Posts Tagged ‘project challenges’

« Older Entries

Project Management and balancing your workload

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

Hi, happy new year – I hope all your projects come in on time, under budget and with all the scope your sponsor wants.

I’m doing a series of blogs over at EasyProjects.Net .

Full disclosure, I’m one of their consultants. I go in and help their clients implement the methodology that surrounds the great tool.

This series is designed to help the project manager who is working off the side of their desk. Often someone with a reputation for getting things done, the volunteered or voluntold PM can find themselves quickly overwhelmed when faced with a project.

I hope you like it.

 

Perry

Tags: , ,
Posted in execution, Information, Planning, Scope, Tools | No Comments »

Time and Stress Management – lessons relearned

Monday, October 4th, 2010

I’ve been blog absent for almost 2 weeks – just 2 hours short of two weeks.

It’s been a crazy two weeks: dad passed away and I moved. Dad went quickly and in his sleep. We know he wasn’t going to make it so we were able to say goodbye and we are all very sad when we think about it.

The move went well from the perspective of the moving, but the place was so dirty I couldn’t unpack. Then I went away for two days to work with a client. So it’s been more than a week, and I just unpacked the last box today.

So, I’ve learned, or relearned a great lesson over the last two weeks.

When things get hairy, review your priorities and make a list of what you can get done. There will be things you can’t do, you need to let them go and not worry about trying to fit them in.

For me, it’s important to make sure I get at least a half hour of down time a day – watching TV, reading, or just listening to music. If I neglect that short break, I lose my ability to be productive and become easily overwhelmed. With that break, I can keep going on my must do list.

For a PM it is important to know what you need to do to keep your head above water. What specific tasks must be done? Is there something that needs to be on the list because you will feel like you should have done it? For me this blog was that thing. Two weeks in a row not posting was not acceptable.

If you can find out what you need to make you feel productive, you may become better with recognizing when your team needs to break, or push a bit harder.

Think about which lessons you keep having to learn. Are they the exact same lessons, or is there a little step forward each time?

Happy PMing.

Perry

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Professionalism, self management | No Comments »

Planning without a start date.

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

I’m sure most of us have been in the situation where a project needs to be planned before there’s any clear date for the start. Often the start date is out of the control of the client because someone needs overriding permissions before any part of the project can start: construction in a development with more than one developer for instance. The trick is, and the question for this week, how do you know when you’ve done enough planning with the limited information?

I have worked with teams to develop plans with little in the way of specs. We needed to do this to fill out information in the business case – true with lots of projects I’m sure. Without some concept of the cost, time and resources involved, the client doesn’t have a way to properly prioritize the project.

I’ve worked with teams to develop plans that result in an RFP – the only way to understand clearly enough what to put in the RFP was to develop a draft plan.

When I’m faced with this situation I usually start building a plan from the top down and from phase 1 forward. I don’t think this is agile, because we are working with a waterfall schedule, but it does give the client and the team the ability to provide details on what they know and not try to put details into the unknown.

Key to the success of this is communication and team leadership. Communicate frequently and clearly that the plan is draft so that you can minimize the expectations of the stakeholder. Keep the team excited about the possibilities so they don’t get tied to a solution that might not make the cut.

What do you do in this situation?

Happy PMing

Perry

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Planning | No Comments »

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

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Innovation, Recommendation | No Comments »

Making decisions, the project manager’s challenge

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Often the project manager is in the middle of a push and pull about decisions. Everyone wants to get started, but key decisions aren’t made. How do you keep everyone engaged when this is happening?

I find this one to be the most interesting challenge, and the one linked tightly to corporate culture.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to go ahead with some of the project while you wait, and other times, delay in decision making is a sign of trouble brewing.

Sometimes the corporate culture is ‘just do it’ and sometimes it’s about careful analysis before acting – and usually somewhere in between the two extremes. If your organization leans towards the ‘just do it’, you need to get an idea of the direction and then go forward. If your organization leans towards the analysis scenario, you need to get documented agreement to go forward before the decision is complete.

How does the PM know which scenario is true for their project?

History will help, what has happened in previous projects when decisions are delayed? Your sponsor will give direction to help determine what to do. And the way the team reacts is also a good indicator.

If you determine you can go ahead while waiting for the final decision, there are some ways to ensure you are doing the right thing. First, your sponsor needs to be on board with what you are doing. And second, develop a way to document both the reasons for going ahead and the implications.

