Posts Tagged ‘Lessons’

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

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Posted in Recommendation, sharing | No Comments »

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 »

Keeping balance in your life

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

I think the topic is applicable to everyone who works. Whether you work for someone or for yourself. You do your best work when you are energized and excited. You can only be energized and excited if you have balance in your life – as a colleague of mine says, you need to fill your buckets before you can do a great job.

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

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Posted in motivation, self management | 1 Comment »

Using your lessons learned. How to make the next project easier

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

We all know the value of using lessons learned from other projects,but how often do we get to use them?

What gets in the way?

I know it’s often difficult to find the lessons learned on any project, let alone a project that is comparable to the one you are about to start.Time,or lack of it, often gets in the way of thinking about any lessons you might want to implement in your new projects. And, organizational assumptions can seem like a barrier to making changes: “we’ve always done it this way and there’s really no way to make it better in this company”.

What I suggest is to take a small step. If you don’t have time to read up on previous projects before you start, build it into the kick off meeting. Ask the team what they think is the one consistent challenge on projects. Use that to try some new tools, tactics, or techniques.

If the team decides that requirement gathering is a consistent challenge, why not try a new approach – maybe moving from one on one meetings, to a series of large group sessions that get refined in one on one sessions. Or, maybe checking where you start requirements, if you attempt to get requirements all at one time, try iteration techniques.

If the team decides it’s communication with stakeholders, how about looking at how the communication normally flows, and bringing something new to the process.

You’ll have different issues depending on your organization. By trying one new thing, and including the team in developing the new method you can take small steps that improve the project performance in your organization.

Any other ideas on common lessons and new approaches?

Happy PMing

Perry

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Posted in Innovation, Recommendation | No Comments »