Tag: Program Management

Worldwide Advice from Successful Project Managers

Written by Asya Karapetyan on April 24, 2017. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Worldwide Advice from Successful Project Managers

Project Managers are responsible for the implementation of project tasks within the prescribed terms, and using existing resources.

The project manager builds a development plan, organizes a team, establishes the processes of working on a project which control the quality and delivery of products in time, and more. Several world class project managers shared their recommendations* for the sake of novices in this field. In this article, you will find useful rules and approaches that successful project managers apply in their work.

Always Be Composed

Remember that nobody will respect a flustered team leader. Try to always remain calm and collected in any situation. Plan your work and follow it. During the execution always work on your most complex pieces of work or sites first. If you do this, you will have a sufficient time for recovery, if required. Make use of task managers, world time clock, and programs for better productivity.
– Julie Craig, Melbourne, Australia

Build Trust

When you communicate with your team, listen to them attentively, making sure that their understanding and expectations are clear and precise. Build trust, support your team and respect their points of view, even if you fundamentally disagree with them. If you do not have faith in your team members’ skills, you cannot fully rely on them, and vice versa. If you plan to implement many successful projects, you need to learn how to build an open relationship of trust.

Think thoroughly, seek input, make decisions and act. Be flexible – don’t be afraid to make mistakes, but be ready to correct and change them.

– Hammad Khan, San Francisco Bay Area, USA

Discuss the Risks and Challenges

No surprises. Make sure that key stakeholders are told about issues and risks before they are raised at meetings. Tell them what the possible options are for resolving or mitigating them and what you recommend. However, make it clear that it is their call. In this case, they will have time to reflect and decide – often choosing the option that you have suggested.
Proper planning. You should have a proper plan with milestones, dependencies, durations, resources to do your job successfully. You will need appropriate information as you move up the stakeholder chain. Usually Chief Executives want a detailed picture on one page with key milestones and indicative dates – not the whole plan, but they must have it if it is needed.
Governance. Successful project management is impossible without a fully constituted, regular and well-attended Steering Committee, which makes decisions and supports you. A proper project hierarchy includes having all the key roles identified and filled with agreed job descriptions. Also, there should be an internal project meeting structure with weekly or daily one-to-one sessions as appropriate and an up-to-date Escalation Matrix so that everyone knows who to contact when things go wrong.

– Chris Clegg, Kempshott, United Kingdom

Ask Questions Constantly

Keep digging and asking why. You need to know all about your project – planning features, objectives and results of the tasks as well as a monitoring plan, which identifies key performance indicators and tools. Organize your work clearly; keep a tracker of all activities and tasks. Keep all Stakeholders and Team members engaged in the work and make sure the tasks that are being monitored are regularly updated.

– Anonymous Author

Keep Detailed Project Documentation

You should monitor the status of completed tasks and never stop communicating with the team. Keep detailed documentation of the project and constantly keep all the team members posted of the latest news of the project.

– Pietro Cordier, Zurich Area, Switzerland

First, Determine the Objectives

Define the project scope well and avoid assumptions as much as possible. Clear the definition of the project terms and concentrate on the stated goals.

– Serge Nalivayko, Las Vegas, USA

Develop Communication Skills

The most important quality of an effective project manager is communication skills. Communication with the team members allows us to promptly identify any inconsistencies. Interacting with customers makes it possible to quickly identify any changes in the requirements for the project.

Build motivated teams and trust them to do the job. The success or failure of your project depends on each member. Therefore, in addition to knowledge and skills, you will need the ability to effectively motivate and manage people.

Plans are alive, so always reiterate them. Collate the task’s progress with the plan. For effective risk management, you should be able to adapt quickly to any fluctuations and make changes if they needed.

– Islam Kotb Ismail, Munich Area, Germany

Adhere to Triangle of Cost, Time and Deliverables

While planning, and implementing the tasks, adhere to the Triangle: Cost, Time and Deliverables. Ensure that the stakeholders have the same frameworks.

