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Strategies for Balancing Deadlines and Team Management in Q1

It’s common knowledge that less than half of the employees know the goals, strategies, and tactics the company has set for the year; this can result in a lack of team alignment, which will only cause further problems in meeting your goals.

Since Q4 has passed, now is the time to reorganize your strategies and give this new fiscal year of 2024 a strong start, beginning with planning your Q1.

So, let’s dive into tried and tested strategies that will ensure you have a smooth sailing first quarter and a successful year.

 

The Covey Time Management Matrix For Deadlines

Created by Steven Covey, this time management framework prioritizes your tasks and time for optimal productivity. In this modal, Covey emphasizes the need to use a four-quadrant approach that helps your business prioritize tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines based on their importance and urgency.

The Four Quadrants Explained

 

  • Quadrant 1 (Urgent and Important): Involves organizing critical tasks and responsibilities that need urgent attention to allocate the necessary time, effort, and resources. These tasks have impending deadlines, time-sensitive goals, or need alleviating immediate risk to the business.
  • Quadrant 2 (Not Urgent But Important): Involves creating plans and focusing on strategic tasks that will highly impact your business. You can identify and work on things that require additional planning and directly affect your overall goals.
  • Quadrant 3 (Urgent But Not Important): Involves minor yet urgent tasks requiring immediate assistance or attention. These tasks are usually the result of poor Q1 and Q2 planning, interrupted productivity, and distractions, so you don’t want too many of them to pile up.
  • Quadrant 4 (Not Urgent, Not Important): Involves tasks that are removable from your list of priorities to some extent, if not completely. They usually don’t take a lot of stressful work and are not directly related to your overall success or time.

 

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Team Management Tips To Ensure Success

1.    Set Realistic Deadlines

Before setting a deadline, you must gauge the complexity, resources, and scope of your tasks and the availability of team members with the necessary skills to accomplish them. You should also ensure your team explicitly understands the expectations and break down larger projects into smaller tasks to make them manageable. Use project management tools, calendars, or Gantt charts to visualize the milestones.

2.    Regular Communication

Feedback and internal communication between employees and employers help the team stay aligned with deadlines and goals. Establish regular feedback channels through meetings, chats, emails, etc., to ensure everyone is on the same page. Doing so will also allow you to resolve conflicts or issues, clarify doubts, and encourage collaboration more effectively.

3.    Encouraging Work Environment

Offer constant recognition and incentives to inspire your team to do better when a job is done well. Similarly, give the team upskilling opportunities to make them feel valued. Several online platforms offer professional development courses that teach various skills. For example, excel training with Acuity Training can help team members understand advanced features that will help them streamline their work.

4.    Be Mindful Of Your Employees

You must be flexible and adaptable with your team, especially when unexpected challenges or changes arise. Stay prepared to make readjustments and be empathetic to your employees’ circumstantial needs. To avoid major disruptions, have contingency plans, scenario analysis, and risk assessments in place.

 

To Summarize

Since the first quarter is crucial to unlock your company’s potential and set the pace for success, you must prioritize defining your objectives, using technology, encouraging collaboration, and monitoring progress. Remember that although Q1 can be challenging, it’s also the time for endless opportunities. To further enhance your team’s effectiveness in managing deadlines and fostering collaboration, consider implementing comprehensive project management training programs. These initiatives can empower your team with the skills needed to navigate the intricacies of Q1 projects efficiently, ensuring that they are well-equipped to handle tasks, meet deadlines, and contribute to the overall success of your business goals.

Late and Over Budget Projects: No Simple Answers to Complex Questions

Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Some simple answers may be true, but most are not. Human systems and relationships are complex. When problems, issues, or questions arise, don’t be satisfied with simplistic answers that assume that there is a single cause that if eliminated will resolve the problem or answer the question.

That is not to say that there are no simple solutions. There are but applying them is not easy. They require adapting the solution to the situation at hand and overcoming obstacles to its application.

 

Examples

For Example, on a personal level, the answer to “How can we live a life of wellness?” is simple, accept things as they are, do what you can do, and let go of the things that get in the way. The same simple answer applies to the problem of chronically late and overbudget projects.

