Tag: Planning

Cultivating Confident Decision Making as a Project Manager

Written by Noah Rue on July 27, 2022. Posted in Articles.

An indecisive project manager is the last thing a company needs. Decision making is critical to project success. If you can’t make decisions with conviction, your team and the success of your projects are in serious jeopardy.

Project managers need swift and confident decision-making skills to do their best work. But how do you cultivate these skills if they’re lacking?

Work on Your Relationship With Yourself

How well we do at work depends greatly on our relationship with ourselves. It’s difficult to think your work is worthy when you don’t believe in yourself. In this case, when you aren’t confident in yourself, it’s nearly impossible to make project management decisions you stand behind.

To be the best project manager you can be and be decisive in your role, you must work on your relationship with yourself. Don’t neglect the importance of feeling good inside.

Spend more time doing things that make you feel most you. Take on challenges and step out of your comfort zone often. Grow your confidence outside of work, and it will begin to be at the forefront of every decision you make at work.

Experiment With Different Decision-Making Methods

Experimentation is also instrumental in cultivating confident decision-making as a project manager, mainly experimenting with different decision-making methods. Relying on one way to make decisions won’t do you any good in a role where rapid change is the norm.

On the other hand, the ability to use different decision-making techniques and apply them effectively to drive your projects forward is wise. Here are a few decision-making methods to get you started:

Consensus Approach — the entire team discusses their ideas and solutions, and you make a final decision as a group.
The Vroom-Yetton decision model — the situation dictates the best way to move forward as a leader and with a decision.
Kepner-Tregoe Matrix — identify a specific goal, weigh different solutions to that goal, and pick the best solution out of those discussed.

Lean into Data-Driven Decision-Making

As crucial as trusting your gut is to grow confident in your decision-making, you shouldn’t rely on it alone. Using data to back the decisions you move forward with can help you feel much more confident in them.

For example, let’s say you’re faced with a decision about adjusting marketing messaging to enhance the customer experience. In that case, you could analyze data about the customer journey to see which marketing messages are responsible for driving the most conversions. Then, you can tweak the messages that aren’t working to mirror those that are.

Get comfortable with data and use it to drive your project management decisions. When you combine data with your hunch, you’ve got something powerful that can prompt insightful decision-making that produces results. And getting results will help boost your confidence, making it even easiest to make decisions in the future.

Think Short-Term and Long-Term

Many project managers think about either short-term or long-term outcomes, but rarely both. As a result, they don’t make the best decision for the situation, adversely affecting the entire project. They may also become continually less confident in their choices, the more they encounter these kinds of situations.

Do the opposite and analyze both. First, take some time to think about each decision’s potential short-term effects. Then, weigh possible long-term effects. Equally consider the potential consequences of both before moving forward with a permanent decision.

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Look at Failure Differently

In role your, you need to make many decisions each day. As much as you want to make the right decision every time without hesitation, that just isn’t realistic. Failure is inevitable in this line of work, whether due to changing circumstances or simply making the wrong choice (even if you were sure it was right). To succeed as a project manager, you must become comfortable with this fact.

The best way to become comfortable with things not going well is to look at failure differently. Embrace moments of failure as learning opportunities. The more you learn from mistakes, the better decisions you can make in the future, and the more confident you can become. Don’t beat yourself up when things don’t go right. Instead, learn from failure and build on it.

Celebrate Wins

Failures will happen, but so will successes, both big and small.

If you want to cultivate confident decision-making, you must celebrate decisions that led to wins as much as you learn from what didn’t work. As you see your decision-making produce excellent results, you can start to grow your confidence moving forward.

Celebrate your decision-making wins. Reflect on decisions you made that produced the positive results you hoped for, as well as ones with unexpectedly positive results. Also, praise the decisions you thought wouldn’t end well but ended up being critical to the success of a project.

Give Yourself Time

If you start working on being more confident with your decision-making today, you won’t be the most confident decisionmaker tomorrow. In other words, it takes time to grow confidence. Allow yourself that time. There will be peaks and valleys in your journey to trusting and believing in yourself wholeheartedly. Enter them all with grace and understanding.

