Author: Cynthia Low

Managing Scope for Project Success

Written by Cynthia Low on June 24, 2009. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Managing Scope for Project Success

Ever start a project without a stable foundation for scope? How did it go? To ensure project success, it is essential that scope be unambiguous and carefully managed. This can be accomplished with the Scope Management Process, which provides a formal set of procedures for planning, executing, monitoring and controlling scope.

The project manager, sponsor and stakeholders use the Scope Management Process throughout the project life cycle to:

Communicate project scope so the sponsor and key stakeholders reach the same conclusion about what is and is not in scope. It is normal for different people to read the same documents and have varying, yet valid, interpretations of the scope. To prevent this, scope must be documented, and more importantly, discussed. The scope statement should contain sufficient detail to be able to establish cost, schedule and deliverable-acceptance criteria.
Monitor and review the project to identify unplanned impacts on scope, cost, schedule or deliverable-acceptance criteria. Would anyone be concerned if the deliverable-acceptance criteria changed, but there was no change to cost or schedule? The answer is yes. The project manager has agreed to deliver something of value to the sponsor that is of sufficient quality to yield business benefits. If that criteria changes in some way, the change should be agreed to and documented so the project manager can later demonstrate the deliverables meet the quality standard.
Raise scope-related issues and recommend appropriate actions or changes to scope or baseline documents.
Formalize approved adjustments to scope documents and cost, schedule, deliverable-acceptance criteria, and other elements of the project management plan.

The Scope Management Process is a set of steps designed to set, track and control scope throughout the project. Key participants in the process include primary stakeholders and resource providers. Basic functions in the Scope Management Process include:

Reviewing the project charter and other documents such as the contract, statement of work and request for proposal. Identify and characterize scope elements and drivers for the project in enough detail to establish scope, cost, schedule and deliverable- acceptance criteria.
Discussing the proposed scope baseline with key stakeholders and reviewing data, assumptions and constraints to resolve misunderstandings and gain approval of the scope baseline. Document the scope baseline and distribute it to stakeholders.
Monitoring scope elements and drivers throughout the project for possible changes that impact the baselines. The project manager and team are proactive and address scope issues before they become critical. Team leaders and staff should review their scope elements and drivers regularly.
Reviewing project progress regularly to identify variances that are possibly caused by scope element or driver changes. This is reactive because the project manager did not see it ahead of time, and the project cost and schedule have already been impacted.
Processing scope change requests using a standard procedure agreed to by the sponsor and key stakeholders. This normally involves analyzing the impact of the change request on the project’s triple constraints and proposing several alternative solutions to the change control board.
Updating baselines and other parts of the project management plan based on approved changes to scope. This should include updating the work breakdown structure, activity list, resourcing, procurement and communication plans.

The preceding discussion has involved addressing scope factors found in proposals, contracts and records. There are other scope factors the project manager must also plan for and manage, such as the skill and experience level of the project managers and staff working on a project. At the extreme, a very inexperienced team might take nearly twice as long as a highly experienced team. The project manager needs to make assumptions about the level of skill and experience of the project team. If the assigned team is less skilled or experienced than assumed, the team should begin mitigating the unfavorable cost and schedule variances they will likely face.

Another factor is the relationship between project staff and the client or sponsor. Project performance is impacted by the level of cooperation versus confrontation, eagerness versus resistance, collaboration versus isolationism, and creativity versus mediocrity. The project manager needs to monitor whether these factors are shifting and how they will impact project performance. The organization performing the project should contractually position itself to defend against a client’s unreasonable interference or constraints to progress. If it does not adequately protect itself from client scope factors through contracting, it will likely end up absorbing cost and schedule variances that should have been transferred to the client.

