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Decision Making: Trusting Your Data

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Decision Making: Trusting Your Data

Decision-making is an inherent part of managing projects. How those decisions are made, and the information that they are based upon, can make the difference between a successfully run project and a potential disaster.

Projects are comprised of hundreds, and potentially thousands of issues. Where do you focus your attention for the greatest gain?

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.

Keep your data current. Trust your data.

Sean Best, PMP is a project manager with the Operations & Technology PMO of TD Bank Financial Group. His 14+ years of project experience includes work in the banking, payment processing, telecommunications and software industries. He can be reached at [email protected].

Tamara Best, BSc, PMP has been a project manager with the Apotex Group of Companies Inc for seven years. Her project experience includes managing the start up of a clinical research facility in Bangalore, India. She can be reached at [email protected].

10 Ways Project Management Skills Can Help Your Career

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on 10 Ways Project Management Skills Can Help Your Career

In today’s digital world, what employers are looking for may surprise you. They assume you’re going to be technologically literate and that you have the skills that are specific to your industry. Once you have the basics, they want to know that you can perform, achieve results and play well with others.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook 2007 survey, employers rated communication skills, and honesty and integrity equally at the top of their list of what they look for in potential employees. Following closely behind communication, and honesty and integrity were: interpersonal skills, motivation/initiative, strong work ethic and teamwork skills.

What struck me as I read those skills was that all of them are inherent in project management, and it emphasized what I’ve believed for years: project management is a career accelerator.

Here’s how you can use project management to put your career in high gear:

  1. SHOW RESULTS. Project management is the art and science of getting things done. When you improve your project management skills, you know how to get things done quickly, and even more important, you learn how to document the results. In our careers, we are often as good as our last hit. You can’t be a one-hit wonder. Instead, you want to keep charting, year after year, with success after success. 
  2. BE EFFICIENT. When you apply project management principles to your work or your home life, you stop reinventing the wheel. Project management teaches you how to make the most efficient use of resources to generate the best results in the least amount of time. At the end of every project, you capture best practices and lessons learned, creating an invaluable documentation of hits and misses. Sound too good to be true? Good project managers do this on every project, and you can, too.
  3. CREATE AN ONGOING DIALOGUE. One mistake I see a lot in project management and on teams is the assumption that there’s one meeting and everyone goes away, and then the communication ends, and somehow everything is still going to magically get done. Your communication skills are not about your vocabulary. They are about how you manage your communication. Are you communicating frequently enough and with clarity? Are you communicating what is relevant? Are you communicating your successes?
  4. PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS. People hear the word teamwork, and they groan or they say that they are, of course, a team player. That’s why I like to bring it back to the kindergarten place in our mind: Back to the sandbox. Do you play well with others? Do other people want to be on your project team? Are you respected? Do you listen actively to what others have to say? Good project managers know when to lead and when to get out of the way. When someone is interviewing you, you know what that person is thinking: Can I work with him? Will my team work well with her?
  5. LET YOUR CONFIDENCE SHINE. When someone shows confidence, everyone in the room feels it, too. One thing I consistently hear from our students is that the biggest payoff from their project management training or PMP certification is the confidence that they gained. They went back to their job with a solid project management foundation that made them feel more competent and able to project more confidence to their team and their boss.
  6. KEEP YOUR COMMITMENTS. Missed deadlines and projects that slip through the cracks are career killers. Project management skills focus on timelines and results that build your reputation and give team members a reason to trust you. “I know that I can always count on her (or him) to get the job done.” That quote can – and should – be about you.
  7. GET A GRIP. Good project managers don’t have to freak out. They can remain calm and in control because they have a Project Agreement which has all the critical information about the project in it. They know when all the deadlines are, who is responsible for what and when, and they’ve also documented changes. Everyone wants to have someone on the team who can stay calm when a project gets rocky, and bring stability to chaos.
  8. ADAPT TO CHANGE. Don’t ignore change. Companies change. Deadlines change. People come and go. Good project managers know they often have to adapt their plans and document what has changed and how that impacts the entire project.
  9. KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What skills do you need to move from the status quo to the next level? Once you have a solid foundation of project management skills, keep building on that foundation. Don’t stagnate. Continuous learning and a thirst for knowledge are always attractive to employers and team members.
  10. LEAD WITH PURPOSE AND PASSION. People will follow those who know what they are doing and who can generate results. Project management is a powerful leadership tool because it not only shows us how to keep our eye on the prize and the purpose, but it’s also about the passion to achieve and succeed. Nothing feels better than accomplishment.

