August Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Project Management

Interview with Marti Menacho, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, TIBCO Software, Inc.

Taos: Tell us a little bit about your company and organization.

Marti: TIBCO is a leading enabler of real-time business and the world’s largest independent business integration software company. Worldwide headquarters are in Palo Alto. The company functions fairly centralized with a majority of the business processes functioning out of Palo Alto. We have a few development centers in the US and India. Sales, professional services and support are based in offices around the world in order to be closer to our customer base. However, we recently acquired another software company headquartered in the UK. They grew their business through acquisition of successful reseller companies and, as a result, continued to operate fairly autonomous as country P & L’s. The company is now moving to localize some of the business processes.

IT at TIBCO is fairly centralized and aligns closely with the centralized model of TIBCO’s business processes. Company direction for IT is centralized in Palo Alto with local deployment and support in the UK for EMEA and in India for development support locally. APAC is currently supported remotely from Palo Alto and with local technical staff. We have been moving more and more first line of support out into the region and relying on the different time zones to provide global support. We are also looking for leadership in certain technology directions to come from and pilot in the regions outside of the Americas.

Project Portfolio Development and Governance

Taos: In your organization, can you talk about how Program and Project Management play a role?

Marti: We’ve implemented a project governance model at TIBCO. At a strategic project setting level, we have an Executive Advisory Board (EAB) with whom IT conducts a quarterly review to:

• Determine priorities and investments,
• Articulate how projects fit into the bigger picture and build upon each other to achieve certain business benefits, and
• Determine the “box” that we are going to work within -
• Timeframe
• Money
• Resources

Both our infrastructure projects and our application and business projects go through the same review process. The business projects are sponsored and presented by business owners (e.g. Marketing, Sales, Finance, etc.). The infrastructure projects are sponsored by me as the infrastructure business owner within the company.

Taos: What advice would you give to other IT leaders who also recognize the need for such governance in their operations. How did you get buy-in?

Marti: It’s an iterative process that has to be based on what will fit within your business. We’re growing, and management was able to recognize that we needed a holistic approach (rather than a departmental approach) to understanding and prioritizing IT projects. Within my own operation, I had to work to get my team to understand that even infrastructure projects have to provide business value.

Step One

To break it down, we first need to understand all the moving pieces so we documented our infrastructure and applications inventory. This included all the departmental developed and managed systems. Then, working with my team documented a recommended disposition for everything based upon our knowledge. Disposition categories were:

• Keep and maintain
• Keep and upgrade
• Replace
• Retire
• To be determined – more information is needed

Step Two

Then, based on the inventory and the disposition, we talked with our business counterparts – some conversations were strategic, about business plans and initiatives. Others were more tactical, about maintenance contracts and end-of-life support. This helped us to see redundancies and duplicate efforts and ensure that we had the business interests appropriately accounted for.

Interestingly, in these discussions many of the business owners wanted to talk to me about how pleased they were with the support they were getting from the helpdesk. I had to be clear that what I needed to talk about were the things that were driving their operation, for example “Let’s talk about how you’re managing campaigns and whether you are getting the results you expect. What are the other ways you are getting leads? How are you producing the SEC reports?” Instead of talking about what IT does today or what we need IT to do, we talked about what they were trying to do. And it turns out that there were a lot of things that overlapped between departments. In one example, Finance was struggled with revenue recognition because of the way Sales quoted products. At the same time, Sales was talking about how they couldn’t get contracts through because there were so many review points in the contract process. Finding these overlaps helped me build my case for the overall governance and Executive Advisory Board model. I could show them that they were essentially having the same problem but didn’t realize it because they were taking a departmental view and putting more steps in their own departmental processes or asking IT to provide them with a new report or a new field to track it.

A project like this requires significant cross-functional business process change. So it’s not necessarily just “I need a new application” or “I need a change to add a new field” or “I need a new networking thing-a-ma-jigger.” Instead, it’s “I have a business problem and it affects more than me. As a business owner of sales, of finance or marketing, I can usually fix my business process issues within my group, but I need someone to help me fix them when they involve other organizations.” Most often we find that issues do involve other organizations and so it’s IT’s role to connect the dots.