Tom Grzesiak, PMP is an instructor for Global Knowledge and is the president of Supple Wisdom LLC. Tom has over 20 years of project management and consulting experience with IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and dozens of clients. He has trained thousand of project managers and consultants. Global Knowledge is a worldwide leader in IT and business training. More than 700 courses span foundational and specialized training and certifications. For more information, visit www.globalknowledge.com

How to Create a Winning Team. Part 3

Written by Cynthia Low on June 17, 2009. Posted in Articles. 10 Comments on How to Create a Winning Team. Part 3

The Technical Support Project

Now that you have a new and improved technical support team in place, you need to let people know. This includes departments within your company and external customers, both of whom need different types of marketing. This article will outline some ideas on how to spread the good word.

Where to Start

Have you ever had any luck telling someone at your company who doesn’t report to you what to do? Me neither. So what you need to do is sell it to them. This is not a one-time deal. You are looking to ingrain deep-seated changes and repeated transactions. That is the realm of marketing.

Changing Perceptions

Have you ever been served a plate of food that looked exactly like the picture on the commercial? Did you lose that weight like the health club promised? Were you able to get those stubborn stains out like it says on the bottle of cleaner you bought? That’s marketing.

You have to talk about the ideal case, the goal. Don’t shoot too high, using words like “guarantee” or “perfect.” Those words will come back to bite you. Also avoid shooting too low, using phrases like “if we are lucky.” That kind of attitude will undermine you right from the start. Rather, the perception that you need to set goes something like this:

“We have made some major changes. We are now better organized and better trained. We are monitoring and measuring ourselves to ensure that we consistently perform at a high level. You can trust us.”

Internal Marketing

You are going to need to market your team to the rest of your company before you try it with external customers. You will also want to involve other departments in your external customer marketing effort. You do, however, have a small window of time to accomplish this. If the external customers discover the new technical support system for themselves, it will lose some of the impact and you will get less credit for it.

Focus on the benefits each department will receive from your improved support system. When you are talking to salespeople, talk about salespeople. When you are talking to developers, talk about developers. When you are talking to accounting, talk about accountants.

1. Sales:

Salespeople are focused on sales, so you need to explain your team in terms of how it will help them close more sales. For example, you can tell them that they will be spending less time on the phone troubleshooting problems. They will also be able to call existing customers and ask for more business more easily. There will not be a large support problem standing in the way of customer satisfaction and developing the relationship further.

You need to provide Sales with both a new support transition script and a process for turning support cases over to you. The script can be fairly simple: “Yes sir, I understand that this issue is important to you. We have just spent a lot of time revamping our technical support system, and the team is much faster at figuring out solutions to problems than I am. They really care about fixing problems for you, so I trust them to take care of this.” You will have to determine which process will work best in your company. My recommendation is that you keep it simple. If you give the salespeople a checklist of information to gather, then they won’t bother. An email to the helpdesk with the customer’s name is perfect. If they can give you some indication of the type/severity of the problem, that is even better. You can also ask them to call you personally so that you can take down the information and create the case yourself.

2. Marketing

Marketing lives on happy reference-giving customers, so they will be glad to follow behind you to dig for quotes and references. It is important for the company that you help them to do that. Automating customer satisfaction surveys, for example, will be very useful.

Marketing feeds sales. Those quotes and reference customers are your long-term marketing program with the salespeople, helping you reinforce their new behavior. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? I hate buzzwords, but that is synergy.

3. Accounting

The new technical support system will also provide support cost data that can be allocated to each specific customer. Right now, the accountants are probably just spreading the costs of technical support across each customer based upon the amount that the customer has paid. If they can get data from you on how much technical support time each customer actually spends, then they can account those costs in a more accurate way. Such a level of understanding of your costs per customer is a tremendously powerful profit-maximizing tool. Upper management and product planning can use this data to target products to more profitable segments of customers. You can use it to argue for raising the support billings on the least profitable segments of customers.

Your accounting people might not see it at first, but the data about how much time you spend on each customer also helps them get the invoices paid. Customers who are using a lot of support time are clearly using the service, meaning they have no choice but to pay the full invoice price. The few who do not pay on time can be influenced by collection calls that threaten to cut off their technical support. Customers who are not using much technical support time, however, will likely need additional marketing about the benefits. You can also consider giving them discounts.

