Archive for category: Project Management

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You have delivered every component of your project, and your project team has started to disperse. It’s time for project closure, right? Not so fast! Here are other critical steps to take before closing your project. 

• Confirm that business value is being generated. A project shouldn’t close until the business acknowledges value. However, some projects won’t generate business value for several months, for example, until new products sell. In other instances, cost savings trickle down over time.  keep a project open to track outcomes. This helps the project team understand if there are shortcomings in the project deliverables. Addressing those shortcomings educates team members so they can improve their skills for future projects.
• Verify allocated costs. Check to see whether costs are still showing up in your project accounts. If they are, further work might be required, such as confirming final contractor payments. It could also mean someone is incorrectly allocating costs to your project. Correct these errors before closure so your project costs aren’t inflated.
• Determine if your sponsor is still engaged. If your sponsor continues to call meetings and discuss the project, it’s too soon to close the project. Work with your sponsor and review any outcomes they believe are missing.  If the sponsor pushes for items beyond the scope of the project, seek to understand their point of view. Try to convince them to allow you to close the completed project and launch a new one. This new project would have its own business case to create the extra outcomes your sponsor desires.
• Confirm stakeholders are using project deliverables without help. Business value should be generated without assistance by the project team. Otherwise, the cost of helping stakeholders may negate the value achieved. Before closing a project, ensure your deliverables are being used as intended. All stakeholders should independently use your deliverables in a consistent manner. If not, revisit your training and make corrections.

If you perform other steps before closing a project, tell us about what you do in the comments section.

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

Coming up:

I have an Office Hours in the works for September with Doug Rose and Chris Croft, two of my (many) idols in the LinkedIn Learning instructor community. Look for more info soon!

I’m almost done updating Project Management Foundations. In a few months, you can look for the updated edition, which includes some info on PMBoK7 and other changes.

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Getting pressured by management to deliver a project early is common, so you should be ready for it. It’s important to note that pushing an early delivery doesn’t mean you’re in crisis mode. It’s a risk vs business value balancing act. Here are tips to balance risk and bring in the project delivery date. 

Cut requirements and initial product reviews. When working with a homogenous stakeholder group, cutting reviews can save you time, with controllable risk. Before proposing this, ensure your stakeholders all have the same business goals. Also, ensure they are attending status meetings, so they understand project decisions. Alternately, you can perform requirements and product reviews while development continues. This introduces the risk of needing to back up to make corrections. But it is less risky than skipping reviews.

Logically cut testing. Logically approaching test plans can be effective when looking to deliver early. Test only those functions where faults will have a notable business impact. That way, you can fix errors found after delivery with minimal impact on stakeholders. This is different from cutting testing altogether. Broad testing cuts deliver mixed results, at best. Often, the impact of recovering from substantial errors overcomes any time savings.

Reduce scope. Cutting scope can be the easiest way to deliver early but often has hidden risks. Stakeholders’ disappointment with the reduced scope can diminish confidence in the project outcomes. Also, confidence in the project team, and in project management can suffer. Before cutting scope, poll stakeholders. Understand their views on delivering early, versus reducing scope.

Fast tracking or crashing tasks. Save time by changing your schedule and working on tasks in parallel (fast tracking). Or, you can add people to complete tasks earlier (crashing). Fast tracking adds product risk, as working tasks in parallel can create rework. For example, let us say I decided to write book chapters in parallel. The risk is what end up with in Chapter 5 might mean I have to change something already written in Chapter 6. Crashing adds a different risk. Crashing adds cost, as you spend more to perform the task. This is because crashing requires more coordination between people to avoid errors. The lesson? Apply fast tracking or crashing with consideration to the added risk.

Deploy agile methods. Agile often results in early delivery of business value. But it isn’t for every project. If you aren’t using agile techniques, before making the switch ensure you have a leader versed in agile. That leader can confirm what projects are right for agile. They can also guide the team, and management, through agile to improve success.

Do you have any tips and tricks to handle the pressure of delivering a project early? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about how to handle the pressures of delivering a project early, check out my project management foundations course.

Coming up:

I have an Office Hours in the works for September with Doug Rose and Chris Croft, two of my (many) idols in the LinkedIn Learning instructor community. Look for more info soon!

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Management might put a project on hold because other priorities take precedence or it needs recovery. When it’s time to relaunch, you don’t pick up where you left off. Here’s the sequence of steps to take to relaunch a project:

• Document what changed. Team members must understand that things will be different. Otherwise, they might not dedicate themselves to the project for fear of failure. To restore confidence, share changes, such as changed priorities, new project management approaches, and scope changes with all stakeholders.

• Meet to review or revise project goals. Revisit project outcomes in case business circumstances have changed. Talk to business stakeholders and technical team members about reprioritizing outcomes or proposing new ones. Make sure that the project is still feasible. Communicate any changes to project goals to all stakeholders.

