Write it Down

Project Documentation Best PracticesWe’re usually pretty certain that we can remember anything. You know how it goes…that time you’re scheduling your next dental visit and you say to the lady at the desk that you don’t need an appointment card. Or when your wife asks you to pick something up on the way home or to do a maintenance activity this weekend. No problem, you got it up here (pointing to that empty space in your head). Do these scenarios sound familiar? Well, they do for me, so that’s enough incentive to write this article…

How many times have you been involved in a project status meeting with your team or with the project customer and things were said, decisions were made, action was planned, and then nothing happened? You follow up with the promising party and they had completely forgotten about the promised action. Or worse yet, they deny ever have made the promise. They’re not lying…they’re just clueless. And even more often what happens is they deliver something similar to what was promised, but it really doesn’t cover the need….it isn’t exactly what was discussed in the meeting.

I can say, all of these scenarios have happened on my teams, with my customers, and even I have been guilty of missing the boat on delivering something I had promised in a meeting but didn’t document and therefore it was not on my to do list. I’ve learned from these missteps to always write these tasks down…and here’s the process I follow during important project meetings to make sure these mistakes and omissions never have to happen again…

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Project Management – 12 Reasons Your Team Is Not Productive and How to Fix It

PM HutBy David R. Robins
PM Hut

Project TeamAccording to research done by Forrester, up to 68% of all projects finish late or fail totally. The problem is getting worse. Due to globalization many teams are not located in one location and the team’s performance suffers due to the lack of collaboration & communication. Today, there are three types of teams working on projects in small to large companies.

  1. Traditional teams – All team members are in the same physical location. This model is happening less often these days.
  2. Distributed team – All team members work remotely and rarely meet each other. This is seen more in web design, graphic art and software engineering disciplines than other fields.
  3. Mixed teams – A combination of the above two. Like teams which meet 1 day of the week in one location and the rest of the week work remotely, or use new technology to create a virtual office for the team. This is becoming more accepted and seen as a good comprise between the above two.

Each of the above models have their advantages and disadvantages like the remote teams are more environmentally friendly but collaboration suffers without extra effort. In this article I am not arguing which one of the above models is better (that is for a future writeup), but that all three models may fail due to one or more of the following problems:

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Remote Teams and Workers – What Yahoo Isn’t Considering

Remote Project Team MemberIt’s all over the news right now…embattled Yahoo is asking new CEO Marissa Mayer to save the company. Once an internet leader, Yahoo has turned into an also-ran and a string of leaders have either left the company or were forced out leaving it in the hands of Ms. Mayer to clean up and shore up.

Her latest action is to call in the chips for every single Yahoo employee…they must either show up at a Yahoo office for work starting in June or ship out. Ouch. This is the 21st century. And if Yahoo wants to be an innovative company, taking a step back 20 years won’t get them there very fast. In today’s world of virtual teams and remote workspaces (home offices, coffee shops, etc.), it won’t fly well with the dedicated, trusted, and talented workers that Yahoo hopefully employs. What makes matters worse is that many of the remote Yahoo employees affected are customer service representatives who will not benefit at all from the increased thought-sharing and face-to-face meetings that Yahoo says will happen and make them a tighter and more competitive company overall.

Here’s what’s wrong with the idea….

It’s outdated

The internet, virtual teams, cloud tools, storage and technology. It’s all about innovative thought, the use of cutting edge technology and quick access to the tools, data and information that we need to do our jobs well. It’s about collaboration. To ask an entire workforce to take a step back and go to an office to work when they’ve been productively working from home or wherever part time or full time is not the right step Continue reading “Remote Teams and Workers – What Yahoo Isn’t Considering”

Does Done Really Mean Done?

Project CompletionYou and your team start to breathe a sigh of relief as you head down the home stretch on your project. Maybe it’s been six months, maybe it’s been two years. In either case you’re bound to be relieved that it’s just about over and you’re ready to successfully transition everything to the project customer. To that end, you want to make sure that ‘done’ really does mean ‘done.’ There’s nothing more embarrassing than handing the solution off to the customer and their user base only to find that you’ve left something out or forgotten or neglected to successfully complete key tasks on the schedule that were clearly your responsibility to complete.

I have found the following list to be very helpful – and critical – things to consider when making sure the project is actually done and ready for handoff to the customer…

Deliverables. Are all the deliverables complete? Don’t laugh…when a project engagement is long, complex, and comprised of many deliverables, something could be overlooked. Or possibly the actual official signoff/acceptance of a key deliverable was overlooked. Either way, this is your chance to make sure everything is delivered and signed off. You don’t want the customer coming back to you for something after the fact – it can be very embarrassing. Make sure all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed. It’s not a bad idea to list out all the deliverables in one email and send it off to your project customer along with dates of when each was completed, delivered, and signed off. It’s just one more way to protect yourself and show that everything is complete.

