Don’t Let Human Foibles Hurt Small Projects

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Small projects don’t always get the respect they deserve. Here are a few tips for keeping people’s peccadillos from derailing your small project: 

Consider team members’ personalities. Small projects have only a few people, so – um —  harsh personalities stand out. With small teams, you need people who work well together. Coax your team members into getting to know and understand one another, even if the project duration is short. Don’t forget about your own personality and that of your sponsor to minimize potential conflicts and leverage your team’s strengths.

Protect your team from excessively detailed reporting. Your sponsor may want detailed reporting even on a small project. Try to discourage this — if possible. On a small project, discuss status with team members and capture the information you need for status reports. Keep your sponsor in their comfort zone of status detail and your job will be much easier. 

Watch for competing priorities. Small projects don’t necessarily mean small amounts of work for the team. Others may be clueless about that and pressure your team members to take on other work. Emphasize the commitment needed to meet project timeframes with your folks’ managers. Small projects can yield big outcomes – make sure all stakeholders understand your project’s value.

Stay on top of change management. Even a small change can significantly affect business processes. To ensure you deliver the intended business value, don’t skip change management in your project. Make sure stakeholders understand, are comfortable with, and can use your project outputs to generate business value. 

For more about managing small projects, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course.

5 Tips to Reduce Scheduling Tool Headaches

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Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Like a sharp knife for a chef, a scheduling tool is a must-have item for a project manager. Scheduling tools, like any technology, can help or hurt. Here are five tips for using your project scheduling tool with less drama. 

  1. Use a template or copy a successful plan. Although projects are unique endeavours, they are rarely totally different from past projects. Use a project template or copy and modify a schedule from a successful past project. You can save time, leverage the success of these schedules, and capture tasks you might otherwise overlook. 
  2. Keep task relationships simple. The straightforward finish-to-start task relationship works most of the time and it’s the easiest for people to understand. Use that simple relationship unless there is a pressing reason for start-to-start or finish-to-finish (or lag and lead time).
  3. Customize calendar and hours/day defaults. The calendar settings you use need to match your organization’s and team member’s work schedules or your schedule won’t be accurate. Don’t forget to add holidays and other non-working days like factory maintenance periods to your project calendar. Also, consider adjusting the default hours per day or other calendar settings to reflect the actual project work time. While an 8-hour workday is common, team members rarely work 8 hours on your project tasks. Team meetings, other project and operational work is often required. You might change the hours per day to 6 or even lower based on your environment. Or you can assign people at less than full time to their tasks. Talk to your team members about what’s realistic.
  4. Keep resource assignments simple. Managing and modifying resource assignments is a huge source of scheduling headaches. A best scheduling practice is to break down project work so tasks are shorter than your reporting periods and have one or two resources assigned. With tasks like these, it’s a lot easier to create resource assignments – and change them once work gets underway.
  5. Train people to use the scheduling tool. Scheduling tools help you produce easy-to-understand reports. Sometimes, people believe they can modify your schedules or produce project reports without any training. That is a recipe for inaccurate reporting, expectation management issues, and a project manager migraine! Make sure everyone who will use the scheduling tool to maintain the schedule and produce reports is properly trained.

For more about scheduling and Microsoft Project, check out my Project Management Foundations: Scheduling course and Microsoft Project Essential Training course.

A project goal that people can understand

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One key to success is making sure everyone understands what your project is supposed to accomplish. Here are tips for putting together a project goal that keeps your project on track to success.

Identify a specific business objective or issue to resolve. Successful projects solve a significant ongoing issue or produce new capabilities for the business and/or its customers. The project goal should succinctly describe the capability or issue, and the outcomes the project will deliver. For example: “The project will address gaps in tracking shipments to our remote locations by creating an extension to our existing logistics application.”

Verify the goal beyond your sponsor and primary customer. As key stakeholders, the project sponsor and primary customer must support the project goal statement. To ensure an accurate and meaningful project goal, conduct a stakeholder inventory and verify the project goal with other influential leaders. That way, you avoid questions about the project intent or scope that could delay project launch. 

Smaller goals work best. Project goals can be quite extensive, which is not only fine, but also often necessary. However, smaller goals achieved through a series of targeted projects are less risky than trying to run one large project. Agile project methods embrace this concept. Breaking your goal into smaller pieces means achieving outcomes earlier. Also, smaller goals might reduce the need for organizational change management activities. You can still achieve significant objectives by delivering in progressive steps. 