But, accepting and letting go into a solution is not so easy. Accept and let go is often the last thing we want to hear when we are trying to resolve the issue of late and overbudget projects.

 

We need to answer the question, “How do we break the misunderstandings, cultural conditions, and habits that keep us from accepting and letting go?” The answer depends on the nature of the people involved and the environment. You must get down to the specific causes of the problem, assess them,  decide what to do, and do it.

When you do take action be realistic. Do not expect miracles (they might happen but let them be a surprise rather than an expectation). The more complex the situation the greater the probability of having to refine the action over time until an optimal solution is found.

 

Predictability – Complex vs complicated

Before moving on let’s be clear about what a complex situation is. The situation is the system, state of affairs, or circumstances within which the issue occurs. When the system consists of many interrelated parts and the parts act independently from one another the system becomes emergent – we don’t know how things will turn out until they turn out. In other words, complex systems are not predictable. Systems in which humans interact with one another in a changing environment are complex.

Complicated systems, on the other hand, also have many parts but their relationships to one another are clearly defined and coordinated. For example, a jet liner is a complicated system. Removing unnecessary elements, you can know what will happen when the pilot flies the plane. Complicated systems are predictable.

Systems can be understood by breaking the system down into their parts. This “decomposition” makes the number and type of intersecting elements – people, expectations, departments, technology, processes, rules, interactions, objectives, predictability, cultural norms, etc. As this is done the degree of predictability of the system becomes obvious.

 

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Late and overbudget projects occur in a system made up of several departments within client and provider organizations. Multiple projects are occurring simultaneously. Departments may have conflicting objectives. There may be insufficient coordination – for example an ineffective portfolio management process. Expectations may be unrealistic. Communication skills and emotional intelligence may be primitive. Hierarchical relationships may get in the way of effective communication, decision making, and planning.

In a complex system, aside from the probability of unpredictability, it is not possible to accurately predict the outcome of a simple solution like the implementation of a new and wonderful project and portfolio management tool set and simplistic training in scheduling and budgeting. Without going further into the causes, we can predict that the solution will not solve the problem – projects will continue to be late and overbudget.

 

Why do we seek simple?

If we can predict that simple solutions to complex problems will fail, why then apply simple solutions?

One reason we do it is because we want certainty. Simple solutions often come with the promise of a quick and definitive fix at low cost. Often, we do not want to or can’t spend the time and effort to understand complexities and determine root causes. Even when we do spend the time and effort, we might find that the causes are too embarrassing to bring to the surface, or we might think they are not actionable. For example, the cause of the problem of late and over budget projects might be a combination of sales efforts that set expectations that cannot be met, poor estimating and scheduling, senior management or clients who won’t listen to reason.

 

It reminds me of a story:

A man, Nasruddin, is crawling around under the streetlamp in front of his house. His neighbor comes over to help. The man is searching for his dropped key. After combing the area under the light, the neighbor asks, “Are you sure you dropped it here?” Nasruddin says, “Oh, I dropped it over there by the door. But it’s dark over there, we’d never find it there.”

So, someone comes up with the idea that a new project management tool and some scheduling and estimating training for the project managers will solve the problem. That makes everyone, except, maybe, the Project Managers, happy. The salespeople are off the hook. Senior management can keep on doing what they are doing, and they are happy that they won’t have to deal with the complexities of making meaningful change.

 

The Bottomline

The simple solution is to accept the situation as it is – look at it objectively, accepting all its flaws, and with a realistic understanding of it, and then figure out what to do to eliminate the obstacles to resolving the problem. With obstacles, like fear of making meaningful change by confronting powerful stakeholders, out of the way, a workable, yet probably imperfect, solution can be found. When the solution includes ongoing assessment and refinement, it is as perfect as it can be.

The challenge is to courageously speak truth to authority, to accept the way things are, and let go into an ongoing performance improvement process to get them to where you want them to be.

 

Best of PMTimes: Keeping on Track – 14 Project Management Tips

Project management always involves significant challenges on the way to success.

