It's About More Than the Tools

Tools are great in the project management world. I dare say they’re a necessity if you want to get your tasks done in a timely manner. And doing things in a timely manner is critical if we want to stay on track and on budget.

But really, the tools we use can be anything…depending on the size of the project and the complexity of reporting. You can actually manage a project with only Excel or similar spreadsheet software as your only PM tool if you have to (though probably only on very small projects) – using it for managing tasks and timeframes in the project schedule, managing resource assignments, and definitely the budget. I use it all the time to manage the project budget – including analysis and forecasting on a weekly basis. But I’d never use it on a big project or a critical project. I’m a fan of real project scheduling software like MS Project, Project Drive, or a similar tool. They’ll get the job done faster, better, more accurately and more efficiently and they have reporting built in to the tool – which will make your executive management and customer much happier and your job much much easier.

But project management doesn’t stop with the tools, does it? In fact, it’s really not about the tools. You don’t have to spend the big project dollars on the tools – you can do it fairly inexpensively as pointed out above. But the big dollars are spent on the personnel resources and the tasks they undertake and the time they spend on the project. It’s about project skills and the actual management of the project itself as well as the leadership used in managing the project resources. It’s about project best practices.

Project management, as a whole is really about…

Consistency

Your team and your customer need consistent behavior. You need to hold project status meetings at the same time every week (yes, every week), you need to deliver weekly status reports in advance of that project status meeting with your team and your customer, and you need to be holding internal meetings with your team every week to get updates and hold them accountable. The project manager who regularly postpones or cancels meetings is not displaying consistency and will find it hard to demand consistency from his own team throughout the project.

Best practices

Using best practices – whatever you and your organization define as best practices – is the responsibility of the project manager. Doing things like using repeatable processes and templates that work, conducting formal project status meetings and reviews, planning out the project budget and reforecasting it to stay on top of it on a weekly basis, and managing project scope closely against the project requirements are all a few examples of project management best practices. These are the responsibility of the project manager and using them is a way to display good project leadership and a way to help ensure ongoing project successes.

Leadership

Finally, project management is about leadership. If a project manager can’t be a strong project leader, then he’s not bringing much to the project table. Sound, swift, and confident decision-making, efficient and effective communication and customer management, consistent behavior and delivery on project milestones and deliverables are all examples of good project management leadership and are all the responsibility of the project manager.

Summary

Tools are a necessary part of the project management process. But they don’t guarantee success and they don’t ‘make’ the project manager. If the project manager can practice consistency, utilize best practices, and show project leadership, then his days as a project manager are likely numbered. PM is much more about the soft skills than just the use of tools.

Brought to you by www.project-drive.net.

Finding Your Niche as a Project Manager

What are you good at? At what do you excel? What areas are project team members frequently complementing you on? Do you get positive customer feedback in a particular area on a regular basis?

For me it’s communication. I once had a business analyst tell me that of all the project managers he’s ever worked with, he received by far the most email from me. He said he felt that he was included on all communications and always knew the latest status and where things stood on my projects. That made me feel good because I consider communication to be the #1 responsibility of the project manager. If you’re doing that right, then that’s half the battle.

Capitalize and accommodate

Everyone has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. No one is strong in everything. Think about those job interviews – you’re asked about your strengths and weaknesses. You know you have some weaknesses – you may even have a huge glaring weakness that you certainly can’t tell them about, but you have to tell them something during the interview because even they know that no one is perfect. But seriously, in order to be successful we absolutely must know our strengths and weaknesses – both in order to capitalize on our strengths and accommodate for our weaknesses. We have to find our niche – what we excel at – and run with it.

Like I said, for me it’s communication. I’m also pretty good at organizing, but I’m best served having a strong business analyst along side me on a technical project who can serve as that person to document the customer need well and ensure that we continue that process as the skilled technical team takes over and creates technical specs from functional requirements. I’m technical – I used to be a developer and an application development manager and have led developers on projects for years as well as being able to estimate development efforts with the best of them – but I’m best left to coordinate, communicate, assign and delegate and leave the detailed documentation to the skilled project team resources.

