Author: Mike Morton

Often we are working with people in another office – very seldom working face to face. That’s even harder.

And what about these new ‘virtual teams’? The toughest of all – especially through different cultures.

Then we have Baby Boomers trying to manage Gen Xers, and Gen Ys working with Gen Xers and no one can understand why people are acting like they do?

I heard a great story from a vendor of one of those personality assessment organizations, contracted to help a US company that had just acquired a company in Ireland. The first year was terrible. Fighting, bickering, nothing got done and the integration of the two companies went nowhere.

The personality assessment folks took all managers off site and handed them the assessment. Afterwards, they put a coloured hat on each person indicating their personality type: the type As in red, the artists in green, and so on. The first exercise simply had them stand in a room in groups of coloured hats and look around. All they heard was “ahhhhh – so this is our problem!”. Once they figured out that everyone at the management level wasn’t a type A, red hat control type, they started to get the job done.

We all need to step back and figure out who our teammates are. What colour hat they might wear. We need to find out where the strength and weaknesses are; where we are at risk as a team.

As leaders, we need to discover each team member’s gifts and leverage them. Like the guy in the corner who can tell the best jokes to lighten things up when it all gets too stressful. Simple. But a great contribution to a team.

As leaders we need to take leadership seriously. We should all be taking leadership courses of some sort every year – and there are plenty of them out there.

As leaders, we need to be more open, more adaptable and, in many cases, we need to lighten up. Most people want to be lead. They want a strong leader who will make them all look like stars in the end – once the project is delivered. No one wants to fail. And failure never lands on just the project manager’s head. It affects us all.

Start tomorrow. Look at your team or teams. Write down something positive about each member – highlighting a strength. Find a way to use that strength and highlight that person’s contribution over the next two weeks.

Make a hero out of someone!

Your information is only as good as the effort you put into keeping it current. What you need is project data.

What you learn from your data can be the difference between managing by the skin of your teeth and managing your projects as a professional PM; making decisions based on facts.

It is the difference between following every goose-chase, looking for the ones that might put your project at risk, and identifying the real risks quickly and early.

In order for ‘information’ to become project ‘data’ it must be documented.

Project data is any documented information related to your project, e.g., project plans, business cases, PMO documents, emails, logs, presentation decks, minutes, agendas, status updates, etc.

Project data is not hallway conversations, meeting discussions, gossip, innuendo, hearsay, body language, or tone of voice. Verbal information remains just that until the commitment to document it is made. It is more difficult to deny something that was written than to deny something that was said.

The value of the information is directly related to the level of commitment behind it. When project information is documented it is published for public scrutiny and does not rely on the accuracy of individual memories.

Using the Pareto rule, 80% of the problems are the result of 20% of the issues. To find that 20% you need to gather, organize, validate and analyze your project data. Mine the 20% that will give you the biggest bang for your buck and delegate the rest.

This could be interpreted as ‘passing the buck’, but at the end of the day your job is to manage the project, not to personally solve every single issue that arises. The 20% usually has a component whose consequences would directly affect the scope, schedule, cost or quality of the end product and, by this definition, falls under the jurisdiction of the PM to address. The remaining will generally fall within the realm of responsibility of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), requiring a greater depth of knowledge/experience than a PM would typically possess.

After all, every project has a team. Each team member is responsible and accountable for their deliverables and it’s the PM’s job to leverage their skills, talents and strengths by assigning them the issues to manage that they are best suited to resolve.

For example, a working project plan with an unusually high number of tasks that are locked with “Start No Earlier Than” or “Start No Later Than” constraints will hide impacts to the critical path, particularly if these tasks have predecessors and successors.

Locked-down tasks are common and often done this way due to a lack of experience with project management applications like Microsoft Project. However it may also be done to intentionally give the false impression to unsuspecting stakeholders that certain key tasks, or milestones, are on track. In reality, delays to other related tasks, even if updated in the project plan, will never show you the TRUE state of the project.

This is a big yellow flag and should bring the status of the project into question. This is an example of using your data to drive decision-making. If your focus is too far down in the weeds (solutioning) this can be missed until it is too late to recover without going RED. The net impact is that this may bring a greater level of scrutiny to your project.

If you can’t clearly articulate (and back up with data) your project’s critical path and total slack in terms of number of days or weeks before your critical path is negatively impacted, your project plan data needs to be cleaned up.

