I stumbled on Xebrio from a comment left online from one of their very satisfied users in response to one of my project management articles. I had not heard of them before, but I also know that the best innovations and user-friendliness often come from the heads down hard working hungry logical organizations trying to solve their own frustrations. Tried and true for sure. So, I asked Xebrio if I could check out their software and write about it. They thoughtfully obliged.


In short... it was better than I expected and I always have high expectations in situations like this because I know that hungry organizations like this know work needs to get done and in a best practices, logical, and fast learning curve fashion. In other words, cut the BS and let's get the work done in the best way that makes sense.


Here is what Xebrio is – it is an ecosystem for project management; start with requirements management and track projects all the way to its deployment, thus ensuring forward and backward traceability.) Xebrio gets involved in every aspect of your project development, right from the requirement phase to the deployment stage.


What did I find to be Xebrio's best feature? Probably requirements management.
​
Why? Because it allows the user to create requirements with inputs from internal project teams as well as external stakeholders and clients, get them approved, or derive new versions including changes and track change history accordingly. Then, derive tasks and test cases, or link to milestones.


It is a project management software that allows you to get a clear picture of product requirements and user stories, allows you to include all stakeholders in high-level planning, lets you manage and assign tasks quickly, communicate and collaborate effortlessly, track issues, plan sprints and releases and keep a close eye on time and budget constraints as well.


Other Xebrio strong points or areas that impressed me as a consultant and long-time project manager? Task management, communication & collaboration (my #1 concern as a project manager), milestone creation and tracking, easy reporting and concise dashboards, secure file sharing, daily planning, asset tracking, and – of course – the always important user-friendliness.


Parting shot...


You get a scalable, flexible tool without compromising quality, features or ruggidness. I've worked with organizations that won't even use their own PM solutions because they are cumbersome and have a long learning curve. Not the case here. Jump in with a demo and free trail... you won't be sorry. They are very happy to demo to your team and the 14 day trial is fully featured. After that...it's cheap to signup. Seriously.

A British man who accidentally threw a hard drive loaded with bitcoin into the trash has offered the local authority where he lives more than $70 million if it allows him to excavate a landfill site.

IT worker James Howells got rid of the drive, which held a digital store of 7,500 bitcoins, between June and August in 2013. He had originally mined the virtual currency four years earlier when it was of little value.
But when the cryptocurrency shot up in value and he went in search of it, he discovered that he had mistakenly thrown the hard drive out with the trash.

Bitcoin prices roar back towards $40,000

Now, with his lost bitcoin having soared even further, Howells has approached Newport City Council in Wales to ask for permission to dig a specific section of the landfill site where he believes the hard drive ended up.

In return, he has offered to pay the council a quarter of the current value of the hoard, which he says could be distributed to local residents.

The digital currency was created in 2009 by an anonymous computer programmer or group of programmers known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are essentially computer files that are stored in a "digital wallet" on your device. They can then be used as payment, with every transaction being recorded in a public list known as blockchain.
The price of bitcoin hit an all-time high in recent days and is now trading around $37,000.

Bitcoin rally may be the 'mother of all bubbles' says BofA

Howells first discovered that the hard drive was missing when his bitcoin was worth around $9 million. Based on the current rates, he estimates it would be worth around $273 million.

He told CNN: "I offered to donate 25% or £52.5 million ($71.7 million) to the city of Newport in order to distribute to all local residents who live in Newport should I find and recover the bitcoins."

"This would work out to approx £175 ($239) per person for the entire city (316k population). Unfortunately they refused the offer and won't even have a face to face discussion with me on the matter."

After discovering the mistake, Howells went to the garbage dump to see where the hard drive might have ended up. He told CNN at the time: "As soon as I saw the site, I thought you've got no chance. The area covered is huge."

How Bitcoin is making waves in the luxury market

However, he now believes he knows how to retrieve it.

"The plan would be to dig a specific area of the landfill based on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive whilst adhering to all safety and environmental standards," he told CNN Friday. "The drive would then be presented to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new parts and attempt to recover the tiny piece of data that I need in order to access the bitcoins."

