Tag: Requirements

Twenty Ideas du jour for the Practicing Project Manager

Written by Ilya Bogorad on April 1, 2009. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Twenty Ideas du jour for the Practicing Project Manager

It is best not to share the project plan with the project team as it leads to unnecessary and usually incredibly stupid questions.
Mandate that team members submit task duration estimates as precisely as possible: two decimal digits (e.g. 17.36 days) are usually sufficient but some projects may require three digits.
Strive to disperse project team over multiple locations: it greatly reduces the time people waste mindlessly chattering with each other.
In this economy, everyone ought to be able to work harder. Schedule tasks based on 10-hour days.
Involve the Steering Committee in day-to-day running of the project. They will tell you how much they like it.
When briefing the Steering Committee, it’s a good idea to declare all nearly completed tasks as completed. Ninety per cent is awfully close to 100 per cent and the Committee Members will feel encouraged.
Try to surprise your Project Sponsor every now and then. Rescheduling the implementation date, firing half of the team or changing the vendor half-way through should all be considered.
Status updates clutter mailboxes, so avoid them.
Get rid of those team members who disagree with you. You are in charge of a critical project and the last thing you want around is some worm questioning your decisions.
Don’t waste any time trying to understand the business domain. It is unimportant and is not your job.
A list of typical project risks can be easily obtained on the Internet. Don’t waste precious time developing it; this is merely a formality.
Act professionally: don’t engage in unrelated conversations with your staff and certainly avoid socializing with them. It is important to maintain a distance.
Information Technology is an exact, predictable field. If your programmers cannot write code without any defects, replace them.
To speed up negotiations with vendors, just sign their canned contracts.
Details are unimportant; the job of the project manager is the overall supervision.
Once the scope of the project is determined, ensure that it is impossible to change it.
A lot of people may claim to be project stakeholders. Feel free to ignore those you don’t like.
Encourage team members to decide for themselves what their tasks should be.
The best way to gauge the skill of a fellow project manager is to ask them about the largest project budget they’ve ever been responsible for.
Plan to release the project team on the day of implementation, to save money.

(Bonus) Forget that it’s April Fools’ Day and start typing an angry letter to the Editor.
Remember that it’s April Fools’ Day when you’re on the third page of it!

Ilya Bogorad is the Principal of Bizvortex Consulting Group Inc, a management consulting company located in Toronto, Canada. Ilya specializes in building better IT organizations and can be reached at [email protected] or (905) 278 4753

Can You Still be Trusted as a Leader?

Written by Cynthia Low on March 25, 2009. Posted in Articles. 14 Comments on Can You Still be Trusted as a Leader?

Most leaders will readily agree that earning and keeping the trust of others is critical to their effectiveness as a leader. That’s true whether you’re running the organization or a project team.

It is quite possibly the single most important prerequisite for leaders at all organization levels. Unfortunately, it can also be the most fragile. Recent events in the economy have spilled over into all business sectors and have shaken the confidence in organization leadership to the core.

To the leader trust is not simply one more element on a long list of desired characteristics. It is more like the foundation that will support all your leadership efforts. If people do not trust you, everything else you do as a leader becomes inconsequential. Forget trying to be inspirational, coach-like, innovative, supportive, a team leader, or visionary. If you don’t have people’s trust they may follow your orders because you have positional authority, but you will not get the passionate engagement that is the result of true leadership.

So how high is your trust index these days? Here is a quick check up. Ask yourself the following four questions. Do you think most people in your organization or on your project team:

Trust you?
Trust you more or less now than they did a year ago?
Have faith in you?
Have more or less faith in you now than they did a year ago?

These are important questions. If you are uncertain about the answers now might be a good time for a 360 assessment or to consciously ask for feedback?

It is likely that during the past year both your personal trust brand and your company’s trust brand have diminished. In a recession as serious as the one we are in now, people tend to operate in a climate of personal fear, a consequence of which is an erosion of trust. This personal fear includes fear of loss of income, loss of position, loss of relationships and loss of security. Most of all it includes fear of what the future is going to look like. That is where you come in as a trusted leader. One definition of trust says that it is “the confidence to guide them to a place and create hope”. If people cannot see a better tomorrow they will naturally tend to trust in you less, even though on a personal level you may not have changed.

Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm (www.edelman.com.) recently published its tenth annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The results show that nearly two thirds of the people surveyed trust corporations less than they did a year ago, and only 17% said they would trust information from a company CEO (insert your name here if you are a senior leader!).

Most alarmingly of all, 77% of the people said they refused to buy products or services from companies they distrusted. That’s quite a sobering thought for anyone, whether you operate in a business to business organization or one that directly serves the consumer.

So what steps can you take to actively try to recover the trust that has been lost?

It’s worth recognizing that it typically takes much longer to regain people’s trust than it does to lose it. Just ask yourself, how long do you think it will take Main Street to start trusting Wall Street again? As Tom Peters once said, “There is no such thing as a minor lapse in integrity” It is going to take time and effort on your part to build back the trust you have lost, especially as this climate of fear is unlikely to disappear in the short term.

