Less Well-known Benefits of Risk Management

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Project management disciplines such as risk management bring control to a project. In addition to the well-known benefits of these disciplines, they provide other benefits that aren’t often discussed or recognized. Here are a few additional benefits that risk management provides:

Encourages optimism. Thinking about what could go wrong increases optimism? It seems counter-intuitive, and yet it does! Plans for responding to risks can encourage the team. Whatever may arise, you have already identified an action to take! In addition, planning for positive risks (also called opportunities) can increase the chance of good things happening and ensure that you make the most of them when they do. That’s certainly cause for optimism! 

Reduces pressure. Project managers face enough pressure without having to develop solutions to issues on a moment’s notice. With risk management, you will have pre-planned responses to events that occur: you’re ready to execute the plan so the team can take action quickly.

Even if a problem arises that isn’t in your risk management plan, a team that’s used to managing risk can jump in to discuss alternatives and develop responses. You do not have to deal with it alone!

Identifies possibilities. Productive risk identification and response planning meetings can unearth more than doom and gloom responses. You might launch risk-reducing actions proactively, which not only addresses risks, but can also increase project value. For example, say you proactively engage a skilled resource to reduce risk. That person’s skill and experience might uncover possible solutions that expand the value the project delivers to the business.

Increases focus on outcomes. Focusing the project team on risk regularly during status meetings keeps the project purpose front of mind. While project team members naturally focus on their specific tasks, risk management provides focus on what might jeopardize project outcomes, and how team members can work with each other and management to produce project outcomes as planned.

Have you come across other benefits of risk management that aren’t typically discussed?

For more about risk management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Cost Management

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Besides controlling the spending for a project, cost management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of cost management: 

Filters out wannabe stakeholders. Project managers should embrace the phrase “you gotta pay to play!” In other words, if stakeholders want their requirements considered for the project, they need to provide funding to deliver what they require. With cost management practices, you can ensure that the project receives acceptable cost-benefit ratios from every request. It also helps ensure unfunded requirements won’t burden your project.

Provides leverage to control change. Cost management can help prevent scope creep! Change request processing includes evaluating schedule and cost impact. That cost management aspect of change management means you have the data you need to say no to project stakeholders when they come up with ideas they can’t cost-justify. 

Enables managing project speed or agile velocity. You know stakeholders are fond of asking for projects to be delivered sooner. Delivering the full project scope more quickly typically means higher cost. You can control the pace and integrity of delivery by asking whether funding is available for the early delivery and whether that extra cost makes sense. Without committed additional funding, fast delivery will skew your triple constraints and move your project status to yellow — or even red.

Similar approaches exist in agile environments. Because cost and time start are initially fixed based on the number of staff and planned sprints, delivering more features means more people or more time, both of which cost more. Before speeding up feature delivery, make sure the stakeholders can justify the request. 

Helps prevent inappropriate projects from being selected. When a client launches a project without proper cost management, they’re likely to discover that the project outcomes don’t save time or money. Proper cost management can stop “dud” projects that aren’t worth the money or effort. In addition, it supports the tactic, “if you’re going to fail, fail fast.”

Have you come across other benefits of cost management in your projects? If so, add them in the comments section.

For more about project cost management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Budgets course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Schedule Management

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Photo by Elena Mozhvilo from Unsplash

Besides bringing control to your project schedule, schedule management delivers additional benefits. Here are a few rarely-discussed benefits of schedule management. 

Defines elephant bites. The adage about eating an elephant one bite at a time works with projects, too. However, the phrase doesn’t mean much unless those bites are defined and are seen as reasonable. The work breakdown structure – as the basis for the overall project schedule – is the perfect tool for defining reasonable bites. Tasks represent the small chunks or bites that need to be produced to deliver the project. A good schedule helps you deliver a project successfully, because people can grasp those small bites and how their tasks contribute to the overall project objective.

Facilitates great how-to discussions. A company’s IT upgrade project team faced a dilemma: should they upgrade the network connections first, then the PCs, or the other way around? While there were technical pros and cons to each option, the schedule ultimately decided the sequence. Vendor resource restrictions determined the best approach — in some parts of the business, the PCs were upgraded first; and in others, the network was upgraded before the PCs. Without considering the schedule in the decision, it would have taken longer to complete the project. A better approach to completing the project was identified because of scheduling discussions.

Provides a defense against unreasonable expectations. A common challenge for project managers is handling expectations of the timeframe required to deliver project outcomes. The best tool for fact-based discussion of timeframe is a set of tasks defined and sequenced along with a reasonable time estimate for each task. That discussion becomes even more powerful if you’ve captured history of task completions, which reinforces your estimates for the current project. If the timeframe is too long,  you can use that information to ask your sponsor which tasks to cut or convey the risk from reducing the hours allocated to a task.

