Vivo

San Francisco Business Times Recognizes Vivo Founder and CEO Marilyn Weinstein
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Waiting for the phone to ring?

You’re perfect for the job. It was written just for you. Ever think that, and assume that recruiters just don’t know what they’re doing? Well, while that may be true, there may be more to the story. It may be your resume.

Here are 3 reasons your phone may not be ringing:

(1)    Too Long!  If your resume is more than 4 pages, it’s likely unnecessarily long. If there are two or more pages of technologies in which you excel, plus a page or so summary, before you even dive into your work history, your resume is not likely to be seen. Worse yet, resumes like this are often signs of a more junior candidate.  A wise client once told us, he uses a secret mathematical equation to discount the validity of a candidate’s experience, based on the number of resume pages. While we suspect he was joking, we do urge candidates to avoid naming every technology and task, and to highlight expertise on their resumes.

(2)    Poor Grammar and Misspellings. We rarely look the other way for poor grammar and misspelled words. If you miss a comma, most recruiters are not likely to dismiss you. However, using “there” instead of “their” and confusing “its” and “it’s” are good reasons to move on to the next resume.  For highly technical positions, we’ll come back to the resume with misspellings if no others were more qualified. But, that’s a big “if”.

(3)    Mismatched Fonts and Formats. This may sound picky, but how you put together your resume highlights several things about you as a potential employee. Your resume shows off your eye for detail. In some cases, it shows how you view consistency, and commitment to a theme. It may send a message about how much or little you care about image and appearance.  Mismatched fonts and formats really show us a level of carelessness that is often inconsistent with what our client has asked for in a candidate.

Our advice: Have a friend proofread your resume. Have someone you trust help you edit it down to a manageable size.

Having provided client-side resources for several similar projects, I read this analysis of Marin County’s decision to walk away from the $30 million it has dumped into its SAP implementation, with interest.

It is certainly not the first “failed” ERP implementation we have seen.  Just this week, our CEO delivered a presentation on controlling Fixed Price engagements, which explored this very topic.  But, as the author of this article suggests, it would appear that the decision to walk away from SAP seems more like a legal tactic than a business one.

This seems to be the same conclusion drawn by Mark F. O’Connor, CEO and co-founder of Monadnock Research , whom the author quotes, as saying, “[t]he Marin Information Systems and Technology group appears to have concluded that fixing the Deloitte-installed SAP application will cost nearly 25 percent more over a ten-year period than buying, modifying, implementing, and migrating data over to a new system in a protracted multi-phase project, during which time they would continue to operate the SAP environment concurrently, until going live on the respective new system modules”. That conclusion seems implausible to me.

The Marin/Deloitte project seemed to have suffered from what we see over and over when we are brought in after a project has gone significantly off track – or when a client is dissatisfied with its outsourcing provider.  Too much has been outsourced.   It is not plug and play in any sense of the word, and it is essential that everyone align expectations accordingly.  Mr. O’Connor said it best in this article: “Responsibility without authority, … always yields outcomes similar to what we see here in complex systems projects. There are literally thousands of important decisions that need be made by client staff during an implementation—while they continue to do their day jobs.”

“I am out here for you.  You don’t know what it’s like to be ME out here for YOU.  It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, ok?” -Jerry Maguire to Rod Tidwell, (Jerry Maguire, 1996)

So, it’s a bit dramatic; however, at some point, every seasoned Project Manager must find themselves muttering similar sentiments.

A memo to Project Sponsors, on behalf of your Sr. Project Manager…

Top performing Project Managers WANT to be responsible for driving your critical projects through to completion on time and within budget.  They’re a highly accountable lot.  It’s in their DNA.  Truth be told, it’s also in their job description.

Experienced Project Managers do their best to ensure a solid foundation for success.  They strive to understand business objectives and requirements.  They diligently weigh a scope-of-work against timelines, resources and budgets.  If everything is in order, they commit to you, “yes, we can make this happen”.

So what five scenarios can leave your Sr. Project Manager mumbling Maguire’s words, “I don’t believe this.  How’d I get myself into this”?

1. Support from the Project Sponsor wanes or the Project Sponsor departs altogether
2. The Project Sponsor ends-up having minimal ability to influence the organization
3. Scope-of-work changes but timelines, resources and budgets remains the same
4. Promised resources are unavailable when needed or reallocated mid-project
5. Budget was never fully approved or is redirected during the course of project delivery

As a Project Sponsor, please simply keep these five scenarios in mind if you want to keep your best Project Managers most effective.  On behalf of your Sr. Project Manager, “Help me…help you.  Help me, help you”.