"The value of the hard drive is over £200m (around $273 million) and I'm happy to share a portion of that with the people of Newport should I be given the opportunity to search for it. Approximately 50% would be for investors who put up the capital to fund the project, and I would be left with the remaining 25%," he added.

​Cryptocurrency tycoon died leaving $145m in limbo. Now lawyers seek exhumation to check it's really him

A spokeswoman for Newport City Council told CNN that the local government authority had been "contacted a number of times since 2013 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins."

In a statement sent to CNN, the spokeswoman said the council had not refused the offer -- but rather, was not permitted to excavate the site.
She said: "The council has told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.

"The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds -- without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order."

Story from CNN...

I wish I could tell you in one concise article why projects fail. But you're smart and you know I'd be leaving something out – possibly an exact scenario that you're going through right now that may have even caused you to notice this article. I feel your pain – believe me...I do...I've been there enough. But it may not be the exact same pain.


That's why I'm going to approach this in more general terms. I have to because I can't know with any degree of certainty exactly what each project manager is going through when a project is failing. When all is said and done, the projects that are failing due to something specific...when examined closer...are likely failing for a broader, more general reason. My hope is that I can touch on most of these reasons in this article and give each of us something more to look at closely as we are considering risks during risk planning and identification. Please consider these underlying potential failure points for most projects...


Communication. In my book, communication is Job #1 for the project manager. Any project run without proper communication planning and flow is potentially destined for failure. The PM needs to be the central point of all project communication and it's best if you have a project communication plan in place – even if it's not a formal one. You should at least have something that provides all key stakeholders with the contact information (email, phone, Skype, etc.) for all key stakeholders, identifies when and where all key ongoing regular project meetings will happen (and who should be there), how project status reporting will happen and how adhoc project communication should happen. It's all about setting expectations and following through – which is much of the concept behind good project management anyway.


Resource availability. Resource availability is always key. This goes for both sides of the project, but for this item I'll stick to the delivery organization/project team as I'm covering the customer next. Resource availability is a key ingredient to the ongoing success of a project. Imagine going full steam on your project and finding out suddenly – without warning – that your tech lead is not going to be available to the project for the next month. It happened to me. Her manager knew...she thought I knew even though we had made no arrangements to do any project knowledge transfer and that should have raised a flag for her to shout something from the rooftops. Plus, she was offshore so there was really no opportunity for a face to face transfer of knowledge, say, over the weekend. I realize this goes back to communication as the main underlying issue, but resource availability – or lack thereof – can rear it's ugly head in many ways. The key is to stay on top of it by constantly (weekly for certain at a minimum) examining and re-forecasting your resource usage and making sure all key stakeholders have access to this information. Don't let my scenario happen to you.


Customer engagement. Customer availability can be just as important as project team member availability. You need the customer to be available on an ongoing basis for requirements and business process information, questions and decision making. The absent customer can lead to key tasks moving forward based on incorrect assumptions or requirements that may be mis-interpreted. Keep the customer engaged by setting proper expectations from the start and by keeping them engaged through regular status meetings and task assignments.


Decision making failure points. Decisions often need to be made on the spot with less than full information or input from key players. You try to minimize these situations, but they still happen. I don't want to call them bad decisions, because good decisions can steer the project wrong when they appeared to be good based on what we knew at the time and based on what personnel and information we had access to. It may be only after the decision...and mistake...has been made that we have access to the right information and realized that...oh, that was a bad decision. That's why customer engagement, key stakeholder availability and team resource availability are all very important. Often, these individuals are critical to good decision making.


Summary / call for input


The bottom line is this – failure happens and often due to something other than what it appears to be on the surface. How we set expectations out of the gate at the project kickoff meeting can help alleviate some of those potential risks and failure points. The rest falls to practicing ongoing project management best practices. That will never ever guarantee project success – nothing can – but it will help get you through or even avoid most rough spots.


How about our readers? What are you thoughts on key project failure points and causes? Do these match up with your own experiences? What would you add to these? Please share your own thoughts and let's discuss.

​The Project Management Office. It just sounds official, doesn’t it? An impressive title. Not all organizations have a project management office, or PMO. And not all should. But it’s definitely a good idea for larger organizations that are running many projects. Why? Because a central office that handles most or all of an organization’s projects can create – especially over time – solid, repeatable practices based on project successes, thus, hopefully increasing their chances of a higher percentage of project successes in the future.


