Tag: Facilitation

Not How Do You Do It… Should You Do It?

Written by Chris Vandersluis on March 28, 2012. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Not How Do You Do It… Should You Do It?

FEATUREMar28th We spend a lot of energy in project management circles trying to determine how to do one thing or another. In my travels to various parts of the planet, something that’s sadly lacking in many places is good judgement on whether we should do that thing.

I’ve told the story before of an engineering organization that was looking for a new timesheet system. This sounded like good news to me because our own TimeControl timesheet system is a good fit for engineering firms. However, I was less happy when I heard the reason why the customer felt their existing system was no longer able to meet their requirements.

“We’re having to do a whole manual transfer of data from that old system to our Finance ERP,” explained the technology specialist. “Because they need three rate values and our existing timesheet can send only two, we’re having a miserable time with all this manual intervention trying to get a third value stored and sent. Can you do that with your TimeControl?”

TimeControl was certainly capable of sending multiple rate values, I assured the specialist, but I was at a loss to understand why they needed such an interface in the first place. In the end, after some discussion, the client agreed to pay for a day of system design and I scheduled some time in the offices.

Our meeting together started off great. They had the CIO in the room and I was suitably impressed that the head of the IT department was sufficiently interested in the problem to attend himself. He and the technology specialist took turns whiteboarding the problem By our mid-morning coffee break we had a combination of boxes, diamonds, circles and lines in the four basic whiteboard marker colors all over the board.

I took copious notes.

By the break, though, I had my first intelligent question. “What was the volume of transactions,” I asked, “that was being handled through this manual process?”

No one knew the answer.

“Can we ask the CFO?” I asked.

A quick call was made. Yes, the CFO was keen to talk to me but could only do so over lunch. I was delighted. Senior management intervention at such a rapid pace isn’t that common and it indicated to me that management was committed to get this problem handled. Things were looking good.

We worked for another hour on the whiteboard diagram. I headed to lunch with the CFO, the CIO, and the technology specialist who had called me originally with a good understanding of what they wanted and the kind of time it was going to take. The CIO and I agreed that changing the timesheet was fundamental to the new solution and that 6-8 weeks of developer time to automate this “archaic manual transfer process” sounded quite reasonable. I was upbeat—sounded like some business on the way.

However, there was something niggling at the back of my mind. The whole premise of the problem came back to a lack of a single field in the old system and its inability to move that column of data to the finance system. I’d already determined that this data was critical to the corporate effort “Why not just give up on that extra data?” I’d asked. “What would happen if you just didn’t transfer the data?” The CIO had told me he’d already considered that and management had made a good case for this data being essential to their ability to bill accurately.

Time for lunch. We went across the street for chicken (business lunches always seem to be feather, leather or fish!)

I sat across from the CIO with the CFO to my left. The technology specialist was across from him. We exchanged pleasantries and then ordered and while we waited for our meal, I turned to business.

“I’m here to work on this timesheet system to finance system interface,” I explained. “The CIO and your technology specialist have been describing the challenge but perhaps you could describe your understanding of it in your own words.”

To his credit, the CFO described exactly what we’d been talking about all morning. This was a good sign. Often, when you go back to the client or end user of a system, the understanding of the requested change isn’t at all what IT understands.

“Now could you describe how you currently handle the interface?” I asked.

“It’s an archaic manual intervention,” he described. Again, it sounded just like what I’d heard this morning.

“And how many transactions are managed through this archaic manual intervention?” I asked.

“Oh, about five a month,” he responded.

There’s silence at the table.

“Five,” I repeat. I see the CIO’s jaw drop out of the corner of my eye.

“Yes,” says the CFO.

“And how long does it take to do these transactions manually each month?” I ask.

“Oh, it takes one of my staff about 20 minutes,” he says.

“Excellent,” I say, my heart sinking as I changed the subject.

The CIO couldn’t meet my eyes. We finished our meal and headed back to the office. As we did so, he walked next to me. “I’m so sorry for wasting your time,” he apologized.

“No need to apologize,” I said. “I’m just happy we figured this out before spending eight weeks on writing the interface.”

The time to recoup a return on investment from the effort we’d described would have been many years. At 20 minutes a month, there was no point in doing the work. In fact, the company had already spent way too much time working on how to do it already.