Why projects fail

More projects fail than succeed. I’ve always stated that more than 50% of all projects fail. A recent number I saw in a Project Management Institute LinkedIn group study showed that approximately 76% of all projects fail to some degree. That number is huge. Some just will fail because they’re poorly defined or never should have happened. Some will fail because funding will run out. Others will fail because of senior management or the customer brings it crashing to the ground because of ever-changing requirements. It’s hard to say what will cause a project to fail until you’re in the middle of it.

Project manager failure points

We must also admit that many projects will fail because the project manager was not equipped to handle the project. Either they didn’t understand what their limitations were, couldn’t communicate with their team or manage the customer well, or weren’t good leaders or decision makers, or we’re very organized. It could be one of a hundred things.

The key for a project manager is to understand how they think and work professionally and what they’re good at and what they must admit that they are not good at. Most importantly, they must recognize those weaknesses and filter those responsibilities to the team whenever possible. Then, and only then, will they give their projects and team members their greatest chance at overall project success.

Brought to you by www.project-drive.net.

Getting the Right Information to the Right People

As the purveyor of good, sound, efficient, and effective communication, the project manager must ensure that he’s not just tossing whatever status info into the air that he feels like to see what sticks to what individuals. After all, giving a C-level customer information on what scripts you ran today while testing the latest bug fix is not an example of good, sound, efficient, and effective communication, is it?

I’ve even gone so far as to create what I would consider a very detailed, yet high-level status report for the client project sponsor of an organization I was consulting for only to have him wave his hands in the air and say, “I don’t want to see this level of detail.” I was astonished, because I thought it was exactly what he would want to see. Next I gave him a detailed issues list with dates, assignments, and status updates and he exclaimed something like, “I’m in heaven, you get it!” You never know who wants what till you try, I guess.

It all depends on the individual – that end user of your information. As the project manager you can spend hours putting together great detail every week but if it’s the wrong information for the wrong individual – even if it’s great info – you still failed.

Set and get expectations early

As the project manager you want your status information to be seen by the masses – for your career, for your reputation, and for the visibility of your project. But you also want to make sure that the status information you send out means something to the receiving parties. In my example above, what I originally prepared was going to be totally ignored by my customer and he wasn’t going to be very happy in the long run.

Go into project kickoff with your customer with an example of what information you intend to disseminate on a weekly basis. Use that as a starting point to work from. This is the best time to get their input and to fine-tune the details that you provide them with. You may even need to create a higher-level summary report for their senior management. And, of course, meet with your senior management and identify key data that they would like to see on an ongoing basis. They aren’t likely going to want your detailed issues list, but they probably will want your budget analysis and forecast every week – that means a lot to them especially if you’re managing a large, high-dollar and profitable project.

Refine as needed

Finally, refine what you provide each party as needed throughout the engagement. Rarely do I find that my first status reports on a project are identical in format and content to my last. Things change, needs change, priorities change – and all this affects who wants what from the ongoing status information on your engagements. One solution is providing a customized project management dashboard like the one offered in Project Drive, the effective web-based project management software product.

Summary

Project managers must be rigid at times and follow best practices in order to help ensure project success. But project status reporting is one area that where it’s ok for the project manager to show flexibility. After all, it is the project manager’s responsibility to be effective and efficient communicators and the foundation of that is getting the right information to the right people at the right time so that good and timely decisions can be made for the project.

Brought to you by www.project-drive.net.

The PM's Role in Project Profitability – Part 2

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we established what should be obvious to all experienced project personnel – that overall responsibility for the profitability of any project is ultimately the project manager’s. I also began to look at what I consider to be the key actionable steps that the project manager can take to help ensure project profitability. Part 1 covered the first two of my top five. Those first two actions were:

• Meticulously manage scope
• Frequent and purposeful revision of the project schedule

In this final segment, we’ll examine three more steps: careful management of project resources, involving the team in managing the budget, and reviewing the budget with management and the client. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Manage resources carefully

A good team of project resources may very well be your key to project success. Indeed, finding – and keeping engaged – the best and most relevant skill sets for the project solution at hand can mean the difference between a successful deployment and a project gone horribly wrong. But the project manager who can’t skillfully manage those talented and high-priced resources and keep them focused on the assigned tasks is destined to deliver a final solution that is neither profitable nor on time.

