Posts Tagged ‘communication’

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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 communication, Innovation, motivation, Professionalism | 2 Comments »

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 communication, Professionalism, self employment | 3 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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Posted in communication, execution | No Comments »

Project Management blogs

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Hi, all. This week is a short post.

I often go looking for other people’s PM blogs to get inspiration for mine, some specialist information, or some insight into what people are talking about in project management.

Mr. Manager send me an email to bring my attention to their latest post, listing the top 50 project management blogs. Check it out and let me know if you have any blogs you think should be added.

Have a great PM weekend – remember next week is a full week after two four day weeks. Enjoy spring.

Perry

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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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Project Management Tools

Monday, January 18th, 2010

How do you evaluate project management tools? How many of the tools you find as a PM manage to fulfill all of your needs.

Let’s start with what those needs might be.

Are you looking for a tool that can express your project schedule in a way that you can understand and manage, or do you need to communicate the critical path to people who aren’t trained to read a Gantt chart?

Are you trying  to communicate the impacts of issues, or the challenges faced by your resource shortages? Do you want to be able to share status at the press of a button?

Until I can find my holy grail of project management tools, I keep trying the new toys.

When playing with the new toys, I think it’s important to remember that a project management tool won’t make you a successful project manager, the tool makes your job easier, it doesn’t do your job.

One old tried and true tool – Microsoft Project I learned how to use Project at the very beginning of my career. When you get comfortable with it, it’s a great tool for keeping track of tasks, resources, and budget. The upside is that Microsoft does continually upgrade and does as far as I can tell, each upgrade has been an improvement from the perspective of the project manager. The downside is that it has very defined expectations of how you will use it. Project doesn’t like it when you want to schedule the project by dates rather than dependencies and the default settings don’t like it when you add or subtract resources. I always feel like Project is keeping me on the straight and narrow when it comes to methodology.

One I recently checked out, and for the purpose of disclosure,  have joined their team of facilitators is Easy Projects. This tool is set up to allow the PM to do the usual things – set up activities, link dependencies, assign resources and set status. I also allows you to assign roles to the people on your project and give them permissions. You can set up notifications when someone adds, alters or deletes tasks. And, it has three types of activity, task, issue or request. This allows you to easily track client additions to the project and see the impact of issue resolution on your schedule. And, it has a dashboard function that works with multiple projects – getting close to status reporting by pressing a button.

Another tool that I haven’t tried but have heard a lot of good things about is Open Project. I’d love to hear about your actual experiences with this tool. From what I see online, it seems very much like Microsoft Project – except it’s free.

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Posted in Professionalism, Tools | 1 Comment »

Dirty little project management secret

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Project Managers sometime fly by the seat of their pants. Okay, now it’s out in the open.

Some PMs do this all the time. They like the rollercoaster ride, they love the heroics and they see creativity in the pressures of the deadlines and drama.

This approach can be successful depending on the culture of the organization, and the complexity of the projects. Low complexity projects can be successful with a pantser approach; high complexity projects can’t always (I’d say more like can’t ever) be successful this way.

So let’s think about a big complex project and how pantsing can work, or not work.

Can work – in unforeseen risks and issue resolution. You can find creativity in groups when you start with “so what might we do” rather than “what are the main strategies we can apply to this issue?”

Can’t work – if it’s your main risk strategy. You will have risks that you identify and can’t think of a strategy – the strategy becomes, we will try to figure it out if it happens. If all your risks have this strategy you are going to burn people out and destroy your credibility.

Can work – when you are trying to create a new and innovative product or service. When gathering requirements for your product, you can engage the stakeholders in free form sessions of what might be possible.

Can’t work – when your project has complex regulatory requirements. You need to have controls and a clear direction to meet all the requirements. You can’t figure them out as you go along.

Can work – when you are trying to find a way to recognize and reward people. It’s fine to figure out fun things to do at milestones. It can bring the team together to create an on the spot celebration.

Can’t work – in resolving conflicts within the team. You need to have a consistent and clear approach to managing conflict. It creates trust within the team if they know how things will be dealt with.

Tell us about your thoughts on planning v spontaneity.

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Posted in organizational savvy, Planning, Professionalism | No Comments »

Does it matter what project methodology you use?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Let’s start with the premise that you do need a methodology, a way to get from “what we want to do” to “we accomplished what we wanted to do.”