Could we do the work? Sure. But we shouldn’t.

And sometimes that is the most effective project of all.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

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.

Managing a “Dangerous Opportunity” Project

Written by Harry B. Mingail on March 20, 2012. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Managing a “Dangerous Opportunity” Project

I call projects like this “a dangerous opportunity”. I inherited a troubled initiative, which not only did not know what they were really trying to deliver, but they were delivering badly.

My client contact was under severe pressure from the parent company to fall in line and develop a multifunctional enterprise computer system from scratch. Application software packages wouldn’t do because they “already looked at them”. And of course the project was “to be completed yesterday” To make matters worse, my client’s boss was an exceedingly intelligent and charismatic individual who lacked experience, yet had the dominating, strong-willed and demanding presence to prolong the project damage.

Why did I take on this “death wish” project? Suffice it to say that once upon a time I skydived while these days I go out of my way to find challenging, turnaround initiatives. Here are some of the things I did.

I suspected that building an enterprise initiative from scratch was unwise. My predecessor really didn’t do problem solving due diligence. Yet my client’s boss, all of the executives and the parent company thought otherwise. To make a long story short, I asked their indulgence to quickly define some key aspects of their business needs, after which they convinced themselves that customized route was suspect and then unanimously chose an enterprise ERP package as their solution. Because a project manager has to influence without complete authority in a matrix environment, one of the best ways to do so is to allow management to convince themselves with solid and objective problem-solving.
Okay, so they were on the right path but I now had to conquer the complexities of preparing and implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These monster projects impact every business function, are highly complex and demand high priority attention from most of an organization’s management and staff. To ensure that stakeholders were on the same page I collaboratively prepared a project charter as the foundation and beacon for a shared project vision and a basis for future project budgets and schedules.
Given the high project profile, a team size of 50 with other indirect participants, organizational inexperience, a lengthy project time horizon, a budget which was 5% of sales and immature implementation practices, I helped management to identify project risks as extremely high. By doing, I garnered support for a strong risk management program.
Now it was time for me to “delegate in detail”. Ensuring that the team estimated in detail and applied productive work-breakdown structure methods, I fostered a project schedule and critical path, taking care to include all major stakeholders in order to win their commitment, support and hopefully passion.
Turnaround projects demand change, especially for ERP’s. To this end, I empowered two influential project members as change agent champions.
My predecessor over-supervised the people. In contrast, I began supervising the work, giving creative and highly specialized workers a zone of freedom to allow them to feel empowered.
To inspire trust and open the lines of communication I also cultivated relationships with subordinate project leads. And, my open door policy ensured that team members were always welcome to discuss and action project issues.
To foster a more timely emergence of the classic “norming stage” of project, I worked with the team to record agreed norms including: strive to do better than budget and schedule commitments, continually share knowledge and criticize the behaviour not the person.
In sessions with individual staff member I asked “What do you want from your job?” Subsequently I proceeded to fulfill as many of these expectations as possible.
I engaged my time-tested qualities when recruiting for the team: trustworthy, genuine, conscientious, at least moderately intelligent, positive problem-solver, hardworking, a team player, willing to learn and happy with the gift of their existence. After that, the rest tends to be much easier.

Innovation is always a primary part of the “modes operendi” I culitivate. I encouraged my project reports to “think out of the box”.

We continuously improved the practices to the familiar tune from hecklers that “It Cannot Be Done”. … Well, we did it. Another “project parachute jumps” safely landed.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Harry B. Mingail, combines a Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Business Analyst Professional (CBAP), Mathematics/Computer Science and Business Administration designations with 25 years of BA, PM and management consulting as well delivery of webinars, workshops, mentoring and keynotes.

Can We Leverage Social Networks to Drive Project Success?

Written by Lisa Anderson on March 6, 2012. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Can We Leverage Social Networks to Drive Project Success?

We have entered a new normal business environment – and we aren’t going back to the way it used to be! Customers are demanding more for less, companies are hoarding cash and growing the top line is a continual struggle. Ensuring project success is becoming more vital as projects are typically geared towards increasing profitability and/or sales revenues. What can project leaders do to stack the odds in their favor? Leverage social networks.
According to Webster’s dictionary, a social network is a network of friends, colleagues, and other personal contacts. The power of your social network can tip the scales on any project. So, what are a few ways to leverage our social network to drive project success? 1) Create community. 2) Knowledge. 3) Publicity.