Regaining your company’s trust brand could be the subject of a whole other article, but here are a few suggestions for regaining your personal trust brand, and if it is going to take a long time you may as well get started now!

Be Inspirational. Right now, it is more critical than ever that you as the leader are able to create hope. You need to build back your people’s confidence in you, and in your team or organization. They need to know that if they respond to what you are asking of them that the future will be brighter than today.

Be Visible. It is unlikely that sitting behind your desk or hiding in your office is going to cut it. Get out there, be visible and let your people know that you are willing to confront the issues head on.

Earn Their Respect. If you are asking your people to go the extra mile for you right now, make sure they know you are willing to do the same for them.

Communicate. People’s sense of fear tends to grow when they are kept in the dark. We naturally fear the unknown, and tend to think the worst when confidence is low. On the other hand most people can handle the truth and will trust and respect you more if you communicate openly, and often.

Self-Awareness. Take a moment to look at yourself. Are you still acting in accordance with your own values or are you sacrificing some of your core beliefs in return for some short term relief. Do people still see you as authentic? Does the room light up when you walk in …or when you walk out? Now more than ever is when your people are looking to you to stand up for what you believe in and lead with integrity.

Put all of these into practice and make them part of who you are as a leader and you just might be able to reverse the trend and see your trust growing back.

Bryn Meredith is a principle of Bluepoint Leadership Development. He has extensive experience as a business leader, entrepreneur and leadership development specialist. Bryn can be reached at [email protected]

Are You

Written by Cynthia Low on March 17, 2009. Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Are You

The U.S. government is getting ready to make unprecedented investments in energy, healthcare and education. Whether you see it as pork or progress is not the question. The question is what can you do as a project manager to be shovel ready?

Think about what many of these projects have in common: technology and infrastructure. For project managers, this means we have an opportunity to play a major role in rebuilding the economy. We just have to be shovel ready.

In project management, shovel ready can be abbreviated to three letters: PMP. The federal government now requires the PMP certification to be part of most contracts, and many state governments are following suit.

You may be thinking, how can one project manager like me have an impact on programs this large? Think about it this way: All of these huge programs are made up of smaller projects, and in order for these programs to succeed, the projects have to be successful.

That’s where you come in armed with your PMP and Project Management expertise. The good news for PMPs is that the PMP is much more than a certification that gets you in the door; it’s even more powerful once you are through that door. Your PMP gives you the knowledge and skills to meet deadlines, manage resources well and be able to bring projects in on time and within budget. If you are in transition and looking for a job, the PMP can give you an edge in the market, and research shows that PMPs can earn as much as $10,000 more per year than those without certification.

Here are five ways you can get shovel ready and be a project manager who is part of one of the largest infrastructure government programs in history.

Five Ways to Get Shovel Ready

Become PMP certified, or if you are already a PMP, keep your certification current with ongoing PDU courses
Manage resources effectively so you can consistently show results that are on time, and within budget.
Understand where you and your Project Management skills can fit into the big picture of any large program.
Use your Project Management knowledge to assess and manage the risk in any project.
Keep building on your Project Management skills so you can capitalize on emerging opportunities quickly.

I know there’s a lot of debate about the government stimulus package, but there’s one thing we can all agree on: We need to be as effective as possible with these programs. As project managers, we’re already ahead of the pack. We just need to arrive, shovel in hand, and ready to go!

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP is the founder of Cheetah Learning, and author of the Cheetah Success Series. Recently honored by the Project Management Institute, Cheetah Learning was named Professional Development Provider of the Year at the 2008 PMI Global Congress. Michelle was previously recognized by PMI as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the world. She is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner President Manager’s (OPM) program and also holds engineering degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Dayton. To hear more about what Michelle has to say about getting shovel ready, download her podcast at http://podcast.cheetahlearning.com/podcastgen/

Making the Client Situation Better

Written by Andrew Miller on March 17, 2009. Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on Making the Client Situation Better

As a Project Manager, what is our main objective? To keep the project on track? On budget? In scope? To implement successfully? There is a strong argument for all of these, but many of them are difficult to manage. Scope is a variable to be debated, project timelines are changing all the time and project budget may be static, but can never be exact.
Maybe we need to look at a different way of determining whether or not we were successful as project managers. Ask yourself this simple question – is the client better off than he/she was when I got here as a result of the work that I have done? (For the purposes of this blog, client can mean external clients or internal business – in each case those benefiting from the project). The reason that I like this question as a gauge of success is it focuses on improving the clients’ position. The reason that you may NOT like it is because it can be a purely subjective measure. Typically you can put measures in place to prove whether or not the client is better off, but most do not spend the time required to do this.

Many of us have found ourselves in a position destined for failure. Project sponsorship is poor, there are not enough resources on the team, the software vendor is non-responsive, etc. In these circumstances, traditional project management measurements (budget, timelines, change orders) would make us look like terrible PMs. But, if we ask the question above, and the client is better off than when we started, then we did a good job. A good PM recognizes that they cannot always fix the problem, but they can improve it.

If a manufacturing organization has a defect rate of 50% on parts and embarks on a project to fix the problem that results in a reduction to a 35% defect rate, did the PM do a good job? Most would say that a 35% defect rate is unacceptably high and therefore the project failed. I would say that on the surface, it looks like the PM did a good job, but what was the project supposed to achieve? Was the target 20%? 40%? Without knowing our objectives, how can we gauge whether we were a success or failure? Traditional measurements do not give us this information, but we are stuck using them because that is what everyone wants to hear.

Maybe we need to look at a different way of determining whether or not we were successful as project managers. Ask yourself this simple question – is the client better off than he/she was when I got here as a result of the work that I have done? (For the purposes of this blog, client can mean external clients or internal business units.) The reason that you may NOT like it is because it can be a purely subjective measure. Typically you can put measures in place to prove whether or not the client is better off, but most do not spend the time required to do this.

Project Risk Management in 12 Questions

Written by Claude Emond on March 11, 2009. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Project Risk Management in 12 Questions

Many people ask me how I proceed when doing a project risk assessment workshop on a project. Well… I ask questions. Actually 12 of them repeatedly. Not only for the assessment portion, but to cover the whole project risk management process cycle: identification, reality check (not in PMBoK per se), analysis, response, and monitoring and control.

Firstly, I never use the word “risk” in those workshops, but rather “concern” or “worry”. Most people just hate to talk about risks….a primitive type of magic thinking to the effect that if we talk about a risk, it will happen (a curious belief since it is the contrary that will happen!!).

Secondly, I do risk management on the project at stake, not using so-called risk checklists and taxonomies. I start with having everybody on the workshop agreeing on a project charter and a workable WBS (which most of the time do not exist the first time I am called in, six to 12 months after the start of the project). Thus, addressing each of the major elements of the charter, and after of the WBS, I start asking my questions.

I separated these questions by risk management process step, with commentaries, to help you see clearly how this goes.

Risk identification

1- Do you have any worries or concerns with respect to…?

I ask this question systematically to everyone present, for each of the major elements of the charter (constraints, project strategy, key success factors, assumptions, etc..) and then for each of the major element of the WBS (looking in this case at inputs, outputs and the transformation process used to deliver the outputs of the element)

Reality check

This is not in the PMBoK, as a separate step per se. This is a little Ishikawa process I added to find root causes and treat them instead of acting on risk symptoms. (It’s my little contribution to improving on the currently used and often unsuccessful risk assessment methodologies)

2- Why are you concerned or worried? Because of a past experience, a current state of affairs or an intuition about possible future events?

On a 100 M $ project I looked at, after a year since its start, this question helped the risk assessment team (12 people) reduce the original 300 concerns or so, found with the first question above, to 67 root causes that everyone could see “in the present” or concerns based on past experiences (I threw away nothing since many original concerns had a the same root cause)

Risk analysis

I then ask three questions on each root cause identified “in the present”, thus one that everybody can see, a “known-known,” if we use the cryptic terminology of the seasoned PMP. Here, I want everybody on the team to agree on the foreseen impact…and it is a lot easier to agree on this if everybody can see the same present situation.

3- What happens if we do nothing with respect to this concern?

4- Would it put the project objectives or part of them in danger?

5- If we do nothing, how fast can we be endangered?

….measures urgency to act if we have to act

6- What is the probability this thing could happen if we do nothing?

…measures probability of occurrence. I purposely delay talking about probabilities at the latest moment possible, since this is highly fuzzy business and nobody sees the same future. But usually, if I got people to agree on root causes everyone can see in the present, they very rapidly agree about the impact of doing nothing about it. So the probability question is settled very fast, as everybody desires to act on the group-perceived danger of doing nothing.

Risk response

7- So, if we need to act, what do we do?

8- Who is responsible to do it and report on it?

9- When will that be done?

Acting on perceived dangers or current problems is the real reason we do risk assessment workshops on projects. I say that because most organizations, which have documented project risk management processes (not many), do not use them consistently. Most, of the very few that do use them, feel happy with stopping the process after producing those colourful red-yellow-green risk probability-impact matrices (that cannot be understood, by the way, by 15 % of the male population, the men who are color-blind). These nice looking matrices are useless if we do not act on them. So, do something (which is only possible if all stakeholders agree to act on a risk element. They can only agree if they see the same present root causes and are all worried together when they see them).

I got a complete risk response plan with 67 elements (dates, everything) on the 100 M $ project mentioned above, after a discussion of only 90 minutes or so, because everybody (12 people in the workshop) knew that they had to act fast, all convinced of the dangers they ALL saw clearly in the same “present situation” they at last shared on this project.

Risk monitoring and control (so…continuous risk assessment)

10- Does our risk response plan works?

11- If not, what do we do now?

12- …And today, do you have any new worries or concerns with respect to…?

Here we start the cycle all over again.

Since project risk management is a continuous process, who should ask these questions?
Me or another facilitator? No, we are not there all the time.
A “special” risk management manager assigned to the project? No, we already have a manager on this project.

A project manager fully aware that risk management is his/her responsibility, because s/he has been hired to do just that; manage uncertainty? I strongly believe so.