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Exporting Project Data for use in Calendars

In many of our projects, we need to be able to send key data to our project managers so they can see the plan no matter where they are. One of the best options for sharing our project data is to export the project to an .ics file, which can be imported into applications such as Calendar, Outlook, and even Google Calendars. When files are imported to these apps, you have the ability to see when tasks start and finish from any computer, and even from mobile devices.

In FastTrack Schedule 10, we can very easily export all or select parts of our project so they can be opened directly by numerous calendar apps. We have the ability to export an entire file, or we can create Filters to export only specific data. For example, we can create a filter to show only tasks for a specific resource, so that when the file is exported, they will only see their assigned tasks.

Our first step in doing this is to switch to a Layout called the “iCalendar Layout,” which will display columns for all data that can be exported. We see key project information including; Activity Name, Notes corresponding to our tasks, Location and Attendee information, and task Duration/Date/Time information.

 

iCalendar Layout

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Is the Customer Prepared?

prepared project customerWhen I was a younger project manager – much younger and more naive – I foolishly thought that every customer that stepped into a project engagement was ready for the project. They knew what they wanted, had the budget in place, a team ready to work on their side, if needed, and pretty much had at least good high-level requirements available to start the process. Some do have these things together….many, however, do not. And it’s amazing how many times project managers set project budgets and timelines assuming that most of these things are in place and therefore plan far less time in the upfront project organization and planning phases than end up being required. What happens then is unfortunate – they end up behind on the project budget almost from the beginning.

What should a well-prepared customer come to the table with in an ideal project situation? What would make the project easier to kick off on the right foot, get quickly underway, and headed in the right direction through those early project phases? From my experiences and perceptions, I’ve come up with the following four key things that, in my opinion, will make for a far better project experience if these are in place at the outset of the project. They may not be perfect and you may have to help guide the customer through fine-tuning one or more of these items, but at least you’ll be on the right track if the initial effort has been put in by the customer….

Available subject matter experts (SMEs). During the engagement you’re going to need access to some end users and subject matter experts because there will be questions you’ll have for them as you try to piece together the requirements you’re working with. These people need to be identified up front and need to be prepared to be ad hoc members of the customer’s project team.

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Using Consolidation to Manage Multiple Projects

Many times, our customers are tackling several projects at one time. Sometimes these projects are related and other times they may be completely separate. When running multiple projects at once, it may become challenging to manage and track data across multiple files. With FastTrack Schedule 10, you have the ability to combine these projects, whether they are related or not.

FastTrack Schedule’s Consolidation feature enables us to combine multiple projects into one large “Master File” in order to create a simple management schedule. When we combine these schedules together, we can make comparisons on key data such as resource allocations, costs of each project, and the dates when tasks must occur.

In the example that we’ll use today, we have two schedules “Project ABC” and “Project DEF.”  Each of these schedules uses a common set of resources: Bill, Ted, Susan, John, and Michelle. While these projects use the same resources and occur over generally the same time, they are not related. If we focus in on the Resource Allocations of each schedule we can see that there may be areas where a resource is assigned to multiple tasks on a single day. However, when the files are separate it may be harder to identify these areas.

Here we can see the assignments for each project when viewed separately.

 

Project ABC

Project ABC Allocation

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Successfully Managing a Remote Project Team

Remote Project TeamHaving all members of a project team in one place is mostly a luxury any more. It’s happened to me once in the past seven years. It’s almost unheard of if you’re working for a company with more than one location and any international or work from home employees. It just doesn’t make sense to go to extreme measures to co-locate an entire team for one project – especially when so many project professionals work on more than one project at a time (sometimes as many as five or more).

So, given this, virtual project teams seem like the way to go, right? Organizations can save millions of dollars and everyone can be working in their shorts and t-shirts all day. But this scenario isn’t without its own challenges that must be planned for and addressed. The key for the project manager is to keep a globally dispersed project team fully engaged and communicating effectively with each other and the customer. And to keep the customer confidence high when they are working with a project team that they may never see – or at least may never see the whole team – during the course of the engagement.

