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

What do you do?

A lot will depend on your team. Are they the type of people to be very conservative with their estimates? Are people in your organization used to beating deadlines?

If answering these questions doesn’t do what you need try these three techniques.

1 – look at your logic. Often there’s room to overlap tasks that depend on each other.  For instance, if you have to produce a marketing communication for a grand opening. You might have the following set up.

1. Create draft plan for grand opening = 3 days
2. Order supplies = 2 days
3. invite attendees = 3 days

This gives you a total of 8 days if you do them end to end. But, if you can invite the attendees at the same time you order supplies, you’ve cut the timeline be 2 days. The caution here is to avoid overlapping tasks that end up overloading your team.

2 – check the relationship between end and start dates. Project scheduling software will assume you finish the task at the end of the day and don’t start another task until the next working day. If you have a lot of one day tasks, you can find weeks in the schedule by doing this

3 – walk through your dependencies.  Look at the logic and at the effect on the start dates for subsequent tasks. I often find a bit of faulty logic that pushes my timeline way out of whack.

At the end of this process, decide how tight you want to control the schedule. If you get it down too tight, you’ll spend too much time managing minutes. If you leave it too loose, you’ll find yourself scrambling for deadlines. Some projects, like construction projects, need to be scheduled to the day because of the logistics of supplies, but if you don’t need to do that, then don’t.

Hope this gives you some help.

Happy PMing,

Perry

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

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

I follow a few good PM blogs so I thought I would send out thanks to the people posting by sending their links out to you.

Project Management tools that Work

Seth Godin is always good for some marketing thoughts that can be translated to many different disciplines

Project Management 2.0

Happy PMing

Perry

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

Perry

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

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

The reason we status report seems to have gotten lost in the search for a new format of status reports. We report to keep people apprised of the status of the project. We use whatever tool fits best within the organization, or methodology.

The key elements of status reporting are,

1. where we thought we would be based on the last approved baseline and where we really are
2. what we see as issues that the sponsor needs to help resolve, and how they need to help
3. what we see coming up that is just a heads up – and what we’re doing about it

If you are reporting clearly and honestly on these three points, the status report has value. If not, here’s the problem,

1. Where we are v where we thought we would be. If you are trying to provide a more optimistic picture, you’ll mislead the sponsor, and lose your credibility
2. If you are trying to show you can solve the issues when it’s really in the hands of your sponsor, you are going to have to come to the table for help when you are at the end of your resources. The sponsor wants to help, let them get in there and do their job.
3. If you don’t tell your sponsor what’s coming up – and say whether you need help or not – you’ll look like you are blindsiding them when they hear it from someone else.

So, the point is, status reporting is communication and if you communicate the right things clearly and objectively, the format is just a tool.

What do you think about status reporting? Do you have a story to share?

Happy PMing

Perry