See, talented technical resources have egos. They know they can do this or they’re certain they can do that. And they are certain the can do it fast. When working with client project team members closely on key functionality of the project, they may be inclined to gold plate functionality or even add new functionality that “shouldn’t take much time” even though it’s not part of the agreed upon scope of the project. Those ‘small details’ add up and in the end you can find yourself giving away a pile of extra hours (dollars) of development time that you never counted on.

The key for the project manager is to use project management software and keep the project schedule in front of the team members, remind them weekly – daily if necessary – what key tasks they are to be focused on and remind them not to add functionality. Educate them in the change order process and make sure they come to you if the customer is asking for more than we’re supposed to provide. That’s called extra functionality and if you work it right, it’s also called project profitability.

Engage the team in budget management activities

The project manager who sits down regularly with the project resources to review the budget status and budget forecast is much more likely to keep the project budget on track than the project manager who does not make his team aware of the financial aspects of the engagement.

Project resources are required to account for their time and charge their time to the projects they are working on. That’s how your project gets hours charged to it. All project resources have ‘grey hours’. Those are the hours that they know they worked in a given week but can’t remember specifically what they did or which project they did it for. It’s often about 10% of their time, maybe more. If they overcharge hours to your project – meaning if they add their ‘grey hours’ to the engagement you’re managing – that can mean your project is getting 10% extra hours….and dollars….charged to it each week by each resource. Don’t be the project manager who is perceived as the one who doesn’t watch the project budget closely and you won’t be on the receiving end of those ‘grey hours.’

Review the budget with senior management and the client

Finally, regularly review the project budget with your senior management and with the client. This is helpful for two reasons:

• Educating the allies. The onus is still on you as the project manager to deliver a profitable project. However, by educating your senior leadership and your client along the way in the health of the project budget you’ve now gained two allies interested in helping right the project budget should it start to go wrong. Both of these parties are stakeholders in the success of the project. Keeping them informed early and often means they’ll be aware along with you when the project budget starts to become unhealthy – and not just when it’s already too late to fix.
• Forcing accountability. If you have educated the client and your senior management as to the status of the project then there’s really no undoing that. You’ve now forced accountability of yourself to them and there’s no turning back. This can be a good thing. Managing multiple projects isn’t that easy, but it’s usually a fact of life for most project managers. Keeping yourself accountable for key areas of the project - like the budget in this case - is helpful and will keep you focused and not inclined to cut corners.

Brought to you by www.project-drive.net.

The PM's Role in Project Profitability - Part 1

Who has overall responsibility for the profitability of a project? Sales? The VP of Marketing? The CEO? The project manager? The project team? Sales is responsible for making a deal on the project that is targeted to make money for the company. The VP of Marketing is responsible for staffing sales and account managers and business development to go out and find new sales opportunities and to create new business for the organization. The CEO has overall responsibility for the organization and it’s profitability. If it flounders for an extended period of time, it will be the CEO who resigns. But in terms of overall responsibility for the budget and profitability of the project….that’s the project manager.

So we’ve established that it’s the PM’s role to maintain the project budget and guard the overall profitability of the engagement. How does that happen? What can the project manager do to ensure project profitability? What actions can he take to help guide the project to an on budget delivery that means it met its financial goals and ultimately ended on a profitable note?

Meticulously manage scope

Most any project manager would tell you that a project’s financial health begins and ends with scope management. And the project manager who performs scope management the best wins…period. Much is said about scope creep, requirements definition and documentation, and ongoing management of new work on the project. But unless that line in the sand is drawn and the project manager adheres to it and gets his team to adhere to it, profits will be lost, unplanned work will happen to make a customer happy, and the project will mysteriously pull into the finish line 20% over budget.