Conclusion

There’s no place for indecision in project management. You’ll slow your team’s workflow, potentially prevent a project’s success, and ruin your confidence with negative results. Use the tips above to cultivate confident decision-making and become a better project manager.

10 Project Management Tools the World’s Top Companies Actually Use

Written by Vartika Kashyap on July 19, 2022. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on 10 Project Management Tools the World’s Top Companies Actually Use

Netflix uses ProofHub, Uber uses Asana, Sony uses Podio.

Almost every successful business uses one or the other project management tool to handle their tasks, track their time, and manage their work in general.

Even numerous studies indicate that using project management tools increase performance and productivity. If you’ve also just started up a business and looking for a variety of tools that could soar your productivity, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve compiled a list of the best project management tools that are being used by some big names in the world and you should too.

Let’s check them out:

1. ProofHub

ProofHub is one of the best project management tools in the business. It is simple and intuitive with features that help businesses to collaborate and deliver projects faster and better.

Business with remote teams can collaborate effortlessly with seamless file-sharing and effective document management. It supports many languages other than English, namely French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Danish, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Russian, and German.

Pros of ProofHub:
● Define different access levels for team members based on their responsibilities
● Gantt charts provide a visual timeline for tasks
● Online reports offer clear insights into projects, tasks, and resources

Businesses using ProofHub: Taco Bell, Netflix, Disney, NASA, Trip Advisor, Fractal Fox, and others.

2. Trello

Trello is a leading project management software that implements the concept of boards and cards. The cards contain tasks either to categorize things or track the project progress.

Trello is useful to enable collaboration in company by organizing and tracking tasks, files, and information at one place. Plus, you can anytime integrate third-party applications into your workflow to increase its effectiveness.

Pros of Trello:
● Intuitive simple boards, cards, and lists
● Simplifies collaboration
● Get a glance at who is doing what and what still needs to get done

Businesses using Trello: Adobe, Kickstarter, Google, and more.

3. Asana

Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help businesses organize, track, and manage work. The work management tool helps you prioritize, stay focused, and make more time for work that matters the most.

With Asana, you can also monitor the status of all your projects in real time, so you can keep strategic initiatives on track.

Pros of Asana:
● Set priorities and deadlines to plan work effectively
● Follow projects and tasks through every stage
● Create visual project plans to determine progress

Businesses using Asana: Deloitte, The New York Times, Uber, Airbnb, and more.

4. Basecamp

Regardless of how big or small your startup is, Basecamp is exactly what you need to get things done. It combines all the tools you need in a single and straightforward platform that makes work feel like less work.

Whether it’s about communicating effectively or keeping everyone in the loop, Basecamp can do it all for you.

Pros of Basecamp:
● Easily add tasks and other necessary details
● View tasks from every project together on one screen
● Available on the web and platforms like iOS, Android, and Mac

Businesses using Basecamp: PNMR, Novasyte, Animals Medical Center of MidAmerica

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5. nTask

nTask is a smart task management software designed to support collaboration, time tracking and monitoring, and project risk management. It’s built around the business needs that lets you do more much than usual.

It is supported by Google Calendar, Outlook, and many other third-party applications. Moreover, it also offers mobile applications for Android and iOS devices.

Pros of nTask:
● Simple and easy-to-use taskboard
● Multiple board views, task comments, meeting management
● Share files and notes easily

6. JIRA

JIRA is a great tool for running business projects that remains extremely popular with software development companies. It could help you prioritize and discuss your team’s work in full context with complete visibility.

What’s interesting with this project management software is that it lets you use an out-of-the-box workflow, or create one to match the way your team works.

Pros of JIRA:
● Interactive and customizable scrum boards
● Reports with real-time and actionable insights
● Automate processes with its robust set of APIs

Businesses using JIRA: Spotify, CISCO, eBay, Square, and more.

