Archive for year: 2022

In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll look at building a collaborative team environment, one of the new project delivery elements in the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) Here are a few ways to create a collaborative team environment for your projects.

• Define roles, not just responsibilities. Productive teams have clear roles and approaches, which can be defined by the project manager, team leader or the team themselves. Team members need to understand their roles, so they know where each person’s responsibility begins and ends, and how information or process steps will be passed from one person to the next. For example, “perform testing” describes a responsibility. That isn’t enough for someone to understand the role. Are they supposed to test a product at various points as it is built, or only the end product? Do they perform testing themselves or include a customer or end user? How and where will the test results be recorded and shared?
• Organize sub-teams. Often, the best way to tackle a set of tasks is with a small group of people. Define sub-teams and identify who will coordinate the team’s efforts to share status with the project manager. This isn’t necessarily a team leader, but rather the person who will ensure proper coordination and communication as the sub-team performs its tasks. To reinforce collaboration, recognize the entire sub-team when items are completed, not just the team leader or coordinator.
• Establish support and review standards. Teams that produce outstanding work use the collective experience and expertise of its members. Leverage that with a peer review process to assure deliverable quality. The peer review process is not to find fault, but to identify ways to produce superior work. To reinforce this approach, recognize both the individual who identified an improvement and the person who adopted the improvement into their deliverable. This supports a team environment where collaboration is recognized.
• Focus on communication approaches. The larger your team, the more communication processes need to be defined and followed. This used to be straightforward, when periodic meetings would be scheduled in a conference room. This isn’t as easy today when team members work from offices, homes, and other locations. Different tasks and reporting requirements necessitate different communication mediums. For example, reporting task completions can be done via a virtual meeting tool. Reviewing a complicated technical deliverable requires rich communication that’s beyond the average person’s and work location’s capability with virtual meeting tools. The lesson here is twofold. First, pick the communication medium based on what the meeting needs to accomplish. Second, understand each team member’s capability with virtual tools when face to face meetings aren’t feasible. Make sure well-trained team members can put the full capabilities of virtual tools to use. 

Do you have any tips on building a collaborative environment? If so, share with us in the comments.

For more about team collaboration, check out Dana Brownlee’s Essentials of Team Collaboration course and Communication within Teams by Daisy Lovelace.

Coming Up

Recording for Project 2021 and Project Online Desktop Client Essential Training is complete. Look for the course to be published in a few months.

Today, we’ll explore how project managers contribute benefits with their expertise, one of the new elements of project delivery in the Project Management Institute’s seventh version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) Here are a few significant ways to apply your expertise in managing projects:

• Complete project tasks. Most project managers have technical and industry expertise relevant to their projects. Completing technical tasks can be an appropriate and helpful contribution to the projects we manage (although it isn’t the project managers primary role.) But you shouldn’t take opportunities away from other team members, which they might perceive as restricting their growth.  
• Coach your team members. The best project managers increase the capabilities of their team members who work on their projects. They provide technical guidance without dictating how to complete tasks. They also help others understand the practice of project management, so they can contribute to building work breakdown structures, verifying estimates, and confirming schedules. Because projects often have wide-ranging business implications, they coach people on business elements as well, such as communication, presentation skills, and managing risk.
• Improve the practice of project management. Project managers are known for getting things done. They bring confidence to their management team that envisioned changes will come to fruition via the application of sound project management tools and perspectives. Applying your project management expertise can help improve your organization’s project management practices. Spreading the word about project management practices is an effective way to support your business. Guiding managers as they work with you to deliver projects is another impactful way to apply expertise and increase your business’ project delivery capability.
• Provide perspectives for management. Respected project managers can help management understand which approaches to facilitating organizational change will be supported by line managers and which ones won’t be! Project work provides project managers with a view to how operational management handles the pressures of increased workload created by supporting projects. Project managers know who responds well, who doesn’t, and which competing workloads might interfere with project progress.

Have you contributed your expertise to your projects in other ways? If so, tell us about it in the comments section.

For more about project management, check out the Become a Project Manager learning path.

In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll explore the benefits of your project team contributing insights to your project, one of the new elements of project delivery in the Project Management Institute’s seventh version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.) Here are a few substantial ways to maximize project delivery by leveraging stakeholder insights.

• Leverage team member experience. Even the most experienced project managers can learn more to help their projects succeed. Project leadership requires a lot of listening and learning. Team members have experience that helps them build a solid work breakdown structure, identify risks and determine risk responses, manage issues, and test products. Technical team members can also help avoid over-complicating project solutions. Tapping team experience helps maximize success and increase team buy-in!
• Team up with key business stakeholders. Business team members provide insights to improve outcomes and enhance project delivery. They can also help avoid pitfalls and identify change management approaches to smooth transitions during project deliverable deployment. Engaged business representatives identify hot buttons that may negatively affect the opinions of influential stakeholders, so you can address those issues and protect the success of your project delivery. These critical insights surface you create a team atmosphere, where business and technical experience are valued. The best decisions are based on a broad set of shared experiences.
• Capitalize on change agents. Change agents can improve your chances for success. Great project managers seek out change agents and involve them in project planning and delivery. The trick is finding the best change agent candidates, because they aren’t always the managers or team leaders that appear on the organization chart. How do you identify these change agents? Listen and watch carefully when requirements are collected. Who speaks up? Who do others look to for agreement? Identify the authors of substantial documents that have been provided. Find these promising change agents and invite them to coffee to do some change agent recruiting!
• Collect project experiences. People who have participated in past projects can provide a wealth of valuable insights. They can provide the actual level of risk the organization accepts, which key stakeholders are short-term money focused, who will insist on including certain tasks or verification in your project planning, and who is likely to come up with new requirements after the project begins. These bits of critical information save time and frustration! Take time to pick project veterans’ brains. You’ll be happy you did!