Create community: One of the most important aspects to whether a project team will succeed is whether the team is engaged. Engaged teams deliver results! In my experience in working with hundreds of project teams across multiple industries and globally, I’ve found that a key ingredient to engagement is creating community. In essence, do your project team members believe they are making a difference and feel like they are a special member of the team?
For example, most trade organizations have had declining membership and lackluster attendance at events in the last several years as members do not feel a special connection to the group. However, in a few rare cases, the chapter (or subgroup) has developed a “family” feel where the members help each other and function more as a community. In those cases, they are thriving, as people seem to be searching for places to connect. Although communities can thrive without a computer present, several of the social media tools enhance the feeling of community as they enable 24-7 communication, instant feedback and companionship.

Knowledge: Another key to success in project management is execution excellence. Undoubtedly, those who are better prepared and ahead of the curve as compared with the competition will thrive. Social networks and social media are cornerstone to staying ahead of the curve.
For example, we can utilize social networks of colleagues, customers, suppliers and our extended supply chain to find solutions to problems (project roadblocks), research products and services, uncover the latest trends and best practices, ask questions, obtain ideas for innovation, etc. We can conduct surveys and polls; utilize Q&A, post videos, request customer and market feedback etc. Twitter, Linked In, Facebook and YouTube can all be secret weapons of choice in the battle of knowledge.

Publicity: There are countless numbers of reasons to seek publicity. Need a new project team member? Want to entice customers? Need to promote your project with senior leadership? Want to create a buzz in the industry? Create engagement with team members? All of the above?
How do we create a publicity buzz? There are several options: Tweet a milestone success. Post an intranet update on your project team’s latest success. Post a video of your new product’s features. Chat with Facebook friends about your customers’ benefits. Put an article in your company newsletter about your next milestone and key contributors. Give an exceptional team member a Linked In testimonial. Search for talent in a specialty group related to your project’s objective. Post a picture of your team celebrating a success. And don’t forget the tried but true – pick of the phone and thank your extended supply chain member for their contribution (and tweet a “thanks” too!).

We are just beginning to tap into the immense power of social networks. Why not be on the leading edge instead of racing to catch up? Speed matters in today’s new normal business environment. If you can leverage your social network and social media to speed up project success, you’ll have the opportunity to leapfrog the competition.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Avoid Failure – Facilitate Effective Communications

Written by George Pitagorsky on February 15, 2012. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Avoid Failure – Facilitate Effective Communications

Effective Communication

Over the years I have become convinced that communication is the key to optimal performance whenever there is more than one person involved in an endeavor. Last month we addressed mindfulness as a foundation for effective communication. Mindfulness is the base. Building on that base, add facilitation skills.

Facilitation

Facilitation is not just for communication professionals and academics. As a project manager, supervisor or functional manager, parent, friend, etc., you can make use of facilitation skills to keep communication open, avoid reactive behavior and stay on topic, at the right level of detail. While professional facilitators generally stand apart from the group and do not take part in content discussions, you can and should be both a facilitator and a party to communication. Professional facilitators (good ones, that is) make it a point to enable groups to be self facilitating. That means everyone takes on some responsibility to facilitate.

Facilitation is making things (in this case the exchange of information) easy by setting people at ease and applying skillful practices to enable effective communication. It is used to design and hold successful meetings as well as to manage conflict and generally make sure there is a healthy flow of information, ideas, facts and so forth in and around projects and organizations.

Facilitators make sure the parties have a clear sense of what they are communicating about, that the right parties are involved, that each has the opportunity to share his or her thoughts and feelings. Facilitators keep the conversation on track and at the right level of detail. They help the parties to establish and comply with “rules” of behavior like being respectful and civil. Perhaps most importantly they cultivate rapport

Rapport

Rapport is a relationship in which people are in-synch or feel comfortable with one another because they feel similar or relate well to one another. There is mutual trust, emotional affinity, similarity, and common interests. When there is rapport, people are more likely to be open and to communicate with clarity.

