Author: Cynthia Low

Serving Up Soft Skills

Written by Cynthia Low on March 18, 2008. Posted in Articles. 9 Comments on Serving Up Soft Skills

When I first got started in the project management software business, I knew that what people needed to be trained in to be a good project manager was the Critical Path Methodology calculation. If only someone knew this magic algorithm, they too could be a good project manager. I still have course materials that include exercise after exercise about how to do forward and backward passes of the CPM calculation.

How far we’ve come!

I’ve had the pleasure lately of working with some people at McGill University who are attending classes to learn more about being a project manager. It’s an advanced class so we’re not spending much of our time on learning how to manually calculate a project schedule. After all, there are many tools that can do it for us. Instead, most of our time is spent on the so-called soft skills that a project manager needs to survive.

I’ve often said that someone who wants to implement organizational project management (these days the most popular term for this is EPM or Enterprise Project Management) needs to be 50% technician, 50% therapist, 50% teacher, 50% mentor and 75% Guru. It’s no small challenge. The problem is that in almost all cases, people are swimming upstream when they want to deploy project management as a common process across the organization.

We’ve got three clients who’ve just hired someone to head up their new PMO and EPM deployment initiative. I’ve got great sympathy for the people doing the hiring. How do they find just the right person for this?

I’ve been thinking about what survival skills I’d go looking for in such a key person and I thought I’d share them this week here.

Presentation Skills

It’s amazing to me how many people in business are awful presenters. This is very much a nurture skill (as opposed to a nature skill that you got by virtue of your DNA). Virtually anyone can learn to present adequately and most people can learn to present very effectively. There are public speaking courses all over and we’ve often sent our staff to them. There are a few basics of presenting that are so simple that no one should be without them. Here are just a couple:

For the love of God, please, please don’t read your PowerPoint slides. If you do what you’re silently saying to your audience is, “You must be illiterate. Thank goodness I’m here to read these for you!”
Make sure people can see what you’re presenting and hear what you’re saying. That includes the volume of your voice, distractions such as outside light or noise, people talking etc. Never, never try to talk over someone else.
Know who you’re presenting to. If you don’t know by the time you start. Use the first few minutes to make sure you know who’s in the room. If you don’t have any clue about your audience, it’s almost inevitable your comments will be off target.

Negotiation

This is key to any project manager’s job but it’s particularly critical if the person we’re talking about will be changing the organizational culture. I’ve never seen an EPM environment created because of pure authority or just at random. It inevitably comes through generating a consensus, and being able to negotiate is the central skill required for that.

Organization/Document Management

This may be one of the most important personal skills. I’ve seen people who are wonderful orators and fabulous hand-shaking people-people but they can’t find a single thing on their desk or on their laptop. If you want to be the person who will create a PMO, then you’ve got to be all about the process and that means being able to track the documents that are a part of what you’re creating.

Basic Technology

I can’t tell you how many people I meet who don’t know how to effectively use Word or any word processing software. The same goes for Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The result is, that I find people writing emails, letters and other communications that are terribly formatted and very ineffective. Training for these tools is available from your nearest bookstore and that means there is little excuse to not have these skills. Using your basic desktop product skills is so fundamental. I don’t see how someone can advance without them.

Leadership

Ah, the most elusive of all! There are so many books, courses and conference sessions on leadership that you can feel swamped with too much advice on how to achieve it. I think this is partly because leadership is related to so many other skills and, in the end, is more a way of being than a particular skill. That being said, there’s plenty you can do to be a better leader. Being prepared, taking initiative, offering to be responsible for something all make a difference. People also have to have some desire to lead, as no amount of books will make a leader if there’s no desire. So I’ll have to put this into a category of personality traits rather than skills.

While we’re talking about personality traits, a desire to learn is critical. When we hire new technical people in our firm, we tell them a few things during the interview process. First, we let them know we only hire people who are ‘quick studies’; people who learn quickly. Then, we tell them that more important than that, is that they will never learn enough. Their training will never be over. The people who succeed in our line of work are reading constantly. After all, you’re reading this and have done for the last few minutes in order to get this far. I do the same. I’ve easily got an hour a day of reading in my industry which I need to just to keep up; to keep constant. People who are looking for the quick fix (can’t I just take the blue pill?) in training will have a much tougher time being successful in deploying organizational project management.