4. Development

You will need to engage the development team if you plan to hire your own developer. The development manager might react skeptically, but you can prepare for your conversation beforehand by gathering some data about how much time the developers spend working on bug fixes. Make notes, and take those notes to lunch with you. You need to sell this to the manager in terms of fewer interruptions and fewer headaches.

It is important to get the development manager on board with your plan because you will need his/her help. The manager must be willing to interview your candidates, train your new support developer on the code base and the source code control tools and invite your developer to meetings. You can’t force that, so gently suggest it after outlining how having a developer in support will benefit the development team and the company at large.

External Marketing

The sales and marketing teams will do most of the work for you on this. They may not run a full marketing campaign about how support is no longer terrible, but they do have a ton of automated messages and informal scripts that they can insert little announcements into.

The most important script is the one mentioned above for the salespeople to use when a customer confronts them with a problem. That personal recommendation is worth more than all of the rest of this marketing combined. You won’t get that personal recommendation very often though, and certainly not to all of the contacts at every customer. You other opportunities to fill in the gaps.

Your company probably already has all of these customer communications going:

newsletter
automated emails to website visitors and new customers
cover letters with invoices

Ask the sales and marketing teams to include a recommendation of the new technical support system in some or all of those communications. Trust them to find the right locations and messaging.

You communicate with customers too, so take advantage of that. When someone opens a case in your helpdesk they should get an automatic email confirmation. Personalize it. Here is what I wrote for our helpdesk:

“Dear ________,

We have received your cry for help. We have logged it in our helpdesk under this case number: #########

Our support ninjas monitor the helpdesk from 7am to 6pm (Central US time), Monday through Friday. They sneak in some other times, but we can’t make any promises about that.

A real person will read this case within two hours (during the times listed above). We triage and deal with critical issues first. So if your payroll is threatened or your site is down you should expect to hear from us soon. And we try to reply to all problems that get to us before 4:00pm on the same business day.

You can reply to this email to update your case. Or you can call us at 800-755-9878 ext 2 (US) or 512-834-8888 ext 2 (everywhere else).”

The internal response to that message was near mutiny from the salespeople, and yes, we have had a handful of negative reactions from customers. On the other hand, we have had hundreds of positive reactions from customers:

“I love it. I’m glad I’m getting help from a real person instead of some software system.”

“Ninjas save the day again. You guys rock!”

Clearly I won. I take great personal pride from that, even though I am planning on rewriting it. I’m thinking that the next version will be in free verse.

Feedback

The support team members need to follow up with the clients. They need to find out if the solution worked. They need to ask the question in such a way that the natural response from the client will be an honest one and, hopefully, a complimentary one. The question should be something like this: “Did the solution I sent over work out for you? Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Assuming that the solution did work, the natural response to this will be complimentary. Sometimes it will even be quotable.

And sometimes the answer will be negative, and we will know that the problem is still unresolved. In those cases we just have to keep digging until we get it right and get to the compliment.

There are three great reasons to go the extra mile to provide great service and receive compliments. Firstly, it really does help the technical support staff to hear it. You can’t keep good technical support people for long if they aren’t getting some validation. Secondly, if the customer can say something nice about you today, that customer will have a positive attitude toward you tomorrow. They are significantly more likely to say something nice about you to someone else if they have already said it to you. That kind of word-of-mouth recommendation marketing cannot be bought. Finally, someone who is willing to compliment you directly is more willing to serve as a reference or provide a quote for your marketing efforts.

When you have transformed your technical support team, you will have done something truly spectacular. Good luck with it. Drop me a note and share your success stories.

Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company’s largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at [email protected].

Assuming that the solution did work, the natural response to this will be complimentary. Sometimes it will even be quotable.

And sometimes the answer will be negative, and we will know that the problem is still unresolved. In those cases we just have to keep digging until we get it right and get to the compliment.

