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Projects Are Complex. Are You Looking After Yourself?

Written by Geoff Crane on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Projects Are Complex. Are You Looking After Yourself?

Project professionals are used to stress. Some even wear the demands of their job as a badge of honour.

But work environments are becoming increasingly complex as elaborate programs force project resources to do more with less. Further, many companies are preferring a model of contingent, transactional labour to populate their project teams. While this makes for an efficient way to manage a project’s bottom line, it removes some important psychological protections that full-time workers used to enjoy.

Recognizing that increases in workplace stress seemed connected to important changes in workplace organization, Swedish researcher Per Gustafsson ran a fascinating study in 2011. He and his team recruited 791 adult professionals from northern Sweden and broke them into three groups. Each group represented length of exposure to contingent employment: 0 months, 1-25 months and >25 months. On the morning of the study, each participant “spit in a cup” for the researchers when they first woke up.

From these saliva samples, the team measured the participants’ “cortisol awakening response” (CAR). This is an important test because it tells scientists how much stress your body expects to experience over the coming day. This process is largely informed by the amount of stress you’ve already been under – in other words, if your saliva contains high levels of cortisol when you first wake, your body likely anticipates a rough day ahead.

Gustafsson’s results were illuminating. It turns out, the longer participants had been working in contract jobs, the higher their CAR scores were. People with no contract exposure had an average CAR of 34%, people with less than 2 years had an average CAR of 41% and people with 2 years or more of career instability saw an average CAR of 51%. It’s important to note here that as CAR scores go up, the usual risks to health associated with chronic stress also rise. For this reason, contract workers need to take even better care of themselves than they did when they were working full-time.

Unfortunately, there appear to be some complicating snags.

Another Swedish researcher, Annika Zika-Viktorsson, ran a 2005 study where she investigated burnout-like symptoms that she had discovered among project professionals. People whose job it was to constantly shift attention back and forth between different projects saw a loss of efficiency that they felt was outside their control. As a result, she suggested, these environments had impacts on people’s job satisfaction and perceived levels of psychological strain. When multi-project environments became too chaotic, she called this state, “project overload”.

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Zika-Viktorsson gave 392 project workers at 9 different companies in Sweden a self-assessment that measured all kinds of stressful aspects of projects ranging from excessive formalization to lack of personal feedback. These challenges appear in the table below. While many of us have had to contend with the items on this list, it turns out that the one item most likely to create a sense of “project overload” in a project worker was the lack of opportunities for recuperation.

Challenges associated with multi-project environments. Numbers in red are highly associated with “project overload”.

Challenges Correlations with “overload”
Opportunities for recuperation -.23***
Insufficient project routines -.16***
Insufficient time resources -.17***
Number of projects -.14**
Deficient authority -0.09
Challenging project goals -0.08
Excessive formalization -0.06
Personal feedback -0.03
Task resemblance -0.02

More than ever before, it seems there’s never a good time to take a vacation – especially not for project workers. While a project is ongoing, there are always fires to put out. For resources spread across multiple projects, those fires can easily combine to form a 5-alarm blaze. Calmer times between projects, or between project phases might seem like a good time to take a break, but those are usually the times all hands are needed on deck to help plan. This problem of taking time off is even worse for resources who work on contract, or who are measured on “utilization” hours. If these folks haven’t taken time off before a project ends, and haven’t lined up their next job, they likely won’t be able to rest until they’ve found the source of their next paycheque.

It’s tough to say if Gustafsson’s research extends to full-time workers whose jobs depend on the existence of adequate project capacity. It’s also tough to say if Zika-Viktorsson’s “project burnout” applies to single-track project environments. When taken together, however, these two studies paint an important picture. On an airplane, if the cabin depressurizes, you’re supposed to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Once you’re incapacitated, the advice says, you’re no good to anyone. In a similar vein, a successful project worker will prioritize his or her own mental health above the needs of their project environment so that they will have the fortitude to see the job through to the end.

But life in today’s project environments isn’t as “grab and pull” as an oxygen mask. Boundaries blur, priorities shift and moving parts smack the unaware in the back of the head. Keeping up with multi-project demands without compromising self-care takes both long- and short-range planning.

