At this point, I have usually worked with the sponsor to make sure we haven’t taken the project in the wrong direction during our planning session. And now I’m ready to turn the information in to a schedule. That means creating a linear order out of the hierarchy. I start by translating the tasks into a list and applying the obvious sequential logic then I go to the team members to get their expertise.

Step one, have them validate the order and add any detail they want (yes, I know you don’t want too much detail because it’s not manageable – trust me it’s easier to take things out than put things in later. I’ll give you some tips on how to make it manageable).

Step two, gather their estimates on the time they need to take to complete the tasks. I usually ask them for the duration. The passage of time from start to finish. If you ask for effort, the amount of time it will take without distractions or waiting times, you also need to know how much of their time is assigned to your project. The effort calculation can be very useful in large complex projects, but for beginners, duration will work fine.

Step three – and final for this post- put all this information into your scheduling tool to see how long the project is going to take.

Of course, it is normal for the first cut of the schedule to be too long. You will still have to work to massage the schedule to a more reasonable timeline. The next post will deal with that. And you need to get the detail to a level where you can manage it without micromanaging or losing control. The final post for planning will cover that topic.

In the meantime, happy project managing.

Perry

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

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

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

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.

As the title suggests, this issue hits on the ability of team members to trust someone to do the job. Sometimes it’s the sponsor, and sometimes a stakeholder, and sometimes it’s a subject matter expert.

Why don’t people trust? Well, I’d say the 99% of the time it’s not about thinking the person won’t do a good job – their desire and motivation, but more about the can’t - about their knowledge and ability. The can’t is where you hear things like ‘it will be faster to do it myself than show someone else’ or ‘they don’t have the experience’ or ‘they don’t have the time to learn’.

In a project the can’t is often true at the beginning. The project is making a major change and only one expert, or the sponsor, knows what the actual outcomes look like. There are two ways I see of dealing with this.

One is to do the upskilling while the project is executing. You involve the team with the experts so they learn the technical differences and develop the new processes. This can increase engagement and adoption, but it will slow the project down.

The other way is to have the experts develop the new processes and then apply change management, training and support at the launch. This can move the project along faster,  but will make the post implementation support longer.

What do I think is the best choice?

As usual, there isn’t a best choice. If you have a legislative deadline your ability to slow down the project to bring everyone up to speed is constrained – deadlines don’t move! So, you use the experts and manage the learning curve.

If you have any ability to move a deadline, I like bringing people along throughout the project. It minimizes the likelihood of the solution failing after the experts leave and maximizes the probability of long term adoption of the solution.

What are your thoughts?

A few interesting links

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This blog posting will touch on the theory of hierarchical needs, from Abraham Maslow. There are links below to a few other theories for thought. In short Abraham Maslow theorized that people have certain basic needs that must be met before they can move on.  Here’s what it looks like.

A graphic representation of the priority of needs

Looking at this from the top down – just to be different. One day you are sitting there, enjoying the day, thinking big generous trusting thoughts. The world is everyone’s oyster, peace on earth, etc. Suddenly you need to pee; no problem, you go to the bathroom. Problem,  the door is jammed shut. Your priority drops to the next layer, what will people think if you have to go to a neighbor asking to use their bathroom? You shake the door handle again, no luck, drop another level as you start the pee dance. Where are your family, why is the door locked. Drop down again, what the heck are you going to do, why are you living in such a crappy house, isn’t there some kind of standard for bathroom doors? Drop down another level, to heck with the rules, you kick in the door and solve your basic problem.

So, think about how this relates to your project teams. Are you making sure their basic needs are met? Do they have to work overtime to meet deadlines? If so, where do you think their minds are as stomachs start to growl, and they enter work hour thirteen? Once the basic needs are taken care of, you need to ask about the work environment. Is it conducive to work; are your team members confined in stuffy rooms? Do they have a place where they can go to think? Is there enough trust to allow people to take a risk?

At belongingness and love – you don’t have to hug everyone – you need to make sure there’s social interaction; chatting around the coffee station, a football pool, these make for a feeling of camaraderie.  Satisfying the need for esteem comes from recognition activities, interesting assignments, and leadership opportunities.

Getting to the top is a bit different, I believe people take themselves to the top, that’s why it’s called self-actualization; you can’t take them. What you can do as the leader is help take care of the rest of the pyramid and create the possibility for people to get there.

So how does this impact your project? When people are in the lower levels of the pyramid, you tend to get crisis management. People are unsure of the safety and security of their basic needs to do the job – maybe it’s as simple as they don’t understand what the project is trying to accomplish – they take actions to create stability and security. In the belongingness and esteem areas, you have team members helping each other to succeed, and making sure there’s spotlight to share.

It’s well worth reviewing some of the fundamentals of people management theory – I think you’ll recognize so of the aspects of current people management trends there.

Tip, check some of these links out.

Maslow

Herzberg – an interesting idea that explains why money doesn’t always motivate people

McGregor – theory X and theory Y management, different styles work in different environments

Hawthorn – sometimes just paying attention helps

Let’s start with the team. Have you ever been on a project where the first risk management strategy is to find out who is to blame? I’ve worked on projects where it seems to be a step in the initiation phase – first figure out the scapegoat group. What happens to the team in this environment? It starts with an expectation that things will go wrong, not that the project will be successful. It puts people on guard, always taking steps to lower their profile. It kills any spirit of innovation, which means no one is likely to offer new solutions to problems. The projects rarely do more than just meet expectations in this type of environment. The lessons learned tend towards, who did it wrong, who should have done something, and every other blame statement you can think of.

If you put the project first, you can focus the team on resolutions. Things always go awry, if you can focus the team on “what happened” and “what do we do to move ahead,” no one takes the blame. Understanding what happened will start the ball rolling towards solutions. If testing failed on a process, it’s not because Joe didn’t create a great process. It failed for a reason and it needs to be fixed. If the client isn’t satisfied with the first iteration of the solution, it’s not because Mary didn’t understand the requirements. They aren’t satisfied, that’s what needs to be fixed. The words you want to hear from your team are, “ABC product isn’t working as expected because of the volume of traffic wasn’t anticipated; here’s the solution.” Definitely not, “ABC product isn’t working because Alan screwed up and you need to fix it.”

Let’s turn our focus to your relationship with the sponsor. If it’s an environment of blame, guess who wears the hair shirt in this relationship – the PM. Your sponsor knows that things change and relies on you to manage that change. So, let’s say your project budget needs to increase because the organization restructured and your key team members are gone. You can complete the work on time with contractors but it’s a 20% increase in cost. Do you say to the sponsor (even subtly) “because you laid off all these people you need to give me a bigger budget.” Or, do you say “Let’s confirm that the project is still active, if so, there are a couple of options. We can keep the same scope and probably hit the date if we hire contractors, it will cost XX. The other option is to reduce scope by XX or extend the timeline.” My guess is the first approach may add your name to the list of people looking for work; the second approach accepts reality and puts the project first with solutions.

It may or may not be reassuring to know this isn’t unique to project environments. Put this search in Google “finding solutions not scapegoats” to find all kinds of examples of this phenomenon.

Tip- I know you don’t really say the second examples, but you might say it in your body language or tone.

Change your project vocabulary

Use, “What happened?” Not, “who screwed up”

Use, “How do you think we can fix it?” Not, “How do we deal with the screw-up?”

Use “How do we avoid this in future projects?” Not, “how do I keep the screw-up off my projects?”

You’ll find people are excited to be on your project and part of a supportive successful environment if you can be successful in dropping blame.

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