Posts Tagged ‘tips’

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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

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Posted in execution, organizational savvy | No Comments »

Project management blog recommendation

Monday, June 14th, 2010

If you don’t follow the Papercut Edge, I highly recommend you give it a try.  The current series of posts are all about the 9 types of PM behaviour that you don’t want to see.

Check it out.

Happy PMing

Perry

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Posted in Recommendation | No Comments »

Project Management Questions

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

A short post today – I’m all done in from tramping around 17 heritage sites today. That’s 10 locations, one had 5 units to show, 2 had 2 units and  a bonus, there was an open house in one of the units. So, it was great but tiring.

This post is about places to ask and  find answers to your PM questions. Places on line, other than Google searches.

LinkedIn has a list of PM related groups. Join one and start a discussion – or create your own group.

Ask About Projects, is also a great resource. It’s more casual than LinkedIn and allows you to vote on good answers as well as to provide your own answers.

Those are two of my favorites, what would you contribute to a list of great sites for PMs?

Perry

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The Art of Project Management

Sunday, May 30th, 2010

Have you ever watched a PM be successful without  an apparent methodology? Is this an example of good project management or lucky project management?

I would say, it can be both. An inexperienced PM can get lucky, and experience PM can be using their knowledge and wisdom to work the methodology without having to openly use all the tools. The challenge is, it’s not always about experience.

How do you know which one you are dealing with?

A lucky PM will eventually run out of luck. At best, when things go off track after the luck runs out, the lucky PM will be scrambling to figure out how to show what happened and figure out what the team will do. At worst, the lucky PM will struggle to figure out who to blame.

For sponsors and clients, you can ask a few questions along the way. A lucky PM will not be able to easily answer specific questions that start with what, when, and how. “How is it going?” is too easy to answer with “great!”, but “What are the current issues (there are always some issues)” is harder to answer if you don’t have a handle on the project.

A ‘good’ PM will have their finger on the project, they will produce the documentation you need but they will be able to answer the hard questions. Or, will be comfortable with saying they will need to check.

The challenges is it’s not about experience all the time. You can find highly experienced PMs who work by the methodology, they run successful projects, they can tell you exactly where in the Project Management Life Cycle the project is. You can also find inexperienced PMs who will successfully manage teams through challenging projects without referencing any methodology.

Why does this matter? PMs will bring to the project what they have: experience, people skills, communication skills, any combination of these. By understanding where your PM fits on the scale of lucky to good, you can understand how work with them.

For an internal PM, you know how to develop their skills. For a contractor or consulting PM, you can work with these concepts to hire the right type of PM for your project.

Have a great project week.

Perry

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Posted in communication, Innovation, motivation, Professionalism | 2 Comments »

Asking the right questions

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

I have been looking on LinkedIn a lot lately and trying to answer some of the questions raised in discussions. I found it hard to give a useful suggestion most of the time because the question was not asked with enough context.

Asking questions is a skill. For a consultant, PM or a business analyst, it’s a critical skill. It’s about asking the right questions in the right way.

What are the right questions? That depends on your objective. Who, what, when, why, how are a good place to start. Thinking about your end goal will help determine what information you need.

  • What are we trying to do?
  • When do you need to have it done?
  • Who will be doing the work, who will be affected by the outcomes?
  • Why are you trying to achieve this?
  • How have you done this in the past, how can we get started…?

These are all excellent questions. When the questions are framed this way the gap is context. When you start to form your questions, think about the people you will be asking, is there ambiguity in the context? Will you need to explain the background? Can your answer come in a yes/no format – this is not what you are aiming for most of the time.

Let’s look at an example.

Question:

Do you have a PMO?

Answer:

Yes or no.

This can be misleading when you go to implement a solution.

If you realize there’s more information, you might ask what does the PMO do? If you go down this route, you’ll get the information you need, eventually, but you are setting up more of an interrogation than an interview.

A new approach:

Question:

Often an organization has formal or informal project support, methodology, training and prioritization. How is this handled in your company?

Answer:

Depending on your client, you’ll get a different answer – what you will get, though is a conversation rather than an answer. The conversation will lead to a richer understanding of what, why, how, who, when.

If you think about the bigger picture of the information you need, you’ll start to form more open and encompassing questions and the result will be a better understanding of your client.

Do you have any success stories, or horror stories?

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Posted in communication, Professionalism, self employment | 3 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 »

Writing Articles for increased visibility

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Hi, the great thing about the Internet is that access to everything is easy. The not so great thing about the Internet is – you guessed it – access to everything is easy. The key is put out useful information, products or services and then to get the right people to pay attention to what you have put out there.

I found a new way to reach out to people on the Internet, and increase my visibility. Over the last few months I have been creating and publishing articles for Ezinearticles.com.

It isn’t a source of income, you publish articles for free. It’s a way to get your name in front of potential clients and drive traffic to your website. When I publish an article, I am putting up fodder for newsletters. People looking for articles to fill a newsletter go to Ezinearticles.com and take content. I benefit because my bio contains a link to my web page and any pertinent information I want to put there.

I do get stats on the number of times someone has checked out my article, and if someone has used it. Just not who.

It’s free to put articles up, the articles are vetted and may be changed a bit to make them more saleable. I have written separate articles and tweaked blog posts for publishing and I’m heading towards the next level of membership – not sure yet what that means.

So, if you have information – or even well formed opinions and advice – consider dropping by to Ezinearticles and giving them a try. They give you guidance and ideas to help you get started.

Have a great week.

Perry

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Posted in Information, Professionalism | No Comments »

Project Management blogs

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Hi, all. This week is a short post.

I often go looking for other people’s PM blogs to get inspiration for mine, some specialist information, or some insight into what people are talking about in project management.

Mr. Manager send me an email to bring my attention to their latest post, listing the top 50 project management blogs. Check it out and let me know if you have any blogs you think should be added.

Have a great PM weekend – remember next week is a full week after two four day weeks. Enjoy spring.

Perry

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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

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Posted in execution, Professionalism, Scope | No Comments »

How do you add value to your client?

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

One of the questions that comes up on discussion boards and with clients is what does the Project Manager do? I have to say I’ve had my struggles in answering this question in the past.

I’ve been chatting with clients over the last week and I think I now have an answer – at least for me, your answer might be different.

I take the complex and simplify it. When my client says “it’s a lot of work”, I get excited. I can take the ‘lot of work’ and make it manageable. I love doing that!

Yes, I report on status, I manage issues and risks and I communicate and support others in communicating. But, what I do first, is simplify. I remember a book I read on consulting that answered the question ‘how do you eat an elephant’ – one bite at a time.

So, I take the elephant and I carve it into bite sized pieces. I pull the overwhelming list of activities out of my client’s mind and give it back to them as a schedule.

What’s your answer to the question “what does a project manager do?”

Happy PMing.

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Posted in execution, motivation, Professionalism, self management | No Comments »

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