Eliminate or Reduce Risks and Resolve Risks. To develop an effective strategy and to implement the project within the stated terms, it is necessary to constantly monitor the risks that may arise during the project, and to have at hand a plan to reduce risks.

Work hard and persevere with every task. You cannot know everything but take every opportunity to acquire new knowledge.

– Christo Farmer, Cape Town Area, South Africa

Honesty, Flexibility, Consistency

Consistency in the team is the key to success. Keep trustful and honest relations with clients and colleagues. Promise less than you can, but do more than promised. Regularly develop new skills and be flexible in the choice of methods used in project management.

– Andrew Soswa, Greater Chicago Area, USA

Prioritize the Project’s Tasks

Communication is never over. Communicate to quickly identify any changes and issues.

Have daily planning, assessment, and prioritization. Coordinate your priorities, distribute power and responsibilities among the project participants and achieve project implementation.

Get as much knowledgeable experience and expertise as possible. Experience is the most valuable resource of effective project managers, which comes only with years of hard work, mistakes and the invaluable advice of mentors.

– Robert Hunt, Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area, USA

Impugn the Ideas to Make Them Better

Your task is to manage projects effectively. Your team’s task is to provide the necessary knowledge and experience. Therefore, it is often useful to ask for clarification of what you are told. If you don’t have the necessary technical knowledge base, ask the technical experts to explain their proposed solutions to ensure their validity and effectiveness.

– Scott Larnet, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Be Creative

The key quality of a successful project manager is the ability to interact, troubleshoot problems and make decisions. Think innovatively and outside the template, but keep in mind the strategic picture of the whole project.

– Melanie Williams, London, England

Keep Team Proposals and Ideas on Track

During the meeting, it is important to stay focused and direct the discussion back on track. Note the ideas, requirements, comments and problems of the participants; try to divide them into categories for practical implementation. Thus, you will be able to focus the participants’ attention on specific agenda items, and assign responsibilities effectively.

– Michael Hammud, Greater Chicago Area, USA

Want to Share Your Tips?

Share with us your suggestions and ideas in the comments below. Tell us your rules for successful project management and the software you use in your work.

Editor’s Note: Some quotes and statements were edited from their original form for readability.

4 Reasons to Dump Excel for Planning Projects

Written by Stephanie Ray on January 25, 2017. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on 4 Reasons to Dump Excel for Planning Projects

Excel is a go-to tool many people use to manage projects. It can almost be fun adding tasks and to-do items row-by-row when you are starting out a project. Almost.

There are many good uses for Excel in managing a project, but Excel can quickly become a problem as the project progresses. Time is wasted. Data is lost. What started out as simple is suddenly overly complex. Right when you need to focus on executing the project.

Let’s look at some of the reasons you might want to ditch Excel and discuss how you can find alternative solutions that are easier than you might think.

1. It’s All About Bob

So you have that one Excel genius on your team. Let’s call him Bob. Bob is your go-to project data expert. He cranks out the pivot tables on demand. He updates the project tasks and spits out beautiful reports.

However, one thing every project team needs to ask themselves: should your whole project rest on the shoulders of one person? What if they leave or are out sick? What if Bob’s laptop gets stolen at the local Starbucks and Bob did not back up to the cloud?

This is called a “single point of failure.” When one person is the sole keeper of vital project data, the business is at risk.

Moreover, it is not a problem exclusive to the Excel whiz. If you are the project manager whose job it is to go around to each team member and ask them for their task status so you can compile all the data into a report each week, what happens when you go on vacation? Alternatively, are you tasked with starting up a new project?

2. Email is Not Your Friend

When your project data lives in email, tucked away in sent folders and in epic threads that need to be unpacked before you find that one time you wrote that one thing… Well, you probably have once or twice wished for a better system than that.

A recent McKinsey study found that people spend up to 2.5 hours a day looking for information at work. That means digging for the Excel file in an email, chasing up people for updates, searching different drives for relevant documents and trying to pull together information from different sources into one place.