You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned any of the traditional technical skills in project management. Do you need to know about time management and scope management and change management and risk assessment and quality control and so on? Of course you do. If you’re going to be working in the project management domain then you need to be not only very knowledgeable about the building blocks of project data but also have experience with using them.

But, if you’re going to be a person who deploys project management not just for yourself but also for others and, in particular, if you’ve been given the job of deploying project management for an organization, then avoid your soft skills at your peril.

Chris Vandersluis is the founder and president of HMS Software based in Montreal, Canada. He has an economics degree from Montreal’s McGill University and over 22 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and is the founder of the Montreal Chapter of the Microsoft Project Association. Mr. Vandersluis has been published in numerous publications including Fortune Magazine, Heavy Construction News, the Ivey Business Journal, PMI’s PMNetwork and Computing Canada. Mr. Vandersluis has been part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council since 2003. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University’s Executive Institute. He can be reached at [email protected]. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Prioritization and Scheduling Based on Value

Written by Cynthia Low on March 18, 2008. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Prioritization and Scheduling Based on Value

Despite most of the industry hype and notoriety surrounding failed projects over the last 10 to15 years, getting a project completed is not where the real project portfolio management challenge lies. Armies of professionals are dedicating their every waking hour to executing tasks with their eyes fixed on the completion of the whole. Rather, experienced executives and managers know that the most difficult obstacles to overcome are choosing the right projects in the first place and getting them started while positioning them for success.

Successful leaders know that their key driving force should be bringing more value to their organizations. They make it their focus to understand the value their departments deliver and make decisions with the objective of increasing this value. Successful leaders also realize time is a precious commodity and it should not be wasted on administrative tasks that do not add value. In the end, they integrate making value-based decisions into all aspects of their portfolio management activities including project prioritization, understanding resource availability and creating project schedules.

Making Value-Based Decisions

There are many opportunities to make decisions throughout a project’s lifecycle. Which are the best projects? What resources should we put on a project? Which task should I work on next? Often, these decisions are made for the wrong reasons – they are knee jerk reactions based on who screamed the loudest.

Really, the work we are all doing is intended to bring value to our organizations. Making value-based decisions means thinking about the consequences of our work in terms of the benefit it will bring to the entire organization, not just one individual or department. The consequences of not making value-based decisions can be substantial: losses in productivity, increased costs, and most importantly the unrealized profits from making bad decisions.

Value-based decisions need to be made throughout the life-cycle of a project, by everybody involved in the project. The responsibility obviously falls on the executive team and portfolio managers. However, project leaders and team members need to ask themselves the critical question often as well: What value will my next action bring to the organization? In order to accomplish this, everybody from the executives to the project team members needs to understand the value of their work and how it relates to organizational objectives.

Which Projects Should I Choose?

How do you assess value and the criteria of value-based decisions as they apply to project prioritization? Most organizations think of project value purely in terms of financial criteria – project costs vs. benefits in dollars. However, there can be many more aspects to value – strategic benefit, risk, alignment and balance. The criteria and their individual importance will vary from organization to organization, and may change over time. The important thing is to consider all aspects of value, not just the purely financial. For example, one project may not bring a lot of financial benefits on its own. But, it might reduce risk or enable other projects that do produce significant financial benefits.

By applying value-based decision methods to your project prioritization process, you will truly determine the best projects for your organization – your top initiatives. This is where the focus should be placed. The beauty is that the prioritization process need not be overly burdensome. For example, for most organizations a simple weighted scoring model combined with knowledge of alignment with business objectives is enough to assess value and make project comparisons. Once in place, this will also facilitate agreement from the executive team on the top initiatives.

Why Hasn’t My Project Started!

Possibly the single most important imperative derived from centralizing all of your projects into one single place – a portfolio – is to decide which projects you will be able to start and when; your forward-looking portfolio schedule.