Gives you a map! Successful initiatives all share a common trait — there is a known and understood path from where things stand today to where you want to be. For projects, a sound schedule is that map. A complete schedule includes milestones and closing tasks, which serve as “X marks the spot” tasks that tie things together and confirm you’ve reached the treasure you were seeking. 

Have you come across schedule management benefits?

For more about schedule management, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course. You might also want to watch my recent LinkedIn Office Hours session about evaluating schedule quality.

How to Recover From a Mistake

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Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Even the most experienced project manager will occasionally make a mistake – a flaw in the project plan, misinterpreting business directions, or overlooking an issue or risk. Here are a few tips on how to recover when you make a mistake in a project:

  • Take ownership. The quicker you take ownership of what happened, the sooner you can work on fixing the problem. You want your team to focus on solving the problem, not blaming one another for what happened.
  • Fully understand the issue or mistake. You need to understand the problem before you can make adjustments to the project. Interview key clients and team members to understand the issue. Then, analyze the facts and assumptions used to make project decisions. For example, confirm that information presented as fact is actually fact. Verify that the initial assumptions used to move forward with the project are still valid. If you discover invalidated assumptions, determine what needs to be confirmed before making those assumptions in future projects. After you collect this information, present the full story of the issue and corrective actions to management.
  • Craft response alternatives. The best project managers quickly develop possible response for addressing project issues. If appropriate, present these alternatives to management so they can decide which one to choose – and you can act quickly. If you won’t have responses identified before you discuss the mistake with management, tell them how you will design your responses and when you will present them for consideration.
  • Update your risk management plan. When a mistake is made, you want to reduce the chance of the mistake being repeated. Add information about the mistake and how you handled it to your risk plan and register for your project — and update any other data sources project managers consult for project guidance. If a risk response was inadequate or inappropriate, update the documentation and review the situation with team members involved in drafting or confirming the risk response. Learning is the best way to prevent future mistakes, which brings me to my last tip…
  • Turn the event into a learning moment. When an error is made, it can be tempting to lash out. Focus on what leadership expert John C. Maxwell calls “failing forward.” Educate your stakeholders to make them better project advocates. By turning a mistake into a learning moment, you can increase the capability of your organization.

If you have other suggestions for recovering from a mistake, please add them in the comment section.

For more about risk management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

You Don’t Have to Feel So Alone

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As a project manager, you have to make decisions, resolve conflicts, manage aggressive timeframes and make the most of small budgets. It can feel like you have to deal with these responsibilities all alone. Yes, your responsibilities are monumental. You won’t feel so alone if you follow these tips:

  • Work with your team members. Take time to work with your team on issues, idea generation, and solutions. It’s even more effective when you chat informally with team members at least 10 minutes each day. You won’t face obstacles alone and you’ll build stronger relationships, develop trust, and foster dedication with your team members. 
  • Show gratitude. Look for opportunities to say, “thank you.” When appropriate, acknowledge accomplishments with formal recognition programs or by taking a team member(s) out to lunch. Expressing gratitude helps build a unified team that will support you as a leader – and you won’t be on your own should things go astray. Do the same with your key stakeholders and project sponsor to build support you can count on when you need it.
  • Enhance your leadership approach. Project leaders have no choice but to rely on others. As you manage larger, more complex projects, the need to rely on others grows. View this dependency as an opportunity to delegate, train and learn from others. Your team members become stronger resources; you grow more familiar with your team’s deliverables; and project management becomes more of a team effort.
  • Leverage your network. Discuss your project with fellow project managers and get their perspectives. Use status reviews with your manager and/or project sponsor to share ideas and perspectives. Attend project management gatherings, like Project Management Institute® chapter meetings and network with other attendees. You might pick up a great idea to make you look like a hero on your project!

If you have more suggestions for reducing your sense of isolation, add them in the comments section.

For more about team building, check out Mike Figliuolo’s Building High-performance Teams course.

The Fine Art of Documenting Lessons Learned

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Crafting lessons learned can be tricky. Lessons learned should help future projects without criticizing anyone publicly. Here are a few guidelines for achieving those lessons learned goals. 