That can be easy to forget when yet another project charter flies over your cubicle wall to land on your desk.

You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything

Written by Brad Egeland on . Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything

Any project manager or PMO director will tell you that successfully managing a project takes a lot more than a little luck and common sense.

It does take a lot of common sense and logic. I believe that experience and logic are the two key principles behind the application of project management best practices. But it takes accountability, dedication, persistence, patience, and solid leadership qualities to experience project management success on a regular and ongoing basis…the kind of basis necessary to keep you in the PM profession for the long term. No one steps into the role of successfully managing projects again and again through shear luck…no it takes experience and the qualities and soft skills and characteristics to actually be able to repeatedly pull that off.

The title of this article comes from a song by Aaron Tippin. I heard it for the first time the other day and it made an impression on me. It contains lyrics like this …

“He’d say you’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything
You’ve got to be your own man not a puppet on a string
Never compromise what’s right and uphold your family name
You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything…”

My first thought was, “this is a good song and very applicable…now how do I apply this to the project manager profession?” I know it’s real and it is saying “be a leader and follow your gut” but how do I translate that to this type of article?

I think it goes like this… If you’re going to be a successful project manager or consultant or whatever, you have to have some goals, integrity and missions. Mine, personally, is to succeed for my customer. My motto is, “You’re only as successful as your last customer thinks you are..” If you don’t have a plan then many things on a project or through others actions or wishes can cause your potential success to fall apart. If you aren’t in control, then someone else will be and you will be subservient to whatever that is and whoever that pleases. So for me, it comes down to three key things…

Make solid decisions and stand behind them.

The project manager who can gather information, ask questions from available subject matter experts (SMEs), and make good project decisions and stand by them without being swayed by those with other agendas will have greater chance at ongoing project successes. Meeting challenges head-on and making the best informed decision possible – even if it’s made with less than optimal information – it’s the best decision that could be made in the moment. Stand by it unless adequate new information becomes available, then of course assess and change directions, if needed. Once you know differently, there is no real honor in standing behind the wrong decision if you know better.

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Lead the team and don’t waiver easily on the principles that make you a good project manager and leader.

This is another one about stubbornness. There are those – even senior leaders in the company – who will try to sway you away from actions you are carrying out on the part of the customer and the project. They may ask you to knowingly go down a path that may not be best for the project’s goals and mission in the name of more revenue or even just making the delivery organization “look good.” I had this happen to me a couple of times that I know of and realized… and possibly more times earlier in my career when I was not aware of the situation. Has anyone reading this had this one happen to you?

Boldly lead the customer and don’t back down when the turbulence hits.

When the turbulence hits. On a project. And it will hit. Every project has issues. The key for the project manager is to stay the course, with both eyes on the budget and resource forecast, of course because hitting a patch of issue laden work can mean the need to call out to some additional experts or maybe even switch out resources to get back on track. Both of these scenarios take valuable time and money which is why the budget and resource forecasts must both be watched and managed carefully.

Summary / call for input and feedback

Leaders are stubborn, unwavering, ruthless even. Don’t be ruthless, but do stand behind your principles, decisions, and actions. Stand for something so you aren’t swayed by anything. Others are going to offer their opinions. Others are going to want you to go down their path. Listen – because that’s half of the good communication equation. But if it’s not the right thing for the project, for the customer, for the team, and for you…then don’t be swayed. I realize that is much easier said than done. Most of us are affected by peer pressure. I know I am. And to leadership pressure. But I’ve had leadership steer me wrong twice and it caused two of my projects to fail – both million dollar+ projects. That was painful. So, I still stand by my motto that “You’re only as successful as your last customer thinks you are…” Keep that in mind and you’ll likely make consistent, forward thinking decisions and actions for your customer and project. Stay the course. Be stubborn… it’s ok. At the end of the day you’re the one who has to take whatever comes on the project, positive or negative. And you’re the one who has to look the customer in the eye and explain the good or the bad. You can give that task to someone else, but the best leaders don’t delegate this.