To this end, I usually focus on the following five methods to keep a virtual team and project running as smooth as possible from beginning to end. It isn’t without some bumps along the way, but it does usually work pretty well…

#1 – Plan up front how project communication will happen. That upfront planning may seem expensive and time consuming – and it can be – but don’t skip it. And in the case of a remote project – Continue reading “Successfully Managing a Remote Project Team”

The Art of Project Management: Sun Tzu’s Rules

PM HutBy Carl M. Manello
PM Hut

The art of project management is of vital importance to the Company. It is a matter of success or failure, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected. — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (paraphrased)

Sun Tzu project managerOver two thousand years ago, Sun Tzu crafted his rules for waging war. The subsequent Art of War is now one of the most often cited books, reflecting strategy in all things from sports to business to the actual implementation of war. I believe one can equally rely upon the Chinese general for interpretations on running today’s ongoing corporate battles: the implementation of projects.

To start this series, The Art of Project Management, I’ll paraphrase one of the Sun Tzu’s set of rules from ancient war-fighting.

There are three ways in which an executive can bring misfortune upon his team:

  1. By commanding the team to just move forward, being ignorant of the fact that it cannot obey. This is called hobbling the project.
  2. By attempting to govern a project the same way he administers a core functional business operation (e.g., supply chain or marketing), being ignorant of the particular conditions of that project. This causes restlessness in the project team’s minds.
  3. By employing resources on his project without discrimination.

Let’s take a quick look at each. Continue reading “The Art of Project Management: Sun Tzu’s Rules”

Should Everyone Agree with the Project Manager?

project manager yesIt’s nice when everyone is thinking the same way – or at least it seems that way. It’s nice when you’re leading a team and everyone agrees with what you’re saying – with all of the decisions you’re making – or at least it seems that way. Then one day you wake up and realize that everyone is acting like zombies and saying ‘yes’ just to move forward – maybe because they’re too busy…maybe because they don’t feel the ownership of the project. Whatever the reason, the project then becomes scary….real scary.

I think deep down we all really know that having all ‘yes’ men on our projects would be a bad thing – no one questioning your actions or that next big decision. No one with a thought or mind of their own. It’s all you and no one is offering any input. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a comfort zone for me.

Project managers need to be confident – maybe even arrogant at times. But do we know everything? We may know a lot or at least need to act like we do, but we certainly aren’t the authority on everything. If we think we are, we won’t last long because we’ll screw up a project very badly sooner or later, and we’ll be gone.

So, do we want a project full of agreeable project team members? Do we want unbridled obedience? Ummm…not me. Here are a couple of thoughts…

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If You Won’t Follow Me, How Can I Be Your Leader?

Become a Project LeaderI caught this quote the other day on one of my kids’ favorite shows, “Peep and the Big Wide World.” Seriously, it’s one of the best shows on TV if you can find it.

Quack, the big blue duck, says, “Ducks are natural leaders, but if you won’t follow me, how can I be your leader?” That statement cracked me up because it is so applicable in some many areas of life…including in the project management world. Quack’s statement implies that a leader should be followed just based on their position or reputation or what they think of themselves. How many times do we encounter this? I even use this on my kids sometimes…. “Respect me because I’m your father!” Ha. If we are demanding respect and a following, then our actions and leadership need to show that. True following, true obedience comes from seeing an example in action.

So, if that’s what we need to do in order to become ‘leaders’ of our project teams…leaders that are ‘worthy’ of the following they command….what do we need to do? How do we need to act? What examples must we set?

My take on this is a list of a few items that we need to show as characteristics in ourselves and daily conduct and who we are as leaders. At a minimum, we need to show:

Integrity. Be ethical and consistent in your actions, values, methods and principles. Be above board on everything – above reproach. Your team needs to see you as a stalwart leader of the project, the team, and the project client. They should be able to expect that you say what you’re going to do and then do it.

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Creating Layouts for Custom Reports

In FastTrack schedule 10, you have the ability to work with nearly 500 customizable columns. Managing the behavior of the columns and when each is visible in a project is key. Using Layouts, you can easily cycle through different sets of columns based on the type of data you need to display in your project.

FastTrack Schedule 10 comes with many pre-define layouts, which cover the essential data of a project.  You also have the ability to custom define layouts using any of the nearly 500 columns that you want. In today’s post, we will take a look at creating a layout capable of displaying key data for a company meeting.

First, let’s take a look at the data we see when working in our default Main Layout.

 

Main Layout

As we can see, the main layout is pretty straightforward, yet is able to convey some of our most important project information, the scheduled dates and durations for our tasks. However, for the purpose of a meeting, this layout may not include other key data that you need to present, such as notes on the tasks. We can easily create a new layout, using the Main Layout as a base, which will be able to show us this additional data.

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