Project Management and balancing your workload

January 7th, 2012

Hi, happy new year – I hope all your projects come in on time, under budget and with all the scope your sponsor wants.

I’m doing a series of blogs over at EasyProjects.Net .

Full disclosure, I’m one of their consultants. I go in and help their clients implement the methodology that surrounds the great tool.

This series is designed to help the project manager who is working off the side of their desk. Often someone with a reputation for getting things done, the volunteered or voluntold PM can find themselves quickly overwhelmed when faced with a project.

I hope you like it.

 

Perry

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Planning the Project – how to massage the timeline

December 10th, 2011

You have worked with the team and the sponsor to create the project WBS and finalize the scope. You’ve turned the WBS into a schedule and you’ve validated the estimates of duration. You look at the delivery date with confidence…your jaw drops. The project is going to be ready 6 months after the date you expected it.

What do you do?

A lot will depend on your team. Are they the type of people to be very conservative with their estimates? Are people in your organization used to beating deadlines?

If answering these questions doesn’t do what you need try these three techniques.

1 – look at your logic. Often there’s room to overlap tasks that depend on each other.  For instance, if you have to produce a marketing communication for a grand opening. You might have the following set up.

  1. Create draft plan for grand opening = 3 days
  2. Order supplies = 2 days
  3. invite attendees = 3 days

This gives you a total of 8 days if you do them end to end. But, if you can invite the attendees at the same time you order supplies, you’ve cut the timeline be 2 days. The caution here is to avoid overlapping tasks that end up overloading your team.

2 – check the relationship between end and start dates. Project scheduling software will assume you finish the task at the end of the day and don’t start another task until the next working day. If you have a lot of one day tasks, you can find weeks in the schedule by doing this

3 – walk through your dependencies.  Look at the logic and at the effect on the start dates for subsequent tasks. I often find a bit of faulty logic that pushes my timeline way out of whack.

At the end of this process, decide how tight you want to control the schedule. If you get it down too tight, you’ll spend too much time managing minutes. If you leave it too loose, you’ll find yourself scrambling for deadlines. Some projects, like construction projects, need to be scheduled to the day because of the logistics of supplies, but if you don’t need to do that, then don’t.

Hope this gives you some help.

Happy PMing,

Perry

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Planning the project – how much is enough? Part 2

November 26th, 2011

So you have your WBS in place and you see it’s touching on every aspect of the project and you’ve talked it through with the stakeholders and sponsor. Great work! You may have also faced the question about how detailed it needs to be. Some people want everything on the task list and some don’t. But you need to be able to manage the project so you need to find a balance. That’s a topic for a later post.

At this point, I have usually worked with the sponsor to make sure we haven’t taken the project in the wrong direction during our planning session. And now I’m ready to turn the information in to a schedule. That means creating a linear order out of the hierarchy. I start by translating the tasks into a list and applying the obvious sequential logic then I go to the team members to get their expertise.

Step one, have them validate the order and add any detail they want (yes, I know you don’t want too much detail because it’s not manageable – trust me it’s easier to take things out than put things in later. I’ll give you some tips on how to make it manageable).

Step two, gather their estimates on the time they need to take to complete the tasks. I usually ask them for the duration. The passage of time from start to finish. If you ask for effort, the amount of time it will take without distractions or waiting times, you also need to know how much of their time is assigned to your project. The effort calculation can be very useful in large complex projects, but for beginners, duration will work fine.

Step three – and final for this post- put all this information into your scheduling tool to see how long the project is going to take.

Of course, it is normal for the first cut of the schedule to be too long. You will still have to work to massage the schedule to a more reasonable timeline. The next post will deal with that. And you need to get the detail to a level where you can manage it without micromanaging or losing control. The final post for planning will cover that topic.

In the meantime, happy project managing.

Perry

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Planning the project – how much is enough? Part 1

November 12th, 2011

Last time I posted I gave some tips on getting the project initiated well. That leads us into some tips on planning. In my opinion, initiation isn’t complete until the plan is signed off. It seems that one of the lessons project managers take some time to learn is that phases aren’t usually cut and dried. You learn something every step along the way that opens up questions about the step before.

This isn’t a failure of the methodology; it’s reality.

To get your plan underway, you need a good understanding of the goals and objectives and you need to have discussed the scope with your sponsor. When you get together with your planning team, you will uncover more scope and find a few more goals that seem to make sense.

The trick to creating a Work Breakdown Structure in a  planning session is to let them get chaotic so people are bringing up ideas. Brainstorming is the time to let people think about what they need to think about. When it gets a bit quiet, you can start to corral the energy into organizing the chaos: grouping the work ideas, clarifying duplicates and asking if there is anything else that needs to be considered.

I like to end the meeting there. You have enough to put together your first work breakdown structure. You will need to add the estimates and assign owners and organize the work in logical order. But, first pull it into something people can understand. Organize all the ideas of what work needs to be done into a list of tasks. Do what you can to put them together in groups or phases.  Identify items that change the scope or the goals.  Meet with your sponsor and get the decisions you need on the new items.

Then take a breath.

The next steps are all about validating the plan. In the next posts we’ll talk about validating the content of your work breakdown structure, turning it into a schedule  with estimates and dependencies and knowing when it’s good enough to get going on execution.

The answer to the question in the title?

For this stage, enough is when your WBS looks like it at least touches on every aspect of your project.