The choice of methodology is growing; we have PMI, and Prince2, as underlying approaches. We have waterfall, agile, and now Project Management 2.0. Glen Alleman has a great discussion on PM 2.0 on his Herding Cats blog.

Really methodology is the process of moving from start to finish in a project. The right methodology helps you to communicate where you are in your project, what is coming, what needs to be dealt with, and what is going really well. Using a consistent methodology within your organization allows you to measure your success against other projects, and apply improvement processes to become more efficient at project delivery.

I think it does matter what methodology you use, based on the project you are undertaking. I’m not sure that statement will be controversial.

What I see happening is that methodologies are chosen by bright shininess, not by appropriateness.

So, I think it does matter what methodology you use, even if it’s your own methodology. If you’ve been a PM for any time, you’ll have figured out your style and that adds the flavour to the methodology. If you’ve been one for a long time, you will have been doing agile before the name was applied to the methodology. After all, an agile project can’t be done through waterfall without lots of iterations of the planning process.

Someone out there is using the next best shiny methodology, they’ve created it to fill a gap in a project that is left by the current methodologies. We’ll all be discussing the new shiny one next year, or the year after, forever – well maybe not forever.

The key to success is that you choose – or make up – the methodology that works for your project.

In my experience, there are two kinds of project.

Type A = First we do A, then we do B, then we do C = commonly known as waterfall

Type B = first we figure out A, then we do A, then we figure out B and then we do B, then we figure out C and then we do C = commonly known as agile.

New and improved methodologies must help to make type A and B more efficient, more effective and more easily understood.

Let me know what you think.

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Posted in Professionalism | 1 Comment »

Communication – why is it so hard?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

I’ve been looking around at blogs for inspiration for today’s post. It seems like communication is a popular topic for bloggers. It is a complex topic with plenty of aspects for thousands of blog posts, even though it sounds simple. How hard is it to be clear, paraphrase for clarity, follow up, listen… and all the other tips people have out there.

Well, the answer is, it’s hard because everyone has buttons that set them off, some people know how to control their own buttons, some people don’t know what their buttons are so they always seem to be going off on an unexpected direction. It’s hard because we don’t communicate in a vacuum; the pm’s voice is only one of many the person is listening to at any given time. And, it’s hard because the project priorities are not the only priorities the person has, often work priorities get drowned out in personal priorities.

Yes, so it’s hard, but you can’t give up. You are a PM; if something isn’t hard, it’s not worth doing. You are super leader, problem solver, communicator, change manager, and there is no kryptonite excuse.

Communication never gets easy. If you think you’ve figured out the team, or the person, you are living in an old paradigm. The expression, the only constant is change, applies to people too. As soon as you find success in working with a team, something will change; you need to keep your spidey senses pinging the environment and adjusting your style to accommodate the needs of your team.

How do you do this? Well, the steps are pretty simple. You need to be clear in your communications, you need to paraphrase, or ask them to paraphrase to ensure common understanding, and you need to follow up.  The caveat to this – aka the first complication – is that you need to do it without coming across as a micro manager.

Complication #2 – you have to understand your own emotional triggers and control them. Just because you’ve told this person four times how to present the status of their work package, doesn’t mean you can snap at them on the fifth time. Their functional manager may have asked for different information and confused the issue.

Complication #3 – rumors can confuse the message. The worse situation is when you need to have the team pull together to meet a deadline and the rumor mill is buzzing with information about your project being cancelled. You can’t control the rumor mill; you can be clear and constant about the truth, as you know it.

Complication #4 – things change. You may have just informed your team about a key decision that impacts the budget, scope or resources on your project, only to have your sponsor tell you the decision has been reversed, deferred, or otherwise changed. Now you will have to re-communicate to the team.  Which is a nice lead into…

Complication # 5 – people don’t trust that the message won’t change. This lack of credibility can cripple a communication plan. You need to figure out how to deliver messages that change or seem to conflict with credibility and confidence. It may sound impossible, but functional managers do it all the time. This is where your ability to be confident and honest in communicating is put to the test.

Here are some links to article on communication.

Communication styles

Communication Styles at Work

Effective Communication

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Posted in communication, organizational savvy, Professionalism, Team management | No Comments »

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