 

Keeping the project on track, managing resources, maintaining a positive atmosphere among team members, and adhering to the budget are the main struggles every project manager faces.

Success is a cumulative notion: in other words, a supervisor has to keep monitoring and directing every single aspect of the project. A rigid timeframe further increases your many duties. Although there is no panacea on how to become project manager guru, the following tips can help you achieve triumph.

 

1.   Study the Project Inside Out

A supervisor must be the most knowledgeable member of a team. This doesn’t mean that he has to be an expert in every aspect. Those who are true professionals in narrow fields can provide this kind of specific expertise. The manager’s duty is to know all the organizational details, including stakeholders’ interests, weaknesses and strengths, goals, objectives, and foresee any potential force measures.

 

2.   Define the Project Requirements

Project manager responsibilities are directly connected to finding a way to achieving their goals and objectives. To avoid a lack or excess of resources, a detailed plan with set outcomes is essential. 

 

3.   Identify Milestones

Milestones help to track your progress. They must be clear and present a rigid timeframe for achieving specific goals. Furthermore, they’re an excellent means of demonstrating your performance to your clients. This way, an ordering company won’t lose itself in conjectures or constantly disturb you to ask how the process is going.

 

4.   Set Up Daily Goals

 

Daily goals are an effective way of managing your workflow on a day-to-day level. Precise tasks for each team member to remove any uncertainty. You can work out your goals each day for a week and shift them if necessary.  This gives you time to concentrate on more urgent issues.

 

5.   Develop Professional Competence

The supervisor’s duties include everything from planning, scheduling, and budgeting to managing stakeholders, a team, conflicts, and risks.

The details vary depending on the industry. For example, working for a printing company like fortunavisual.com is different than working for a tech start-up. You can sign up for project management courses. However, the only valuable specialists are professionals in narrow fields. This knowledge can be gained through practical experience or an additional study of your chosen industry.

 

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6.   Maintain Effective Communication

Communication is key. A supervisor must build a rapport with his/her company’s stakeholders, team, and contractors (if there are any). Alongside this, his/her duty is to establish an open dialogue between team members. Honesty, respect, and impartiality are three things to always bear in mind.

 

7.     Support and Empathy Are Crucial

Rigid deadlines, an unexpected force majeure, and demanding clients provoke stress. This affects everyone in a team. Breakdowns are inevitable if each member doesn’t feel valued. Mutual support and empathy in communication help to maintain team spirit when fighting against oncoming hardships.

 

8.   Track Time

Meeting deadlines is almost as important as the quality of a product. Time-management is one of the most essential project manager skills. Certain platforms and apps can save the day when it comes to tracking time. With these apps, you can track not only the workflow timeframe but also how much time your employees devote to a task. In case they exceed the set limit, optimize your operations.

 

9.   Learn Your Team’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Every team has strengths and weaknesses. Project management success requires compensation of weaknesses with strengths. A well-selected team and mutual support are key to maintaining the balance.

 

10.                 Don’t Neglect the Software

Humans make mistakes. Technologies help minimize them. Project management software helps to keep track of progress, delegate tasks, and build effective communication and organization. For example, efficient teams usually use apps, such as Dropbox or Workfront, for sharing files.

 

11.  Always Assess Risks

Risk management is one of the primary responsibilities of a supervisor. Knowing the potential pitfalls helps you prepare for a fight or avoid one. Keep in mind: this process is continuous. New risks may arise as you continue working.

 

12.  Work Out Standardized Templates

Standardized templates are critical project management tools and are a decent basis for project development. A fully thought-out system, methods, and processes can be adjusted if necessary. It allows you precious extra time for dealing with urgent issues and working on the product itself.

 

13.  Carry Out Regular Tests

Leaving the testing phase for the closing stage of a project is a bad idea. It’s much easier, faster, and cheaper to fix a problem once it’s been identified. Later on, it can be hard to detect where exactly the mistake lies.

 

14.  Reflect on a Project

The regular analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of the project’s specifics. Analysis should be both general and precise. In other words, every single detail must be subject to the supervisor’s criticism and evaluation. Nonetheless, you’ll be able to clearly see how it influences the overall progress and the final product.