Getting and staying certified is one way to get your career on the fast track and watch it soar. But take time to have some fun along the way. Try our crossword puzzle and see how many of the 10 ways you can remember. Then get started by downloading our complimentary PMP toolkit at www.cheetahsmartstart.com.

Buckle up and enjoy the flight!

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

® 2007 Cheetah Learning, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Creating and Delivering Great Television Programming

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Creating and Delivering Great Television Programming

Most people in Canada know TVOntario (TVO/TFO) as the television network that delivers terrific educational programming. For U.S. readers, TVO is the Canadian equivalent of PBS. TVO’s mission is to supplement the formal education and training systems in Ontario and the surrounding provinces. The schools use television and other communications technologies to provide high quality educational programs, curriculum resources, and distance education courses in English and in French.

Creating and generating engaging and educational content for television is a collaborative, creative venture, in short, a project. Television programming requires the use of multiple team members or resources, and often times, these team members are not employees, but external resources. What’s more, the programs must be developed in both English and French, which requires even more resources.

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.

As the project software is accessible from any browser, Project Insight links the geographically dispersed TVO programming team. Now with five years of usage, the TVO team has mastered its processes and methodologies using Project Insight as its project platform.

Cynthia K. West, Vice President, is a partner at Project Insight (www.projectinsight.net) where she oversees the sales and marketing efforts for the project management company. West is a “serial entrepreneur” with over 15 years of experience in IT. She specializes in building the sales infrastructure for new companies or divisions. She can be reached at [email protected].

Leading a Multigenerational Project Team

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Leading a Multigenerational Project Team

Project managers that can create strong, collaborative work environments will achieve more significant project results – be that time, scope or budget. Today’s PM has a role beyond project deliverables; your role is also to get, keep and grow your team members. To do so, it is critical to understand your employee groups; who they are, how they differ from one another and what they expect from you as a project manager. PMs need to create an engaged relationship with all team members to achieve a win-win outcome for the team members and the project stakeholder.

Today’s workplace comprises four generational cohorts: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Gen Ys. Each generational cohort possesses unique values, characteristics, and skills based on its experiences of life-defining events. The commonality of experiences creates generational identities, which are viewpoints that each cohort has on life, love, family, work, politics, and society.

Each cohort’s identity translates into different behaviours in the workplace. These behaviours can be grouped into five organizational factors: relationship with the organization, relationship with authority, relationship with colleagues, work styles and management styles.

With four generations in the workplace, you are faced with four different, and often conflicting, approaches to work. As a project manager, it is important to recognize that members of each generation bring their “generational baggage” with them into the workplace. These perspectives can impact the ability for team members to work well with each other. For example, when a Traditionalist’s respect for authority and directive management style meets a Gen Xer’s relaxed attitude toward authority and informal work style, conflicts can erupt between team members. When generational approaches to work clash, the results are increased turnover, reduced team engagement, and diminished project results.

How can this knowledge be used to improve the performance of your team? Since you play a key role in getting, keeping and/or growing the talent on your team, its important for you to first understand your own generational identity, and how your work style may differ from those you lead. Fundamentally, PMs should think about how they like to work – linear vs. fluid. When we didn’t have as much access to technology as we do today, tasks had to be completed in a strict linear order because there was strong interdependence. It was impossible to complete step three without completing steps one and two. Gen Xers and, in particular, Gen Ys have not been exclusively exposed to a linear world. Technology has allowed the merging of multiple meda and the ability to multi-task easily. Students are found instant messengering 20 friends, while texting three more, while downloading music while doing homework. They bring this work style into the workplace. They expect to be assigned multiple tasks, preferably with little routine involved.