Don’t dilute the goal. Ensure every project task helps you achieve your goal. Especially on longer projects, other goals have a way of sneaking into your project. Ensure that you and your team members focus on only the work needed to complete your project as defined. Enforce a stringent change management process to avoid scope creep, and you’ll be on your way to delivering successful outcomes!

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

What Goes into a Project Charter?

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A project charter defines and formally launches a project. What information goes into one? What level of detail is best? Here are my tips for what a project charter should do.

  • Authorize the project for a smooth launch. Primarily, a project charter ensures the project is authorized, so money and effort can be expended. A brief announcement email might suffice. Or significant detail could be required, depending on the organization’s norms. Include the information your organization requires for project authorization, so you can launch the project without issues.
  • Inform and engage stakeholders to obtain resources. Resources are often in short supply. Managers want to assign the right people for the job. Include the information that helps managers identify who to assign as team members for your project. This information often includes required technical skills, preliminary project timeframes, funding sources, estimated project milestones, and the project priority within the organization’s work portfolio.
  • Obtain funds. A sponsor’s project approval may not be enough to release project funds. The project charter must contain information required by the finance organization. This can include internal and external resourcing needs, whether existing or new vendor contracts will be used to obtain skilled resources, cash flow projections, and other cost and business case details.
  • Define responsibility/authority. Projects require a shared understanding of the responsibilities of the project manager, sponsor, and other key stakeholders. In some organizations, these roles are pre-defined across all projects. In others, responsibilities can change based on project context, and the management level from which the project is managed. The project charter should include details of assigned authority, accountability and decision-making processes.
  • Assumptions, risks, constraints, and other details. Organizations often have specific information they require in a charter, for example, a regulatory requirement that mandates a project deadline. Be sure to identify the unique industry expectations your organization and management team have regarding a charter.

An effective project charter can vary wildly –from a verbal assurance by a senior leader, to an informal email, or a detailed multi-page document. Follow the guidelines above as a start. If you vary from your organization’s typical charter, include more detail versus less. An effective charter gets your project off to a good start – and that’s the first step to successfully completing your project.

Here’s a great resource for project management templates.

Developing a Productive Project Culture

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A productive cultural environment is critical to delivering successful project outcomes. Here are tips for managing a productive project culture whether your project has a unique culture or is an extension of your organization’s culture.

Plan cultural development tasks. Effective project culture doesn’t happen by accident. The best project managers are purposeful about developing a positive culture: constructive ways to make decisions, defining your authority, and defining your technical team leaders’ responsibilities. Building a common understanding of how you will communicate with each other is a fundamental cultural requirement. This takes more effort than most people realize. Vendor personnel might need to adjust their habits and expectations for your project. Employees from different offices or countries might need to adjust.

Plan for tasks to bring your team together and ensure cultural expectations are aligned. While people are adjusting their cultural expectations, spend time to help them smoothly integrate with your project.

Get feedback. Cultural transitions might be difficult for team members. Even when they may appear to be working well, they may struggle working within your team’s expectations. Ask for and carefully review feedback regarding your project culture. Listen carefully and offer help if you have any doubts about their comfort level.

Focus on positive intent. You may find team members’ cultural expectations differ from your own. Don’t dismiss their expectations as wrong or incongruent. Instead, focus on the positive intent of their cultural norms. Learn what they hope to achieve through their cultural habits. Ask team members whether they see difficulties or risks in the cultural elements you put in place. This helps build deeper understanding and make team harmony easier to achieve.

Be flexible and consistent. Team members work best when they feel understood and appreciated. The best results come from being flexible to accommodate individual needs, while being consistent working with your full team. Say a team member has different expectations about their involvement in decision making. You can speak with them ahead of time one-on-one, while involving the entire team in the decision after that conversation. The individual’s expectations are met, while the team sees a consistent approach to making decisions.

Review your results. Once you bring together your project culture, don’t lose focus on it. Your culture will be challenged by the stresses of project highs and lows. Work with your team and adjust to meet the perceived needs of your team members. Spend extra time collecting opinions or provide more assurance to hard working team members – it can help you maintain your team’s effectiveness.

For more about corporate culture, check out Sara Canaday’s Organizational Culture course.