A successful project relies on many different things working, such as effective team collaboration, narrow-field-expertise, communication with everyone involved, and proper organization. 

 

Published on: 2020/07/15

Best of PMTimes: Risk and Opportunity Management

When asked how typical risk management exercises are conducted, most project managers reply that this involves conversations and documentation around risk events and their respective probabilities and impacts.

 

While this is a necessary and beneficial exercise, this standard approach and mind-set does not account for taking time to recognize and focus on maximizing opportunities, and it often leads the team and project manager in the opposite direction.

Effective risk management should not be focused solely on recognizing possible failure points, but also on learning how to best recognize and capitalize on opportunities to ensure both project and future success.

Opportunity Management is about removing barriers to success and creating a path for yourself and your teams. Make sure you create time not only to identify and deal with risk, but also to recognize and capitalize on opportunities in your projects.

Chances are this change in perspective will enable you to see multiple opportunities that may not have arisen otherwise.

Enumerated here are six opportunities that nearly every project manager, regardless of discipline, can and should capitalize upon.

 

  1. Take the opportunity to recognize and reward success.

Successful projects are always the result of successful teams. Successful teams are the result of the collaboration and efforts of motivated and talented individuals. The project manager must maximize all opportunities to recognize and reward team success.

This can be challenging in today’s marketplace given the tremendous financial emphasis on budgets and spending. In tough economic markets, don’t discount the importance of direct individual feedback.

 

  1. Take the opportunity to provide and ask for feedback.

Feedback is an incredibly powerful, yet often overlooked opportunity that can be utilized with peers, direct reports management vendors and senior management as well. Many project managers realize the importance of providing feedback to functional managers but fail to maximize opportunities that may arise from asking for feedback.

The important thing to keep in mind is that people always remember how they were treated and made to feel, long after the American Express gift checks are spent. We as project managers are in a unique position to provide both constructive criticism and praise to both team members as well as their functional management.

It is the project manager’s responsibility to stand up for team members to ensure that their best interests are represented.

 

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3. Take the opportunity to network with professional project managers in your field regarding lessons learned.

Most professional project managers aren’t shy about sharing lessons learned, opportunities they’ve maximized and those they’ve missed along the way!

Take the opportunity to share experiences as well as to learn from others. Local PMI chapters, special interest groups and LinkedIn are but a few of the many ways to accomplish this. These lessons learned could very well be the result of feedback from number two, above!

 

  1. Take the opportunity to utilize and involve senior leadership and your sponsor.

Never underestimate the value of the project sponsor when it comes to removing obstacles to get things done. People tend to listen a bit more intently when senior leadership speaks.

Allow them to be engaged and assist with removing barriers and obstacles. Project initiation is also a great time to have candid conversations with leadership about their vision for the project as well as opportunities they foresee. This also affords you the opportunity to highlight movement toward and capitalization on said opportunities in status meetings.

 

  1. Take the opportunity to recognize cultural boundaries, international holidays and cultural differences, etc.

Most teams these days are a veritable melting pot of cultures and time zones. As such, communicating and determining a mutually agreeable time for the team to meet often presents many challenges and opportunities.

The project manager should take the opportunity to build rapport with international team members and stakeholders by learning about international holidays as well as working off-hours to account for different country’s time zones.

 

  1. Encourage Opportunity Management within your teams.

This demonstrates to the team that you not only value their input but are willing to recognize and implement it toward the success of the project.

Everyone has unique perspectives and insights regarding opportunities within the project—oftentimes all you have to do is ask.

 

Capitalizing on these six opportunities will assist with building rapport within team as well as provide the project manager and team with valuable and timely information beyond conventional risk exercises.

 

Published on: 2019/01/29

Best of PMTimes: The Greatest Challenges When Managing a Project

What do you find to be the hardest part of managing a project? I bet if you asked ten different project managers that question you would get at least six or seven different answers.

 

I believe that many on the outside of project management looking in probably think it is easy. Be organized and you’ve got it made, right? I wish it was that easy but then again if that was all there was to it I guess the pay would be considerably less than it is and we’d all miss the challenge.