7. Wrike

Wrike is a cloud-based collaboration and project management software that scales across teams in any business. Companies can use it to simplify planning, gain visibility, streamline workflow, and also to enable collaboration.

It shows real-time reports and status for all of your team’s projects. Wrike helps distributed teams to discuss projects and tasks details with the full context of the work. You can also tag images and videos to provide specific feedback.

Pros of Wrike:
● Interactive dashboards
● Centralize communication with stakeholders
● Custom workflows, fields and project folder structures let you work the way you want

Businesses using Wrike: Google, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mars, L’oreal, and others.

8. Droptask

Droptask is a visual and intuitive task management software that helps you manage projects, tasks, and to-dos individually or as part of a team. It comes with a neat interface and real-time collaboration features.

The business plan gives you an unlimited access to flexible workspaces, innovative collaboration and integrates seamlessly with your favorite tools. Droptask has made collaboration easier, better, and faster.

Pros of Droptask:
● Kanban-style workflow boards
● Project templates and permission control
● Integration with Evernote, Google Calendar, Outlook, Gmail, iMindMap

Businesses using Droptask: Harvard University, Coca Cola, BBC, Ralph Lauren, and others.

9. Podio

Podio is a customizable work management solution leaders trust and employees love working on. It helps you create a consolidated process to get your teams working in sync.

Podio enables you to keep content, conversations, and processes structured at one place so that you can focus to get more work done. It is a perfect place to bring your clients and external parties to one place and eliminate lengthy email threads and time-consuming file sharing.

Pros of Podio:
● Granular admin capabilities
● Rigorous security standards
● Automated workflows and data visualization

Businesses using Podio: Volvo, Deloitte, Sony, NFL, and more.

10. Monday.com

Formerly known as Dapulse, Monday.com is a simple project management tool that helps you plan, organize, track in a visual platform. It’s quite flexible in approach and usability as it lets you customize your workflow to match different needs of your business.

Pros of Monday.com
● Plan everything visually
● Track progress with multiple views
● Simple and intuitive

Businesses using Monday.com: Discovery, Carlsberg, Philips, Fiverr, and more.

Conclusion

Now that you know about the modern tools world’s leading businesses are using, it’s high time even you should invest in one such project management tool to manage work effectively and get an edge over others in the market.

How To Write A Data-Driven Resume

Written by Ron Boaz on July 6, 2022. Posted in Articles.

As business professionals, we know the increasing importance of data-driven decision making in our projects and operations.

This article will explain why we need to bring that same approach to resume writing, and how to level up your Project Manager/Business Analyst resume writing skills.

The Importance Of Data

In the business world today, it is hard to come by important decisions that are made in the absence of data to support them. Managers are, understandably, loath to not have evidence stacked up to support a claim or decision that exposes their organization to opportunity, but also risk.

This same perspective can be applied to hiring decisions as well. Are not employees a huge opportunity, albeit potential risk, for any business? A star employee can transform an organization for the better, resulting in a strong bottom line and happier customers. In a competitive job market, candidates need to sell their attributes and accomplishments to hiring managers, who increasingly need to base their hiring decisions on strong evidence, not unlike other operational or project decisions. Show me the data!

What Does This Mean For Your Resume?

For one, your resume needs to be quantitative. Most resumes list work experience and education in a neat table, sorted by date and organization. This is a good start. However, when you drill down into the details (the bullet points) underlying each previous job, the descriptions often leave something to be desired. For example;

“Compiled project analysis for company executives”
“Managed an organization-wide ERP solution implementation”
“Trained support teams on use of new software tool”

What these examples demonstrate is a lack of volume, scale, or size. How is a hiring manager to know if you managed the roll out of an ERP system for a staff of 10, or 2000? What does improved service delivery really mean? That each agent more consistently said thank you at the end of each call? Or were turnaround times reduced by 30%? Look for your ‘wins’ and highlight them with data.