Readers – what is your take on this? What principles and goals have you built your project management reputation and practice upon? If pressed real hard to choose…do you go with the customer or the leadership when you know they are in direct conflict with each other? Touch questions… sometimes career defining situations and decisions.

Meeting Facilitation Boot Camp

Written by Caprice White on . Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Meeting Facilitation Boot Camp

Meeting facilitation is a soft skill that is a vital part of your business analyst toolkit. It is rare to be a business analyst and not facilitate meetings.

Over your Project Management or Business Analyst career, you will attend, schedule, plan, many, many meetings.

As a facilitator, you must remain a neutral party. You are responsible for meetings and works shops that uncover and reveal requirements, are productive and provide an environment that fosters open communication and enables all stakeholders to reach agreements and consensus. You can do this, Of course, you can! YOU are a superstar when it comes to meetings.

Even superstars need a refresher once and a while, so it’s meeting facilitation boot camp time!

1. Plan Your Logistics

Logistics are the who, here and when part of the process. The list below should assist you with your logistic preparations:

  • Who are your participants? Ensure that you invite the correct stakeholders to your meeting.
  • Where will your meeting take place? Make sure your meeting space is the appropriate size for the number of stakeholders who will be in attendance. Do not make the rookie mistake I did in my early days and book a meeting room suitable for 8 when I had 15 attendees. You want to make sure your stakeholders are comfortable and have enough room for any presentation materials.
  • Are there time zone considerations? Does your company have people working remotely offices located in various time zones? If so, you need to take this into consideration when booking the time for your meeting. Make sure it is at a reasonable time where all parties can attend.
  • Pre-book any resources required such as shared conference call lines, meeting room, projectors, laptops or web-sharing software.
  • Ensure you familiar with all of the equipment you will be using during your meeting. Just to be on the safe side, schedule a dry run before your meeting so you can address any technical issues to ensure things don’t go pear-shaped.
  • Print out any documents or handouts required for your stakeholders. If your meeting requires pens, paper, post-it notes or larger writing sheets ensure these supplies are on hand and ready to go before your meeting.
  • Who will be taking notes? If you are facilitating the meeting, will you have time to take notes or do you need assistance from another Business Analyst or Admin? Arranging this beforehand can help with the efficiency of your meetings.
  • Will you be serving food or coffee? If so, ensure these are pre-order for your participations. I find a box of donuts and coffee goes a long way in eliciting requirements from early morning stakeholders.
  • Always have a backup plan in place. Sometimes resources fail, or rooms get double booked. Ensure you have a backup plan.

2. Set the Agenda

Once you have your logistics sorted, it’s time to send out meeting invitations and set the agenda.
Have you ever received a meeting invite and had to contact the organizer because it was unclear what the meeting was about and what the expectations were? Any confusion can be avoided by sending your stakeholders a clear agenda that includes the following:

  • An objective for the meeting
  • List of discussion topics
  • Need your stakeholders to do some homework? Don’t forget to include attachments or pre-reading for attendees to review.

3. Ice Breaker and Introductions

Once your stakeholders have arrived and are settled in, take the first 5 minutes of the meeting for people to introduce themselves and what their roles are on the project. This allows your attendees to understand other’s roles and responsibilities on a project, creates context, and gets them comfortable and ready for the meeting.

If there is time, I like to throw out an icebreaker question, unrelated to the project or meeting to get people comfortable in the right headspace to communicate. A few sample icebreaker questions for the group are:

  • When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
  • What is the strangest food you have ever eaten?
  • What is the longest you have ever stayed awake and why?

4. Review the Agenda and Get This Party Started!

Now that your participants are settled, take 5 minutes to review the agenda. This establishes meeting guidelines and context, which will make the meeting a lot more productive.

  • Review the objective of the meeting and the agenda
  • Restate the project objective as a refresher to the stakeholders.

This demonstrates that the meeting or workshop you are holding is relevant and aligns itself with the project objectives and priorities.