  • Identify recurring issues. Issues that are likely to re-occur if they aren’t addressed are significant lessons learned because they will help many future projects. Conversely, issues related to one-off technology or unique business processes won’t be that helpful in the future, creating useless entries to wade through in your lessons learned library.
  • Identify an avoidance or risk reduction strategy. Nothing is learned if you don’t document how to avoid the issue. Describe the issue or risk and explain what to do differently. Future readers need to understand the context, so be specific and include early warning signs for the issue. Entries with these details will help your project management peers (or yourself if the issue crops up after you’ve forgotten about it).
  • Improve project methodologies and guidelines. Lessons learned might present opportunities to improve your project management methodologies or templates. Write your lessons learned entries with this in mind. If your lessons learned entry can’t be applied to your methodology, there may be gaps in your project standards. For example, if your methodology doesn’t handle working with your procurement organization on vendor contracts, write your lessons learned entry to add that process to your project management methodology and template set.
  • Refrain from mentioning individuals or roles. Appropriate lessons learned talk about the issue that occurred and the approach for avoiding or reducing its impact to the project. Talk about outcomes and processes, not specific decisions or inaction. Don’t mention individual’s names. Mention roles only if absolutely necessary. 

Do you have tips for describing helpful lessons learned from your experience?

For more about lessons learned and project closure, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Successful Eating Plans and Project Management Have a Lot in Common

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Photo by Dan Gold from Unsplash

I enjoy cooking — and eating – and I also believe in the benefits of a healthy eating plan. A recent conversation reminded me of the similarities between successful eating plans and project management. So grab that acai bowl (or rice cake if you insist on dieting) and have a read.

  • The correct amount is ideal. Sufficient, not excessive calories are key to effective nutrition plans and project plans. Fewer people on a project are easier to manage, reduce communication problems and are more likely to work as a team. Just as you don’t want to eat more because you have low-cal foods on hand, don’t add project team members unless they have expertise you need. Using the correct amounts in your eating plan and your project will yield better results. 
  • The right mix is crucial. An eating plan includes a mix of nutrients to keep you healthy. A project also needs the right mix of technical leads, industry expertise, and action- and planning-oriented team members. Your project is apt to stall with an out of balance team. 
  • The timing of consumption matters. When you eat can be as important as how much you eat. Likewise, when you deploy project resources is important. Bring in experts too early and you might suppress your team’s ideas, because they defer to the expert. Bring in experts too late and you risk spending time and money on dead-end approaches they would know to avoid.
  • Produce early results. Eating plans that don’t generate recognizable early results might be dropped as unsuccessful. When stakeholders dedicate budget and critical staff time to the project, they want reassurance that they are making a wise investment. When you deliver early project results, your stakeholders will stick with you, just as you will stick to the menu when you feel healthier, stronger, and more energetic. 
  • Keep your eye on the goal. Persistence pays off! Whether your goal is health, strength, energy, or weight loss, keep your eye on your objective—and remember that progress won’t be consistent. That way, your chance of success increases. With projects, monitor performance and accept that business priorities and issues might impede project progress.

If you can think of other similarities, post them in the comments section. I’d love to add them to this list.

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

 

Must-have Hard Skills for Project Managers

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Photo by Leon on Unsplash

A solid team can contribute to the broad range of skills needed to complete projects successfully. However, project managers must possess several skills to ensure project success:

Construct risk response plans. Although team members can identify risks, the project manager handles building and managing sound risk responses. Because the PM is the project liaison to the sponsor and senior leaders, the PM must be able to discuss, adjust, and deploy risk responses effectively.

Recognize schedule feasibility. Lots of schedules that are built don’t reflect reality. For example, feasible schedules include realistic expectations for team members’ weekly allocation the project. Schedules must also include realistic estimates of the effort to complete tasks. And fast-tracking or crashing built in the schedule must be sensible and doable. The PM must be able to spot these pitfalls and correct them. 

Domain expertise. The PM must know enough about the project’s technical domain to work with technical domain experts. In other words, the PM shouldn’t be fooled by experts trying to escape probing questions. For example, a project manager experienced in IT won’t have an issue talking to experts deploying new IT tools. That same PM, assigned to a construction or mining projects could easily be deceived by “the experts.” Project managers can successfully manage projects without specific domain knowledge. However, that situation introduces risk and increases project personnel costs because domain experts need to partner with the PM.

Knowledge of both the technology and business environment. A project’s business outcome often requires different knowledge than what you need to know to build the deliverables that facilitate that outcome. Consider a hospital project to provide advanced medical diagnostic services. Understanding the financial and marketing objectives of the project is much different than understanding the technology used in the sophisticated medical diagnostic equipment that interprets medical test results. The project manager, who works with the team and customers, needs to understand both: what’s needed to produce deliverable as well as the viability of the business outcomes. 