What this can look like:

“Comprehensively analyzed and compiled dozens of address, routing, and fuel data points on a weekly cadence, to draft executive reports that could be quickly understood and acted upon”
“Managed a 1 year ERP implementation affecting 900 staff, resulting in time savings of 5 FTEs”
“Facilitated dozens of training sessions of 5‐25 participants each, achieving an average instructor rating of 4.5/5 from feedback forms”

There are 2 important take-aways from the above examples:

Fully use the real estate provided to you on the page. Your resume should only be 1-2 pages, so use up that white space as efficiently as possible.
The examples use specifics that are quantified.

Examples of other metrics you can use:

$’s spent, saved or earned
Time taken or time saved
Cadence or turnaround time of process or task
# of people impacted, trained or involved
# of computers/machines updated or provisioned
Volume or quantity of materials

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Is The Data Impressive Enough?

What if the numbers aren’t impressive, you may ask? When providing feedback on resumes, mentees often state they don’t think their accomplishments sound big or important enough if too much detail is given, as if keeping it vague somehow augments their work. If you don’t think an accomplishment is worth quantifying, remember that hiring managers can also revert to the lowest common denominator, if quantities aren’t provided. You may have concurrently managed 10 accounts worth an average of $10,000. In the absence of concrete numbers, a hiring manager may theoretically guess that maybe it was 4 accounts worth $5000 each.

Sometimes, exploring different ways of telling your data story can make your work history sound more effective too. Maybe you successfully negotiated a $100 savings on a monthly vendor contract. That’s great, but maybe you can re-word it as, “Negotiated a 10% savings on a recurring monthly expense, saving $1000s per year”. Explore absolute versus percent versus ratio metrics for each claim, as sometimes one will sound better than the other.

Internal- And External-Facing Data Points

You may notice 2 distinct metrics types, that we can call internal, vs. external. Often, when we are stuck in the weeds of our projects, we only think of our internal metrics. These could include things like # of stakeholders managed, dollars spent, or groups involved. What are often more impactful, in terms of convincing employers of the significance of your work, are metrics that speak to what your project ultimately accomplished; the downstream outcomes. Sometimes, these data points may not be known for months or years. These could include things like # of new clients, # of people trained, or incremental dollars earned or saved, directly due to actions you took while deep in the weeds of your project. Have a think about your last few projects. What were their downstream outcomes?

Quantify Your Interests

People differ on the utility of a personal interests or extracurricular section of your resume. I’m personally a fan, because hiring managers are hiring people, not robots, and want to know who the person is that they are hiring. Also, hiring managers, like all humans, are subject to nervousness around meeting new people in a formal interview setting. The personal interests section provide great small chat talking points to fill otherwise awkward pauses that can occur before and after the formal questioning part of an interview.

Just like with the other sections of your resume, be specific, and quantified, with your personal life! Instead of;

“Organizer of musical festivals”, or
“Love travelling and photography”

you could say

“Have organized 3 musical festivals with 1000s of participants each”, or
“Have traveled in 23 countries, and photographed the Taj Mahal to the fish & corals of the Great Barrier Reef”

Final Thoughts

Lastly, quantifying your resume is an exercise to perform not only once you are looking for your next contract or job, but on an ongoing basis, so that you can leverage the metrics you have formulated for yourself in conversations and informal networking chats.

Good luck on your next application!

7 Easy Time Management Tips To Increase Your Efficiency And Productivity

Written by William Rodgers on July 5, 2022. Posted in Articles.

We all know how hard it is to keep up with everything in such a competitive world.

Most people who live in urban areas notice that everything around them seems to go on without waiting for anyone or anything. Time is flying by and you don’t even notice when yet another day has passed.

So how do you manage your time in a way that will be beneficial for you? Use these seven time management tips to increase your efficiency and productivity.

1. Set Your Goals

Every hardworking person has some kind of goal in mind that they are actively working towards. If you don’t have a clear aim in mind, you cannot possibly know why you are doing what you are doing.