The three main constraints for positioning project start dates are capital, staffing, and risk confluence. Downstream from the identification of top initiatives, staffing the project as well as risk confluence (and accumulation) with other active projects become the main constraints in scheduling the start dates of top initiatives.

Most organizations are so resource constrained, relative to the demand placed on their portfolio, that resource availability becomes the driving factor in determining the portfolio’s forward looking view. A preliminary understanding of the general scope of a project is necessary in order to determine its resource needs. Once you know the resource requirements, analyzing resource utilizations becomes a valuable tool in answering questions such as “When will the Top Initiatives start?” and “Why can’t my project start right now?”. In addition, understanding resource utilization allows the opportunity to balance resources to avoid extended periods where resources are over-used or under-used, and to determine skill sets that might we be lacking.

Modeling Resource Loads

The basic building block of modeling resource utilization and capacity is to be able to accurately model the loads placed on your resources. The first impulse may be to simply sum all of the tasks assigned to a resource to determine their load; after all, isn’t that what all of those detailed project work plans are for? Unfortunately, this technique is very costly as, instead of leading projects, project managers are now in the clerical position of tracking down the status of every single task and ensuring that every single task’s level of effort is precise. Loading with this the level of granularity becomes time consuming as it is difficult to decide whether a task will take 1.5 hours or whether it will actually be closer to 2.0 hours. Ironically, determining resource loads with a bottom-up, task-oriented approach is not only very costly, but in the end, is very inaccurate also. Successful leaders see this as a non-value add method of resource loading and the added detail is not worth the effort.

Rather, for the purposes of portfolio planning, the value-based approach of resource loading is best done top-down – at the project level. The ability to estimate is fundamental to project management and any technical profession. For each resource on each project, an estimate of the overall percentage of a resource’s time that will be committed to that project during a given time frame is the proper level of accuracy necessary for the purposes of portfolio planning and resource utilization. Typically, percentage estimates such as 25%, 35%, or 50% are within the margin of error for resource utilization purposes. The end result is a resource utilization model that is not only easier and less time consuming to manage, but more accurate as well.

Putting It All Together

Making value-based decisions seems logical. The question is why more organizations are not applying these techniques in their portfolio and project management processes. The answer could lie in the fact that most portfolio and project management methodologies and tools still advocate a bottoms-up approach that mires organizations in details. In reality, the true value is in the business benefits of the portfolio as a whole, not the completion or a single project on-time and in-budget.

Applying value-based decision making to portfolio management will produce greater financial benefits for an organization. In addition, other benefits of making value-based decisions should not be overlooked. It will also produce buy-in and motivation for projects and activities from the entire organization.

Steve Chamberlin and Bob McMurray founded 3 Olive Solutions, LLC (www.3olivesolutions.com) with the mission of developing software solutions that help executives and managers be more effective leaders within their organizations. 3 Olive’s flagship application, Portfolio Intelligence®, is an on-demand project portfolio management solution with a methodology that is ideal for small and mid-sized organizations or departments within larger companies such as the project management office (PMO). Portfolio Intelligence® is an affordable and easy-to-implement solution that enables executives and managers to organize, control and make better decisions on their work efforts resulting in higher business value, better resource utilizations, and lower costs. For more information, please contact 3 Olive at [email protected] or (800) 753-5821.

Making Sure that the Medium and the Message are in Synch

Written by Cynthia Low on March 4, 2008. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Making Sure that the Medium and the Message are in Synch

Editor’s Comments

“I want it yesterday,” is the clarion call of harried managers everywhere, pressed to deliver on time. Anyone who works from a home office or on the road knows the importance of the right tools and ground rules to let them work effectively. In her article, Virtual Velocity; Effective Project Management Gives Virtual Teams the Edge, Michelle LaBrosse gives us some pointers on how to put the communication tools and work culture together to reap the rewards of the virtual workforce, and bring projects to successful conclusions.

