When you work for someone else, that can be as simple as not taking work home on the weekend, or taking a two week vacation. When you work for yourself, it gets a bit more complicated. You need to find the opportunities between client needs to refresh yourself.

I’ve found myself thinking lately about all the things I have to do. The problem is  I work better at things I get to do. My blinking alarm was telling me that it was time to take a break. But I still had all these things I had to do.

When I get in this cycle I find it works to look at when I think I can take a break – next week, after a milestone/deadline has passed, whatever works.

Then I plan what I’ll do with my time off and as the day approaches I let people know I am taking a day off.

I find the planning helps me feel like I’m taking a bit of time off because I’m thinking of what I want to do. Not only what I have to do.

I planned my day off for last Thursday and protected the day by letting clients and my business partner know I would not be available. And, it worked.

I not only got Thursday off, but I have been doing more reading and relaxing since Thursday than I’ve done for a couple of months. The added bonus is when I think about the work on my plate, and getting more work, it feels like something I get to do again.

What do you do to fill your buckets?

Happy PMing

Perry

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

I’ve been chatting with clients over the last week and I think I now have an answer – at least for me, your answer might be different.

I take the complex and simplify it. When my client says “it’s a lot of work”, I get excited. I can take the ‘lot of work’ and make it manageable. I love doing that!

Yes, I report on status, I manage issues and risks and I communicate and support others in communicating. But, what I do first, is simplify. I remember a book I read on consulting that answered the question ‘how do you eat an elephant’ – one bite at a time.

So, I take the elephant and I carve it into bite sized pieces. I pull the overwhelming list of activities out of my client’s mind and give it back to them as a schedule.

What’s your answer to the question “what does a project manager do?”

Happy PMing.

As the title suggests, this issue hits on the ability of team members to trust someone to do the job. Sometimes it’s the sponsor, and sometimes a stakeholder, and sometimes it’s a subject matter expert.

Why don’t people trust? Well, I’d say the 99% of the time it’s not about thinking the person won’t do a good job – their desire and motivation, but more about the can’t - about their knowledge and ability. The can’t is where you hear things like ‘it will be faster to do it myself than show someone else’ or ‘they don’t have the experience’ or ‘they don’t have the time to learn’.

In a project the can’t is often true at the beginning. The project is making a major change and only one expert, or the sponsor, knows what the actual outcomes look like. There are two ways I see of dealing with this.

One is to do the upskilling while the project is executing. You involve the team with the experts so they learn the technical differences and develop the new processes. This can increase engagement and adoption, but it will slow the project down.

The other way is to have the experts develop the new processes and then apply change management, training and support at the launch. This can move the project along faster,  but will make the post implementation support longer.

What do I think is the best choice?

As usual, there isn’t a best choice. If you have a legislative deadline your ability to slow down the project to bring everyone up to speed is constrained – deadlines don’t move! So, you use the experts and manage the learning curve.

If you have any ability to move a deadline, I like bringing people along throughout the project. It minimizes the likelihood of the solution failing after the experts leave and maximizes the probability of long term adoption of the solution.

What are your thoughts?

A few interesting links

About. com

neen james

ezine articles

I think we’ve done well in understanding our niche; new authors, good books, all genre’s. And our competition; well, there are lots of flavours of what we’re doing but we look to the traditional p-publishers as the market to watch. Why? Well, they have the market defined and at some point will think of digital as the primary format and figure out how to deal in the digital world.

We agreed to take November off to write our next great novel. It’s been hard for me to stay away from marketing and reviewing other authors’ work. But two more days and we’re back on focus.

My priorities for the next phase – publish books – is to finalize the details of the initiation phase – and move through to execution (how many projects jump into execution with key initiation steps still open).  I hear the screams from the PMs out there – yes we’ve done our planning!!!  It overlapped the initiation phase like so many business projects do, figuring out what we need to do and at the same time figuring out how to do it.

We have some great authors lined up and our first titles should appear at your favourite e-bookstore within the month.

Keep your eye on PaperBox Books - great books on the download

Initiation. In November of every year novelists around the world participate in 30 days of writing madness. The goal 50,000 words – totally self imposed, no prize but a button on your site and the feeling of accomplishment you get as you type the last few words. This year, more than 150,000 people are attempting the challenge.

From a project management approach, here is how I initiated.

The time line is set. November 1 local time, to November 30 midnight local time.

My personal goal = 80,000 words written in that time period

success measurement – the first draft of the book is complete.

Approach:

Create fully fleshed out characters and a minimum of 60 scene outlines before November 1.

November 1 – 30

Write daily until complete.

Motivation and team building:

• Participate in challenges.
• Participate in regional word war with New Zealand – and kick their kiwi butts.
• Participate in word wars in the IRC

Status reporting:

• Daily word count posting to NaNoWriMo
• Maintain spreadsheet with minimum and expected word counts and progress charts

Risks:

1 – will run out of ideas – mitigate with a fully fleshed out outline

2 – characters will take over (did happen in 2008 is happening now) – mitigate with periodic reoutlining of plot.

3 – priorities will change throughout month – mitigate by exceeding word count in early days.

Communications plan:

Tell everyone so I will be too chicken to admit I failed.

Next post  will talk about issue management.

Happy National Novel Writing Month

So, what did I do wrong? Everything; and I should have known better. I didn’t plan; I used what I call the enthusiasm process – fire, aim, ready.

When you apply for a contract position, people treat you like a potential employee.  I have something like 20 versions of my resume – is that what a consultant does? I talked to my contacts, I had a lot in the small community of credit unions, and everyone was happy to point me to jobs that were available. It just didn’t seem to fit properly with what I envisioned.  So, taking a step back I had a ‘duh’ moment and realized I needed to build a plan to start a business.

I treated the process like a project. I built a 1^st quarter goal. I thought long and hard about what business I was in. If I were a project management consultant, I would need to find out what projects were in the early stages. I needed to find a second line of business to minimize the risk of dry periods, and I needed to get some income coming in fast.

I learned that there’s a big difference between a consultant, who gives advice, and a contractor, who does a job. I knew I wanted to be a consultant. As I built my pitch and thought about marketing myself, I found that there are many small business people who don’t know what project management is, they are used to just getting things done. If I was going to target that market, I needed to explain project management and my differentiator, hard to do in a 2-minute pitch.  I had determined that small and medium companies were where I could add value, and my differentiator was that I would build capability in the business as I worked with them.  I wanted to grow my business through training and mentoring, not necessarily project managing.  And, I knew if I was going to be successful as a consultant I would have to be able to explain what benefit the client would receive.

The hardest part for me, and I’m guessing a lot of people who became free from the corporate bonds in the last year, was navigating the passage from employee to advisor. The best step I took was going online and finding business meet up groups.  Find one and go, you’ll meet with people who are in the same boat as you and people who’ve been there. I was amazed by how much free and graciously offered help was available. I had the good luck to join in with a group of people working to create a marketing process bible. Working with this great group of people has helped me refine my understanding of what business I have chosen to be in.  Each time I answer that question, it gets a little clearer and I get a step closer to being able to identify and attract the client I can help.

How have I done with my first quarter goal? I missed it by a week. If I hadn’t written down my goals, I don’t think I would have achieved it at all. Because of it, I’ve started on my first engagement and I’ve made progress in developing my training and mentoring business line. I know there will be difficult times ahead; I know I’ve been very lucky so far. More importantly, I know I’ve made the right decision.

My tip of the week is for those of you who are still trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.

Get out there and try different things. Join groups. Talk to people. Keep working on your vision. Make a list of four things you want to accomplish this quarter and start figuring out how to accomplish them.

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt