Tag: Project Management

Top Business Trends to Watch for in 2023

Written by Andrea Brockmeier on January 11, 2023. Posted in Articles.

This past year has been a bit of a respite from the chaos of the last couple of years as many people have settled into working from home, in the office, or some combination. We seem to have arrived at a new normal, at least as it relates to where we’re physically working.

Fortunately, much of what we’re working on and observing from our business training is as dynamic as ever. As members of the Educate 360 family have been doing for the last 30 years, we try to keep our finger on the pulse of what we see happening that suggests trends in various areas of our business world. This year, we are organizing our trends a little differently to better reflect the interplay between the areas we are watching, such as traditional disciplines like project management and business analysis. Further, as our Educate 360 family of specialized training brands continues to grow, we can include more topics to accommodate our broadening range of knowledge and expertise that more comprehensively reflect what’s happening in the business world.

With that in mind, our 2023 Trends Watchlist includes trends in:

Project Work and Product Delivery

PM Skills and PM Processes
Use Cases are Back!
Business Relationship Management is a Hot Certification for Everyone
Wither “Transformation”?
From “Projects” to “Products” Continues
Refocusing on Value
PMO – “Pretty Much Over”?

Data Science

Text-to-Anything Models

Cloud and Information Security

Serverless Architecture
The Security Risks of Digital Nomads
Shifting the Surface Area of Attacks in a Remote World

Power Skills and Leadership

Staying Disciplined to Priorities – Adding Less to Do More.
The 45-minute Meeting
Attracting & Retaining Talent…Continued

We’d love to hear your thoughts about our observations and prognostications. Join our webinar on January 5, 2023 to hear our contributors talk about these trends, get your thoughts, and answer questions. (Date has passed.)

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Project Work and Product Delivery

PM Skills and PM Processes

In the world of project management, we are noticing more awareness of separating project management skills and project management processes. Organizational leaders know when projects are not producing the results expected; the challenge is understanding whether that is a consequence of the knowledge and competencies of the people working on projects, how projects are managed in the organization, or both. Of course, good processes can contribute to better skills and good skills can help develop good processes, but they are two different things. In our discussions with clients, they are paying more attention to whether they need to work on developing the skills of their practitioners or improve their project management processes. As with any good problem-solving, understanding the cause of the problem makes for a more strategic and ultimately successful investment of resources to fix it.

Use Cases are Back!

Use cases became widely adopted in the 1990s as a core model in Rational Unified Process (RUP). They are technology independent so there are no constraints as to how they can be used. Use cases were to be written from a business perspective, in business terminology for the end users to tell a story about their expectations of the system, that is, “If I do this, this is how I expect the solution to respond.” Unfortunately, over time, use cases were co-opted by technical designers who added technical design elements to them, so they ceased to be understood by the business. Eventually, they fell out of favor except by technologists.

However, there has been a resurgence of use cases being used in agile environments and using them as they were meant to be. For example, use case diagrams are again being used to diagram conversations about which “actors” (people or other systems) will interact with the system. They are also being used to provide contextual detail to make sure everyone is on the same page about what the system will or will not do and provide a conversation holder about how the user will interact with the solution. They ensure all questions about possible alternative or exception paths are answered at the outset before these questions bog down work or slow down an agile team’s progress. They also feed nicely into test cases. All of these benefits are again being recognized – in a new type of environment.

Business Relationship Management is a hot certification for everyone.

Organizations are built on relationships. Thus, every organization needs a business relationship management (BRM) capability. Many certified project managers and business analysts are recognizing the value of expanding their capability in this power skill and even pursuing certification. It does not take away from other roles or drive the individual in a different direction, but rather empowers them to thrive with a mission to evolve culture, build partnerships, drive value, and satisfy purpose. As a project manager, BRM capabilities can optimize the value of ideation, and value management. They help link projects to organizational strategy and purpose across functions. As a business analyst, BRM capabilities focus on building partnerships and recognizing, measuring, and communicating value through effective relationship management. As an organizational change manager, BRM capabilities help build strong partnerships with people to help them move from the current state to the future state. Even executives can use this certification to support and communicate organizational factors and value to support strategy and satisfy organizational purpose.

Wither “Transformation”?

While the word, “transformation” continues to be popular both within the Agile community and within organizations pursuing a more adaptive way of working, an emerging trend within both is a growing realization that the word actually underplays the fundamental change needed to realize the desired result. Becoming agile (note the lowercase reference to adaptability versus the uppercase reference to the Agile movement) is starting to be viewed, not as an event that can be defined, planned, executed, and closed; but instead as an evolution, a fundamental shift toward becoming an organization that values learning, along with continuous small improvements, above all else in delivery of customer value. This development will come as no surprise to the founders of the movement, but it represents a significant shift for those organizations who are just beginning to understand what being “agile” truly means.

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From “Projects” to “Products” Continues

While this trend began a few years back, the shift from “project-based” thinking to “product-based” thinking will continue and accelerate in the new year. The implications associated with this trend are profound. Organizations will continue to define their “products” (this is often not as easy as it sounds) and be challenged to alter how these products are staffed, funded, developed, deployed and evaluated. One specific aspect of this shift will be the continued emphasis on outcomes – the impact that a product delivery effort has on its intended users and/ or customers. This emphasis will specifically challenge organizations to truly understand who these users and customers are and identify ways to measure the value that they provide from their perspective instead of focusing on legacy measures of success such as “on-time, on-budget”.

Refocusing on Value

With economic tightening underway worldwide there will be increased pressure to define and deliver true value in 2023. “Value” is a word that remains misused and abused in many organizations. Who among us hasn’t been told, “that’s not value-add!” with no definition of the word accompanying that exclamation? With funding plentiful due to governmental subsidies during the pandemic and organizations dealing with the multitude of changes forced on them by COVID, it was easy to relax the definition of what was truly valuable. As the economic cycle trends downward and funding becomes more scarce, organizational discipline around defining and delivering “value” will only increase.

PMO – “Pretty Much Over”?

This title is a re-run of a joke that has circulated for a number of years in the Project Management and Information Technology communities. While 2023 will not see Project Management Offices (PMOs) go away, it will see a shift in both their purpose and structure. Organizations will continue to realize that a centrally controlled office responsible for policing how individual projects are executed is not adaptive enough to accommodate the change that is ever present in today’s workplace. Instead, PMOs will shift to being smaller organizational units dedicated to laying out and fulfilling the minimum structure necessary for reporting results while, at the same time, becoming a resource that individual efforts can call upon for training and instruction in methods that speed the delivery of value (e.g., removing organizational impediments).

Data Science

Text-to-Anything Models

Recent advances in Machine Learning and GPU Cloud Computing have allowed for the creation of models that can take in text input and generate output in a completely different modality. Consumers may already be familiar with services like DALLE-2, which allows for the generation of images from a text description (text-to-image), but that is only one use case for text input generation. Recent publications have shown work in text-to-video, text-to-3dmodel, and text-to-audio. Text-to-video models allow for the generation of videos (several minutes in length) from just a text description, for example “Video of biking during a sunset” and then viewing an .mp4 output displaying the video. Text-to-3DModel has allowed for the quick creation of 3D digital assets from a simple text description and text-to-audio can generate background MP3 audio files from a simple text description, such as “audio of car alarm in background noise”. We expect to see more use of these technologies in an increasingly wider variety of applications into and beyond 2023.

Cloud and Information Security

Serverless Architecture

Most organizations that have migrated to the cloud did so by simply building out their applications in the cloud the same way they always did on-premises starting with creating virtual machines. As the cloud deployments have matured, we are seeing a shift to the serverless architecture. Instead of worrying about the size and quantity of virtual machines needed to run a given application stack, serverless allows companies to concentrate on the application itself. No longer needing to worry about the underlying instances their applications are running on (operating system and runtime updates and security patches as well as scale) developers can now focus solely on the application and its code. Services such as AWS Fargate, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Run are all examples of this serverless architecture. The move to serverless is being driven in part by cost savings. But serverless is also increasing agility and time to market of solutions.

The Security Risks of Digital Nomads

The pandemic caught many companies off guard when employees needed to start working from home. It was a challenge for those organizations that must comply with regulatory requirements to make sure their staff was able to access personally identifiable information (PII), protected healthcare information (PHI), and financial information in a secure manner. Many have succeeded in creating a secure environment for those that gain access to sensitive information from home by implementing Administrative, Physical, and Technical controls. As companies continue to allow employees to work from home, a new trend will emerge to compromise the assets that support the critical business processes.

Shifting the Surface Area of Attacks in a Remote World

Hackers will no longer focus on directly attacking a company’s network; a new emphasis will be placed on compromising the end user’s personal accounts and applications used on the same computers gaining access to corporate data. Security professionals will need to focus their attention on the increase in social engineering attacks and phishing emails designed to gather information from the computers being used for remote access. The cached information in memory, temporary files and on the local hard drives on a compromised machine will be a treasure trove for hackers.

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Leadership

Staying Disciplined to Priorities – Adding Less to Do More

As 2023 brings in another year of unprecedented access to data, leaders continue to be inundated with inputs to inform decision-making and prioritization. This access to information is generally positive for leadership but it elevates the need for more disciplined prioritization. Prioritization allows individuals, teams, and organizations to ensure that they are spending time, money, and other resources on the most important initiatives. Priorities can be defined by helpful frameworks to assess the nearly unlimited options a leader has to steer a team forward.

While it may be tempting to take immediate action with the new information presented and regularly add priorities to pursue new opportunities, the best leaders will remain disciplined to ensure that new information enhances ongoing priorities and that new initiatives are not considered for addition until progress is beyond a certain point. When a leader declares something a priority, it should have a strong and clear rationale for pursuit but also have clear checkpoints of progress along the way. This allows the team to stay focused on the end vision of that priority, while also allowing for pivots and tactical changes as necessary with the infusion of new data and information. Too many priorities with too little progress can have a detrimental impact on team productivity and morale.

Priorities can also serve as a fantastic filter for a team’s time allocation – does what I’m about to work on relate to our organization’s priorities? If not, I’m going to limit my time dedicated to it so I can get back to the things that will drive the progress against our organization’s priorities! The pressure will continue to increase for leaders to help their organizations stay disciplined in their priorities, despite temptations to chase after new opportunities with continuous cycles of new data and information in order to accomplish more against their stated priorities and keep their team members engaged and energized.

The 45-Minute Meeting

A tactical leadership trend starting to emerge and likely to increase in popularity in the coming year is the notion of the 45-minute meeting (…or the 25-minute meeting). Three years into the remote / hybrid work environment because of the global pandemic and let’s face it: it is not uncommon to have long stretches of your day in back-to-back virtual meeting environments barely leaving room for a bio-break or scrap of food. We’re all tired!

A simple way to improve productivity and employees’ mental health in the current virtual communication environment is to reduce the duration of meetings. Just because calendar invite preferences default to 30-minute increments, does not mean that they cannot be adjusted. And as meeting durations get customized, people are being more intentional about the time spent virtually collaborating – like sending agendas in advance to help cut down on the awkward silences and gaps to figure out where to take the discussion next or sending relevant materials before the call to provide additional time for digestion and contextualization. The lack of complaints from the recipients of invitations to shorter meetings is also likely to continue. It turns out that the vast majority of people appreciate a few minutes to refill their coffee!

Attracting & Retaining Talent…Continued

This will sound repetitive from last year, but the key leadership issue we are still hearing about is attracting and retaining talent. While the underlying drivers are slightly different, this theme is still the same. A year ago, there was a lot of talk about returning to the office and a hot labor market making people more prone to leaving. While these issues are still there, as a return to office has happened in all sorts of grey ways, and some rumblings of the labor market getting just slightly less hot, these have become just two of multiple factors and not so much THE factors driving the attracting and retaining talent challenge.

What has become the driver is broadly making the workplace one that people want to join and at which they want to remain. This is clearly stating the obvious. However, it seems like the obvious has too many factors to consider: pay, benefits, work-life balance, mission, advancement, fulfillment, feeling welcome, and enjoyment, just to name a few. (As you can see, last year’s prominent topics of COVID-related items and hot labor market are subfactors in this list).

Balancing all of these items seems impossible considering that they are of unique and varying degrees of importance and priority to every individual. It is becoming clear that the simplest answer to hitting the mark on those factors might be the only answer and that is to focus one level up: Is this a place at which people want to work? That simpler question is easier than constantly thinking the next level down to the tens if not hundreds of levers and dials that one tries to get right. Are people happy with what they are doing, do they feel welcome, do they feel they are well-compensated at work?

We can’t get every dial perfectly right and by no means are we saying we can get things right for everyone, but in aggregate, using common sense and basic human empathy can really be the only formula – all the dial-turning is more art than science if you use your common sense and empathy as a leader. Unlike last year when leaders tried to get the exact right formula for inspiring people to return to the office, now with no one item being the most important to everyone, leaders just need to look, listen, and act wholistically to make their company a place at which people want to work.

Educate 360 Professional Training Partners upskills individuals with the Management & Leadership, Data Science, and IT skills needed by technology-led and innovation-driven organizations. Educate 360 is comprised of specialized training brands with footprint throughout the U.S. and Europe including Pierian Training, Project Management Academy, Six Sigma Online, United Training, Velopi, and Watermark Learning.

Jason Cassidy, PMP, is CEO of Educate 360.

Andrea Brockmeier, PMP, is Director of Project Management at Watermark Learning.

Ken Crawshaw is Senior Principal Technical Instructor for United Training.

Amy Farber is Chief Strategy & Commercial Officer, driving growth initiatives across Educate 360.

Dr. Susan Heidorn, PMP, CBAP, BRMP, is Director of Business Solutions at Watermark Learning.

Norman Kennedy, MCT, AAI, is a Cloud and Security focused Senior Technical Trainer at United Training.

Jose Marcel Portilla is Head of Data Science at Pierian Training.

Mike Stuedemann, PMP, CST, is a Scrum-Focused, Agile Agnostic Coach and Trainer at AgilityIRL and partners with Educate 360 for Scrum Alliance courses.

Best of: 10 Useful Project Management Apps for Your Phone

Written by Michael Gorman on January 3, 2023. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Best of: 10 Useful Project Management Apps for Your Phone

The weapon you use in the war field can determine whether you will win the battle or not.

When it comes to project management, the tools you use can determine the quality of the results.

These days, time has become a valuable thing. For that reason, project managers need to have the right tools to accomplish projects fast and without stretching the budget allocated. That’s why project management mobile apps are a necessity for every project manager.

Given that project managers are always on the go, having a tool to work on your project anywhere at any time is convenient.

The good thing is that most project management apps are available on android, iOS, and web-based.

In this article, we have combed through the sea of project management apps and compiled a list of the ten useful apps for mobile devices.

Study shows that 77% of successful projects use project management tools. What’s the secret? Let’s see how useful these tools are.