In my forthcoming book Managing Conflict in Projects:
Applying Mindfulness and Analysis for Optimal Results I identify six facilitation techniques, which are used to create rapport

Active listening—taking the effort to hear and understand what others are saying and to show them that you have understood it as they have meant it to be understood;
Questioning—enabling active listening by digging into the other parties communication and making sure your understanding is accurate;
Matching and mirroring—creating a sense of trust and comfort by recognizing the way other people speak, appear or behave and replicating it in your speech, appearance and behavior
Using body language—recognizing the tacit, non-verbal part of communication to go beyond the words to get the real meaning of what is being communicated. Body language becomes an integral part of mirroring when you realize that the way you behave (how you stand, dress, speak, etc.) has a subtle impact on the way you are perceived by the others and that you can control the way you behave to manage the impact
Making eye contact—maintaining trust and comfort while not over doing it with staring
Moderating the communication process—managing the flow of communication to make sure everyone has an opportunity to speak, that one person isn’t taking over the communication inappropriately, that people stay on topic and at the right level of detail, etc.

Mindful Communication

As facilitation and mindfulness come together we get mindful communication. The guidelines are simple:

Talk about what’s really important. Stay on topic. Stay at the “right level of detail”
Really listen to each other. See how thoroughly you can understand each other’s views and experience.
Say what’s true for you without making everyone else wrong. Bring facts to the surface and recognize the difference between fact and belief or opinion.
See what you can learn together by exploring, particularly when there is disagreement.
Avoid monopolizing the conversation. Make sure everyone has a chance to speak.
Avoid emotionally driven behavior and speech.

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Communication and Mindfulness

Written by George Pitagorsky on January 25, 2012. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Communication and Mindfulness

Foundations for Effective Communication

Last month’s blog highlighted the need to speak up at the right time in project life to avoid problems and minimize the impact of those that are not avoided. In an earlier blog I discussed Improving Communication: Controlling Your Body Language and Tone.

This month we’ll explore communication techniques that can be used to make speaking up easier and more effective and enable the control needed to moderate behavior and speech.

Effective communication relies on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, right intention, basic facilitation skills, the right vocabulary and courage. Over the next few months we’ll explore these in the context of project work.

Mindfulness

Let’s start with mindfulness, the ability to be consciously aware of what is happening in and around you. It implies clear, objective observation. Mindfulness is the foundation for effective communication. It enables emotional intelligence and the ability to facilitate. It enables you to choose the right words and behavior for each situation. Increased mindfulness has also been shown to promote good health, better memory, concentration and enhanced performance in general.

Mindfulness is cultivated by mindfulness meditation. It is a very simple practice, just comfortably observing things like your own breath, feelings, thoughts and mental constructs (models, beliefs, opinions, etc.). These are objects of mindfulness. Additional objects of mindfulness are the way other people behave, what they say and how they say it. In effect anything that occurs in or around you can be an object of mindfulness. By observing these phenomena as objects the mind is trained to become more objective. Objectivity leads to better decision making and that leads to better performance.

For an instruction on how to do mindfulness meditation go to http://www.pitagorskyconsulting.com/articles/article/6339267/106485.htm.

Why Mindfulness is Important

Mindfulness is a key to communication because it makes it possible to be responsive rather that reactive. If when faced with a stressful situation a person can feel his or her feelings before reacting to them, then there is the possibility of choosing what to say and how to say it.

The ability to see and feel the reactions of others to what one says and does makes it possible to shift behavior, body language, tone and the content of communication to get the kind of response one is looking for.

When faced with a challenging situation in which the desire to speak up about a sensitive topic is being blocked by fear or lethargy, it is mindfulness that enables clear thinking to arrive at the optimal course of action. It does so because it enables a “step back” that separates oneself from her feelings and provides the “space” to decide.

Typically, people are so identified with their feelings and emotions that they do not have, or even think they can have, the ability to decide. Anger results in scowling or yelling; fear in withdrawal and avoidance. One becomes stuck in his or her conditioning.

Mindfulness meditation gives the practitioner the ability to see experientially that there is choice; the ability to break old habits and respond creatively and appropriately in every situation. Anger is felt as anger, fear as fear, but these emotions are not immediately converted into unskillful behavior.

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