It’s also the cry of many project sponsors, who invariably throw in a couple of other requirements – that it be within scope and budget. But as Alan Koch reminds us in Negotiating the Triple Constraints, scope, cost and budget must be balanced to achieve project success. He also makes the point that many project sponsors either don’t know about the triple constraints, or don’t care….”I want it yesterday, come hell or high water!” It’s only later that the realities of scope, cost and time sink in.

On the blog front, Ilya Bogorad addresses what he describes as the most serious issue with project management today: The pointless project done well. Some of the most valuable resources a company can put together are wasted with the best of intentions. David Barrett discusses Project Management for the Masses, pointing out that there are many part time PMs out there who find the professional project management world intimidating, and he offers some help on how to adapt it to smaller projects. In his blog. Claude Emond talks about the importance of the project vision and regrets that many project managers he’s met dismiss it out of hand. Find out more in Vroom and the “Capability Principle.”

Thanks for joining us and let us know what you think.

Negotiating the Triple Constraints

Written by Cynthia Low on March 4, 2008. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Negotiating the Triple Constraints

We’ve heard it all before. The project sponsor announces, “Here’s what I need. I need it by the first of the month, and it can’t cost any more than this.” The project sponsor dictates scope, cost, and time and tells us that nothing is negotiable. That is what and when we must deliver, and, “Oh, by the way, the quality must be good, too!”

The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) teaches us that every project is governed by the “Triple Constraints” of scope, cost, and time, and that they must be balanced with each other to achieve project success. But our project sponsor either doesn’t know about the Triple Constraints, or doesn’t care. The mandate is decreed and we are stuck with it!

Or are we?

Why the Unreasonable Demands?
Does our sponsor want the project to fail? Of course not! So, why are we given such unreasonable demands? If you look at the situation from the sponsor’s point of view, the demands start to make more sense.

Any manager in any organization (profit-making, non-profit, government, or whatever) is responsible for completing as much work as possible, as quickly as possible, and for the lowest cost possible. Managers who settle for anything less are shirking their fiduciary responsibility to the organization.

More often that not, the manager does not have a good way to estimate how much time and money a project should take. Even if this person has past experience with this sort of project, it is unlikely that he/she has the time to analyze it and consider all of its ramifications. When it comes to setting the constraints for the project, a manager who is serious about fiduciary responsibilities will push you hard, and then will push you just a little bit more.

The unreasonable demands stem from the project sponsor not knowing what the project will require, so he/she makes a best guess, then pushes beyond it to ensure that the project time and money are well spent.

What Can We Do About This?
Embarking on a project when we know it cannot be completed with the available resources is called a “Death March.” If we simply march forward, we know that the project will fail, and we will suffer as a consequence.

But if we object, we are often told to stop whining and get back to work. We can tell the sponsor that we don’t think the project can be completed with the given resources, but we are likely to be told that we can and we will! It is our opinion versus that of the sponsor – and with the difference in position, our hands are tied.

While it is true that we do not have the authority to argue with management, we do have some tools that can help level the playing field: hard data and useful information. Our sponsor doesn’t want to do the wrong thing, but probably lacks the information necessary to make the right decision. And we have that information!

We can level the field and prepare to have a meaningful negotiation with our project sponsor by following a simple three-step process:

List the project activities. Follow disciplined planning procedures to identify all of the steps that will impact project success. Be careful to think through all of the work that must happen using past projects as a guide to be sure you don’t miss anything.
Research past projects. Understand the time and resources that those activities have normally required for success on past projects. (Or at least determine which resource levels were insufficient on past projects and use them to estimate what would have been needed.)
Produce three solid defensible plans. With the information from steps one and two, you can now produce three plans. Why three plans? The first plan will reflect exactly what the project (as defined by the sponsor) will actually cost in both time and money. The other two plans suggest alternatives that could come closer to meeting the constraints: perhaps one that has a smaller scope and meets the cost and schedule constraints, and another that meets the schedule and scope by increasing costs.

Armed with all of this information, we are prepared to actually negotiate with management!