It’s easy when our very skilled developers are working closely with subject matter experts on the customer side for them to incorporate ‘nice-to-haves’ that come up during meetings. The problem is, these ‘nice-to-haves’ aren’t actually part of the documented project requirements that the end solution is being built against. It is the project manager’s responsibility to educate his project team about the dangers of such activity. Five extra hours here, ten extra hours there, more testing time and suddenly you find the project several thousand dollars off the mark budget wise.

Only perform work that is documented by requirements and ensure that all other requested work is turned into change orders that are priced for the customer to review and decide whether or not to pay for. Change orders make the project more profitable by allowing the delivery organization to get paid for that work and they make the customer happy by getting work that they want added on actually documented, completed, tested, and part of the final solution.

Frequent and purposeful revision of the project schedule

If the project gets out of hand, profitability will likely go with it. Many project managers in matrix environments are managing several projects at once. With so much going on, it’s very easy to lose track of what tasks are happening when – also making it very difficult to keep the project team in check and hold them accountable to their project tasks that they are responsible for.

It’s definitely not enough to put the project schedule together and leave it alone. On some projects, PMs start with a detailed schedule produced from project management software and then they put it on a shelf. That can’t happen - it must be a living, breathing part of the project and it – along with the weekly status report – should drive the weekly formal project status meeting with the customer. A regularly distributed, up-to-date project schedule lets each team member know what tasks they should be working on and keeps the team focused on the work that should be happening. Meaning your time, effort and dollars are being spent on the important work – and helping to keep the project profitable.

In Part 2 of this two-part series, we’ll examine three more ways the project manager can help keep the project on track and profitable throughout it’s lifecycle.

Brought to you by www.project-drive.net.

Take Your Project to the CEO

As project managers, we often wish there was a way to ‘get our way’ on our projects. Get the resources we want, secure the proper equipment for testing, and maybe increase the project budget to get the entire team onsite for a project milestone celebration with the customer. But, alas, we’re so busy with the day-to-day management of our project – and it may be one of several projects that we’re leading at any given time – that we don’t have the time or energy to make too much noise about it. If only there was a way to make things easier to get what we ‘need’ for our projects – and to sometimes just get the things we ‘want’, too.

What we find often is that in order to get things accomplished for our projects and on our projects and to gain the visibility we need to get there, there are some steps we need to take on our own. We essentially must ‘market’ our product to get the things we need for it to help ensure its success and to help ensure the overall satisfaction of our customer on the engagement. And there’s no better person or persons in power to market your project to than the CEO or top-level senior leadership within your company. The three proactive actions that I’ve found to work best for me are discussed below.

Send your project status report to senior management

A very easy first step is to include your CEO or senior management on your regularly weekly status report distribution. As long as they have your status report on a regular basis then they know who you are, who your customer is, and what’s going on with your project on a weekly basis. That’s probably 100% more visibility than most of the projects in the organization.

If your CEO knows your project and knows your needs, then you’re more likely to get their attention when issues arise – like resource availability or technology needs. You’ll be seen as proactive and on top of your project and you’ll be surprised how quickly help will be on its way when needed.

Have the CEO or other senior management attend a status meeting

Invite the CEO – or some level of senior management – to your next status meeting. Think of a reason – any reason – that will get them there. Maybe an important issue is being discussed that requires a key decision and you’d like to have them hear about it and be involved.

By getting the CEO involved in your status call with the customer you will be serving two purposes that will help your project from this point forward. 1) Your CEO or senior leadership will be even more aware of you and your project further entrenching their interest in your project’s well-being. And 2) the customer’s satisfaction level will immediately rise because now they think their project is important enough to your organization to warrant this type of personal involvement from the top. Not many projects get that – but then not many project managers go to this level of effort to make it happen.

Invite the customer to your site

One more thing you can do is to invite the customer to your site if they are not local or if this is not already a common occurrence. Invite them for a tour, or a face-to-face meeting with your leadership, or possibly even a disaster recovery demonstration by your IT staff if that’s relevant to what you’re doing for them on this engagement.