Importance of project management apps

Project management apps are useful for assigning and scheduling resources.
The apps help managers to keep track of the progress of projects at any time.
They are useful for the execution of project plans.

With that in mind, let’s us have a look at each project management app and what it can offer.

1. Trello

Trello is a powerful and flexible web-based project management app that can be used by individuals, small, and medium-sized organizations. The app is easy to use and is designed with drag-and-drop features such as collaboration, issue tracking, task management, budgeting, etc.

What’s more, it supports iPad, Android, iPhone, desktop and can also be used on browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome, IE, and Safari.

The good thing about Trello is that it integrates Pivotal Tracker, Dropbox, Zappier, Hubstaff, Bitium, Desk.com, and more.

Besides, the app offers different plans starting with a free plan, business-class plan, and an enterprise plan.

Overall, Trello is a powerful tool for collaboration and communication.

2. Asana

Asana is also another incredible project management app that is also useful for task management, agile management, Excel project management, team collaboration, and many other tasks.

Similar to Trello, this app is also accessible on Android, iOS, Windows, and mac OS. It is also a web-based application that is useful for agile management, creation of customizable to-do lists, resource management, bug tracking, time and expense tracking, testing/QA management, and budget management.

Asana is also a powerful tool for collaboration. This allows managers and teams to work collaboratively on projects.

With Asana, project managers can assign tasks and completion dates, plan their day, communicate priorities, etc.

The good thing about Asana is that it integrates with multiple platforms including Dropbox, WordPress, MailChimp, Google Drive, Zendesk, GitHub, Slack, just to mention a few.

The tool offers a free plan for a few members, a premium and an enterprise subscription.

3. Wrike

Wrike is another awesome project management app for task collaboration and online project management. It is a suitable app for companies of all sizes and helps to enhance communication, accountability, and transparency.

Wrike is a cloud-based project management platform that is also available on Android, iPhone, iPad.

Similar to Trello, this app comes with remarkable features including milestone tracking, project planning, status tracking, time and expense tracking, file sharing, bug tracking, budget management, just to mention a few.

It also integrates Dropbox, Zapier, LinkedIn, Slack, Evernote, Salesforce, Google Drive, GitHub, and Adobe.

The free plan supports up to 5 members but the tool has two other plans including the professional and business plans.

4. Teamweek

For project planning and task management, managers can find Teamweek a useful tool for the work.

The app offers four plans in addition to the free one that supports up to five members.

What’s more, Teamweek integrates with Slack, calendar, Asana, Trello, GitHub, Jira, etc.

The good thing about Teamweek is that it is built for novices and techies alike and is accessible on browsers and mobile devices.

With this app, project managers can create and assign tasks to team members using drag-and-drop features. Another good thing about this app is that it offers Gantt-chart visualization so project managers can keep an eye on crucial milestones.

Overall, Teamweek is a flexible, easy to use and useful project management app for project managers and team members alike.

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5. Basecamp

With Basecamp, project managers can organize projects under one roof. Given that it’s a web-based project management platform, users can work on their projects anywhere at any time. Besides, Basecamp supports any team size at the same price.

What’s more, project managers can use Basecamp to create to-do lists, share files with team members, track time, collaborate with a team, etc.

Besides, the app can integrate with Usersnap, Zapier, TestLodge, Automate, Kilpfolio, etc.

It is also accessible via mobile devices including iPhone, Android, and iPad.

6. Monday.com

When it comes to project management tasks such as Calendar, time tracking, reporting, planning and many more, managers can never go wrong with Monday.com.

With this app, team members can collaborate effectively. It also has four plans in addition to the free trial.

7. Podio

Podio is a web-based project management app introduced by Citrix. The app was developed to simplify workflow management, project management, and team collaboration.

What’s more, the app is useful for file sharing, task management, team collaboration, etc.

Podio integrates with multiple platforms including Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, Email, Google Drive, Evernote, GoToMeeting, and many more.

8. Smartsheet

Smartsheet is also another incredible web-based project management platform for task collaboration and data integration.

The tool is useful for businesses whether large or small.

What’s more, the app comes with a user-friendly interface.

Similar to other tools discussed above, this app is useful for bug tracking, Gant chart, project planning, collaboration, file sharing, resource management, task and time expense management, milestone tracking, etc.

9. Nifty

Nifty is a sought-after project management platform when it comes to team collaboration, automation of projects, reporting, and project planning.

With Nifty, managers can manage projects through Kanban-style Tasks.

What’s more, the tool features an easy-to-use and intuitive interface.

10. Projectmanager.com

Taking position ten in our list is projectmanger.com, a web-based project management platform that allows effective scheduling or projects, creation and assigning of tasks on the web. The tool also allows managers to track the time spent on particular tasks.

What’s more, the tool supports Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Spreadsheets.

Final Words

There you have it: Ten useful project management apps for your phone. From this list, Trello, Asana, and Wrike, have stolen our hearts. These tools are easy to use and come with plenty of incredible features to take your project management to the next level.

