Archive for the ‘communication’ Category

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Success Measures – try a new approach?

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Hi, we all have our set success criteria for projects: on or under budget, on time, within scope. But, what if you made one new criterion every project.

How about setting a goal for customer satisfaction? If you set some standards of performance, you can measure them at the end. If your team has a challenge with customer communication, one way to improve it is to make it a part of the success of the project.

Is stakeholder management a challenge? How about finding a way to measure the satisfaction your stakeholders feel at the end of the project.

These two ideas require that someone in the team take on a role of management. If you want to measure  satisfaction, you start by agreeing on what that means and you have to continue to check throughout the project that you are meeting the expectations. Does it mean you have to do everything the client  or stakeholder wants? No. It means you need to manage the expectations and keep in communication with people.

Have you used something interesting for success measures on your projects? Leave a comment with your ideas.

Happy PMing.

Perry

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Status reports – useful or not?

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

I’ve been reading a number of posts on LinkedIn and other blogs about status reports and why they don’t work. Most of theses are promoting a different model for status reporting. The problem is not with a format of reporting, but with the process of reporting.

The reason we status report seems to have gotten lost in the search for a new format of status reports. We report to keep people apprised of the status of the project. We use whatever tool fits best within the organization, or methodology.

The key elements of status reporting are,

  1. where we thought we would be based on the last approved baseline and where we really are
  2. what we see as issues that the sponsor needs to help resolve, and how they need to help
  3. what we see coming up that is just a heads up – and what we’re doing about it

If you are reporting clearly and honestly on these three points, the status report has value. If not, here’s the problem,

  1. Where we are v where we thought we would be. If you are trying to provide a more optimistic picture, you’ll mislead the sponsor, and lose your credibility
  2. If you are trying to show you can solve the issues when it’s really in the hands of your sponsor, you are going to have to come to the table for help when you are at the end of your resources. The sponsor wants to help, let them get in there and do their job.
  3. If you don’t tell your sponsor what’s coming up – and say whether you need help or not – you’ll look like you are blindsiding them when they hear it from someone else.

So, the point is, status reporting is communication and if you communicate the right things clearly and objectively, the format is just a tool.

What do you think about status reporting? Do you have a story to share?

Happy PMing

Perry

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Communication Plans, the key to project success

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

It may be too much to say a communications plan is the key to success, but certainly not having one is going to cause everyone much unneeded stress. This communication plan is not the internal plan of status reporting, issue resolution and periodic updates, it’s for your stakeholders whoever they may be.

If you have never created a communication plan, here’s the short list of things to consider;

  • start with a strategy – what are you communicating
  • create an objective – what are the concrete goals for the communication plan
  • identify your audience – there may be several different groups
  • develop the key messages – the key messages usually are the same no matter how many audiences you have
  • identify the communication channels
  • deliver and assess

Now that you have your plan, and you are working the plan, let’s talk about what benefits you will see.

When you are communicating the right information to the right people, in the right way, everyone has the opportunity to understand the project. Note, I said they have the opportunity, not that they will understand. For the people who still require help you also have consistent messaging to use.

When you focus on communication it becomes easier to find your audience and align the messaging. If there is no plan for what and how to communicate, often you find yourself pulling communications together on demand and finding the closest channel rather than the right channel.

Planning early for communication allows you to set measures for communication success and that allows you to adjust the communications if it’s not meeting the objectives.

Having a schedule to communicate can sometimes help meet a goal or get a decision tied down. Why? Because when you have a plan your driver is to get information into the communication. When you don’t have a plan, there may be no driver, and communication gets delayed rather than driven.

Do you have any thoughts on communication planning?

If you would like a template for a communication plan, send me an email, and I’ll forward one to you.

Happy PMing

Perry

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The Art of Project Management

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

Have you ever watched a PM be successful without  an apparent methodology? Is this an example of good project management or lucky project management?

I would say, it can be both. An inexperienced PM can get lucky, and experience PM can be using their knowledge and wisdom to work the methodology without having to openly use all the tools. The challenge is, it’s not always about experience.

How do you know which one you are dealing with?

A lucky PM will eventually run out of luck. At best, when things go off track after the luck runs out, the lucky PM will be scrambling to figure out how to show what happened and figure out what the team will do. At worst, the lucky PM will struggle to figure out who to blame.

For sponsors and clients, you can ask a few questions along the way. A lucky PM will not be able to easily answer specific questions that start with what, when, and how. “How is it going?” is too easy to answer with “great!”, but “What are the current issues (there are always some issues)” is harder to answer if you don’t have a handle on the project.

A ‘good’ PM will have their finger on the project, they will produce the documentation you need but they will be able to answer the hard questions. Or, will be comfortable with saying they will need to check.

The challenges is it’s not about experience all the time. You can find highly experienced PMs who work by the methodology, they run successful projects, they can tell you exactly where in the Project Management Life Cycle the project is. You can also find inexperienced PMs who will successfully manage teams through challenging projects without referencing any methodology.