5. Facilitator Not a Participator

Remember, you as a meeting facilitator are a neutral party. Your job is to lead the discussions, and drive out requirements by engaging your audience. You are the liaison between the project sponsors, stakeholders, and software development teams. Remember to remain neutral and allow your stakeholders to make decisions required to move forward.

6. Manage Distractions

If your stakeholders are holding or being distracted by side conversations or are getting way off topic, it’s your job as the facilitator to bring their focus back to the agenda.

7. Parking Lot items

Sometimes it seems that your group may wander off topic or wish to discuss items not on the agenda, or have questions and concerns that will not be addressed during your limited meeting time. I have found the best way to address this is to create a “Parking Lot” list of items. This lets your stakeholders know that you are listening to their questions and concerns and that they will be addressed in the future but not during this meeting.

8. Use Visual Business Modeling Tools

Using visual business modeling tools during your meetings and workshops can help drive out requirements or uncover processes for your stakeholders. These assist with identifying and analyzing user requirements, system requirements and capture business rules.

9. Conclude with next Steps and Action Items

Once your meeting is complete or if you run out of time, it is a good idea to wrap up your session by reviewing the following:

  • Parking lot items
  • Action Items
  • Next Steps

10. You are not done yet superstar…follow up with your stakeholders

Just because your meeting has concluded, it does not mean your work has ended.

  • Distribute your meeting notes including action items. It is best practice to do this within 24 hours of your meeting.
  • Set deadlines and follow up on any action items
  • Set up and send out invitations for the next meeting if required
  • Remember to thank your stakeholders for attending. A simple thank you can go a long way.

Effective Presentations – The Basics of Telling Your Story

Written by Jason Kelly on . Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Effective Presentations – The Basics of Telling Your Story

Regardless of the delivery tool, you utilize to engage and share information within your meeting/workshop there are some basic components required for a good slide deck.

Some of the information below may seem obvious; it has been observed over time that we are skipping the obvious.

What is Presentation?

A presentation is defined as the process of presenting a topic/subject/activity to a preselected audience. Within a business context, you are typically demonstrating, introducing, sharing or discussing a project activity. Each presentation will contain its purpose and objective, and this will be reflected within the main body of the presentation content. One thing that can be consistent is the framework structure to your presentation slide deck.

What Should Be Included in All Presentations:

  • Title Page Slide – Reference the project/program this presentation is part of, plus the topic of today’s presentation. Presenters names and date of presentation are important for the title page. The title page is especially important if you consider this presentation might get physically or electronically shared throughout the company.
  • Objectives / Purpose Slide – The objective can also be identified as the meeting goal. Why is everyone getting together? The purpose is more granular and focuses on the elements that will support your objective. Just a couple of bullet points are fine for this slide. 
  • Agenda / Contents Slide – Breakdown of the key topics and presenters (if different) in the sequence of presentation delivery. 
  • Contents – main content of the presentation. This is dynamic based on the objective of the presentation.
  • Agenda Progress Slide(s) – If the presentation goes on for longer than 20 mins it is a good idea to re-insert the agenda slide with an indication of progress as the presentation moves through different topics or speakers. This allows the audience to understand what is coming next and how much the presentation has progressed.
  • Wrap up Slide – When the presentation is close to conclusion, you need to recap on the key topics discussed and review any action items generated during the presentation.
  • Contact Details Slide – Provide a slide with your name and contact details. Again someone in the future might want to reach out to you to discuss the presentation.
  • Where to find the file Slide – If you are sharing information within the project team, make a reference slide who show the file share repository location for the file. That will allow attendees to share the file quickly amongst their team.

Editor’s Note:

We have all been in the room with an endless boring series of slides being flashed in our eyes. I have enjoyed a good many naps that way. The section below further illustrates and elaborates on the writer’s article above. If you want to see presentations done right, check out TEDTalks. The best presentation I attended was on the topic of paper towels. Check out Joe Smith’s TEDTalk on “How to Use a Paper Towel.” You will never dry your hands the same way again.

5 Key Reasons Why Some Projects Succeed and Some Don’t

Written by Brad Egeland on . Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on 5 Key Reasons Why Some Projects Succeed and Some Don’t

It is just a fact in the project management world – some projects succeed, and some don’t.