Have success stories and anecdotes related to obtaining insights from team members? Share them in the comment section!

For more about working with your project team, check out Daniel Station’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.

Coming up:

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll look at stakeholder attitudes, one of the new approaches to analyzing stakeholders in the Project Management Institute’s latest version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.)

In PMBOK7, Knowledge Areas are replaced with Performance Domains, which recommend additional activities in several areas, including stakeholder analysis. Let’s look at challenging stakeholder attitudes and responses that increase your success in stakeholder management.

• Inattentive/indifferent. Key stakeholders can behave as if they don’t care about the project or its outcomes even if they would be positively or negatively impacted by those outcomes. They might not pay attention due to their workload, business issues, or other distractions. Remember, your project isn’t the only thing on the stakeholder’s plate.

• • To gain the attention of a distracted stakeholder, talk to the stakeholder’s peers and support staff to find ways to engage the stakeholder.
  • Use clear and persuasive graphics or flowcharts to show how the project might impact the them. Share this information with the stakeholder’s department.
  • Demonstrate that the stakeholder needs to decide between the alternatives by a specific date. Clearly communicate that the project team will make the decision if the stakeholders doesn’t respond by that date. This approach doesn’t guarantee a response from the stakeholder, but it typically gets their attention. If the stakeholder disagrees with your choices, you have documentation that they had an opportunity to make the decision and opted not to.

• Fearful. Stakeholders who fear negative project outcomes are challenging to manage. Their past experiences may have been bad. Fear can manifest through micromanagement, requests for overly-detailed status reports, and drawn out decision-making.

Talk to your stakeholder to understand their concerns. You may have risk mitigation plans in place that address their fears. Communicate your plans, or create new risk items, and obtain the stakeholder’s approval for the mitigation and status sharing strategies should their concerns come to fruition. You might reduce their fear by demonstrating that you understand their concerns and have plans to address them.

• Demanding and self-centered. All stakeholders are affected by the project by definition. Some stakeholders act as if they are the only project stakeholder. They place demands on the project without regard for the needs of other project stakeholders. If the demanding stakeholder is your sponsor, that is likely their prerogative. If not, emphasize the other project requirements you are managing with this stakeholder. If they continue to show no regard for other stakeholders, get your sponsor involved to negotiate with this demanding stakeholder. (Remember, the project sponsor is responsible for the project and its outcomes, and wants to see the project succeed.) The sponsor can then help you reprioritize the project requirements. At that point, you can cite the sponsor’s directions when you deal with the demanding stakeholder.
• Wheeler/dealer. Stakeholders might offer funding or resources for a project in a bid to get their desired outcomes added to a project. They might be extraordinarily persistent! This can seem like a variation on the demanding stakeholder in the previous point. You might consider asking them to work with the sponsor to prioritize their outcomes. It might make sense to introduce new requirements or reprioritize requirements in exchange for benefits. For that reason, the best approach is to handle these proposals through your standard project change management practices.
• Indecisive. Slow decision-making by stakeholders impacts project schedules — and cost when resources assignments must be extended. Being proactive is the best way to address this situation. Major project decisions have to be made after stakeholders consider the pros and cons of alternatives. Include a specific task, assigned to the sponsor or key stakeholders, delineating the decision to be made and the time allocated for them to research and consider their position. In addition, calculate and communicate what it costs for each day that the major project decision is delayed. This can help illuminate highlight the impact stakeholder indecisiveness has on your project. You can also use this information to create a project change request to alter the project schedule and budget due to the decision-making delays.

Have experience with any or all of these stakeholder attitudes? If you have insights and suggestions for dealing with them, add them in the comments section.

For more about stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.

Coming Up

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

Scope management is all about ensuring your project produces what is required — and only what is required — to satisfy project objectives. It also delivers additional benefits you don’t often hear about:

Helps manage risk. Talk to an experienced project manager and you’ll likely hear a hard-earned lesson: the bigger your project, the riskier it becomes. For initiatives that require a lot of organizational change and project deliverables, you can break down scope into phases to make things more manageable. This breakdown into smaller chunks reduces risk and makes it easier for the organization to absorb the changes because they are applied in progressive steps. In many respects, the most effective way to manage project risk is to work closely with your stakeholders to manage scope.

Expands understanding of business requirements. Scope management is best performed through conversation. And conversation not only helps the project team understand business needs, but also helps the business recognize what is straightforward and what is difficult for the project team to produce.

In addition, good scope management means prioritizing requirements. This helps the project team understand what’s vital to the business and can enhance the business’s perspective on its own requirements! So, the business and the project team are better positioned to produce what’s most important, reducing scope and risk.

Builds confidence in the project. Detailed conversations about scope, including well-crafted questions to gain detailed understanding of business needs, can help build stakeholder confidence in the project team’s ability to meet its objectives. Good questions that inspire analysis and understanding of business needs can build trust that the project team knows what needs to be done. And starting off a project with trust from business stakeholders is a big plus.

Helps adapt to available resources. Skill shortages are everywhere and have been amplified by the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Scope management helps everyone be realistic about what can and cannot be done. Discussions about available skills help craft a realistic project schedule. Scope and resource management drive productive discussions about prioritizing work, particularly for scarce resources. The earlier these conversations and prioritizations are made and understood, the easier it will be to build a sound schedule and proceed through the project lifecycle.

Have you obtained other benefits from scope management? If so, share them with us in the comment section.

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

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.