Well, this ‘data’ is all over the place. How do I pull it all together in a way that makes it meaningful? At the end of the day, all data leads back to the project plan. This is your hub and baseline. The data is always reviewed and validated within the context of ‘how does this impact my scope, costs, schedule, quality of deliverable, or quality of my team’s performance?’

How often should you validate your data? If you’re working on a large project with a minimum lifecycle of six months to a year, anything more frequent than weekly is likely to be a waste of time. The numbers of mission critical issues that can crop up in that time are likely to be few. Less than monthly is too long for a potential risk to fester before it gets noticed.

Why should you spend your time validating and reviewing data? The real question is, ‘where is your time best spent?’ Meetings are excellent for validating existing information or to uncover new information followed by documentation. Consensus is vital to ensuring that the issues are clearly understood and your data is validated.

The real win is not whether you spend the time validating your data. Rather it is how efficient you become at it. For example, how you file away your information will directly impact the time it takes for you to find, analyze, and act on it.

You may have a project administrator who can do this in addition to the meeting bookings and minutes that they may be tasked to do. Depending on the size of your project (and the expected Net Present Value of the business case) this resource may be fully cost justified. A well-trained, dedicated project admin is worth their weight in gold!

For those who do not have that luxury, there are tools out there to analyze your data, (Gantt Charts, PERT Charts, WBS Charts, etc.) a simple to use but well designed filing system (paper and electronic) can reduce the time spent doing this from hours to minutes. Any tool that you can use to capture, process and analyze your data is one worth spending money on.

Once you’ve spent the time validating your data, you need to take advantage of it. You need to mine your data, find the ‘nuggets’ that will separate you from the pack, and make your decisions with conviction.

The Challenges
When TVO contacted Project Insight in early 2003, the programming team was using Microsoft Project desktop to manage its programming projects. While Microsoft Project is a good tool for managing single projects by a single project manager or project coordinator, it falls short as a solution for projects involving input from multiple team members and the collaboration required for such creative ventures.

One issue the programming team had while using Microsoft Project is that the team had to email the schedule around to all team members. As the project was updated, it was often confusing as to which version of the project schedule the team was to review.

A second challenge was that not all team members understood the project process and how the projects were structured. The project managers were caught in the middle of ongoing confusion among less savvy resources. These resources did not understand Microsoft Project, nor had the desire to learn the software program.

Creating great television programs means collaborating on files and documents, and the team did not have any good method for sharing these project assets. They needed to find a centralized place to store and access these assets. Another issue that kept coming up was ‘version control’ of documents and files as the team was not sure which version of the file was the right one. When viewing graphic files, the changes are subtle and not always obvious. The extra ‘housekeeping’ of managing these files was slowing projects down.

The team was also geographically dispersed, not all resources resided in the same location, making collaboration even more challenging. To add to the complications, the programming team had to work on multiple projects at the same time.

The Solution
The TVOntario project management team knew that they had to find an alternative way to manage their projects. In early 2003, they began evaluating possible web-based project management solutions. Web-based solutions were just starting to appear in the market in early 2001, making the TVO team early adopters.

The idea of a web-based solution is that it provides one centralized database or location from which to view all the team’s project schedules and project assets or files. Executives and project sponsors may also report and oversee all ventures in real-time.

TVO evaluated several potential solutions, but quickly found that Project Insight rose to the top of the list. “We didn’t have to search a lot because Project Insight had everything and the cost was very reasonable,” stated a TVO project manager.

The Results
The TVO project team started using Project Insight in May of 2003 with 12 employee team members, four outside contractors, and a team of 15 users working at the Ministry of Education. TVO immediately experienced greatly simplified project management.

The first improvement was simply the ability to put all projects in one centralized location, making all projects accessible from any web browser, from any location in the world. As many of their team members were not employees, Project Insight enabled all team members to create, access, edit and update their projects and tasks from their offices or homes.

Since the team was no longer using a desktop application for project scheduling, but rather a web-based project solution, the issue of which version of the project schedule the team was current became moot. Team members update task percentage complete, which updates the project schedule in real-time.

The issue of explaining project structure and process was reduced as Project Insight offers an easy-to-use and understand interface. In conjunction with a half day training session, new programming team members understand the basics of project management and scheduling. “The biggest success in our case was the short time spent explaining to new team members how a project is structured. The learning curve was shortened considerably,” stated a project manager from TVO.

There were fewer problems with document version control. Project Insight organizes the project team’s documents within each project within a documents repository for each project, making files easy to find, access and update.