Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’

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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Posted in communication, Planning | 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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Posted in communication, execution | 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 »

Encouraging innovation, can it lead to chaos?

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

If it did, would that be so bad; isn’t chaos the place where new and great things are discovered?

I think the most difficult thing for a project manager to do when it comes to innovation is let it happen; in a group, someone will always have an idea for improvement. Project managers want to be able to predict the progress of the project to the plan; how can you do that when someone says, “I think I can come up with a better way to do this if you give me some time to investigate.” What goes through your mind?  “Yikes, how much time? What is better, anyway? Who do you need how much is it going to cost?”

If you don’t keep that in your mind, you might find yourself killing a great idea with questions.

I managed a series of projects with my last client and by project number four we were pretty set in the routine of what needed to be done, how much it would cost, when we’d be finished. And we were great at delivery, the problem was with one deliverable. The process we used minimized the customer disruption, but still caused disruption, no one was really happy with the outcome. The deliverable required customers to change a code that couldn’t be translated automatically. One of the team members, new to the team for this project, said, “I think I can come up with a better way to do this if you give me some time to investigate.”

If he reads this blog, he’ll recognize the situation. What I’m hoping he won’t recognize is my internal reaction; “What the @@##!!, do you mean? We’re on track, we can’t divert for an idea. And other similar thoughts.”

What I said was something along the lines of, “tell me about it.”

We had a quick discussion and I asked for this information; how long do you need, who do you need, how comfortable are you that this could work.

The result was a solution that resulted in no customer complaints, little manual support, and overall savings of a week of post launch assistance, as well as a reusable solution for future projects. Man, am I glad I had my internal filter running.

So, the tips for this week are,

  • Be willing to listen when someone has an idea, it can be someone new to the team, someone on a completely different work stream or any stakeholder who comes up with an idea.
  • Try to find the resources to investigate the idea if it has some potential to improve your project.
  • Don’t ever think that a solution is perfect; someone will always have an idea to improve it.

Some resources for innovation online,

The always informative and entertaining Tom Peters has a video

An article on developing innovation

Steven Shapiro’s 24/7 innovation site

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Posted in Innovation | 3 Comments »