Vendor and contract management. In projects involving significant contracted skills or components, the project manager must be able to manage vendors and their contracts to ensure that deliverables are created efficiently and interactions between vendors are in the project’s best interest, not the vendor’s. For example, customized technical components built for a project require the project manager to validate contracts as well as integrations between those components and other parts of the project solution.

Strategic thinking. In projects that significantly alter business direction, the project manager must be able to think strategically to ensure the approach supports specific project goals and fits into the sponsoring business’s strategic direction.

What other hard skills do you think project managers absolutely must possess?

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

 

Tips for Launching Projects Successfully

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Photo by Leon on Unsplash

The fate of most projects is determined by how they’re launched. With a proper launch, the project has a good chance of succeeding. Botch it and the chance of delivering value is almost zero. Here are my top tips for nailing the project launch:

  • Develop a shared understanding of the project. You and your project team might have a solid grip on the project and what it will produce. One key to project success is making sure that your sponsor, project customers, vendors, and other key stakeholders also have a common, shared view of the project, its objectives, and how you will deliver business outcomes. Communicate meticulously to all stakeholders to create this unified project understanding. Without consensus, turf wars can arise, which can compromise funding, slow the project, and are difficult to recover from. 
  • Define metrics and targets. One of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is “Begin with the end in mind.” To do that, you need to define “the end!” Before you start a project, identify the target metrics and success criteria, so everyone understands early on what success looks like. If you don’t have tools to measure results, include tasks in your project plan to create those tools. Get consensus up front on how those tools will work, where the data comes from, and how the metrics will be calculated. Disagreement over measuring success not only kills projects, but does so at a very inopportune time — late in the project lifecycle.
  • Identify the skills required to deliver the project and how you will acquire them. A project team with the correct skills significantly increases your chance of project success. Many projects suffer from underestimating the challenge new techniques and technology present to project teams. People think “we’ll figure it out” or “our internal staff can learn.” That may be so, but you need to validate those assumptions early on. Work with your team to determine what they can and can’t learn. If using internal team members is impractical, include the availability and cost of consultants/contractors in your estimates. 
  • Touch base with powerful, out of scope stakeholders. Why would you work with stakeholders whose interest is out of your project’s scope? Because big issues can arise if they believe their business interests should be addressed in your project, and they find out they won’t be. Communicate with these would-be stakeholders in conjunction with your sponsor to ensure they understand their business interests are out of scope. That way, no big change requests land in your lap, creating tension and complexity in your project.

Do you have tips for launching projects that have helped you achieve project success?

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

Improve Your Leadership Skills with Emotional intelligence

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As project managers, we don’t simply manage work, deliverables, and documentation – we lead and support the people on our project teams. Emotional intelligence (also known as Emotional Quotient or EQ) helps us do that. Here’s how enhancing your EQ can help:

  • Relate to people working from home. Working with others is challenging even when you work side by side. Interacting with people onscreen amps up the level of difficulty. Although some people work from home and love it, others wish they were in the office. EQ helps you relate to and support your team members through their struggles. Your supportive leadership makes all your team members feel more comfortable with their work environment, which means a better chance of meeting project objectives.
  • Deal with people under stress. Stress creates obstacles for project managers and can significantly decrease project success. Stress often arises from business challenges like reactive decisions, irrational or missing responses to project problems, and fear about speaking the truth regarding project difficulties. With solid EQ, you will be able to recognize the root cause of these issues. Work through stressors with your stakeholders to ease their minds and deliver project outcomes.  
  • Manage excessive workload. Many businesses suffer from too many concurrent projects, competing operational responsibilities and being short-staffed – whether in your business or third parties you contract with. Pushing a schedule and managing to deadlines doesn’t guarantee progress. To negotiate deadlines and obtain staff to complete tasks, you need to understand the delivery pressure others are under – and that takes EQ.
  • Work across cultures. Project managers often work with people from different cultures, whether they represent different geographic regions in your country or different countries altogether. We are all human and have the same emotions behind our reactions. However, how emotions are triggered can vary across cultures. The higher your EQ, the more you will recognize these emotional triggers and the signals indicating the presence of emotions. That enhances your ability to work with stakeholders, no matter their cultural background. 
  • Apply change management if needed. Success goes beyond delivering project deliverables. For example, installed software doesn’t represent a successful result if the client isn’t tech-savvy and requires training and support to achieve the desired benefits. You might need to apply change management to achieve business outcomes, which requires skill, leadership expertise, and EQ. Whether you perform change management or depend on change managers, you need to understand what drives successful change management, which takes EQ.

For more about Emotional Intelligence, check out Gemma Leigh-Roberts Developing Your Emotional Intelligence course and Britt Andreatta’s Leading with Emotional Intelligence course.