Bringing the customer onsite can definitely boost the profile of your project within the organization because there will be some specific preparation that will have to happen and likely some post-visit follow-up and communication between the customer and your senior leadership.

Summary

I’m certain there are many more ways you can make your project more visible – these are just three. However, gaining the attention and involvement of senior leaders in the company in your project – in a good way rather just when disaster strikes – can bring instant visibility to your project. And once that happens, it’s far easier to gain help with resource and technology acquisition, project funding, and the general knocking down of those annoying roadblocks that often get in the way of our project and a successful end solution.

Managing Projects Through Uncertainty

These are definitely uncertain times. The economy is still tanked in the US. In some US cities one out of every seven house sit empty, real unemployment rates are running as high nearly 30% (After adjustments), and there are approximately five unemployed applicants for every one open job. Uncertainty and chaos at its best.

So it should be of no surprise when we experience uncertainty in our projects and with our project customers. After all, the very same uncertainties I've already mentioned are affecting our companies, our client companies, and nearly every single financial decision being made. How can anything be stable? How can we be certain that our project won't be halted or completely shut down tomorrow? How can we be certain that our project management jobs will be relevant and needed next week? How can we know for sure that our project teams that our customers are counting on won't be disassembled due to layoffs or needs on more important projects next month right in the middle of critical tasks? The answer is we can't. We can never be certain. Even in good times we can't be certain of these things as managing projects is really all about managing change, isn't it? I've had most or all of these things happen to my projects and teams in good times and bad due to forces and conditions that are often beyond my control or influence.

We don't take on the role of project manager because it feels safe. Project managers generally know things can change or happen during the course of any engagement that can greatly affect the outcome if we aren't prepared for it. It's called risk planning and risk management. We just have to be aware during very uncertain times that there are additional risks that may need to be considered and planned for.

So, do we really do things differently when we're managing in uncertain times? And by uncertain times I mean with our jobs, our company's status, our client's stability, or our projects financial or technical viability. Do we do things differently? In my opinion, yes, at least a little.

When I'm managing a project during what I would consider unstable or uncertain times or circumstances here's what I focus on:

Solid documentation

Document, document, document. It's a tedious task unless it's for deliverables that are already built into the contract and we're getting paid for them. But during uncertain project times it becomes even more critical. The more documentation that's available, the easier you can onboard new team members if your project team is unstable. And, more documentation means you have yourself well covered if customer questions arise concerning your team's performance on the project.

Thorough risk management

We all perform issue management - it's hard not too when issues arise. But really performing risk management and doing it right is something we often overlook or gloss over. Not only is risk management and planning critical, it's even more so when times are uncertain. Different things need to be planned for such as work stoppages, technology solution changes, or sudden project resource losses.

Effective communication

Communication is job #1 for the project manager and it's never more evident than when you're dealing with unstable project situations. It's extremely important to keep your project team and the customer well informed of project status, project schedule, and all issues at all times - especially when your project is running through turbulent waters.

Customer satisfaction

There's not really any one thing you can do in terms of customer satisfaction. There's not one thing you can specifically do to guarantee it. But rather it's a cumulative process of maintaining best practices and good communication and checking in frequently with the customer to make sure that their needs are being met. Don't assume your customer is happy...ask them.

Frequent upward reporting within the organization

Finally, keep your senior management well informed on your project. Especially if the uncertainty lies within your own organization. The loudest project manager is usually not the one who gets the ax first. It's the quiet one because they seem more expendable even though they may be the ones who are just the best at taking the ball and running with it. So if you're more independent and good at taking off with a project with little to no senior direction, that's great. But if your company is laying people off, start making some noise. Make sure your senior leadership knows who you are, who your project team members are, and what's happening on your project.

Summary

I realize that these are things we should - and hopefully do - focus on anyway during our projects. But during uncertain times they are definitely key processes that we can't afford to skip or cut back on. If anything, they need increased attention and focus and that's where I generally put in some extra effort. I can't say it's always what keeps things afloat in uncertain project times, but I can guarantee that it has never hurt the project.