Overview of PMO concept and duties


First, let’s examine the overall concept of the PMO and the duties it is intended to perform. The key functions that the PMO brings to the organization are:

• A structured governing project management body
• A central repository for all projects and project information
• A centralized management structure for all project management functions
• An experienced and competent staff of project managers
• Project portfolio reporting capabilities
• A well-defined project management process or methodology

The organization with a project management office in place has the benefits of one central hub for all project management functionality. All projects can and should be run through this office. All project managers should report through this office. The PMO should be it’s own separate entity with a staff, a budget, a mission, etc. The best PMOs are well-defined and freestanding organizations within their companies or business units.


Common PMO downfalls/concerns


Once an organization has created a PMO, then they have a mature, successful project management practice, correct? Not even close. Many companies with PMOs still see project failure rates well above 50%. And PMOs within mature organizations still fail – sometimes more than once. I worked at one Fortune 500 organization that went through several iterations of a PMO without ever truly getting it right.


PMOs fail for many reasons – lack of communication, lack of senior management support, lack of experienced personnel, lack of solid processes in place, and yes…even lack of funding. In this next section, we’ll examine what I believe to be the key steps to take to ensure that you have the best possible foundation for your PMO going forward and, therefore, your best chances at project success for your organization.




Steps to creating an effective PMO


An organization looking to experience the best possible chances for success for the projects they take on and the customers they manage them for may want to look at creating a well-defined project management office to oversee the entire PM functionality. Or, if they have a PMO structure already in place but are continuing to experience repeated project failures or frustrations, a PMO reorganization may be in order.


Either way, these next four key concepts are what I consider to be the main building blocks to PMO effectiveness and project management success:


Obtain senior company leadership backing/participation


I’m going to start off with this one because I feel strongly that this is the most critical factor for PMO success. Our senior leadership makes the decisions on budgets, projects, who stays and who goes, etc. Because of this, their buy-in on the project management office and its place and importance in the organization is of utmost importance. If these company leaders do not see the value in the project management office and do not promote it as a viable entity, then it will not survive. Major projects may get assigned to other departments, funding for the PMO will be limited or non-existent, and the ability to staff the PMO with good PMOs and structure it with good processes will be severely limited. Executive leadership must be on board …. otherwise, the PMO is doomed to fail and projects will fail with it.


Ensure strong leadership


Too many times the PMO Director ends up being a project manager who just happens to be leading the project management office. That’s really a bad call unless your organization and PMO is very small. The director needs to be a well-connected leader in the organization. One who can knock down obstacles for the project managers on their projects. But that person needs to not be overloaded with 5 or 6 of their own projects. It’s understandable that a leader like this may be in high demand for a very visible project or to assist a PM on a troubled project with a high profile client, but that needs to be the exception, not the rule.


Hire experienced project managers


Seeking and hiring PMP-certified project managers is a good place to start, but it should definitely not be the only hiring objective. PMP certification can help ensure that your project managers are using best practices to manage projects, have a good foundation of project management knowledge, and are using a common language when communicating across projects. However, it is still only a supplement to down-in-the-trenches project management experience. The PMO must contain several project managers with experience in leadership roles and many successful projects under their belt. That said, it’s still also a good idea to a have a mix of junior and senior level project managers allowing the more senior project managers to mentor the junior staff as your organization seeks to grow its own PM talent.


Implement templates and repeatable processes


Your well-stocked PMO full of experienced PMs and eager-to-learn PMs needs templates, processes, policies, etc. to follow. In short, they need a good project management methodology to lead the way. Time – and money – must be allocated to putting this in place before the PMO can successfully take off. Otherwise, your project successes may just be luck and potentially rare. Just as you must allocate enough time and money up front in a project to plan, you must also do that with the PMO. A consistent process with reusable templates for project plans and documents will give your project managers the tools they need to run successful projects that will allow you to see that success repeated in a higher percentage of projects going forward.

