Ukraine’s Tech Scene Keeps Growing

This September, I traveled to Ukraine to visit my software development team in Odessa. The Black Sea Summit, one of Ukraine’s largest tech events, coincided with my stay, so I jumped at the opportunity to get to know the local tech community a little better.

This year, the Black Sea Summit was held for the second time. The event attracted over 700 tech experts, and featured a number of sessions and workshops. The ones dedicated to inspiration and growth were my favorites.

More than 30 world-renowned speakers shared the latest industry trends with the audience and showcased the best practices to attract investment and foster innovation. I was very excited to listen to Wendy Dent, Mark Tyurell, Andrew Kolodjuk, Rich Strombuk — the  Technology Pioneers who have greatly influenced the business and society according to the World Economic Forum.

Patrick Kramer, the Chief Cyborg Officer of Digiwell, was one of the headliners. During his presentation, Patrick implanted a chip in a hand of one of the volunteers from the audience, who, as a result, became the first Ukrainian cyborg. The chip can store payment details and contact information, and even open locks without a key.

While international speakers were talking about new technologies, young Ukrainian teams were presenting their startups. Ukraine is home to Europe’s largest tech talent pool with its 74 000 specialists, and the fourth largest supplier of IT professionals in the world, so I was very interested in seeing what kind of cool new tech is coming to life here. These are the six startups that won the first round of Seedstars Ukraine at the Grow Stage: BioSens, a portable device for quick food diagnostics; Viosk, a tool that allows to create video adverts automatically; Protokol, a service for decoding speech and converting speech into text; DeviceVoice, an IoT solution for the vending industry; Glash, a video-stabilization technology that runs on smartphones and action cameras, and allows to create extreme sport videos; and Gorilla, a service for ordering food from different restaurants.

The BioSens developers brought the first prototype of their device to the conference. The invention is easy to use: just put in the product such as milk or juice on a special biosensor and in 15 minutes view the information about the concentration of bacteria and mycotoxins in the product on your smartphone. Speed is the main advantage of this new tech since the same type of analysis can take up to two weeks in a lab.

Of course, such a great conference wouldn’t have taken place without the support of multiple sponsors, and I take great pride in the fact that HYS Enterprise, our software development partner, was among them. Kudos to the entire Black Sea SummIT team for all the work they put in to make the event happen!

Jan Willem Tromp

Why is resource leveling in a multi-project environment not successful?

Interesting question. In a multi project environment people work simultaneously in several projects.  Resource allocation is the biggest challenge in such an environment. Resource leveling over multi projects demands priority rules between projects. Planners have to define these priority rules. After leveling the planner has a hard time to understand the leveling rules of the software system. He does not recognize the end result.
 
Secondly, resource leveling assumes a deterministic world. I can assure you that determinism does not exist in a multi project environment. Why? To much variations in task completion and to many interdependencies between projects because of the shared resources. Every time you level, reality will hit you soon. 

Thirdly, for 30 years the academic community tries to develop heuristic methods for optimizing the resource allocation. I know some of the professors in this world who decided to stop this avenue because it does not work! In contrast with Advanced Planning & Scheduling in manufacturing environments, this does not work in multi project environments. To much variation.

But there is one way out. Add a lot of safety to every task to deal with the uncertainty. Then do the resource leveling. You will notice that it is much more stable. But don't be sad if you discover that the efficiency of your company dropped down significantly and lead times of your projects expand.

Conclusion: be careful in believing the ambassadeurs of Project Management software that are exited about their resource leveling functionality.  

Their are two alternatives concepts: FLOW MPM and CCPM. Although CCPM is also a type of resource leveling within one project.

The project planning nightmare resolved

Just imagine you want to create a project schedule with a few hundred tasks. You split the project in a few phases and finish every phase with a milestone. On the top of your Gantt chart you put all your milestones. In order to maintain the project schedule in execution phase you connect the tasks. Setting relations between tasks in a Gantt chart is undoable that’s why you prefer a network view. And what do you get? A spaghetti network. Do you have a clear overview of your project? No way!

The classical way of creating a network with 6 milestones and just 14 tasks. It is already a spaghetti network!

We took up the challenge to improve it. We created FLOW MPM software where you easily can calculate the priorities and resource load only based on project networks. We also made it much easier to draw a network without loosing the functionality. Have a look below.

Believe it or not. But this project network in FLOW MPM has the same functionality as the first network. But we less relations to maintain. You get no spaghetti but a clear network.

Do you like it? 

Jan Willem Tromp

The balance between order and chaos in multi-project companies

According to Geraldi (2008), many management and organisational models state that an organisation is successful if it manages to combine organisational creativity and innovation with mechanical efficiency. However, most Multi Project Based Organizations find it difficult to achieve this. The desire to avoid inefficiency and the urge to minimise uncertainty and risks increases the degree of control and bureaucratisation, which often means a decrease in creativity and flexibility.