Step Three

At this point, I went back to the executive team and proposed the advisory board and governance model. One of the things that I stressed is that there would never be enough resources to do everything we wanted to do, and it is our role as an executive group to agree upon a clearly defined roadmap. We never had a roadmap before for IT, now we do.

Project Management Structure and Methodology

Taos: Once you got the governance model in place, did you next build your Project Management Office (PMO)?

Marti: No. I wish! Right now we don’t have the luxury for a separate PMO. If I could, we would have a PMO Director who would centrally own the portfolio and manage all the tools and templates we use to support our methodology, but it’s hard for a company to go from 0 to 60 in less than a year. Instead, I introduced the model that we use, and continually work with my management team and their project teams to develop common templates and tools to support the different phases of a project. In that way, they buy-in to this process and we make sure the tools and templates really work for our structure and needs.

Taos: What is the Project Management Methodology you came up with?

Marti: There are five phases - Planning and assessment, design and prototyping, construction, testing and conversion, implementation and support. These are not unique to TIBCO, but we went a level deeper and defined what happens in those phases and what the EAB and Project Sponsor are responsible for (See Chart).

Given that I haven’t been here a full year yet, we’ve only had our third Executive Advisory Board meeting. One on the outcomes is to build the rolling roadmap so that the current quarter and the following quarter are firm, the 3 rd quarter is soft and the 4 th quarter is in a liquid state. We have yet to go through a full cycle but we are close and it’s working very well. This will be a big asset as we go into next year’s budget planning not only for IT, but also for the business groups.

Taos: You mentioned you don’t have a PMO. Do you have dedicated Project Managers?

Marti: Not really. Our senior analysts are managing projects today. It’s a stretch sometimes, but people really want to improve their skills in this area. Given this, ideally I’d have my PMO Director mentoring and providing more guidance through the project lifecycle.

Adoption

Taos: Without a dedicated champion for Project Management, how are you instilling your methodology within your operation?

Marti: Depending on the skill level, they work closely with their manager or director. We schedule project reviews throughout the project, and we have them role play – dry run - preparation for the quarterly EAB meetings. This is a great learning opportunity as well as preparation for the meeting. It really helps get those operating in PM roles get indoctrinated into the system. Senior IT management asks a lot of good questions, gives realtime feedback, and creates a safe environment for people to learn. As a result, our team thinks more like the business owners.

Tools

Taos: How do you determine what tools are going to be used in which projects, especially when you get down to smaller projects where the individual contributor or individual team members act as their own project managers?

Marti: We have a lot of that. Regardless of the project size, every project starts with a Project-At-A-Glance and is required to update the Project Status which includes financial tracking to budget. The idea, even for the small projects, is to go after approval for the box you are going to work within – cost, timeframe, resources – and as long as you work within that, based on the value you sold, you don’t have to go back to the well. So we need to make sure that we’re tracking within that box.

At a previous company, we had a Corporate Project Management Office that lent themselves out to projects. They developed a tool kit of templates and techniques and were used based upon the kind of problem that you were trying to solve and where you were in this project. That’s the same type of thing I’d like to do here - to create tools and ideas that people can pull out of that box when they need it.

Taos: Are you using or do you for see purchasing tools such as Niku’s tools, or Mercury’s tools, or Microsoft Project for the enterprise, etc.?

Marti: Personally, I’ve only used Microsoft Project and in-house developed portal tools. We have all of our projects in our TIBCO portal on our intranet. This way we can share information easily. Mostly what you need with projects is the ability to share information.

Microsoft Project is also good from the standpoint of being able to illustrate and track and make sure you’re on target to critical milestone. For clear reporting I’ve used a couple of homegrown templates that I’ve created or adapted over the years using common red, yellow, green indications. On a weekly basis I can easily take a look at any of the major projects that are going on and sit down with the team and quickly understand what they need.

Measuring Success

Taos: How does TIBCO define and measure the success of a project?