An aim is also very important to keep you motivated. It is very easy to get discouraged if you are putting a lot of effort and see no instantaneous results. Having an aim, however, will increase your chance to stay dedicated to your job and find inspiration even in the hardest of times.

Once you decide what your goals and aims are, make sure to keep them in front of your eyes in some way. Maybe this will mean that you print out a huge poster and hang it by your desk at work or maybe you will only have to place a sticky note on your refrigerator to look at every morning.

2. Create A Schedule

Having a schedule is directly related to productivity. Creating a plan for a day, a week, or even a month will increase your confidence in your own future and will help you have your priorities straight.

There is also the flipside of having a plan which is that you may get too obsessed with it and react badly if something goes not according to it. This is why you must always be able to adapt to new circumstances. Don’t be afraid to change your plan at some point if the situation requires it.

3. Detect Time Loss

One of the most important factors that determine the success of your time management strategy is detecting where you are losing time. You absolutely must know when you are losing your precious time and what you can do to change this.

When you will be creating your schedule, you will most likely notice in which periods you spend your time for nothing and, eventually, lose your precious minutes. Make sure that you add some valuable tasks to these hours and change the situation.

4. Set Shorter Deadlines

Longer deadlines lead to procrastination. This is the sad truth which not everyone realizes. When you set a longer deadline for yourself, you usually think that you are doing a good thing because this will mean that you have more time to do what you want. In reality, you are letting yourself procrastinate and then make yourself stressed when you have little to no time left until the deadline.

What you must do is take smaller goals and set shorter deadlines for them. This way, you will be able to complete everything in time and motivate yourself to keep moving on. Success always prompts people to try and do more. Use this technique to boost your confidence and increase your energy levels.

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5. Learn To Say “No”

You don’t need to agree to everything someone asks you to do! You do not exist solely to please them or to help others all the time. You must accept the fact that helping others and letting yourself down at the same time is not a good thing, especially for your mental and physical health.

It is time to learn to say “no”. Imagine that a friend is asking you (for the eighth time already) to look after their kid while they go out with friends. But you are busy in that exact time or have plans to go out yourself. What you must do is politely decline their plea and be honest: you have plans. Don’t worry about what they may think. You have the full right to have a life, and if they think you are their personal servant, then bad news for them because you really aren’t.

6. Get Some Rest

Getting some rest leads to being more productive. What you must understand is that your health must always come first. As pointed out in the previous tip, it is important to take care of yourself, because nobody else will.

Having a good night’s sleep is the first step to being more productive in the day to come. If you weren’t able to get enough hours (the norm is eight to ten hours for adults), then make sure that you nap during the day. You can do this even while you are getting to work by bus or other public transport.

7. Stop Being Lazy

This may seem like something that directly challenges the previous tip, but it’s actually not. Being lazy is an art… and a curse. If it is already a habit of yours, then this is the time to finally get rid of it.

Don’t think that you are the only one suffering from laziness though – many people do. But not everyone realizes it is a serious problem, while those who do, often blame themselves for being lazy and feel terrible or even depressed about it.

Instead of trying to get rid of laziness all at once, take baby steps one at a time. This means that you must select those hours when you are lazy and lose time, and then try to decrease the by five, ten, and then fifteen minutes. It may take you weeks or even months to get rid of this bad habit entirely, but all your effort will ultimately be worth it.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, managing your time is not as complicated as it seems. Anyone can become more productive as long as they genuinely want to. Follow the advice in this article and change your life for the better!

Best of PMTimes: 5 Secrets To 5% Increased Profit On Your Next Project

Written by Brad Egeland on June 29, 2022. Posted in Articles.

All resources matter on the project.

Without all resources working cohesively and effectively together, it can become nearly impossible to effectively and successfully deliver on the project. But beyond that – looking to the revenue level and the profitability on the project… everything affects it, but close management and oversight of it comes down to the project manager. No one entity on the project has the insight, access to info, and overall project knowledge from that standpoint to effectively manage how healthy the project financials are.

