Archive for year: 2023

Providing opportunities to team members makes them individually more capable, which leads to more organizational capability for delivering projects. Here are things you can do – TODAY – to create this win-win environment. 

• Encourage sharing of risks and issues that may arise. Project status can change based on what’s been completed, what’s delayed, what stakeholders are talking about, new ideas, and risks that arise. And you’re more likely to hear about them when you support your teams. Here’s how. Whether updates are positive or negative, thank people who share this information. Your first response should be “Does something need fixing?” followed by “What can we learn from this?” That way, you not only address project issues, but also create learning and growth opportunities for your project team members.
• Build in discussions of risk and learning. One agenda item for every project status meeting should be the status of existing risks and potential new risks. Periodically, include an agenda item for a team member to share something they’ve learned. This presents project work as a way for project team members to learn and grow. It also improves your project outcomes and provides incentive for people to join your project teams in the future.
• Help team members understand the business relevance of their project work. A WBS and short task names don’t convey the relevance of tasks to your team members. Take the time to help them understand how their deliverables fit into the big picture to improve the business. The deliverables you receive will be on target and your project team members will expand their business knowledge and opportunities for growth.
• Share the business’s impressions of your project. Often, project managers shield their project teams from business stakeholders, especially when business pressures cause wild reactions to status changes or preliminary project change ideas. But you, as project manager, should share how the business views the project and how its outcomes will be used. That deeper perspective helps the team grasp the strategic relevance of the project and builds capacity to produce results on future projects.

I’m a big fan of win-win approaches, so I know this is an abbreviated list of how to promote and benefit from a win-win focus. How have you promoted win-win in your organization and what other benefits have the organization and individuals received?

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

Coming Up

One of the most frequent questions Chris Croft and I get is “Do I need project management certification?” quickly followed by “Which certification or certifications should I get?” Everyone’s journey is different, just like Chris and I took very different paths. So, we’re going to explore whether project management certifications are valuable, what else you can do to make yourself stand out, and finally, which certifications to look at if you decide you need them. Bring your questions to this informative and fun session. By the way, this topic is just one that we explore in our new course, How to Launch a Career in Project Management.

Register for the Office Hours session here. (The session recording is available on the event page after the live broadcast ends.)

 _______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 42,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

The people who work on your project are both a significant factor in its success and a significant cost. So, it’s a good idea to analyze resource plans with an eye to maximizing success while minimizing cost. Here are a few things to think about to make your resource plans shine.

• Get skill levels just right. Most project managers are concerned about not having enough skilled team members. Turns out, being over-skilled can lead to problems, too. It’s great that highly-skilled folks will “do things right the first time.” But they might not do the job any faster. So, a higher-skilled person (who usually costs more) can increase your project cost without shortening the schedule. For the nest results, review your resource plans to make sure you have the right mix of skills you need. If necessary, supplement skills with contractors.
• Are your resources really available? You might rejoice when you get a talented staff member assigned to your project. But these rock stars are often busy with day-to-day operational tasks. Work with management to confirm that “the talent” will be available to your project over the long term.

If their longer-term availability isn’t assured, consider a different approach. For example, assign a lower-skilled, yet capable team member to the project. And arrange for the higher-skilled person to review their work. That way, you’re more likely to stay on schedule while still obtaining the benefit of the talented team member’s knowledge.

• When projects run in parallel. Team members can be pulled into multiple projects. If several projects need the same critical resources, plan your project alongside your fellow project managers. This avoids resource conflicts and undesirable schedule delays.
• How do key stakeholders perceive your team members. Skill isn’t the only criterion for selecting team members. The right attitude and how key stakeholders perceive them is important, too. When key stakeholders don’t trust someone on your team, their confidence in the project could be low.

What if you need someone with critical, scarce skills who doesn’t have the best reputation with stakeholder? Build and share stakeholder management               plans that address the trust issues and maintain confidence in the project. For example, you might include additional reviews of their work or help the team member communicate more effectively.

• Leverage contractors to build skill. Project requirements might necessitate hiring contractors because the appropriate skills aren’t available within your organization. To maximize long-term benefits, require contractors to provide skills training for your staff. That way, skill-building becomes part of the resource plan, expanding capabilities and reducing costs.

Note: Some people aren’t good at training others. If you’re going to have contractors provide training, require that the companies you contract with provide people with training experience.