Published on October 9, 2019

Best of: Top 10 Ideal Management Strategies for Project Manager

Written by Claudia Jeffrey on December 27, 2022. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Best of: Top 10 Ideal Management Strategies for Project Manager

Organizations around the world carry out projects that are purposeful to their causes and ultimately provide them a means to accomplish their objectives.

However, one of the biggest challenges considered to carry out successful projects is to make sure that they are completed on schedule, remain within the predefined budgets, and show little to no disparity between the actual and calculated quality of work. Therefore, projects are an extensive undertaking, and the one managing all the responsibility is none other than an assigned project manager. Things can get pretty stressful at times, to say the least.

According to a study posted on Workamajig.com, only 58% of organizations fully grasp the value of project management, whereas 93% of them utilize standard project management practices. Hence, there is no doubt that there is a need to help project managers formulate strategies that they can implement to accomplish their goals and targets successfully. In this post, we offer you some of the best ways through which a project manager can ensure triumph over all odds while responding to their duties. So let’s take a quick look at each one of them:

Best Strategies to Manage your Projects

· Always Choose the Right Resource

There is a great deal of emphasis made by several project managers that failure to choose the right resource can affect not only your overall productivity but can also dampen the quality of work that you produce. Choosing the right resource over here means the best option for each particular task or sub-task that allows you to deliver sub-goals and main objectives in less time, cost, and better quality. Evaluate your options and pick the ones that reduce your time taken to complete the task, is less expensive, and delivers the standard of work that is above your desired expectations.

· Celebrate Incremental Achievements

Motivating your team members and keeping them high spirited through the project is highly important. At times you will find many milestones lying ahead of you in a project before it reaches its completion. Identification of these milestones is important, and this is where the project manager needs to do their part. However, once a milestone is achieved, you need to make sure that there is some sort of celebration. This will allow your team members and the workers involved to blow off some steam as well as rejuvenate themselves as well. Projects can be long and tedious, positive reinforcements in between keep your team enthusiastic and passionate to reach the end goal.

· Finalize Everything on Paper

Without a proper plan or study of what kind of journey you’re going to embark on, there is no need to make efforts. First and foremost, you need to point out all the necessary details and get them in writing. This will allow you to keep a record for safekeeping as well as your line of reference before the initiation of the project. Having things jotted down also offers you a solid position to look back on so that if you find yourself currently deviating from the actual pathway, you can redirect yourselves and your team to the correct track of things.

· Determine Methodologies

Popular methodologies for project management include Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum, Six Sigma, and Waterfall. Each methodology focuses on different aspects of a project, undertakings, and apply various approaches to get things done in an orderly manner. Each methodology also offers quite an extensive list of mechanism which needs more time and space to discuss in detail. They all require a separate discussion in their own right, to say the least. Plus, you can also find a lot of material online to increase your pool of knowledge about them.

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Define Roles

There is a reason why we are asking you to perform this seemingly mundane task. First of all, defining roles is adamant to keeping your staff in-line with their duties. They need to be held accountable and responsible for the different tasks they have been assigned under your leadership. Plus, defining roles also helps you set the hierarchy and the line of command for your teams. This means irrelevant communications and wastage of time in being idol can be avoided. Roles should be clearly defined so that they relay important information for every member and worker who is taking part in the project.

· Keep Track of Milestones

Tracking milestones are essential as you need to validate how far you and your team have come since the beginning of the project. It can also offer you reassurance if you are following the right track and keeping up with the predefined schedule for the project’s sub-tasks and main tasks. Lastly, it can also help you to increase the intensity of your efforts if you find yourself lagging behind. Thus you will know when to work hard and when to give your team a bit of refreshment so that they can recharge their energies—knowing the difference between the two matters a lot since it can help you keep things functioning in proper order.

· Monitoring & Controlling Operations

If you need to measure your team’s performance, then you need to create a yardstick to which you can compare their efforts. Monitoring and controlling your team’s input and output allows you to understand your day-to-day operations’ various strengths and weaknesses. There are several ways you can do this. Like for example, you can have a benchmark analysis or set strict standards that your team needs to abide by under all circumstances.

· Project Budget vs Project Scope

The project budget allows you to cater to your financial needs and requirements for completing the project. In contrast, the project scope defines the parameters and boundaries for you and your team who have undertaken the project. This can include various tasks that need to be completed. Combine the two, and you get a comparative analysis or a liner graph on which you can study how your team is performing. Not only do you have to keep in line with the predefined budget, but also make sure that your initially planned project’s scope remains unharmed.

· Stakeholder Expectations

The ones who provide you with the duty to complete the project often have something huge at stake. These stakeholders have certain expectations. You must know these anticipated values. However, if you take the directions from your stakeholders to manage your project, make sure they are extensive and detailed. The more information you have, the less disparity will be there at the end when the project is completed. If you follow this approach, you need to make sure that you gratify every stakeholder’s expectations; otherwise, you might not receive that pat on the back you were expecting from them.

· Utilize Analysis and Evaluations

Lastly, there are several ways to analyze and evaluate your performance for a project. Analysis can include risk, financial, and PERT, to name a few. For your evaluations, you can apply the Internal Rate of Return, Net Present Value, Payback Method, and Profitability Index apart from various other techniques.

Conclusion

Managing projects are not an easy task, and that is why not every gifted manager can be requested to become a project manager. There is, at times, a lot of financial investment and risk involved in projects, which is why you need a very mature person who has shown a brilliant track record in the past, to be asked to undertake this huge responsibility. Stakeholders are impossible to deal with if the project does not deliver according to their anticipations and fails to gratify their requirements. We hope this post was able to offer you enough strategies to go all out and make your projects successful.

Published on: June 17, 2020

Management Skills: Understanding What Makes Delegation Effective

Written by Diane Wong on December 7, 2022. Posted in Articles.

What should managers know about delegation? Understanding the key elements of delegation is the key to using this management skill effectively.

Delegation is a management concept that is frequently misunderstood and misused. It is entrusting an activity and its results to another person. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines delegation as ‘the act of empowering to act for another. In effect, this means that one person gives another the right to make decisions for him. It is this idea that underlies many managers’ reluctance to delegate.

The following information about delegation might help a manager overcome his concern about delegating that kind of decision-making power.

What Can and Cannot Be Delegated?

There are three terms about delegation that are often used interchangeably but they are quite different.

Accountability: the main feature of the manager’s job is that he is held accountable for the results of the work being done. It is a feature that is attached to that position. The manager cannot delegate accountability. No matter what work he gives over to a subordinate, he alone is accountable for the final results.
Responsibility: an employee might have certain responsibilities concerning the work. These are usually identified in the job description. Whether or not the employee wholeheartedly accepts those responsibilities and fulfills them is his choice. All the manager can do is offer the responsibilities of some of his work. The employee might or might not want to accept them.
Authority: by definition, authority is the ‘power to influence the behavior of others. A manager cannot delegate responsibility or accountability, but he can delegate authority. He can make it known that an employee is acting in his place for that particular work; that the employee has the power to influence the work being done by other staff.

Why Is Effective Delegation an Important Management Skill?

One function of a manager can be defined as achieving work objectives by coordinating the efforts of other people. Effective delegation has two benefits that are relevant to this.

A manager who delegates is practicing good time management He has more time to spend on other major areas of his job for which he is accountable. He has time to look for efficiencies in the overall work process.
A manager who delegates authority for certain tasks creates a working environment in which staff can learn from their successes and failures.
As staff assumes more responsibility under the guidance of the manager who is ultimately accountable, the entire organization grows and matures.

When Is Delegation Appropriate?

Here are some of the primary factors for the manager to consider when deciding whether or not to delegate.

Organization objectives: do not delegate amid a crisis that requires rapid, informed, decisive responses to restore the organization’s normal operations.
Availability of staff: it’s not just a question of how many people are available, but also, who are they, and what is their experience and competency? It might be better for the manager to do the job himself, rather than delegate to the wrong person.
Location: where are the employees located? If the manager works in a head office and his employees are scattered across branch offices, he should be delegating. In the interest of efficient operations, considerable authority simply has to be delegated to those people who are in the field where the actual work is happening. The scope of the delegation depends on how fast, efficient decision-making is balanced with the consistency of policy and procedures across the entire organization.
Culture of the organization: what is the current culture? Do managers still make all the decisions? Even if that kind of environment is already changing, employees will need a period of adjustment until they can fully accept that they are being trusted with the authority and decision-making that has been delegated.

The manager might find it easiest to look carefully at his job and identify what absolutely cannot be delegated. Then, consider everything else, perhaps a specific project at a time, or a time-limited process. There are many options. For example, an administrative assistant can answer routine letters and e-mails. Jobs that require specialized skills can be delegated to employees with those skills. The manager has to see only the results. Activities that lead to the professional development of employees and test their ability can and should be delegated.

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How to Delegate and Manage Efficiently

Business owners who are effective managers practice time management. They also have strong skills in negotiation, supervisory, and leadership. After all, “managing” equates to “achieving objectives through others.” Technically, any manager who cannot successfully delegate cannot manage, by definition. Therefore, business success depends on their willingness to motivate, trust, and reliance on their employees to produce results.

To delegate is not that simple, and when done in the wrong way, it can backfire. But when used effectively, it greatly benefits the business. Delegation is an art in business and a skill that can be learned. There’s popular workplace advice: “delegate when possible.”

One of the most famous and often quoted on delegation comes from an equally famous Scottish industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie who said, “The secret of success is not in doing your work but in recognizing the right man to do it.”

Here are ways business owners use to delegate successfully.

Match the Right Employee with the Tasks to be Delegated

Delegation takes careful thinking. The staff’s expertise, strengths, and interests are highly considered. For example, for a staff dealing directly with customer service, the role is delegated to an employee who enjoys serving customers, possesses great people skills, and knows how to investigate and solve problems.

Define Clear Goals and Expectations for the Assigned Tasks

Defining clear objectives eliminates the ambiguity in the process as the staff discovers for himself or themselves how to follow through. It also enhances the probability of achieving desired results.

Clarify Assigned Tasks

Once the right match is identified and goals clearly defined, the manager confirms that the staff understands the purpose and the goal. It is important that the manager sets clear deadlines and removes ambiguities.

Set-up Controls and Checkpoints

Controls and checkpoints monitor the employee’s progress. The manager or business owner discusses how progress and performance measures are evaluated as a yardstick for success.

More Insights on Delegation

Delegation is not the same as routine work assignments that fall within the normal job role of the staff. They should be identified and explained to the staff. True delegation involves giving the staff the responsibility and authority to do something that’s normally part of a manager’s job and not theirs.
Delegation is not “dumping” tasks either. It is not an abdication of responsibility. If employees think that the least desirable tasks are being tossed on their lap in the name of “delegation,” they will resent it.
New managers may tend to assume that once they delegate, they are no longer accountable for the task outcome. Handing over responsibility and authority to employees has its limits, however, ultimate accountability remains with the business owner or the manager.
Some managers may fall into the trap of taking an assignment back unwittingly. They might say, “Here, let me show you,” and end up doing the whole assigned task themselves. A competent manager avoids this by letting employees solve problems for themselves.

Delegating greatly improves efficiency through proper planning and communication. Business owners and managers can focus on high-priority issues and not get bogged down in work that depletes their time and energy. At the same time, they can develop their employees and make them more valuable to the business.

There is a certain amount of risk-taking inherent in the delegation. The manager must be willing to accept the results of the delegated work and be willing to be held accountable for them. But, if he is delegating effectively, monitoring, coaching, and supporting, the organization as a whole will benefit.

Leadership Eco-Guide to Improve Organizational Performance

Written by Randall Englund on November 23, 2022. Posted in Articles.

A widespread desire to improve organizational performance may be sated by focusing on a key set of necessary and high priority actions—imperatives. An essential focus on creating excellence in people, processes, and the working environment reaps tremendous benefits and enables executives and their organizations to achieve desired objectives. Leadership skills and environmental factors provide significant impetus towards sustainable success.

An ecosystem is a community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. A “green ecosystem” creates an environment for consistent, predictable, and sustainable success. It eliminates “toxic” substances and provides projects with a physical and mental context that allows them to prosper. This allows management to focus on overall organizational success, not just on individual project performance. People then feel like they are constantly contributing to organizational and personal knowledge and creating growth.

Keywords: Leadership, organizational maturity, green ecosystem, organizational learning, sustainable success, biomimicry, project management, sponsorship.

To the questions:

What types of leadership skills and employee competency and training are necessary to affect successful organizational transformations?
How does biomimicry influence the design of an organizational architecture?

Without a “green” foundation, organizations experience failures, budget and schedule overruns, lack of trust, and dissatisfied stakeholders. People leave, often because leaders do not meet their needs, and witness the “great resignation.” New generations want different work conditions. These “toxic” work environments are usually permeated by political practices that create uneasiness and frustration among all except those who wield these negative practices with power. Trust in institutions and governments is weak.

Progressively improving practices, also called organizational maturity, requires that project leaders and management reduce organizational “toxins” and create “green” organizations. “Green” in this context extends the physical, tangible thinking about project work into the nonphysical, intangible personal working relationships that affect our working environments. In this sense, in an “ecosystem” that allows good project management and complete project manager mindsets to grow, “green” is good.

An ideal situation is proactive leaders who are committed, accountable, and serious about projects they select and sponsor; they are knowledgeable, trained, and able not only to talk the talk but also to walk the walk. Such people are trustworthy in all respects. Trust is seen as earned by being competent and acting for the common good. Their values are transparent and aligned with the organization and its strategy. Such sponsors protect the team from disruptive outside influences, do not operate through fear, and back the team up when times are tough.

A key need and imperative is to support organizational learning, even at the risk of tolerating some failures. Executives at all levels set the tone for how failure and learning are perceived. Take the time to share thinking, standards, and expectations. Provide appropriate rewards, not only for successes but also for failures that led to heightened understanding about risks, things to avoid, and innovative approaches. Conduct retrospectives on all projects: what went well, lessons learned, what do differently. Tap biomimicry as a tool to learn from nature and create organic solutions to challenges. The goal is to establish higher priority for continuous learning that gets recycled into new best practices.

Compost Bin Analogy

A compost bin is an apt analogy for a green ecosystem. The compost pile offers a robust model, a model adapted to changing times and to the new millennium. It is a model of growth, of sharing, of happiness. It is a way of understanding career success in organic terms—where the accumulation of life’s (decomposed) experiences provides a broad and fertile base on which to cultivate and accumulate new and ever more valuable experiences. The pile grows ever fuller, without losing stability. It is about career growth, death, decay and rebirth. Whatever comes along in life, just put it on the pile and let it ripen.

Metaphysically speaking, people are the sum total of what people learn, what people experience, what people create. People increase in knowledge and in wisdom, taking what is given to them by the sun and giving it back to the world that is illumined and warmed, also by the sun. In the end, people can do little more than pass on the wisdom that they have accumulated. Then people also become the soil, quite literally uniting the humus of themselves to a collective wisdom. With a model such as this, progress is judged to be in what people will have become, and not in how high people will have climbed. There is purpose and value in all of life’s experiences.

People need to interpret and evaluate careers and lives according to a model, and they need to be free to choose which model to use. This is a biomimicry model by which people might use the light of the sun to photosynthesize their happiness. Create an organic approach to the implementation of all endeavors, especially those driven by projects. Learn how nature operates and seek ways to incorporate organic approaches in all endeavors. An organic organization is one where people feel they operate naturally, comfortably, and happily.

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Most professionals need to take responsibility, self-manage, and continuously develop their careers. The compost pile analogy fits with reference to molecular structure as an organic depiction of a more complete project manager. Through natural, ongoing processes, scraps turn into beautiful humus… but not without some stinky in-between steps. By adding waste products such as manure (which can be thought of as a metaphor for learning from bad experiences) to the compost, the process of creating rich soil is accelerated. The output, when the soil is added back into nature’s garden, is a bountiful harvest. Similarly, people become better persons, managers, and leaders by continually expanding and growing their skills and using lessons learned.

To address the most crucial executive actions, look at the ingredients needed for success—form an organizational architecture. Outline the need for actions and focus. This resembles an ecosystem—a community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Just as in nature, trees, flowers, and animals need a suitable ecosystem in order to develop, grow and bloom. So do projects. Dispersion of power, transparency, and mutual accountability enhance thriving organizations. High correlation of these factors leads to environmental sanity.

The natural sciences state that all objects start with their particular genetic combination which allows them to grow and prosper. It is the environment in form of light, water, air, and sustenance that hinders or supports genetically given development. So, plants that are genetically equal when they are seeded will develop differently when exposed to different environmental circumstances. Projects are not different. Projects grow and prosper when their environment allows for it. Be cognizant that the working environment takes care of a particular set of genes (such as project type, size, geography, and number of projects as well as stakeholders’ power, interests, and relevant skills) to allow them to develop into successful endeavors. Executive management puts this “ecosystem” in place. Establish the equivalent of the right soil, water, fertilizer, and light in place so that the organization can prosper and bloom through more successful projects.

Replace thought traps—e.g., how we do things here, won’t work here—with leading practices, culled from experience. Learn how to integrate key people, team, business, technical, and organizational skills, tapping multiple disciplines. Apply reframing tools that are often as simple to apply as thinking differently. Feed imaginations by beauty, not by fear. Open doors and walk into new spaces. Align efforts with laws of life. Shift from controls to co-creating with nature. Encourage curiosity, ask and share “why”, and look for causal patterns. Be aware of vested interests and biases. Know that life is continuous change; the same is also true for organizational dynamics.

Just as our physical planet is facing existential threats, so do organizations. Much is written that socially responsible firms perform better financially than less responsible competitors. Prioritizing sustainability leads to better results. Know that concentration of power, whether politically or social, undercuts democracy. Help people gain control over their lives and work with autonomy. Leaders can set new precedents and change the norms and rules of societies so that negative human tendencies are kept in check. Elicit powerful, positive qualities that are most needed. Be a positive role model. Communicate a sense of possibility, more so than probability. Dissolve the presumption of lack; actively nurture positive proclivities. Focus on business outcomes, more so than project outputs.

It is possible to escape the constraints of evolution…by learning about our environments, imagining differences, and turning those imaginations into reality. Much as in nature where configurations of atoms are essentially infinite and lead to marvelous assemblies and products, people skills operating through individual and expanding personalities can contribute in infinite ways. While our planet may experience limits to growth, innovation does not have the same limits. Creativity needs always to be welcomed.

The imperative facing leaders in all organizations is not only to embark on a quest to manage processes such as business analysis, project, program, and portfolio management, but also to create “green ecosystems.” Continually improve environments that encourage project-based work. A meaningful goal is to eliminate people interaction pollutants and “toxic” actions that demotivate project managers and their teams. This means searching with unrelenting curiosity for leading practices. It also means, when these practices are revealed, that leaders are prepared to take action. Integrating executive leadership with new thinking, guided by an eco-guide, make the difference that leads to competitive advantages for organizations These are places where people do their best work. Wise leaders adopt, adapt, and apply these leadership imperatives.

Other Resources:

Englund, R. L., and Bucero, A. Project Sponsorship: Achieving Management Commitment for Project Success. (2nd ed.) Newtown Square, PA.: Project Management Institute, 2015.
Englund, R. L., and Bucero, A. The Complete Project Manager: Integrating People, Organizational, and Technical Skills. (2nd ed.) Oakland, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2019.
Englund, R. L., and Bucero, A. The Complete Project Manager’s Toolkit, updated. https://englundpmc.com/product/toolkit/, 2019.
Englund, R. L., and Graham, R. J. Creating an Environment for Successful Projects. (3^rd ed) Oakland, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2019.
Lappe, F.M. EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create The World We Want. New York: Nation Books, 2011.