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.

 

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.

People problems, business pressures, and creating unique results come with unexpected challenges. Dealing with chaos is one more thing project managers must do. Here are a few tips for reducing project chaos.

Research past lessons learned. Capturing lessons learned is often like wishful thinking. People talk about doing it, but rarely get around to it. If that’s the case in your organization, don’t give up. Instead, ask project managers and sponsors in your business about the problems they’ve seen on their projects. If your organization has a lessons learned database, examine it thoroughly. By understanding past issues, you can build insightful risk and contingency plans. And those plans can help you quickly identify the root cause of potential issues and address them before they create chaos in your project (and your life!) 

Watch for changes in stakeholder behavior. When stakeholders get stressed, their behavior usually changes. They might get more talkative, less talkative, or voice concerns about your project out of the blue! Don’t just wonder what that’s about. Initiate 1-on-1 discussions with stakeholders to identify what’s going on with them. Showing compassion for your stakeholder and your project outcomes creates trust, which can lead to learning more about potential problems. That leads to greater insights and less chaos!

Evaluate and respond to baseline variances. Be sure that you understand your baseline metrics for scope, schedule, cost, and quality. When Those metrics are off by more than 5%, determine the cause of that variance. And when the variance goes beyond 5%, jump into gear to get things back on track — and share the status and your actions with your project sponsor. Proactive communication about issues and responses can instill confidence in your project leadership, which means fewer “please explain” type of meetings, and – you guessed it — less chaos!

Focus on what’s important versus what’s urgent. If something is important and urgent, by all means, focus on that first! After that, work on important issues and don’t get distracted by urgent yet unimportant things like a ringing/chirping telephone. Minimize distractions by turning off your phone, pausing email notifications, and hanging a do not disturb sign on your door. That way, you address the most vital tasks on your project. Less chaos! 

 

Projects will always involve unexpected or sudden changes. These tips can calm things down for you and your project team. Do you have tips to share for reducing project chaos? If so, share them in the comments!!!

 

For more about reducing project chaos, check out Chris Croft’s Project Management: Solving Common Project Problems course.

As a project manager, you know that effective project management increases project outcomes and delivers improved business results. Here are ways to strengthen the benefits your project management practices provide to your projects and your entire organization.

Deploy repeatable methods. Applying consistent project management processes across projects is a great way to beef up the benefits of project management in your organization. You save time and effort — and increase productivity –because people don’t have to learn new approaches and processes every time they work on a project. Your teams already understand the project artifacts and expectations for delivering a successful project.

That’s not to say you can use only one project methodology across the organization. Each project should use common practices for the methodology that is most appropriate to the project. For example, standard WBS structures in waterfall projects and standard sprint structures for agile projects provide iterative learning as team members apply familiar practices time and again.

Continuously improve your project management methods. On every project, make a point of reviewing your approach, whether waterfall, agile or hybrid. Monitor their effectiveness and make adjustments to enhance the benefits project management delivers. 

Measure benefits through standard project metrics. As the saying goes, “You get what you measure.” Standard metrics provide the compass heading for increasing project success within your organization. And increased project success means better business results. Look for trends in metric results: in different product areas, business divisions, and personnel. These trends can highlight areas of weakness and enable focused improvement initiatives.

Project management benefits only become evident when you apply standard metrics across your entire project portfolio. Of course, agile and waterfall projects are controlled differently, so you apply different metrics for those approaches. For example, baseline versus planned schedule and cost variances are typical project metrics used in many industries. In agile projects, sprint burndown and velocity are typical metrics.

Improve results with supportive reviews of projects, project managers, and project teams. A supportive review differs from an audit. An audit is considered successful usually when faults are identified. In contrast, reviews set out to discover what worked well, so those successful approaches can be implemented across the organization. Reviews find areas that were suboptimized and explore the source of ineffective action. In addition, you can identify and address issues that weren’t handled well – or not at all. The focus is on learning from the past rather than finding who is to blame. This focus on continual improvement not only delivers better project outcomes but also increases your team members’ confidence in delivering projects.

Demonstrate benefits with cumulative project results. Metrics such as estimation accuracy, customer satisfaction with project outcomes, and actual ROI against plan are telling when examined across many projects within your business. These metrics are powerful indicators of the impact of project management on your organization. Ongoing improvement in these performance indicators leads to improved organizational health and increased agility because projects are delivered faster and with better outcomes. (Keep in mind, these metrics require diligence and effort to collect, so you need to encourage management to support their consistent use.)

What project management benefits have you seen in your organization? What actions have you taken to enhance and promote those benefits?

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

Coming Up

Tatiana Kolovou and I will talk about communication techniques in a LinkedIn Office Hours broadcast on September 30 at 1pm MT.

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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.

Stakeholder management is crucial to project management. And influencing others is crucial to stakeholder management. Don’t count on charisma or positional power for influence. Experienced project managers use project information as their go-to influence tool. Here are ways project information can turn you into an expert influencer.

Keep people informed about the project schedule. How many days have you had when someone hasn’t asked, “When will the project be done?” or “When will you need my resources?” or “Can we change the schedule?” A detailed project schedule answers all these questions. It can show the impact on important tasks if you change the schedule or alter the date a critical resource becomes available. Let your project schedule do the heavy lifting when it comes to influencing stakeholders.

Address risks and costs. Stakeholders, reacting without thinking, might request changes or actions that add scope, reduce testing, or deliver sooner. Address the risks and potential costs of such actions — in advance — by including them in risk, scope, and cost management plans. That way, you have ready-made arguments for sticking to agreed-upon plans. 

Highlight trade-offs. In other instances, stakeholders request changes to plans based on wise business decisions.  Show the trade-offs within these decisions. Fast-tracking a schedule adds risk. Crashing the project schedule adds cost. Presenting trade-offs is powerful: you either underscore the impact of change or end the discussion if the impact is deemed unacceptable. Either way, stakeholders move forward understanding the impact of their decisions.

Leverage experts. Building project deliverables with the help of technical experts strengthens your project planning. Use the influence of your team’s experience to confirm your approach. If you don’t have experts in-house, reach out to contractors or other project managers and technicians who have delivered projects like yours. Real-world experience boosts your ability to influence stakeholders.

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