Why does this matter? PMs will bring to the project what they have: experience, people skills, communication skills, any combination of these. By understanding where your PM fits on the scale of lucky to good, you can understand how work with them.

For an internal PM, you know how to develop their skills. For a contractor or consulting PM, you can work with these concepts to hire the right type of PM for your project.

Have a great project week.

Perry

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Posted in Innovation, Professionalism, communication, motivation | 1 Comment »

Asking the right questions

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

I have been looking on LinkedIn a lot lately and trying to answer some of the questions raised in discussions. I found it hard to give a useful suggestion most of the time because the question was not asked with enough context.

Asking questions is a skill. For a consultant, PM or a business analyst, it’s a critical skill. It’s about asking the right questions in the right way.

What are the right questions? That depends on your objective. Who, what, when, why, how are a good place to start. Thinking about your end goal will help determine what information you need.

  • What are we trying to do?
  • When do you need to have it done?
  • Who will be doing the work, who will be affected by the outcomes?
  • Why are you trying to achieve this?
  • How have you done this in the past, how can we get started…?

These are all excellent questions. When the questions are framed this way the gap is context. When you start to form your questions, think about the people you will be asking, is there ambiguity in the context? Will you need to explain the background? Can your answer come in a yes/no format – this is not what you are aiming for most of the time.

Let’s look at an example.

Question:

Do you have a PMO?

Answer:

Yes or no.

This can be misleading when you go to implement a solution.

If you realize there’s more information, you might ask what does the PMO do? If you go down this route, you’ll get the information you need, eventually, but you are setting up more of an interrogation than an interview.

A new approach:

Question:

Often an organization has formal or informal project support, methodology, training and prioritization. How is this handled in your company?

Answer:

Depending on your client, you’ll get a different answer – what you will get, though is a conversation rather than an answer. The conversation will lead to a richer understanding of what, why, how, who, when.

If you think about the bigger picture of the information you need, you’ll start to form more open and encompassing questions and the result will be a better understanding of your client.

Do you have any success stories, or horror stories?

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Posted in Professionalism, communication, self employment | No Comments »

Mergers, successful transition

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

This blog was inspired by a LinkenIn posting.

I’ve worked on four successive credit union mergers and each time we developed looser success criteria. The reason we did this is integration and success on mergers is complicated and we found the tighter we tried to control it, the less successful we became.

At the beginning of the project, you may not know enough about the technical integration details to develop success criteria. I’ve found it much more useful to start with guiding principles and develop success criteria as knowledge grows.

The integration of the people is somewhat easier to plan – harder to achieve success. The key parts are communication, training, communication, training and transparency – oh, and communication.

Trying to achieve smooth people transition is a false goal. If you acknowledge that there will be challenges and hard times, it builds perspective. The difficult times will be difficult, but no one is measuring them against false promises of easy transition.

Guiding principles can be as simple as – minimize customer disruption, maximize employee involvement, transparent communication.

What this means is that you begin to set success criteria when you know enough to set realistic ones.

As and example, our transition date for the banking platform data was a key criteria.

By setting the date based on executive wishes,

  • we had to make changes to the date,
  • we had to reschedule training,
  • we had to re-communicate information to staff and members and
  • we had to work the team long hard hours.

By setting the date based on analysis of the banking platform, we were able to

  • pick a date we could stick to
  • initiate structured training and change management
  • clearly communicate the progress, and upcoming milestones
  • clearly communicate to the membership what was happening
  • identify innovative approaches to meet the guiding principles
  • let the people who were leaving know the date they could go on to their new journeys

Does anyone else have tips for project managers on mergers and acquisitions?

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Informal Communication, the one key project tool

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

The value of communication for the project manager goes beyond the communication plan. It is the one key success tool for any PM.

In the communications plan, the PM and sponsor agree on the basics. They identify the frequency and form of the status reporting, and may include informational communication to the stakeholders, clients, end users, media, community, you can probably think of a slew more.

What isn’t in the communications plan, and I’m not sure how you would put it in there, is the informal communications. The elevator conversations, the water cooler sound bytes, the hallway decisions, you know what I mean.

Even if you can’t document how you are going to deal with the informal communications, you need to talk about it.

One topic to discuss with the sponsor and the team is key speaking points. Throughout the project, people will ask you and your team ‘what’s the project about?’ If everyone gives a different answer, it can dilute the message and drop your project down the visibility and priority scale. If everyone says the same thing, in their own words, your project comes across as focused and well thought out.

Another question that is more difficult to ’script’ is “how is your project going?” The reason this is difficult is that the answer will be different for every person. To use an IT project for simplicity, a business analyst who is struggling to get requirements from a client, may see the project very differently from a developer who isn’t yet engaged in the work. The optimistic sponsor will see things very differently from the QA tester.

I’ve found that the best way to get a clear message out is to communicate perspective to the team. For the sponsor, who sees the big picture, they need to understand it’s normal to have challenges at the detail level and that they don’t need to act if someone hears from QA that there are problems.  The end user who might be going through a difficult learning curve, needs to hear the end goals to give them perspective.