Many studies place project failure – to some degree or another and by someone’s standards somewhere – at between 56% and 74% of all projects. I have also seen a couple of more optimistic surveys putting the success figure at closer to 54%. Still, none of those figures make any of us feel warm and fuzzy about our chances at project success. We all know that we tend to cut corners or that our methodology or process may not be the best. It is like continuing to eat fried chicken when your doctor tells you to stop for your health. We often still like to stick with what we feel comfortable with even if we know it could have (not definitely will have) negative consequences at some point later than tomorrow or next week.

That said, let’s look at five key areas that loosely fall under the logical concept of project management best practices that can, when practiced regularly and thoroughly, logically lead to better project outcomes.

1. Proper Planning

Proper upfront planning is always going to be a critical best practice that leads to project success more often than projects that lack the proper amount of planning. What is the right amount of planning? There is no yardstick for this, but it involves a combination of detailed requirements planning and documentation, setting up a proper way to regularly manage project financials and resource supply, risk and issue management, and of course, a planned and keen oversight of project scope and change control. Communication is the #1 responsibility of the project manager and helps everything else go much more smoothly. That is why I also consider a project communication plan – whether it is a formal project deliverable or just a casual spreadsheet for everyone to review and post on his or her office wall – as something that should be sent out at the beginning of every project. Yes, it is part of the planning process and ensures that everyone on the project knows who is responsible for what communication, how to contact all key stakeholders through just about any means possible, and when, where and how the regularly scheduled project meetings will be happening.

2. Close Budget Oversight

Close budget control is critical, but not practiced nearly enough. Involve the team and ensure the team is accountable for assigned tasks including the estimated effort, actual effort and the effort to finish tasks. If your team knows that you watch and manage the budget closely, then they are going to be more likely to charge their time to correctly to your project when working on multiple projects making it far less likely to charge junk time to your projects.

3. Project Team Ownership of Task

How do you get your project team to “own” their tasks assigned to them? Make them accountable for everything about those tasks. From defining them with you during project schedule planning work to tracking them while the project is in motion to reporting on their status to the project customer during weekly formal project status meetings. The sooner your can get your project team members assigned to their roles on the project, the sooner they can assist in the early project planning activities including the project schedule development and the individual task definitions and scope. Those are the tasks they will be assisting with and owning, and that planning phase helps them to feel and gain ownership of those tasks they will be working on soon and throughout the project engagement. It helps build in automatic ownership and accountability.

4. Error-Free Deliverables

Ok, perfection is not going to happen. However, you can certainly strive for it with your work and your team’s work on deliverables that go to the customer. Peer review everything to greatly reduce easily overlooked mistakes in project deliverables going out for customer review and sign off. Trust me – I know from personal experience that sending off the same great functional design document three times with errors still visible – even simply typos – can lead to a significant decline in customer satisfaction and confidence in yours and your teams’ ability to deliver quality. I corrected the problem – almost too late for one project – by requiring peer reviews by all project team members of everything that went to the customer. Everything (except for the basic communication emails, of course). Our problem was a problematic free PDF creation program, but it was sloppy for us not to be checking and just sending errors off for the customer to find. That should never happen on a customer deliverable.

5. Solid Customer Engagement

The engaged customer is the one that is available to exchange ideas, supply and receive information, provide critical input on key project decisions that need to be made and can clarify requirements or business processes on the spot when progress requires it. If the project manager can keep the customer focused more on your project than the hundreds of other things that are trying to take up his or her time, then you win that battle in making it easier to get quick info when the situation requires it. You will be able to make sure that the customer is sitting in those weekly project status meetings helping make next step plans when they come up. Win-win.

Summary/Call for Input

I could write on this topic till the end of time and never really pound home any real guarantees of project success – there are no guarantees. In the end, adhering as much as possible to logical best practices, repeatable successful processes, practices and templates, and trying not to just bring a project home on the wings of luck are your best way of ensuring project success.

What are your thoughts on this topic? What works for you? What has failed miserably? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.