Do you have questions about resource plans or tips for crafting awesome resource plans? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about resource plans, check out Chris Croft’s Managing Resources Across Project Teams course.

Coming Up

Office Hours: Great Meetings Build Great Teams July 11, 2023, 11am MT

Although great meetings won’t guarantee project success, poorly run meetings could lead to project problems. In this Office Hours broadcast, I’ll be talking with Jim Stewart, PMP and Rich Malzman, PMP about how to keep your necessary meetings from becoming necessary evils. Join us for a fun and informative session. (Bring your questions for a chance to win a complimentary eBook of Great Meetings Build Great Teams. Sign up here:

 

Office Hours: Gen AI: The Project Manager’s Edge July 19, 2023, 9am MT

AI is transforming project management in several ways, such as taking over the creation of complex and realistic schedules through analysis of all available data. As a project manager, you may wonder how to harness generative AI applications in your work and how to implement them successfully. Join me and my fellow LinkedIn instructors, Doug Rose, Dave Birss, and Christina Charenkova to explore how to put AI to work on your projects. Sign up here.

 _______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 41,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

 _______________________________________

 

Want to make project goals achievable? Start by making sure they’re clearly articulated and supported by key stakeholders. That’s no guarantee though because other conditions can affect their achievability. Here are actions to help ensure your project goals are reasonable and motivate your project team.

• Include training and experimentation tasks in your plan. You will attract the best team members if your project offers learning opportunities. Include training and the chance to practice new skills with some experimentation in your project plan. This expands team members’ understanding. New skills also pique team member interest in project goals. Businesses must innovate to remain competitive. So, treating projects as learning opportunities in addition to enhancing business capabilities means more value that your projects can deliver to stakeholders.
• Develop success measurement approaches before creating success criteria. A common mistake made by project managers is to define success criteria without understanding how those criteria will be measured. For example, some criteria can be assessed only with subjective measures. This often causes conflict instead of uniting the organization around success. Create the measurement process first, then determine what result will be considered success. Your success criteria will be meaningful and allow you to track your degree of success.
• Focus on business processes, not tools or IT systems. Project staff are more likely to understand project goals when they’re tied to existing business processes. Focus on the new or revised business process objectives. This helps team members understand the direction they need to take to meet project goals. Difficulties occur when goals focus on tools. For example, the goal “Implement a new warehouse security software system” leaves out the problem that needs to be corrected, or what opportunity the business wants to achieve. 
• Set practical timelines. Project team members are more likely to support practical, non-arbitrary deadlines. A practical deadline means the timeframe reflects durations proven achievable in past projects. However, a tight deadline for legitimate reasons can be considered practical if management supports new approaches to help meet the deadline. Tight, but practical timelines require motivated teams, so explain the rationale to them to gain their support. (Think Apollo 11 landing on the moon prior to the end of the decade!)

What else do you do to create achievable goals and obtain support for them? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about defining goals, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Great Meetings Build Great Teams

Although great meetings won’t guarantee project success, poorly run meetings could lead to project problems. In this Office Hours broadcast, I’ll be talking with Jim Stewart, PMP and Rich Malzman, PMP about how to keep your necessary meetings from becoming necessary evils. 

Find out why you should create a project plan for a meeting, how to handle people who behave differently in meetings. Learn about the science of meetings and how to use it. Listen to lessons learned from real-life meeting experiences. 

Join us for a fun and informative session. (Bring your questions for a chance to win a complimentary ebook of Great Meetings Build Great Teams. Click here to sign up: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7079138489325268992

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 40,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

Project managers usually manage more than one project at a time, which means they provide more value to their organization. But problems can arise when a project manager has too much work to do.  The Project Management Institute’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct recommends that project managers be honest and work within their skills and capabilities. So, if your workload is excessive, you should ask for help. Here are some indications that you are or could soon be overloaded.

• Your PM workload adds up to more than your expected work hours in any given timeframe. A rough estimate of your PM workload is to calculate the total hours for all project work tasks (non-project-management) and then add 15% for project management. For instance, if the total hours for work tasks is 100 hours, 15 project management hours is a reasonable estimate. When you manage multiple projects, add up the 15% PM estimates from each project. If the combined total for any timeframe exceeds your expected work hours, there is a risk of overload.
  

