I like to get involved in LinkedIn discussions. I like a bit of controversy, not the kind that gets personal but a good healthy discussion. LinkedIn discussions are a good way to see what’s going on in the ‘world’ you join there.
Here are some conversations you might want to jump in on if you are PM.
What should go into an advanced Project Management course?
How would you deal with corruption?
How do you deal with PMs who miss deadlines?
Happy PMing
Perry
Do you ever wonder if you have enough in your life? Are you a change junkie? I think PMs tend to be change junkies – perhaps because I feel it justifies my own behaviour.
This post is not about project management but about identifying an opportunity, business and self management. Something PMs need to understand no matter what industry the specialize in, they need to connect with the ‘business’ end of the work.
In the last year I’ve worked with a great business partner to bring an e-publishing company to life. PaperBoxBooks works with new authors to help them find their on-line reader. We created it to fill a gap we found between the way traditional publishers saw the market and the new fast growing e-publishing world.
Today – almost 12 months to the date we started talking about PaperBoxBooks – we officially launch Fiction Therapy. We found that new authors are hungry for feedback that helps them improve their writing and we weren’t able to devote the time to our PaperboxBooks authors that we wanted to. So, along came Fiction Therapy, a place for authors to hear the good, the bad, and the – well maybe not ugly but fixable?
From a PM perspective we did all the right things for initiation: strategies, smart goals, success measures.
From a business perspective, well that remains to be seen.
If you are a writer or know someone who is interested in getting feedback on their writing, check out Fiction Therapy. If you want to follow us on Twitter we’re @fictiontherapy you can learn about special offers or giveaways.
As for self management, if I want to add anything else to my plate, I have to let something go. Not something my inner change junkie wants to hear.
Happy PMing
Perry
If you like fantasy romance and read ebooks, check out Off Track by Alice Griffiths (my romantic pen name).
A short post today because I’m suffering a bit from team burnout. It’s been a while since I’ve been here and I wondered how many project managers forget that teams get burned out and they need time to recover.
I’ve been working as part of a team putting together a conference. I’ve never done this before and man did I underestimate the effort. Sound familiar? Well, I wasn’t even taking on the biggest load but today, the conference ended today, I feel wiped. I know I can start controlling my time now, well as much as I’ve been able to control it in the past. And I enjoyed the conference, getting a ton of great ideas and advice.
But, today I have little or no perspective. I see all the tasks I’ve let slip in priority. I look at the pile of new work I have to do and it seems like a mountain. Okay, that’s a bit melodramatic. In my head I know I’m in control, but my tiredness is weighing me down.
So, when your team has pulled a huge effort to meet a deadline, and you’ve celebrated with them, thanked them, and congratulated them. You need to remember that they need a bit of breathing space.
Don’t launch into talking about the next exciting challenge – it can seem like a never ending demand on them.
Don’t expect them to give 110% percent the next working day – they may not have the energy.
Do be clear about the next immediate priorities and what the expectations are for the next few days.They’ll need some perspective.
Do review the project plan with the team – seeing how far they’ve come can re-energize them for the next effort.
Do have the sponsor thank them for their effort – it’s nice to hear the effort is appreciated at the top.
Anyway – I need to do some things I want to do for the rest of the day, rather than things I feel I have to do.
Have a great PMing week.
Perry
Have you ever wondered why that team member suddenly causes you more problems when you have less time to deal with them?
It’s not them.
When you get under pressure, your little inner voice, the one you ignore otherwise, starts telling you how to act. It’s a lizard voice in your lizard brain. Rarely will your voice tell you ‘be patient’, ‘ask questions’. It usually comes in the form of “get it done and deal with the people later”.
My voice tends to tell me to ‘just get it done and don’t wait for people to figure it out. You can always show them how you did it afterward”. Not very empowering for the rest of the team.
The lesson I’ve learned over the years – and still have to remember to learn – is when that lizard starts talking I come to a stop and remind myself to ‘be patient’ and ‘ask questions’.
When you start to hear that voice, whatever yours says to you, take a breath think and then act.
What about when there’s a safety issue? I suggest that the best time to make sure you aren’t causing more problems rather than calmly dealing with the situation.
Happy PMing
Perry
If you don’t follow the Papercut Edge, I highly recommend you give it a try. The current series of posts are all about the 9 types of PM behaviour that you don’t want to see.
Check it out.
Happy PMing
Perry
A short post today – I’m all done in from tramping around 17 heritage sites today. That’s 10 locations, one had 5 units to show, 2 had 2 units and a bonus, there was an open house in one of the units. So, it was great but tiring.
This post is about places to ask and find answers to your PM questions. Places on line, other than Google searches.
LinkedIn has a list of PM related groups. Join one and start a discussion – or create your own group.
Ask About Projects, is also a great resource. It’s more casual than LinkedIn and allows you to vote on good answers as well as to provide your own answers.
Those are two of my favorites, what would you contribute to a list of great sites for PMs?
Perry
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
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.
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?
There are any number of blogs, articles, and other sites where you can find out how one thing compares to another. What I don’t see very often is comparison of things to a base list of requirements.
The big thing right now is e-reader comparison, will the iPad kill the Kindle? Is the Kobo reader the best thing since the printing press, should I buy the Sony reader. I have read a lot of these comparisons because I am an e-publisher in my other life. But what I notice when I come to use these comparisons to decide whether I want to buy a device, there are few if any comparisons to my requirements.
This could be because it’s hard for the person posting the comparison to know what I want – my requirements. I think, though that they could come up with a preliminary list. Some do, by default they compare what they think is important. Just like during the requirements gathering stage of a project. The Business Analyst goes in to the client meeting with a base idea of what they might want.
Do you complete a project based on that first cut of requirements? I hope the answer is no. By assuming you know what the client wants, you are guaranteed to have scope issues, stakeholder and client issues, and lots of workarounds.
In a project environment, you get to speak to the client. Take full advantage of that. Get their ideas, needs and wants on the table – at the start, and during the project. I think it’s important to remember that scope change is not a failure of the project, scope change properly managed will improve the client relationship and the success of the project. Scope creep is usually either due to poorly collected requirements, or to poor scope management.
And to those of you out in the Internet who are doing comparisons, please continue. You may not be measuring the comparison against my requirements, but you are doing a great job.
Success in your projects this week.
Perry
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,
By setting the date based on analysis of the banking platform, we were able to
Does anyone else have tips for project managers on mergers and acquisitions?