​Way back in May of 2010, I conducted a survey of my readers – mainly project managers and PMO directors and CIOs, etc....and I asked them some questions about their organization's project management infrastructure. One question – and the troubling responses to it – focused on whether or not the respondents felt that their project management office (PMO) was effective. 42% said yes, 58% said no. 58%. That is a solid majority. That's sad...nearly 6 out of every 10 respondents thought their PMO was not really doing its job in terms of taking care of the project managers career growth needs, various training needs, process and methodology needs, and overall project customer needs. We didn't get real specific, but those are some of the key things I explain as major functions of the PMO and a majority these individuals felt that their PMOs were not getting the job done.


With all that said, what can we do to help make our project management offices more effective? If your is struggling, it's going to likely be more cost effective to fix a few weaknesses than it will be to dismantle and start over from scratch. I've seen both, and I managed to hang around during the dismantling because I was a needed consultant at the time. In fact, I played a big role in the damage assessment and rebuilding phase.


Not knowing specifically what's wrong, I'll give my top five general hacks or fix attempts to help get the struggling PMO productive, efficient and pointed in the right direction...


Replace the PMO Director. When change has to happen, you often start at the top. The project is going very poorly and the customer is complaining...replace the project manager. When the PMO is sinking, try replacing the PMO Director. I've seen too many PMO Directors who were either so-so resource managers so they moved them over to run the PMO (bad call), or were mainly project managers and held the title of PMO Director in name only (equally bad call). The PMO Director needs to focus on the project managers and their needs, not whatever project they leading at the moment. Get the right person in their fast.


Improve status reporting. A tweak to the status reporting process can usually bring some fast relief. Turn out a one-size-fits-all template with a good dashboard view. This will free up project manager time from from creating two or three different versions of the status report and give everyone the detail they want and need.


Distribute status reports up the organization. If it's not already happening, make sure that all project status reports are being distributed up the organization. This gives the PMO added visibility and credibility with senior management...and this is critical to senior management buy-in and funding for the PMO. Win-win.


Replace project managers....now. Just like the PMO Director needs to go, so do some project managers. If you have 6-10 project managers or more, replace half. Be sure to retain the most successful experience so you can hit the ground running again, but you must clean house to some degree. If fewer than 6-10, look for one or two to replace.


Improve PMO usability. Make the path for the entire organization to using the PMO for managing their projects easier. That means potentially creating a better project initiation process. Skip phone calls and emails...create an online form that creates most of what a project manager or account manager needs coming out of the gate before sitting down with either the potential customer (for internal projects) or the internal sponsor for external projects. Too many cumbersome roadblocks can leave your project initiation process nearly unusable or easy to skip much like some of those online job application sites.


Summary / call for input


There are no guarantees that any of these will actually “fix” your PMO. These are general attempts to improve the process and they have been proving to help a troubled PMO gain some much needed traction in the past.


How about our readers? What are your thoughts on these suggestions and what have you seen work for you or your colleagues over the years? Please share and discuss.

​Last year, the 170,000 CES attendees were estimated to have generated $169 million in direct spending and a broader economic impact of $291.2 million, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
During this atypical January, however, that flurry of activity, that money and that work is gone. CES 2021 is an all-digital affair.

It’s a new year but coronavirus is showing no signs of slowing down, unfortunately. In fact, it’s mutating.

The new B.1.1.7 strain that made headlines two weeks ago is theorized to have originated in the UK, though the research published thus far suggests that it’s on its way to becoming a globally dominant variant.

Reports were quick to note that contracting this new sequence would not impact disease severity and that there’s no reason to believe that it’s more resistant to targeted therapeutics or inoculation than previously reported strains.

However, before this clarification could have any impact, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the US Coronavirus task force alerted health officials to a new strain out of South Africa called, 501.V2.

Not only is 501.V2 more contagious than other coronavirus strains, but it also may be able to blunt the effectiveness of contact tracing--in addition to causing more severe illness. Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci believes the new strain may already be in the US.


“I would be surprised if it were not already in the United States, but you never know until you find it, and then prove it’s here,” Fauci explained to Newsweek. “If by some chance it’s not already in the US, it’s inevitable that it’ll come to America as people begin to move more freely between countries again. Sooner or later it will get here.”

Moreover, the UK strain, which is said to be 70% more transmissive than previously reported strains, is less transmissive than the South African variant.

Currently, the UK strain is in 30 countries, including the US. Both variants circulating in the US concurrently could spell disaster for an already turbulent winter.

“The South Africa variant seems even more easy to transmit than the new variant we’ve seen here [in the U.K.].” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock explained. “Harder to deal with than the U.K. variant.”

Sunday Omilabu, director of the Centre for Human and Zoonotic Virology at the Lagos University College of Medicine and Teaching Hospital, is one of the first academicians to detail 501.V2’s transmissibility.

According to Omilabu, a person infected with the South African strain can pass it along to up to five people before reaching viral clearance. This estimation reflects the highest rate of coronavirus transmission recorded thus far.

“The variants discovered in the UK and South Africa, they are distantly different from the variants discovered in Nigeria,” Omilabu added. “What we could say clinically is that we have more people coming down with severe signs and symptoms.”


Just like living organisms, viruses benefit from natural selection over time. The longer a virus exists within a community the more sophisticated its pathogenesis becomes.

A populated gene pool helps some strains develop resistance to drug treatment. Others take on quicker transmission rates. This process is said to occur very quickly in RNA viruses compared to DNA viruses.

Although the majority of public health officials contend that coronavirus mutations are to be expected, the development of deadly strains can be curbed by limiting the number of people the virus gets exposed to. The more cells the novel coronavirus injects, the better it gets at doing it.

Right now, SARS-CoV-2 is mutating roughly every two weeks. Thankfully, all reasoned analysis suggests that the clinical resources on deck are effective against the variants documented thus far.

“The emergence of new COVID-19 variants is common. However, those with a higher speed of transmission or potentially increased pathogenicity are very concerning. Crucial investigations are underway to comprehensively understand the behavior of the new mutant virus and steer response accordingly,” concluded Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s regional director for Africa.

Dive Brief:​

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) found bad actors used password guessing and spraying "in some cases" for initial access, according to an updated SolarWinds advisory on Wednesday. 

• In some cases, CISA found intrusions in organizations where SolarWinds Orion was not in use or the platform was not exploited. In these cases, the agency found evidence of adversarial tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) using passwords and "inappropriately secured administrative credentials accessible via external remote access services," according to the advisory. 

​

• The agency said the initial access root cause is still under investigation and the latest findings do not "supersede the requirements" of the initial emergency directive 21-01, where the agency asked federal agencies to power down SolarWinds products.

Dive Insight:

As investigators and researchers work to understand the full extent of the SolarWinds hack, the latest CISA update points to a constant in cybersecurity: weak passwords.

Password spraying is often described as a brute force attack, where attackers inundate usernames with rounds of passwords, looking for a match, according to Microsoft. When hackers are seeking out specific targets, they'll research an individual, looking for clues on social media or other platforms, to build possible passwords. 

"Weak passwords are a major vulnerability that offers an easy entry point to any system no matter how much we spend on sophisticated approaches in other components of the system," said Hanan Hibshi, research and teaching scientist, Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, in an email.  

In its advisory, CISA included research from Volexity, which found the advanced persistent threat (APT) leveraged a previously stolen secret key "to generate a cookie to bypass the Duo multi-factor authentication (MFA) protecting access to Outlook Web App." The same activity was seen in SolarWinds' supply chain hack, leading Volexity to conclude there are undiscovered initial vectors outside of SolarWinds Orion, according to the memory forensics company. 

Last week, the Department of Justice found about 3% of their Microsoft Office 365 inboxes were compromised as part of the attack. The APT relied on authentic credentials "in the form of assigning tokens and certificates to existing Azure/Microsoft 365 (M365) application service principals," CISA said in its Wednesday update. The TTP granted attackers escalation tools and a way of "interacting with the Microsoft Cloud tenants." 

Microsoft has issued guidance on how organizations can identify whether authentication took place outside of the purview of the system owner and their infrastructure and changes to the identity federation. 

If MFA isn't available, CISA advises organizations to use complex passwords consisting of more than 25 characters. Complex passwords hurt user experience, leaving many employees recycling their passwords across platforms and devices. 

Password managers can mitigate the risk of poor, overused passwords because it limits how much an employee has to remember. But doing so "does not come without the cost of organizations investing in those solutions," and appropriate employee training, said Hibshi.