Marti: Each project has its own ROI associated with it, including:

• expected results, e.g. we’re going to now be able to do something that we couldn’t do before and we expect that that’s going to give us greater flexibility in key areas, and
  
• measurable benefits associated with:
• cost savings,
• cost avoidance,
• revenue generation

The philosophy that we are adopting is that the project doesn’t stop when it goes live. That’s just a milestone in the life cycle of that project. The Executive Advisory Board tracks the project beyond “go live” and the Executive Sponsor reports on whether or not we achieved or are on track to achieve the benefits that we said we were going to get. If we’re not on track to achieve those, then the Executive Sponsor and the team may recommend an appropriate plan to adjust.

Selling the Value of an Infrastructure Project

Taos: Can you give me an example of how you sold the value of an infrastructure project?

Marti : We just did a project for moving from NT to Active Directory. There were two business questions to be answered here.

• Given that NT is near EOL (end-of-life), do we go on our own or do we look for vendor support? Is this an area of our business which is important enough - tier one, critical functionality to justify not going it alone?
  
• How do we get to single authentication?

Based on the criticality of the system to the business and the desire for single authentication, we could propose the migration as a business project and not a technology project that they would probably not care about.

Another example - we just proposed the movement from the SunOne mail platform to the Exchange mail platform. Most people wouldn’t really be interested in that because it’s “behind the scenes”. They can still use the Outlook client with either one. However, we proposed it based on the additional business benefits associated with using Exchange and Outlook – ties into Blackberry and our SalesForce.com application.

Project Management Challenges

Taos: What is the biggest challenge you’ve had to deal with around project management?

Marti: Delivery. It’s all around expectation. I’m not looking for people to tell me what I want to hear because I want to hear it, and then not be able to do it. Tell me what reality is and tell me early so that we can change the reality if we can.

Taos: Do you foresee needing to teach people how to better anticipate where the problems might lie or to better scope what it is that they have to do? And, is this trainable or does it come with experience?

Marti: Actually, I think that the most challenging thing is that people always have a more positive outlook than perhaps they should. They usually think that if they work hard, it will work out somehow. So really the challenge is getting people to talk about the problems, and potential problems and to do so early. A lot of times, people work harder than they need to because they don’t identify their risks associated with various aspects of the project, or they don’t recognize them early on. You always hear about the dash to the finish line or carrying the ball into the end zone and the amount of work - the push - at the end of the project. Well, a lot of times, the push at the end of the project is because all of those little things that you thought were going to probably be okay, but they weren’t quite okay yet.

Marti Menacho has had an impressive 20-year career working for some of the Who's Who manufacturing and high tech companies in Silicon Valley. She has successfully blended her knowledge of business operations and technology to develop strategies and create solutions that has enabled companies to achieve substantial growth. As Vice President and CIO at TIBCO Software, Ms. Menacho is responsible for TIBCO’s global IT presence. TIBCO Software is a leading enabler of real-time business and the world’s largest independent business integration software company. Prior to joining TIBCO, Menacho was the Sales and Marketing Executive Vice President Saama Technologies. Ms. Menacho is responsible for business expansion through value-added partnerships with customers and strategic partners. She directly managed the sales and marketing organizations, increased margins from 35% to 44%, and was personally responsible for 25% of the company’s revenue in a flat and declining economy. Menacho held Chief Information Executive positions at Nortel Networks and Clarify Corporation. At Nortel she was an integral part of integrating new company acquisitions into the business structure. As the CIO at Clarify, Menacho was responsible for showcasing for their own CRM product. Under her leadership IT was actively involved in defining requirements and beta testing new product releases. Menacho held management positions at 3Com, SGI, ASK Computer Systems and Syntex. She was a member of Vice President Gore’s eGovernment committee during the Clinton administration and is currently on The Professional Services Network board of directors.

TIBCO Software Inc. is the leading independent business integration software company in the world, demonstrated by market share and analyst reports. In addition, TIBCO is a leading enabler of Real-Time Business, helping companies become more cost-effective, more agile and more efficient. TIBCO has delivered the value of Real-Time Business, what TIBCO calls The Power of Now®, to over 2,000 customers around the world and in a wide variety of industries.