Happy PMing

Perry

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The basics of balancing priorities: Initiation

October 29th, 2011

In a perfect world there would only be one priority. In reality, we all juggle competing demands on our time. This is complicated further when you are balancing operations with projects. One is usually a fire to be put out, the other a deadline to meet. The next few posts will cover some situation and ideas of how to manage through the challenges.

Let’s start with a quick reminder of what the PM is charged with. Your job is to manage the project to a successful delivery. What gets in the way when you have a  project in addition to the day to day operational duties, is the conflicting demands. But, as the PM you are still expected to do both well.

This week we’ll talk about how to set your project up for success at the initiation stage.

Initiation, when you are discussion the project with your sponsor, is the best place to set expectations. You are hearing about the project for the first time. You are getting excited about the possibilities and you are trying to think through the team you need. Your sponsor wants to know how quickly you can do the work.

As an experienced PM you know better than to promise a date until you’ve finished at least the planning meeting.  But, in your mind you start doing the estimating. This is where you need to slow down. As a project managers we are used to helping team members work through their estimates, but many times we don’t put the same discipline around our own capacity.

In the initiation phase, take the time to think about your own time constraints. Is your operational job more busy at certain times of the month? Do you often have to drop everything to solve a problem? If the answers are yes, think about how you can protect time to be available for the project team. Is there a way to set up meetings that allow you to be flexible? Is there a possibility of delegating any of your operational duties? Are there meetings you don’t need to attend?

Working on how to balance your time in the initiation stage will set you up better for planning the project. Think of it like the safety message when you are on a plane. Putting on your own oxygen mask first will allow you to assist others. Planning to solve your own time challenges first will help to get the project plan balanced for everyone.

I hope this tip worked for you and I look forward to your comments

Perry

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The last regular post.

November 7th, 2010

Hi, you may have noticed there was no post last week. It’s because I’ve run out of topics. I wanted this blog to be helpful but not repetitive. I’m down to repetitive, so I’m retiring the blog. The existing posts will still be available through my website.

I want to continue sharing good ideas about project management through twitter, @perryawilson, by linking to other blogs.

Happy PMing.

Perry

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Seth Godin, guru of everything?

October 24th, 2010

Okay, no one is the guru of everything, but I find Seth to be great at posing questions and giving just a bit of an answer.  this post is a good example. Change is difficult. Mostly because it is complex and there are too many reasons why it fails. But, the way people act is a huge factor.

If you can’t figure out how the positive people are feeling, you will focus on the verbal negative people.

Good luck

Perry

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5 reasons for business people to attend project managment training

October 17th, 2010

Let’s be clear, I’m not asking business people to prepare for PMP or Prince2 or any other certification. I mean training on the basic skills, techniques and processes of project management.

Do any of these describe you?

  1. You have just been assigned a project off the side of your desk and have no idea how to start
  2. You have been picked as the sponsor of a project (big or small) and you don’t know what to expect from a PM
  3. Your projects (as a sponsor or assigned PM) are getting off track
  4. As the sponsor you have no idea if your projects are on track or not
  5. As a business leader/owner you have too many projects on the list and no way to prioritize

Whether you have to lead or sponsor the project, it’s important to know what to expect. How do you start a project so that it’s more likely to be a success?

  1. scope statements will detail what you will or won’t deliver
  2. success and closing criteria will help keep you on track
  3. good governance documented in a charter will help keep the project moving

How do you manage communications? Who get what information?

  1. status reporting will provide an overview for most audiences
  2. a communication plan will help identify who your audiences are for each communication
  3. a stakeholder management plan will help keep everyone up to date based on their needs.

Shameless plug

I have a course designed as a full day workshop designed for the business person that leads you through the process from initiation to project closure.

If you are interested check out my training courses or contact me directly perry@perryawilsonconsulting.com

Happy PMing

Perry

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Happy Thanksgiving Canada and a few great blogs

October 10th, 2010

Hi, well the turkey is eaten – or packed away for sandwiches later – in our house the vibe was great and the food was wonderful. I hope everyone had a great day.

I follow a few good PM blogs so I thought I would send out thanks to the people posting by sending their links out to you.

Project Management tools that Work

Seth Godin is always good for some marketing thoughts that can be translated to many different disciplines

Project Management 2.0

Happy PMing

Perry

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Time and Stress Management – lessons relearned

October 4th, 2010

I’ve been blog absent for almost 2 weeks – just 2 hours short of two weeks.

It’s been a crazy two weeks: dad passed away and I moved. Dad went quickly and in his sleep. We know he wasn’t going to make it so we were able to say goodbye and we are all very sad when we think about it.

The move went well from the perspective of the moving, but the place was so dirty I couldn’t unpack. Then I went away for two days to work with a client. So it’s been more than a week, and I just unpacked the last box today.

So, I’ve learned, or relearned a great lesson over the last two weeks.

When things get hairy, review your priorities and make a list of what you can get done. There will be things you can’t do, you need to let them go and not worry about trying to fit them in.

For me, it’s important to make sure I get at least a half hour of down time a day – watching TV, reading, or just listening to music. If I neglect that short break, I lose my ability to be productive and become easily overwhelmed. With that break, I can keep going on my must do list.

For a PM it is important to know what you need to do to keep your head above water. What specific tasks must be done? Is there something that needs to be on the list because you will feel like you should have done it? For me this blog was that thing. Two weeks in a row not posting was not acceptable.

If you can find out what you need to make you feel productive, you may become better with recognizing when your team needs to break, or push a bit harder.

Think about which lessons you keep having to learn. Are they the exact same lessons, or is there a little step forward each time?

Happy PMing.

Perry

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