There are other communications that need to be considered but it’s important to keep in mind that the communications plan is only the beginning of the project communication. The project manager who doesn’t pay attention to all communication will find themselves surprised by what people think or what they say.

Happy PMing

Perry

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Communication plans and actions

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

This is a popular topic in project management circles. And not just PM circles, this is a commonality with the business team too. Can you have too much communication? The usual answer is no. But, I’ll put a caveat on that answer. No, you can’t have too much of the right communication. Yes, it’s easy to have too much of the wrong communication.

What’s wrong communication?

There’s a rule of thumb I learned in my business background that says people have to hear something 7 times before they understand.

Right communication. 7 different ways of saying something will cover off most communication styles.

Wrong communication. Saying the same thing the same way 7 times. Some of your audience will have heard and understood you on the first or second time, after that you are usually undermining the credibility of your message. and some of your audience still won’t get it because that’s not their communication style.

7 different ways to communicate – there are more, but these are the ones I found are common.

  1. face to face announcement
  2. face to face discussion
  3. email
  4. newsletter/intranet
  5. casual – water cooler conversation
  6. group communication
  7. presentation

Within a project there is also another wrong kind of communication. Using detailed communication when you need high-level and vice versus.

  1. Using the detailed team status report to provide executives with an overview. Executives need overview and high level information, not the day to day details of task management.
  2. Using high-level strategic plans to coach team members on details of the tasks.

If you use too much detail with the executives, you run the risk of either bringing them down to play in your sandbox, or turning them off and losing their passion for championing your project.

If you don’t use enough detail with your team, you run the risk of not helping them past their challenge – and that they will not come forward in the future.

How do you avoid these communication pitfalls? Ask yourself these questions.

Who is your audience, what do they need to know, and what do you need from them?

The executive will want to know what the big issues are and how they can help you resolve them. You want the executive resolving those issues with their peers and their organizational clout.

The team member who needs coaching, needs you to help them come up with solutions. You need the them to find solutions that keep the project on track and aligned to the goals.

Does the audience know the strategic alignment of your project to the company goals?

If your executive team is like most, they have more on their plate than they can handle. You may need to remind them of the alignment in your communication. For instance, you might start a conversation on resource issues with, ‘this project is expected to achieve (corporate strategy) and we need you to do assign X so that we can do that’.

If your team member is struggling with how to resolve a problem, you can start that conversation with, ‘we know the end result we need to achieve is (insert corporate goal here), so how does the problem affect that goal, and what solutions help get us there?

Have a great PM week.

good links to communication articles

Tech Republic

Mind tools

eight2late

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Is a list of tasks enough of a plan?

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

When projects struggle with planning sometimes the teams create lists of tasks. To add detail, the lists contain names of people, they estimate how many days are needed for each task, and even list beginning and end dates. So what’s the problem?

If the project is simple and requires a small team of knowledgeable experts, this will probably be enough. I’m a supporter of doing the right amount of  planning rather than completing all the steps and forms.

The problem is when the project is complex. In one of my past projects, the team struggled with the concept of planning. I proposed the process of pulling together a team to plan and spend a day or two for the whole process. At the end we’d have a list of sequenced activities with clear milestones and a resource estimate.

Thinking it would be easier, the team leads sat down and started listing tasks and names. In their defense this was a project that required specific expertise and having the experts do the wbs would be a good approach.

Top three problems with the approach.

No milestones, no deliverables. The list of tasks didn’t lead to a clear deliverable that could be tracked. The team lead was never confident that the tasks listed were complete.

No understanding of overall resource usage. While we knew that Joe had to work a total of 12 days between start and end dates, it was difficult to align the start and end dates of each activity to make sure that the 12 days wasn’t actually over a 3 day period.

No clear reporting ability. When it came to reporting to the steering committee we had to manually pull the information and come to a consensus about status each time.

As a bonus problem – time! Originally I estimated a couple of days for the whole project activities list. It took a week for one part of it.

It’s one of those things that I think we as PMs struggle with all the time. What ideas do you have for selling the client on the process?

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Project data base for questions and answers

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

I received an email tell me to check out askaboutprojects. I’m naturally suspicious of unsolicited emails but then I looked closer, the email had come in response to my latest blog post – yay, someone is reading my posts.

I took a look and I’m impressed. This is a site where you can ask and answer questions about project management.  The questions are all over the board and the answers range from a quick sentence to a detailed instructional message.

This might end up being a common source for lessons learned, a place to hear about new tools and ideas, or a great place to find answers to your common frustrations.

Here are a few samples:

Does it help to use a software to create the WBS

Four PMs gave answers about software and how to do a WBS.

If you had to hire a project manager to work with you which would be your top 5 requirements

A couple of interesting answers there now, neither had certification on their list.

How do you prioritize your tasks

Great ideas posted in answer to this one.

It seems to me that it’s common to hear PMs ask for the best way to develop stronger skills and improve their delivery and approach project after project. Ask About Projects seems like a great place to start.

Leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.

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