. That’s the difference between 10’s of thousands of hours working with a program and opening Numbers a few times over a couple of weeks.Not to mention every other spreadsheet in every other office in creation is already in Excel.So, here’s what we’re dealing with, do you use what you really know, plus what everyone else knows -OR- use something no one else uses but it’s free. Or try this - Submitting to my boss the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet -OR- sending him something he can’t open but it’s free? He’d think I’m an idiot.Personally, I’d rather not give my boss (or client or partner or vendor) the impression that I’m an idiot - make them figure that out for themselves.I do all my work on Macs, but you can bet I’ve saved off a copy of that Keynote Presentation in the PowerPoint format before I send it around. (It still stands out as the Keynote themes are so different from the many times used ppt templates). Same with business process drawings - saved off in Visio to share.As to what will Microsoft do next? Well, if history is any example, I’m sure whatever Microsoft does will make sense to Microsoft. Will it make sense to you or me? Probably not.Edit/Update: Interesting comments on today’s WSJ’s CIO Journal The Morning Download: Google Cloud’s New Chief Faces Growth Challenge - they cite the ‘smartest-kid syndrome’ whereby Google sells cloud technologies they use themselves - ‘built by the smartest people for the smartest people’ which, limits market appeal due to both ability to use by ‘average*’ users and ability to identify with Google’s hyper-techie image.*average users - which could mean I’m a flippin’ genius when it comes to formulas projecting payback and ROI for companies adopting new ERP software (I’m not but let’s all pretend for the sake of the example), however, spending all my time analyzing workers, transactional volumes and increased through put of production lines means I don’t really spend all that much time studying Excel advanced features - so even though my genius is evident elsewhere, my Excel skills are merely ‘moderate’ or average.