  Project manager workload with possible overload

• Stakeholders feel ignored. Stakeholder management is an important activity for project managers. An early indicator of PM overload is key stakeholders saying they don’t know what’s happening on a project or say they are frustrated by their questions not being addressed. If this happens, look at the type of issues stakeholders raise and the complexity of your projects. Overly complex projects, even small ones, could require more time than the 15% rule of thumb suggests, which could cause PM overload.
• Schedules aren’t updated. As a project manager, maintaining the project schedule is a fundamental, administrative project management task. As tasks are completed, you record progress and re-estimate project cost and completion time. If you’re overloaded, schedule updates are one of the first things that drops off your radar, even if you have a scheduling person to help you. If you don’t have time to update the schedule, it is time to ask to have some of your projects to be reassigned or to get some additional help.
• Team synergy problems arise. Project managers need to ensure their team members are on board and working well together. They must understand their role, the responsibilities of other team members, and the relationships between deliverables. If this understanding breaks down, a PM typically notices these problems quickly. If not, you haven’t been paying attention to your team’s status, which could be due to your being overloaded.
• Technical project issues arise and aren’t addressed. If you haven’t addressed technical issues that arose, this could be an indication of project manager overload. However, it can also mean you don’t have enough training or that you don’t have access to an experienced technical team member to address those issues. If that’s the case, you should ask for a technical resource to help you (because by that time training will take too long). 

Note: If you are supervising project managers, you can use these overload indicators to identify project managers that need help or to reassign projects to others.

What do you look for to determine whether you or one of your project managers is overloaded? Share with us in the comments section.

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

Coming Up

Keep on the lookout for more Office Hours broadcasts in July!

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 39,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

_______________________________________

Managing a remote (virtual) team has some nuances over managing an onsite team. A few adjustments can make a big difference in your success with virtual team members. Here are a few techniques that can help your remote resources work as part of a productive team.

• Hold frequent short meetings. Schedule meetings 3 times a week for 15 minutes. These meetings provide quick opportunities to understand what’s happening —  like conversations you have when you’re co-located with your team members. These discussions can identify problems early so remote team members don’t get stuck solving problems on their own. These meetings can be with small groups or 1-on-1 depending on the number of team members and their role on your project.
• Foster a team the same way you do when you’re co-located. Reserve time for checking in on how your team members are doing and give them a chance to share with each other. Consider virtual coffee breaks where you don’t spend much time on business. Instead, encourage each team member to talk about what they’re doing outside of work or what their favorite work activities are. Or they can describe a book/podcast/video that they enjoyed.
• Insist on good video conference capabilities. Phone calls are good, but video conference meetings are better…when the technology works. Seeing someone’s non-verbal cues helps you understand how meetings are going and connect with remote team members. If you don’t have video conferencing, make sure speaker phones work well. Nothing is worse than being remote and not hearing discussions, or not being able to contribute because you can’t be heard.
• Arrange participation in meetings for all attendees. Give each attendee a purpose in meetings. Consider a role for every attendee in your virtual team meetings. Rotate coordination responsibilities for the meeting, such as delivering project status items or stakeholder perceptions. This approach relieves some project management workload while increasing meeting engagement.
• Increase the frequency of feedback sessions. All team members benefit from feedback delivered by the PM. Virtual team members need this feedback even more, because they might not participate in other deliverable discussions. The sessions don’t have to be extensive. They can focus on one or two specific deliverables or presentations, and the impressions they generated. Feedback keeps virtual team members engaged and comfortable about their contributions.

Have you encountered problems dealing with remote team members? Or have you found ways to engage remote team members and improve their productivity? Share your questions or tips in the comments section.

For more about working with remote teams, check out  Cyndi Snyder Dionisio’s Leading Remote Project and Virtual Teams course.

Coming Up

Project success is driven to a large extent by healthy relationships within your project teams, which is why a lot of people skills go into project management. In this Office Hours on June 1, 2023, at 11:00am MT, Todd Dewitt will join me to talk about how to build better relationships – by learning to overcome our own fears and by building rapport with others through empathy and mutual respect.

Todd will be sharing some of the insights and strategies from his new book, Dancing with Monsters. I’m a big believer in relationship-building, so I’m looking forward to this conversation. I hope you’ll join us and bring your questions and challenges! Here’s the link to join: https://www.linkedin.com/events/betterrelationships-betterresul7060330084796170240

______________________________________________________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 38,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

______________________________________________________________________________