The Negotiation
Most managers have had little experience with receiving well prepared and defensible plans, so you are likely to be met with a barrage of questions about your plans and the data on which they are based. Don’t be discouraged by such a reception. It is management’s responsibility not just to trust what they are told, but also to ensure that it is realistic and is based on real data. It may take some time to convince your sponsor that your plans and your data are based in reality, and, depending on how positive or negative your relationship has been in the past, it may take a project or two before your sponsor begins to believe you.

When your sponsor begins to believe in your data, you are finally in the position to negotiate project constraints that are workable and realistic. What the project ends up looking like is up to your sponsor. While your sponsor may make choices with which you disagree, as long as you provide the information necessary to make good, rational decisions, you have done your part to ensure successful project planning.

About the author
Alan S. Koch, PMP, is a writer on effective Project Management methods and instructor for Global Knowledge. His 29 years in software development include over five years in Quality Assurance (including establishing & managing a QA department), and eight years in Software Process Improvement. This article was originally published in Global Knowledge’s Management in Motion e-newsletter. Global Knowledge (www.globalknowledge.com/PMILocal) delivers comprehensive hands-on project management, business process, and professional skills training. Visit our Knowledge Center at for free white papers, webinars, and more.

Virtual Velocity: Effective Project Management Gives Virtual Teams the Edge

Written by Cynthia Low on March 4, 2008. Posted in Articles.

The need for speed has never been greater, but anyone who has worked from a home office or on the road knows how easily virtual velocity can be hampered without the right tools and ground rules.

The right tools are easy enough to find. Most of us already have them or have access to them: email, Instant Messaging, conferencing (both video and tele), cellphones and Blackberries. Once the tools that are right for your organization are in place, the biggest barriers are often around communications and work culture. Ground rules that focus on them can increase your team’s productivity and let you reap the rewards of the virtual workforce.

Build Trust in Person and Grow that Trust with Clear Expectations
In order for people to work effectively virtually, there has to be trust. Trust doesn’t happen magically. It is built when you bring your team together for training or team building, and then continues to grow with clear expectations consistently set by leaders and met by the team.

Manage Results, Not Activity.
In the physical office environment, “busy work” often gets mistaken for real work. In the virtual environment, when you can’t see what people are doing, the key is to manage results. Set expectations and monitor the results, not the daily activities.

Schedule Regular Communication
It’s important that there is a regular time for reporting both progress and potential pitfalls to the team. This keeps people on track and gives every one the discipline of a team check-in.

Create Communication that Saves Time — Not that Kills It
Have you created an email culture that wastes time with endless “daisychain” conversations that take several hours to read? Does your team spend hours trying to solve an issue with an email conversation that could have been solved with a thirty-minute conference call? With email, being a critical tool in our work environments, it’s important to create a new culture of effectiveness around it. Ask yourself: how you can make your team’s email communication even more productive?

Create Standards that Build a Cohesive Culture
What are your standards of quality? How do you define excellence? What does your brand mean to each employee? Making sure everyone knows the answers to those three questions is even more important when people are scattered geographically. Virtually, you need to create cohesion with excellence and a sense of pride in what your company stands for.

Define Rules of Responsiveness.
When people are working remotely, it’s important that you define what your rules of responsiveness are for your culture. How quickly are people expected to return an email, an Instant Message or a phone call? What is your protocol when people are out of the office or on vacation? If you’re in a customer service environment, it’s important to have clear expectations regarding how to respond to all customer inquiries.

Working virtually is not rocket-science, but it does require new rules for our workforce. These tips are a good starting point for your team as you build your own best practices for effective project management in the virtual world. Enjoy the journey and invite your team to help you create a powerful work culture.

Michelle LaBrosse is the founder and Chief Cheetah of Cheetah Learning. An international expert on accelerated learning and Project Management, she has grown Cheetah Learning into the market leader for Project Management training and professional development. In 2006, The Project Management Institute, www.pmi.org, selected Michelle as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the World, and only one of two women selected from the training and education industry. Michelle is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner & President Management program for entrepreneurs, and is the author of Cheetah Project Management and Cheetah Negotiations. Cheetah Learning is a virtual company and has 100 employees, contractors, and licensees worldwide.

A version of this article appeared in the February 4, 2008 issue of CareerSmart Advisor