How do you determine what to do? That’s probably the easiest part. Look at activities that need to be done regardless of the decision. Can you start drafting risk plans, communication plans, or resource plans.

Can you develop marketing plans? Will the decision have an impact on the way you’ll market the product?

Can you analyze some potential solutions?

The overall question in this circumstance is depended on the decision you are waiting for. If the decision could determine whether the project goes forward or not, or is a fundamental decision about the product features, you probably don’t want to use resources of any kind because the risk of wasting resources is high.

If the decision is a refinement of the features, or a buy/lease decision, there are a lot of activities that can be done to move the project forward while you wait.

Happy PMing

Perry

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in execution, organizational savvy | No Comments »

Communication Plans, the key to project success

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

It may be too much to say a communications plan is the key to success, but certainly not having one is going to cause everyone much unneeded stress. This communication plan is not the internal plan of status reporting, issue resolution and periodic updates, it’s for your stakeholders whoever they may be.

If you have never created a communication plan, here’s the short list of things to consider;

  • start with a strategy – what are you communicating
  • create an objective – what are the concrete goals for the communication plan
  • identify your audience – there may be several different groups
  • develop the key messages – the key messages usually are the same no matter how many audiences you have
  • identify the communication channels
  • deliver and assess

Now that you have your plan, and you are working the plan, let’s talk about what benefits you will see.

When you are communicating the right information to the right people, in the right way, everyone has the opportunity to understand the project. Note, I said they have the opportunity, not that they will understand. For the people who still require help you also have consistent messaging to use.

When you focus on communication it becomes easier to find your audience and align the messaging. If there is no plan for what and how to communicate, often you find yourself pulling communications together on demand and finding the closest channel rather than the right channel.

Planning early for communication allows you to set measures for communication success and that allows you to adjust the communications if it’s not meeting the objectives.

Having a schedule to communicate can sometimes help meet a goal or get a decision tied down. Why? Because when you have a plan your driver is to get information into the communication. When you don’t have a plan, there may be no driver, and communication gets delayed rather than driven.

Do you have any thoughts on communication planning?

If you would like a template for a communication plan, send me an email, and I’ll forward one to you.

Happy PMing

Perry

Tags: , , ,
Posted in communication | No Comments »

People skills and your inner voice

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

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

Tags: , , ,
Posted in self management, Team management, Uncategorized | No Comments »

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in communication | No Comments »

Earning PDUs – Free

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Hi, those of us with our PMP designation know the  PDU stress. Some leave it to the last minute, some gather PDUs over their three year cycle. But, whatever approach you use, you can pay for them in money or time.

Money can be as little as the cost of your chapter event. PMI West Coast chapter has monthly events, lovely dinner, great speakers, and 3 PDUs for $45. Or as expensive as a PMI seminar. Great workshops, fabulous advice, and usually a great location. Moneywise, cost of event + cost of hotel + cost of travel = expensive.

Time can be based on volunteering, writing articles or books, or simply doing project management work.

At the West Coast chapter event this week, I heard from a fellow PMP that he was running out of time. He has 3 PDUs and 6 months to get the other 57. I suggested he write an article for the chapter newsletter. Something he hadn’t considered.

If you write a blog, you already have at least the start of an article. I created an article for ezinearticles.com from a blog post about estimating. This site is great for building your credibility and driving traffic to your website.

Most SGIs have newsletters and will be happy to include articles in an issue.

Have a great week of project management.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Professionalism | No Comments »

Gathering requirements is it ever complete?

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

This blog post was inspired by a post on LinkedIn

The dream of gathering absolutely complete requirements is just that, a dream.You will find no matter how detailed or complete, or ‘approved as final’ your requirements are, things will change. That isn’t a failure of the requirements, it’s a fact of project management.  If you try to perfect the beginning, you’ll never start your development or build phase.

If there is no element of uncertainty, I don’t think you have a project.

The PM’s job is to manage what happens: issues, changes, delays, opportunities. Doing a great job of gathering requirements only resolves the questions at the beginning of the project. The client or stakeholder, or sponsor will have new ideas as they get new information. The market demands change. The longer the time frame of the project the more likely you will have changes.

Doing a great job of gathering requirements is only one part of the project start. You need to develop your scope change management plan as well. That plan will include your process of assessing changes against the project drivers and making recommendations.

A good scope change plan will help the PM manage ‘pet’ ideas as well as fabulous ideas that everyone loves but will have a significant impact on the time, cost and quality of the original project.

Happy PMing

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in execution, Professionalism, Scope | No Comments »

« Older Entries