Along the project life-cycle, employees face diverse types of challenges. Projects tend to emerge as chaotic systems, as projects start with an unique idea, the project scope is still not clearly defined, project stakeholders are not sure of its feasibility, the contract linking possible parties still does not exist, authority and responsibilities are not clearly defined, the new members of the project are still getting to know each other and identifying the best form of cooperation, etc. Thus, projects are still in chaos, i.e. formless or disordered, or at least, significantly less defined and formalised than the subsequent phases of the project. The following phases clearly demand higher levels of order. Procurement, production and assembly – involve many companies and people; consequently the decentralization of authority and responsibility is necessary to cope with the amount of work to do on time. The final phases demand a very high coordination of tasks and companies on site, and consequently, well defined structures and clear responsibility, but still with some flexibility for unpredicted issues that frequently emerge on site.

Thus, projects demand both mechanic and organic paradigms, both order and chaos; in other words, the management of projects faces different challenges and requires organizations with different degrees of flexibility.
This paradox is especially pronounced in multi-project companies – companies such as software development, engineering consulting, plant engineering companies, civil engineering, event management. These companies have projects as their main function and source of turnover. Consequently, these companies deal with the different types and intensities of complexity in projects, as well as among different types of projects in the company’s portfolio, between projects and supporting functions, as well as among subsidiaries, acquired and merged companies, and relevant project partners. Such heterogeneity demands structures with different degrees of flexibility.

GLOW Management developed FLOW MPM that helps multi project organizations to balance between order and chaos. While developing and executing the projectplan we are aware in which phase you are in and deal with the uncertainty coming from the edge of chaos and strive for balance between order and chaos.

Jan Willem Tromp

GERALDI, J. 2008. The balance between order and chaos in multi-project firms: A conceptual model. International Journal of Project Management, 26:348-356.

Plan less, Get more, the new way in multi project management

It is a myth that in order to get good priorities and load graphs in a multi project environment you have to create a detailed project plan and actualize the Gantt frequently.
GLOW Management has done a lot of research in multi project environments and found out that the dominant way of doing project planning is not sufficient anymore and extremely labor intensive.
We turned it around. Our main goal was to develop a planning method for a multi project environment which would deliver the best priorities for tasks and actualized load graphs for all resources, with less effort.
With FLOW MPM we are able to do that. You just have to create a project network. It is sufficient enough to connect summaries with milestones (instead of all tasks). Secondly, you do not need to put task bars on the right spot in your planning. FLOW MPM is very sophisticated software that creates a Gantt automatically based on the network and buffer time. You don’t have to input and maintain a lot of parameters to run FLOW MPM. We dislike parameters but love agility.
A project manager in heavy machine building said: ”I do not need a planner anymore. Together with my team we created a network. During the project, FLOW MPM gives me the right priorities and actualized load graphs over all projects. We only have to update the remaining work. FLOW gives much better information and insight, resulting in high reliability, more speed and efficiency. It also saved me a planner. We plan less and get more”.
Jan Willem Tromp

We will start your project later in order to deliver earlier!

This counter intuitive title is not a paradox. If your most loaded people have to play a role in an extra project, all projects can delay. First of all because the waiting times go up and secondly because this extra project causes bad multi tasking. People have to divide their attention to more subjects.

Let me give a short example of an experience.

A client (R&D department) of us wanted to improve the due date performance. We did an analysis with our software FLOW MPM and the conclusion was the following:

• The most loaded resource group assumed a capacity of 4 man-hours per hour (5 men). 
• FLOW* calculated a workload of 11 man-hours per hour. Way too much. 
• And the output* of this group was 2.3 man-hours per hour, 

The output is the actual capacity in this circumstance. By reducing the load to 6 man-hours per hour, the output went up automatically to 4.7 man-hours per hour. Why? Because the people in this group were able to focus on less projects.

End result. The lead-time dropped more than 70% and the finished projects doubled.

* coming from the tool FLOW MPM

6 basisregels voor hogere snelheid en efficiency in multi project omgeving

regel 1. Zorg ervoor dat geen enkele resource groep meer dan 10% overbeladen is. Monitor de ontwikkeling daarvan continu.

regel 2. Prioriteer activiteiten over alle groepen en projecten heen. Na vrijgave zijn alle projecten gelijkwaardig.

regel 3. Grijp bij overbelading direct in door werk te herverdelen, milestones te verschuiven, projecten bevriezen, deadlines verschuiven of capaciteit te verhogen (indien mogelijk).

regel 4. De gemeten output is je bewezen capaciteit. Volg de trendlijn want deze is dynamisch van karakter.

regel 5. Zet niet bij alle projecten de deadline vast. Zorg voor flexibiliteit. Het is je reddingslijn.

regel 6. Zo gauw een groep vol beladen raakt, email en telefoon uit voor 75% van de werkdag. Geloof me, dit werkt fantastisch.