ESI International Offers Free PMBOK® Guide Update Webinar

Written by Cynthia Low on June 10, 2009. Posted in Articles. 9 Comments on ESI International Offers Free PMBOK® Guide Update Webinar

Arlington, VA – Keeping up with the differences between editions of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide) just became much easier. ESI International now offers a free webinar to direct project managers through the latest updates to the highly regarded guide to global best practices of project management.

The current, PMBOK^® Guide-Fourth Edition, published by The Project Management Institute (PMI^®), includes changes in three categories: consistency, clarification, and coverage. These changes refine ambiguity, increase coherency, and add detail to areas that were lacking or non-existent in previous editions. Process flow diagrams have been replaced by data flow diagrams, and a new appendix focusing on interpersonal skills has been added.

The free ESI webinar is a chapter-by-chapter review, presented by Joseph R. Czarnecki, PMP, Senior Advisor, Instructional Design, ESI. From walkthroughs to side-by-side comparisons with the previous edition, the review highlights the differences within each PMBOK^® Guide knowledge area to help project management professionals identify and understand the more significant changes, as well as the impact of each.

“The guide – and the changes to it – are so comprehensive that we immediately recognized the need for a range of tools to help our clients, including a webinar,” Czarnecki said. “Besides saving time and ensuring proper preparation for the PMP^® Exam, the goal is to put the changes in context, so that users get an understanding of why changes were made.”

The free webinar can be accessed at www.esi-intl.com/PMBOKWebinar.

6/09

How to Create a Winning Team

Written by Cynthia Low on May 27, 2009. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on How to Create a Winning Team

The Technical Support Project. Part 2.

Staffing is the most critical part of creating a winning technical support team. If you make mistakes with the steps discussed in my first article but excel at hiring and managing your people, you will succeed in the end. If, however, you do well with the mechanics and make mistakes with staffing, you will certainly fail.

Your Staff Today

Even if your current staff is doing a good job, you will still have to bring new people in to help you rise from the ashes. I know you don’t want to fire the people you have today – it doesn’t help morale – so give it some time and the problem will probably resolve itself for you. Your current staff will naturally turn over when they get tired of listening to complaining and blaming. Your task will then be to hire better than you have in the past.

The Hiring Process

Each employee comes with their own set of technical skills, personality quirks and attitudes, so give plenty of thought to what your hiring criteria will be before you even begin. The easiest way to approach this is to make a list of the minimum technical skills that your new team must have, and then narrow that list down to determine which skills each individual must have for their specific job.

Next, think about which character traits you want in your team. The following are some that I have found to be incredibly useful.

Quick Learner – It is easy to test potential candidates for how quickly they learn new concepts. Find a few puzzles that build upon each other in complexity, then show the candidate the first. Afterwards, ask him/her to solve the second. Under the pressure of a job interview, can this person digest the information and apply it? If not, this candidate should be avoided.
Responsible – You can ask specific questions to measure a person’s sense of responsibility. Can they tell you about a time when they made a mistake that hurt someone else? Someone who doesn’t have a strong emotional reaction to telling you such a story is not the right person for you.
Empathetic – Empathy is very important because it guides communication with angry customers. During the interview process, I ask references if they think the candidate is an empathetic person. You can also ask candidates to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test. ‘F’ personality types tend to be more empathetic than others, so you can interpret their results accordingly.
Curious – Technical support is nothing more than a long series of problems to be solved, and a person who is naturally curious is best suited for this type of work. In interviews, I ask about hobbies to find out if a person is curious. For example, one of my staff members was taking a welding class when I interviewed him. I asked him why and he answered, “I was curious about how it worked. Since I had some free time, I thought I would give it a try.” I have never been disappointed with his internal drive to figure out technical problems.
Logical – A logical person will approach complex problems and say to themselves, “I can figure this out.” For this reason, I actually test for logic during interviews by getting a few logic puzzles together, making them multiple-choice and giving them to the candidate. One previous candidate was asked, “Which is more valuable, a trunk full of nickels or a trunk full of dimes?” The candidate chose nickels, and when I asked why, replied, “Well, I thought that since nickels are bigger, they must be worth more.” This person did not approach problems logically, so I did not hire them.
Trustworthy – You must be able to trust the people on your team, so during the course of your interview, imagine that the person sitting before you is a friend of yours who has volunteered to take care of your personal business while you go on vacation. Ask yourself if you would trust them to collect your mail, feed your pets and take care of your house. If not, you shouldn’t hire them.