No, project management about much more than just being organized but you already know that. What do you find to be the most difficult aspects of the daily project management grind? For me, and from what I’ve perceived from many of my colleagues, it comes down to a fairly common list of about five things, depending on the types and sizes of projects and the clients we are dealing with, of course. There are always those variances. Let’s consider these five items.

 

The project budget.

The project budget has to be on here, likely always #1 or #2 on every project. 95% of the population has problems managing their own money! That doesn’t make them that much better at managing someone else’s!

The project budget is always a challenge. Unlike your own budget where it’s only you or a few people spending, for a project budget, you may have 87 different people, places or things charging to it. The project budget status can go from healthy to dire straits overnight as charges come through accounting and hit your project and now you must go figure out why.

Staying on top of the budget every week by updating the budget forecast with actual charges from the week before and re-forecasting it for the remainder of the project is one way to combat those budget surprises. Perhaps the only way. And, by doing this you can just about guarantee that it doesn’t go more than 10% out of control vs. the 50% overage that an unchecked budget can quickly realize. The 10% overage is a fairly reasonable/easy fix. You may never recover from the 50% overage.

 

Scope management / change control.

Scope management and change control are two of those two-word phrases that are basically like four-letter words in the world of project management. Scope management is always a challenge for the project manager and project team because some things are close calls on whether they are in or out of scope. Plus, we aren’t always thinking in terms of “scope” when we are plugging through the work or fixing issues. And change control results in those ugly change orders for which customers have to pay extra, and that’s always a fun thing for the PM to bring to the project sponsor’s attention to obtain approval.

 

Resolving team conflicts.

Some people actually thrive on conflict. Not me. I’d prefer that we all just get along and do our jobs. That’s why I like project management better than, say, managing a team of application developers who report directly to me. I’ve done that; I’ve had staff at several different organizations where I’ve worked. Resolving conflicts, personnel issues, giving performance reviews – these are a few of my least favorite things.

 

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Pleasing everyone with the status report.

You can please some of the people all of the time. You can please all of the people some of the time. But you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Is this true? With status reporting it seems to be the case. But if you want to maintain your sanity and have time to manage your other projects and job requirements, it is in your best interest to find a status report format that works for everyone. By everyone I mean all stakeholders who care to hold your status report in their hands and a few who don’t care but you want them to care.

Create a usable and informative dashboard for everyone – especially for the project sponsor’s and senior management’s viewing pleasure. For your senior management, a few of the key stakeholders, and possibly some high-level players on the customer side, this may be all they ever want to see. It can be some high-level percentages or possibly a green-yellow-red stoplight approach to reporting the timeline, tasks, and budget health. Beyond that you want the weekly detail that goes into any good status report. This status report should drive the weekly team and client meetings. You will want to report on completed tasks, what’s happening now, what’s coming up soon and all outstanding issues and change orders.

The status report can be painful and a huge weekly chore on your to-do list, but if you can figure out how to create a one-size-fits-all approach to status reporting on your project, you’ll save time and effort overall by not creating several different reports trying to please everyone on your project routing list.

 

Getting all detailed requirements documented.

This one can be a real headache. Why? Because it seems that no matter how hard you try, no matter how many eyes are on it, no matter how many experts are involved and no matter how much your project client participates and insists “that’s it”, you’ll eventually find that something was overlooked.

It’s ok because the fault usually lies with the project customer and they end up paying for the extra work and time in the form of a change order. Still, customers don’t like change orders, and it usually means some painful re-work. It would be nice always to get it right the first time. But that’s almost never the case.

 

Call for input

Project management is challenging. Period. Some parts are harder than others. Some we master. Some we never really get used to or we seem to at least always make them hard. I wish I had a magic formula or all the time in the world on every project so that we could do everything well and everything right, but that is never the case. We always need to cut corners somewhere, and that doesn’t make most of these challenges easier…only harder.

How about our readers? What are your biggest challenges or least favorite activities associated with managing projects? What have you found to be your most troubling parts of managing a project?

 

Published on: 2016/04/05