Renewing your passion as a project manager

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It’s easy to succumb to the pressure of a steady parade of project challenges and forget the plusses of being a project manager. To regain your project manager passion, consider the contributions a project manager makes:

Driving your business’s success. Projects don’t succeed without project managers and businesses don’t move forward without successful projects. For every new product, customer success story, or happy-dance stock price move for your business, you know projects are behind those successes. Project managers are the on-the-ground tacticians of a business and drive its ongoing viability.

Nurturing your team members. As a project manager, you make a significant difference in the lives of your team members. I have had to protect my team members from business challenges on every project I’ve managed! Poorly thought out changes, management probes, oversold benefits, and priority squabbles are a few examples where you have to step in to protect your team. That way, your team can complete their tasks and advance the project. Plus, you can develop your team members by mentoring them and assigning skill-building tasks.

Satisfying and supporting consumers. Your role in bringing projects to life can affect consumers in significant ways. Project end-products fulfill not only your business’s needs, but also your customers’ needs. Keep in mind that your projects provide new ways of producing work, servicing products, and supporting the community. Your efforts as a project manager move the economy forward!

Growing yourself. Your project management role can be a vehicle for personal growth. I’ve learned something from every project I’ve worked on, like the inner workings of an industry to new technology to best practices for leading people. By definition, a project creates a unique product or result, so learning comes with the territory. Use your projects to take advantage of exposure to new business areas, new technologies and new or enhanced skills. Step outside your comfort zone to learn even more. 

Promoting fun. Curt W. Coffman and Kathie Sorensen, PhD authored the book Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. When you create a positive project culture where fun is promoted, you will realize better results. And that reinforces your purpose as a project manager to: create new outcomes, support the business, and provide opportunities for people. 

To learn more, search for “project management” (or any topic that interests you) in the LinkedIn Learning library. 

Life management = project management

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I manage my life like one long project. Quick review: It’s a project because my life is a temporary endeavour (I don’t want to live forever) that is unique and comes with a budget. Life is messy so it really needs managing! Here’s why I project-manage my life and you should manage yours, too.

Priorities are important – and the primary stakeholder is demanding. Like any project, there are many possible outcomes and multiple ways to reach each outcome. Prioritizing outcomes and deciding how to achieve them is my approach to projects: Understand the possibilities, look at the alternative strategies and choose the best one. For my life project, I decide what I want, how I can achieve those things, and pick my path. The big difference between my life and a project is the primary stakeholder…I’m more demanding and second-guess myself more than any of my other project stakeholders have ever done!

You never get time back. The first question about a project is usually “what’s the schedule?” My first task every morning is to check my schedule. Whether for personal time or a project, every minute is something you can’t redo. Getting the most out of time is important, whether I’m managing deliverables or delivering dinner to friends.

Money creates balance and safety. A budget helps balance income and expenses in projects and in life. Effectively managing finances helps support my lifestyle — my home, car, hobbies travels, and philanthropy. Think cost-benefits. Finances support the tools and people who deliver my “lifestyle” and minimize the risk of my life project being cancelled!

Regular health checks are vital. Exercising, keeping fit, eating properly and regular medical check-ups maintain my vitality. Besides hiring the right people, deploying the right tools, and managing diligently, regularly scheduled life status meetings are important. Not just medical check-ups. It’s important to take the time to evaluate my life and decide whether my goals have changed. Life status meetings are also a good time to identify what’s working, not working, and what I could be doing better. (If you don’t like meeting with yourself, consider creating a board of directors for your life – which is a topic for another article.)

To check out my courses, jump to http://linkedin-learning.pxf.io/bonnie-blog

Things going badly? Have More Meetings!

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When your project isn’t going well, you and your stakeholders need information. FAST! As counter intuitive as it sounds, the best thing to do is to have MORE meetings. Not just any meetings, however. Here are a few effective meeting strategies when things are rocky:

Run short, focused data-sharing sessions. Project conditions change rapidly when problems and unexpected circumstances surface, so constant communication is needed. Try holding multiple 15-minute meetings, for example, one at the start of the day and one right after lunch. These meetings help you provide team members with what they need to know and what they need to do to recover the project. Frequent focused meetings also help ensure you have the latest status of recovery tasks.

Skip the “everyone is invited” norm. People often complain that meetings are a waste of time—and that’s a legitimate complaint. Meetings usually run too long and aren’t useful. When your team is under pressure, determine who needs to be at your short, focused meetings. Set conditions for team member attendance and communicate those expectations so people who don’t need to attend can continue working on critical tasks. For example, a team member is finishing a critical deliverable and can miss the meeting to get it done.

