Posts Tagged ‘ideas’

Planning the project – how much is enough? Part 1

Saturday, 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

Prioritization and emergencies

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

So, what happens to a schedule when emergencies happen?
At one time or another the team will have emergencies that take them away from the critical work. In most projects, there will be changes to the market that cause emergency changes to scope, timelines or budget. And, often the PM is the one to direct and support the team through the emergencies.
What happens when the PM is the one who has the emergencies?
Have you set up the project to run without you – even for a short time? Do you have contingencies for your absence?
What are the tips you would give to less experienced PMs?
Happy PMing

Perry

Learning from each other

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Hi, as PMs we learn from each other as much as from formal training and education. LinkedIn has some great PM groups, and there are PM blogs galore. There is one online question database that I’ve been tweeting about all week that I thought I would blog about and hopefully grab a few more followers.

The site is Ask About Projects and they are losing the free stackexchange service any day now. Rather than start charging for the service, the Ask About Projects team is trying for another free service at Area 51. What they need is another 3 people to follow. Another 5 questions voted on topic and the same number voted off topic to move on to the next stage.

Following is just a click of  a button and creating a small profile. You can post up to 5 new sample questions and vote on 5 in each category.

Check out the two sites and jump on the bandwagon to save the site.

Thanks.

Perry

LinkedIn discussions

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

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?

Why do IT projects fail?

How do you deal with PMs who miss deadlines?

Happy PMing

Perry

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?

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

How do you add value to your client?

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

One of the questions that comes up on discussion boards and with clients is what does the Project Manager do? I have to say I’ve had my struggles in answering this question in the past.

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.

Project Management Blogs

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

What the heck did we do before the advent of blogs and twitter. I thought I’d list a few blogs and articles today that I follow for PM.

Blogs:

A take on PM from a legal project perspective. Legal Project Management

Project management 2.0 – this post gives the top ten PM blogs.

The Project Management Blog

Project Management tools that work.

PMI blogs

Do you have any favorites that you would like to share?

Happy PMing

PM as e-publisher

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

So, now I’m on the other side of the table from my comfort zone. As the business owner and partner I have to think about much more than just how to deliver. It’s what to deliver as well.

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

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.