When Excel hosts your project data, it requires a lot of extra time spent on activities to find or replace information. What if you had that time for actual project work?

3. Checked Out for Eternity

Bob has sent you the latest project updates in his Excel doc. You love his pivot tables, but the spreadsheet has been checked out for the past 4 hours. No one else on the team can update their tasks! You have to IM, Call, or email your colleagues to see who has it checked out and remind them to close it. The next time you have a critical issue to address you to walk away from your desk forgetting to check in the spreadsheet.

4. All the way in Column J.

You hate scrolling over to column J. Data gets lost in columns and become stale and useless quickly. The spreadsheet is too wide with too many columns.

Imagine an alternative scenario. Your project data is online, so your whole team can update their tasks without being asked. The guys in the field add videos of their progress as attachments directly on the task rows, which means everyone is working together to keep all the project data in one central place.

Reports are always fresh, up-to-date with all the data in the system.

Collaboration is possible with the right tools and team leaders who open up the project plan for the team to share in.

So if not Excel, then what?

We happen to know a thing or two about online project tools. In addition to all of our free project management training content and resources, we produce online project management software. So we are a little biased. However, we also know a lot about how online tools work and can help you make smart choices that can work for you and your organization.

So, first let’s discuss what online project management can do, and then some tips for you to choose the right tool for you. Core benefits of online project management tools:

Always up-to-date
Can be accessed by anyone, via web or mobile
Online project file storage
Automatic email alerts

In short, avoiding the single point of failure problem is easy when you run projects online. The cloud is always backed up. Moreover, your team can update tasks themselves. You do not need to have Bob taken away from his other duties to create reports for everyone else. The reports are auto-generated based on the task updates from the team. Anyone can get the reports at any time.

Tips for selecting an online tool

Every team has unique needs, depending on the nature of the project. But there are a few must-haves that you need to make replacing Excel a worthwhile investment:

Easy Excel importing – make sure you can easily import existing project files
Interactive Gantt – You don’t need to replace Excel with just an online version of Excel. You want to take advantage of the online automation, such as a Gantt chart, which allows you to adjust tasks dates and milestones easily and automatically updates your team’s tasks lists in the process.
Timesheets – Why track time in a separate tool when you can track time right with the project tasks as they’re being performed?
Real-time dashboards – Dashboards are just a collection of reports, like pivot tables. But you don’t need Bob to make them if they’re integrated with the online tool and in real-time.
Collaboration – You want to improve your productivity, but to do that you need to increase opportunities for collaboration. Look for features that enable file sharing, file storage, chat features and mobile tools.
Easy to rollout to teams – Not every online tool requires a lot of time or training or implementation costs.

Of course, cost is a factor every team must consider. There are, as you would imagine, enterprise-grade tools and then there are simple task tools, and then there are some that are in between. Ask your teams to identify some key features they would find helpful and do your research with that in mind. And be sure to take advantage of companies that offer free training webinars to show you the tool’s features.

But, who has time for implementing a new tool?

Excel can be very valuable for a lot of project functions, like data analysis and advanced calculations. It can be a good place to start that task list. And it can appear to be a cheap tool, something already in place in an organization. But it has to be seen in the context of the time it takes away from the team, when productivity can be radically increased. Think about 2.5 hours a day times 5 per employee! That’s a lot of looking for information that could be better spent.

Even if that’s a super high estimate, it’s not hard to imagine spending 30 minutes every day here and there searching for that email or file. And that’s just you. So your 2.5 hours per week times your whole team… how do you not have time to put in place a tool that can save you from the single point of failure and increase productivity?

When you’re looking for a new tool, ask the customer service teams of the companies you’re vetting whether they’re there to help with onboarding your team. Check review sites to compare customer service reports. When you make a new investment, there will be some hiccups, as change is hard in an organization.

But you can find a tool that doesn’t require dev time to implement or costly training programs with your team.