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Are You a Better Person Today?

Written by Ilya Bogorad on . Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Are You a Better Person Today?

I write for Project Times once a month. Since the last time, I have started new projects, spoken to several new prospective clients, written a couple of articles and prepared for several speaking assignments. I have attended three industry events and a specialty seminar in London (UK). I have read two fiction books and two books related to my specialty. I have moved my house, got together with friends (several times) and enjoyed quality time with my family. Casting my mind back 30 days, I find that I am better today than I was then, for myself, for my clients and for my loved ones.
How have you improved yourself, professionally, since we last spoke?

Have you developed a better understanding of your current industry? Have you sat down for a coffee with a subject matter expert to tease out the precious tidbits of knowledge we all are happy to share, when prompted?

Are you a better communicator today? Have you picked up, or developed yourself, some dramatically useful visual aids or templates. Have you learned to project yourself? To listen to others?

Have you made a concerted effort to understand the strategy of the organization? Have you determined how your project or project portfolio fits into it? For Pete’s sake, don’t tell me it’s not your job!

You might have improved your business acumen by delving in to the world of finance and taking your skills to the next level from the basic understanding of financial statements. Financial language is what the business speaks, and a project manager who can’t is at a great disadvantage. In fact, not being able to converse with a CFO is often a career-limiting move.

How many times have you had a lunch with your project sponsor? What is more important for your project than developing a solid, trusting relationship with him or her?

Have you attended an industry event, read a specialty book and stayed on top of current trends? Have you given back to the profession by mentoring a colleague, delivering a presentation or writing an article?

If you haven’t, where are you heading?

Special announcement: I hope we can meet at ProjectWorld in Toronto. My presentation on Healthcare projects is at 3:45pm on April 16, and I am a panelist in a discussion on whether one size of PMO fits all settings, on April 17.

Why Go for Certification?

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Why Go for Certification?

I got a very typical call today from someone who wanted my opinion on certification – was it worth it or not? My first reaction was THANKS! I had to write my blog today and I was struggling for a topic. Now I had one.

My answer …it depends. Sorry.

First of all it really depends on the value your industry and some specific organizations place on certification. I can tell you right now that any technology-based project environment places a very high value on certification – specifically the PMP – the Project Management Institute’s designation. I also know there are some large institutions, specifically the systems divisions, that are now making PMP a requirement for all PM applicants.

I think the reason for this is that there are so many people applying for these jobs that this designation provides an initial filter on the applicants. So, on the job application front, the PMP give you a leg up. No doubt about it. But once you make the first round, you are on your own. To very clear…the PMP does tell the reader something to be sure – a level of understanding of a Body of Knowledge, a guaranteed quantity of experience. But honestly, that’s it. It certainly does not indicate the level of quality of a PM.

If you look at other industries, this may not be the case. The fewer the project management positions and applicants, the less important the designation is. Reasoning …these people have the time to go through resumes and the interview process to find the right qualifications. Now, if a PMP designation pops up in that process, it’s a good thing. But I would suggest not necessary. Construction, engineering, the more traditional project management industries are placing less and less value on the PMP designation. They are now looking at other designations and professional education.

Is the PMP designation transferable across different types of projects? No! You cannot be a project manager in an IT environment and work in the construction industry. You cannot move from marketing projects to software development projects as a project manager, regardless of your certification. You need the experience within each type of project, from the ground floor up, before you can manage those projects.

Having said all of this, I will often tell people that if it is easy – do it – you cannot loose. In other words, if you have the knowledge, educations and credentials to write the exam and pass – go for it. If all of this is a struggle for you be careful before you go to all the trouble. It may not be worth it.

My advice to anyone is to look at your industry and evaluate the importance of the PMP designation, and other certifications, before going forward.

A Look at Soft Skills and Project Value

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on A Look at Soft Skills and Project Value

Editor’s Comments

There’s a lot of technical wizardry involved in running a successful projects, but the kind of skills often described as “soft” are important too. They could be described as the general management skills that help make things happen in every corner of the business environment, including the project management office.

Chris Vandersluis shares some thoughts about the soft skills that need to be part of the project manager’s armoury in his article Serving Up Soft Skills, including the importance of presentation skills, negotiation and other important aspects of management that are critical to project success.

In their piece, Prioritization and Scheduling Based on Value, Bob McMurray and Steve Chamberlin believe that getting a project completed is not where the real project portfolio management challenge lies. Their view is that the most serious obstacles to overcome are those in the path of choosing the right projects in the first place. In their article they give some ideas on how to prioritize and schdule projects to maximize project value.

Monthly blogger Andrew Miller expresses the possibly controversial view that Project Measurements are Waste of Time – and explains why he holds that view. Mike Lecky talks about a number of integration tools that help to make work easier for project managers and help ensure the success of projects.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Project Times and that you’ll give us your valuable feedback to help us with future issues.

Serving Up Soft Skills

Written by Cynthia Low on . 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:

  1. 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!”
  2. 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.
  3. 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 . Posted in Articles. 4 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.