Managing the Team

While hiring is important, some portion of my success comes from my management style. I’m not perfect, but I have an intentional plan for how I manage and I stick to it as best I can.

Train your team well

Good training leads to capable support people. You are going to be hiring people to figure out problems, so clearly you can’t train them on precisely what they are going to be working on. The objective here is to do the best you can. Don’t, for example, put them into entirely unfamiliar systems and ask them to demonstrate proficiency right away. Your current staff is probably under-trained, so as you work on creating a winning team, get real product training scheduled for them. You should also make ongoing training a priority, especially when it comes to new product releases.

Set goals and boundaries

Setting goals for your staff is easy: simply make them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Based). Boundaries, however, are slightly more complicated. I usually explain them to my people like this: “That decision requires a context of information that you don’t have, for example, you are not tuned in to other department’s schedules. It’s not a matter of trust, but a matter of knowledge and responsibility. You don’t have time to know everything and shouldn’t have to be responsible for everything. Right up to the boundary, do what is right for the customer and the company. Talk to me when you are asked to cross a boundary or when you feel like it is the right thing to do. I’ll take the responsibility for making those decisions.”

Listen to and help them

Unfortunately, many managers treat their staff like servants while the goal of management is actually the opposite-to help people do their jobs better. I consider myself the “one-man technical support team enablement department.” Consequently, my team knows that my door is always open. They have my cell phone number and are not afraid to use it. Allow your team to do the same.

Review their performance

Everybody needs to know how they are doing, so give your staff their appropriate praise and correction. As a rule, praise should be public and correction should be private. You should also do regular performance reviews and have a job growth plan in place in order to keep the best people around.

Holding periodic meetings will promote communication and let your people know how they are doing as a team. If there is a problem, you can discuss it without assigning blame to anyone. Tell your team that you want to discuss the process they are having difficulty with in order to ensure that it is the best process for them. Take comments and suggestions on how to improve. This kind of input is priceless.

Trust your staff

If you have done everything else, the final step is to let your people do their jobs. Unless you are a micromanager, this should be the easy part. Give them the self-confidence they deserve through showing that you trust them.

Keeping Your Team Happy

It is always important to focus on boosting morale. Don’t wait for it to drop before you do something about it, or it will be too late. Small things such as buying lunch for your team more often than other department heads do will go a long way towards keeping them happy.

Long-Term Retention

Retention is much more important in a technical support team than anywhere else. Development, marketing, sales and accounting will all have an easier time training a new employee than you will in technical support. This means that you need to have a plan in place for retaining your best people. It will likely include the management style I just described, as well as giving raises, bonuses and promotions.

This is why hiring is so important in the first place. You will want to live with the consequences of your selections for a long time.

The Technical Support Project

Written by Cynthia Low on May 20, 2009. Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on The Technical Support Project

How to Create a Winning Team. Part 1.

I have been manager of technical support at my company, Journyx, for seven years, and as such, I can say that creating a winning team was one of the most significant projects I have ever had to complete. When I started, we had disgruntled customers in all different directions, but no more. I learned a lot along the way, and in retrospect, I see things that should have been done sooner, as well as things that shouldn’t have been done at all. Consequently, in this three-part series I will outline effective methods for change and improvement within your technical support department.

Communication and Planning

You might compare technical support to a team of jugglers. It requires a lot of communication and teamwork to be able to handle flying bowling balls, knives, flaming batons and pianos. For instance, you will need to know when a baton or knife is heading your way, or who will be able to catch the piano. There are three big processes to put in place in order to facilitate the communication required to do this juggling.