Hold separate meetings with content relevant to specific attendees. To avoid wasting time, hold meetings for different groups providing information relevant to that specific group. Divide your stakeholders into teams of people that need to work together and have separate meetings for each team. To maintain synergy with your full team, consider having your entire team attend one of the daily meetings each week. Set the agenda for that meeting with items relevant to the entire team.

Talk about the “elephants in the room.” Information is key to success. The more transparent you are, the more transparent your team will be. The earlier you share good and bad news, the more information you will receive in return. Above all else, accurate and complete information can help you recover your project.

Remember that you are leading humans. Effectiveness comes from team members who know and understand each other professionally and personally, especially when things are challenging. Recognize birthdays, significant accomplishments, not so significant accomplishments, and instances when stakeholders acted as a team. On occasion, bring food to your team meetings. Remember, people with fears and concerns are in the room with you. Be thoughtful and calm, and your stakeholders will mirror that behavior.

For more about meetings, check out Dave Crenshaw’s Leading Productive Meetings course.

How projects fail and what to do about it

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Photo by Mauro Sbicego from Unsplash

You don’t have to look far to find project failures. While many circumstances contribute to project failure, a few common circumstances often are the culprits that make good projects go bad. Here are the most prevalent management failures that lead to failed projects:

A lack of proper management. Projects without professionally trained —and supported— project managers are like sailboats without a rudder. Eventually they will crash. The only question is what they will hit before sinking. Proper project management is mandatory.

Poor stakeholder management. Generating deliverables that don’t meet the expectations of stakeholders usually results in project failure. Disenchanted stakeholders rarely use deliverables they didn’t want or expect, no matter how good they may be. Making sure stakeholders buy into the products you’re producing is vital to delivering successful projects.

Throwing good money after bad. One of my favorite phrases is, “Fail early, it’s cheaper.” Nowhere is this more accurate than with projects. Once a project becomes troubled, cancellation may be the best outcome, because it saves money, time and, in the long run, can enhance your reputation. Justifying spending more money to validate the money you have spent so far is foolish. Look at where the project is today, and the time and money it will take to generate business value. If the money it takes to recover the project stands up to the scrutiny of a business case, then continue. If not, cancellation is the best alternative.

Avoiding the perception of failure while you are already seen as failing. Managers rarely understand that failed projects that take forever to “go away” do more reputational damage than one cancelled to minimize corporate impacts. Project cancellation is a proactive alternative to failure. When things go bad, understand the root cause and stop the project. Then, perform better project definition, risk management or other alternatives to start a new project with an increased chance for success.

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Top 5 team building tips for PMs

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Photo by Leon from Unsplash

Project managers set the tone for their project teams. The best team building occurs when you take advantage of everyday opportunities to boost your team’s morale. Here are some project management team building tips:

Use your kickoff meeting to shape your project team. Anytime you get your team together is an opportunity to build team morale. The kickoff meeting is the first – and in many ways the most significant – opportunity to develop team synergy. Hold a contest to pick a team name. Have your sponsor give a motivation speech to the team. Or schedule time to get to know one another.  

Boost your team during weekly status meetings. Status meetings are great opportunities to generate enthusiasm. Recognize achievements such as consecutive periods of “all status targets met,” handling a sensitive customer situation, or a technical idea that moves the project forward. When things aren’t too great, use the status meeting to generate new ideas to rescue the project and encourage the team to keep moving forward. 

Celebrate milestones. Recognize the team when you reach a milestone. When a milestone was late or over budget, acknowledge the obstacles that were overcome and the lessons learned. That helps boost morale. For longer projects, create milestones to recognize progress, which will help maintain morale and forward momentum.

Reach out to team members – particularly remote team members.  Hold one-on-one conversations with project team members on both a business and personal level.  Here are two great questions to enhance a team member’s sense of belonging and purpose: “What does this project mean to our customer?” and “What does this project mean to you?” Listen carefully to the answers. The first question can confirm team alignment. The second question can help you choose the best assignments for your team members to maximize the value the project provides to them.

Formally recognize the value your team members deliver. Write a one or two paragraph summary of each team member’s contributions and send it to their manager. This helps you earn a loyal team member for future projects. Do this diligently and you’ll have a team with high morale before your new project even begins, because team members will pursue a position in your projects!

For more about team management, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course or Cyndi Snyder-Dionisio’s Leading Remote Projects and Virtual Teams course.