Also, not only can the project manager help keep the project stay on track financially, they can also help increase project revenue and profitability through effective financial management, scope management, and customer and team management. Many things do affect all of this – well beyond my list below, I know – but for me it starts with regularly performing these five tasks… my secrets to keeping project revenues high and project profits hopefully higher than expected. Let’s discuss…

Discuss Financials Weekly With The Project Team.

One of the best ways to get the team aligned on managing their own time charging well and accurately on the project is to just let them know it’s very important to you and to the bottom line of the project. Many don’t realize that and they’re just trying to account – usually at the end of the week – for all their time. They know they put in 65 hours on various projects and they are tired and throwing hours down on a time sheet that means very little to them other than a task that is due Friday afternoon or Monday morning. It’s not daily tracking as it should be – in reality it’s Friday afternoon guess work when they would rather be doing anything else.

So, discuss the project financials at each weekly team meeting. Make sure they know how much time charging is expected of them for that week and the following week from your resource forecast and ensure that the two match up. I realize this one action may not add to the profitability of the project very much – but it can keep it from being the rollercoaster ride it often is and can definitely keep the project from unexpectedly going 50% over budget leaving the project manager wondering what went so horribly wrong.

Limit PM Travel.

Believe it or not, not all project customers see PM’s as a vital expense on the project. I had one project client in Texas who just didn’t see the need or value from Day One. Even my lead tech – who was mostly working onsite with the client – said “how can you not like Brad, you don’t even know him?” I got to the bottom of this PM disdain on their part and they were mostly concerned about budget and questioned the need for my $150 per hour project hit. So I immediately looked for ways to manage from afar. I eliminated my travel and reduced meetings to conference and video calls and they loved it. Best of all it added to the profitability of the project without affecting my management of the project or our performance level on the project.

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Limit Team Travel.

Beyond the PM travel, look for ways to limit team travel as well. If the plan calls for onsite quarterly meetings with the customer re-think that. Does the customer care if you do it with a video call, thus saving thousands and adding to the profitability of the project? I realize that some travel can’t be avoided and the customer will need it to maintain a level of confidence and overall happiness in most cases. But it can be kept in check – I’ve worked too many projects where it seemed we were traveling way too often and making the rest of our “productive time” and effort on the project suffer when we could be effectively delivering on the next phase instead of wasting important dollars on what has already been accomplished by traveling just to review it.

Manage The Project Scope.

Scope management may be the best overall way to help ensure project profitability. Too many projects go by with extra work added without the necessary change orders in place to cover the work, add the necessary revenue for that work and keep the profitability of the project in place. Those change orders can add nicely to the project profits – I once added $100k in revenue with a high profit margin by selling the need for an onsite business analyst to the project client. The customer loved it, project revenue skyrocketed and profitability took a nice jump as well. Look for ways to do things like this when managing scope.

Tighten Resource Management And Forecasting.

Making your team aware, watching scope, limiting travel, etc. are all great ideas. But the real profitability boost comes from you – the project manager – effectively, efficiently and relentlessly forecasting resources accurately throughout the project engagement. Don’t just come up with a resource forecast and let it sit. Revisit it weekly. Maybe you no longer need an expensive business analyst during weeks 32 and 33 on the the project. Discuss removing the resource from the project for those 80 hours – thus possibly saving the project as much as $12,000 during that downtime for the resource. If you are working on a time and materials basis with the client it may not help revenue and profitability much. But if you are charging more on a fixed price or deliverable basis, your profits could increase dramatically

Summary/Call For Input

You’re the project manager. No one else can keep costs on track and profitability high like you can. Never just phone it in when managing anything that affects the project $$ bottom line. Even one hour a week spent analyzing project financials and re-forecasting the project financials and resource usage can reap huge dividends in the long run in terms of profitability on the project.

Readers – what are your thoughts? Do you agree with this list? What are your secrets and tricks for keeping project revenue and profitability in check and adding to it throughout the project? What frustrates you the most with revenue planning and profitability on the projects you manage?