Decide on 3-5 levels of case severity and decide on service requirements for each (how quickly you intend to respond and fix). If you already have priorities defined in your maintenance contracts, try to use them. Discuss the plan with your team and make sure they understand that top priority cases must be addressed first, so someone must pay attention to incoming cases and prioritize them immediately.
If you find that you don’t have the time to fix a problem so the customer never sees it, an alternative is to publish the solution in order to allow them to solve problems themselves. If you don’t have the time to provide all of the necessary technical details, you can write up a rough version and copy-and-paste.

In order to make this work, you need to document the problem and solution whenever you come across an issue that you haven’t seen before. Do it while you still have all of the test sites in front of you. Eventually, if management allows it, you might want to publish the problems and solutions in a public knowledge base. At our company, this has proved infinitely valuable for us. Our first knowledge base was a text document on a shared network drive, but now we have help desk software with a knowledge base feature.

Software companies, take note: You need developers within your technical support team. Asking the development team for bug patches frustrates both sides. Developers don’t want to stop working on their new, fun codes, and you probably resent that, when you ask for a low-level design change, they give you a better error message. Having your own developer eliminates this conflict, and he/she will find and fix things you didn’t even know were broken.

Repeat after Me

Having the right attitude is integral towards a successful tech support team, so try to encourage the following values among your people:

I am responsible for getting this fixed, and for documenting the problem and its solution.
I understand that people are frustrated and angry, but I won’t take their anger personally.
I will empathize with the frustration that my customers feel, and tell them that I understand and share their feelings. I will calm them down with my words and manner.
I will not accept abuse.
I will not blame the customer.

Leading them by example goes a long way, so take them to lunch and tell stories about how you handled various situations. Answer a few calls in front of them. Let them see you embracing the right attitude and putting team values into practice, and they will follow suit.

Baby Steps

Redesigning your team involves creating a game plan for progress. You do this by setting short-, medium- and long-term goals for future improvement. Your current state can be easily ascertained by asking yourself the following questions: How many cases does tech support receive each week? How many are handled by other departments? How many customer complaints reach the executive team?

Once you understand where you are, then you can decide where you’re going. Short-term goals might be to get permission to go about rebuilding your tech support team, choosing the tools you will use to accomplish this, and putting them in place. Medium-term goals can be to handle all calls within the team and resolve problems before customers become too angry. Finally, a long-term goal can be to reduce support costs. You can do this by reducing costs per product line, product launch, customer and customer attribute (e.g. market, size, industry, salesperson, title of primary contact, etc.).

Customer data becomes viscerally important when you use it to make important decisions for your company. For example, pairing customer attribute data with data on

income per customer will show you that some types of customers are more expensive to support than others. This is useful information for senior management to have when they are making decisions about such issues as product direction and pricing.

Are We There Yet?

By implementing a help desk tool, you will be able to see how well you are doing against your goals. The right tool will run reports on the number of cases opened and closed per day, week, and month and the amount of time spent on each. When you need more advanced reports, you can do one of three things:

Duplicate CRM and accounting data in your help desk
Merge the CRM, accounting and help desk data
Connect your help desk to your CRM and/or accounting system

As your number of cases goes up, you will need to hire more employees. Look out for Part 2 of the series soon, in which I will discuss hiring the right people for your improved support team.

Randy Miller has 11 years of customer-focused experience in sales and services delivery. Prior to joining Journyx in 1999 as the first Timesheet-specific sales rep, Randy spent five years in the Corporate Sales and Retail Management divisions of leading electronics retailer CompUSA. Since then Randy has held many different positions at Journyx, including: Sales Engineer, Trainer, Consultant, Product Manager, Support Team Manager, and Implementation Manager for Enterprise Accounts. Randy has personally managed development and implementation efforts for many of the company’s largest customers and is a co-holder of several Journyx patents. Randy was named Director of Services in 2005. Randy can be reached at [email protected].