Also, for many PMs, it is important that all team members be in the office every day working at their desks – a remnant of ‘if I don’t see you, you are not working’. For many younger employees, sitting at the desk does not necessarily mean working. They know that they can get as much done with their laptop sitting at their local café as sitting in front of the office PC. Is there an opportunity to be more flexible about in-office work schedules?

Leading a successful project team requires that you develop strategies that maximize the strengths of each generation while managing the differences. This can include the types of tasks on which different team members work. In a session with project managers, one colleague mentioned that she actively allows team members to self-select some of the tasks they wish to complete. What amazed her is that the choices that were made aligned to generational preferences. For example, her more mature colleagues selected tasks that had longer timelines with greater project profile status, while the younger team members wanted to work on tasks where there would be immediate results.

Regardless of age, all employees seek a positive and collaborative relationship with their managers. Beware though; the grace period that Gen X or Gen Y employees will give you to get the relationship right is much shorter than that of Baby Boomers or Traditionalists. The fact is that many leaders exhibit the management style that they experienced, often a top-down command and control approach. In most cases, this approach doesn’t create the level of collaboration that is necessary for today’s business success. Strong communication skills and a constant questioning of your and your team members’ assumptions are steps toward creating productive high-performance teams.

Adwoa K. Buahene and Giselle Kovary are co-founders of n-gen People Performance Inc. n-gen is a performance consulting company that provides performance solutions layering on a generational perspective. It specializes in recruitment and orientation, total rewards programs, employee brand promises, career-pathing, learning and development, mentoring, performance management, succession planning and management practices. For more information, visit www.ngenperformance.com.

Positive Risk: An Idea Whose Time Should Never Have Come!

Written by Claude Emond on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Positive Risk: An Idea Whose Time Should Never Have Come!

Claude Emond’s Blog, SURVIVING THE PROJECT AGE, in which he shares his views and ideas about project management – and invites you to share yours

“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.” (Albert Einstein)

We live in the Project Age. Projects are everywhere, used as means to adapt to and succeed in our exciting, ever-changing uncertain world! To succeed, we need to communicate better; this is not what the concept of “positive risk” is doing for us!

The word ’risk‘ dates back to the late 1600s, derived from the Italian ’riscare’ meaning to run into danger. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as a situation involving exposure to danger, the possibility that something unpleasant will happen. The word ’opportunity‘ dates back to the late 1300s, derived from the Latin ’opportunitatem‘ meaning fitness, suitableness, favourable time. The Oxford defines ’opportunity‘ as a favourable time or set of circumstances for doing something, quite the contrary to the meaning of risk. So both history and dictionaries, which I propose, reflect common wisdom, are quite clear on the subject: a risk is associated with a probable negative impact, while an opportunity is something that we can make to evolve into a positive.

In a mysterious effort to rewrite history, we PMBOK-trained project managers now define a risk as an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objective; and an opportunity as a risk that will have a positive impact on project objectives (source: PMBoK), a so-called positive risk. This is not a “necessary paradigm shift”, as promoted by some authors; this is just adding “unnecessary confusion” in boardrooms (where those who pay for projects reside!), a disservice to the cause of improved risk and opportunity management on projects.

We do not need a paradigm shift to manage both risks and opportunities. We simply need to rigorously apply SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and management on our projects. Since upper management in most organizations is already familiar with the well-known SWOT technique, making it a preferred PM tool to discuss both project risks and project opportunities would really serve to create a better communication bridge with upper management. An attack on historical wisdom, using a new concept like positive risk will never create better communication nor promote good project management in the boardrooms.

We can’t survive the Project Age with moves like that! We can survive it by using common wisdom, the same dictionary and already proven tools like SWOT! So I say: let’s flush this positive risk nonsense, and include proper SWOT analysis and management in our PM toolbox!

And you, what do you say?

Part of this text is taken and adapted from the article “From Donald Rumsfeld to Little Gibus : Managing project risk and uncertainty revisited”, Le Bulletin (PMI Montreal Quarterly Newsletter), Vol. 14, No 3, Dec 2005 (https://www.projecttimes.com/wp-content/uploads/attachments/BulletinDec2005.pdf)