• Hold a re-kickoff meeting. A relaunch is like a new project starting. At the meeting have the sponsor reaffirm the organization’s dedication to deliver the project and share the schedule and budget. Communicate any reprioritized project goals. Introduce new team members that are joining the relaunched project.

• Expand project monitoring and reporting. Focus status reporting on the root cause of the project stoppage. Senior leaders will want assurance that priority or process issues won’t reoccur. Use status metrics that can provide that assurance. Discuss any other concerns senior leaders have with the relaunched project and tailor your status reporting to address those issues.

• Be positive. People will watch your attitude and behavior as project manager as the relaunched project progresses. Maintain a positive attitude, and you’ll inspire confidence in the relaunched project.

If you have other tips for relaunching a project, share with us in the comments section.

For more about launching projects, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming up:

I’m thrilled to share that my course Project Management Foundations is LinkedIn Learning’s #5 Most Popular Course of the year globally! These skills are important today and into the future because change drives new projects and the pace of change continually increases. The course is free through August 2022.

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Project ideas pop up all the time, but that doesn’t mean they are all worth pursuing. Companies want to reap enough benefits from the time and money they spend on projects. To make sure a candidate project is worthwhile, someone needs to complete some prerequisites before the project is launched.

Who gets these prerequisites in place when the project idea is so early in initiation? Management might ask a project manager to work on them. And that person might become the project manager if the project is approved — but also might not. If the organization has a project management office, a PMO staff member could take on this work.

Here are the prerequisites that ensure a candidate project is worth pursuing:

An engaged sponsor. For a project to succeed, the sponsor needs to believe in the project’s business value. That’s because the sponsor:

• supplies time and funding to determine if the project is viable
• identifies the research the project requires
• decides the degree of risk the business is willing to accept
• figures out business priorities
• works through conflicts if key stakeholders disagree about the project’s focus

A clear goal. There should be a clear definition of the candidate’s project outcomes. The definition can be high-level. The sponsor and key stakeholders need to understand and agree on these outcomes. (Project initiation then focuses on picking the approach to create those outcomes.) The viability of the project also depends on resource availability, the ability to change business processes, and dependence on old systems that may be difficult to alter.

Available business analyst skills. Some projects focus on improving the way the organization does business. Others produce a new product or service. Business analysts and members of the business need to work together to evaluate these opportunities. It’s tempting to sketch out new processes or envision new products without thorough research and engaging business analysts. Skipping this effort adds risk and increases the chance of inaccurate assumptions that lead to project failure.

An understanding of priorities and budget. Organizations have only so much money to spend on projects. And they also prioritize projects based on how they support the organizations’ goals and objectives. Whoever evaluates the candidate must identify the candidate’s budget and priority. Otherwise, people might view the project as a waste of time or out of line with management’s objectives. 

An experienced project manager. The chance of project success increases when an experienced project manager takes the helm. The level of experience depends on factors like the project’s significance, complexity, and size. For instance, someone trained in project management but with little experience could handle a small, lower-priority project (and gain experience at the same time). A critical and complex project will need a senior project manager.

Who has performed these early steps in projects you’ve worked on? Are there other steps you’ve seen performed before launch? If so, share with us in the comments section.

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

Coming Up:

Office Hours– On August 9, Sam Yankelevitch and I will talk about overcoming obstacles for global and remote project teams. Working remotely is a reality today: it’s increasingly important to pay attention to the quality of our interactions with our distant colleagues. Language, culture, and distance influence the way we work together with stakeholders on our projects. We can either leave these factors to chance, or we can learn to leverage them to improve our project outcomes.

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A project review is typically run from within an organization, while an external compliance-monitoring organization, such as a consulting firm or government agency, often conducts a project audit. Without the proper perspective, a project review or audit can be like a trip to the dentist. Here are different management approaches you should take with project reviews and audits to make them as constructive as possible.

• Understand the scope of the exercise. The first step to support a review or audit is to understand its scope and intent. Typically, the primary topics are: 1. compliance with documented processes or accepted practices and 2. the mindful use of money. For a supportive review, share the available documentation concerning the project so the review team can select what they want to review. Government audits (or reviews that are trying to target errors rather than educate or be supportive) are a different story. For these, ask the audit or review team what documentation they require and provide that. This will limit the scope of the audit/review and make the exercise easier to manage. Note: you might be tempted to flood auditors with lots of documentation to show your project control capability. However, that usually backfires, because it gives auditors more targets to investigate.

• Gather information on your project management processes. Have artifacts ready to show that you’ve conformed with agreed-to project management processes. If you haven’t complied with a documented process, demonstrate that you consciously did that with management’s concurrence so you can provide that to the review or audit team. Documentation that review teams typically request include risk or change logs, your project schedule with notes on the assumptions used to build it (like team member availability of 30 hours per week), and decision logs.

• If you discover that you overlooked a process, proactively create an action plan to correct that oversight. Say you’re preparing for a review or audit and find an obvious deficiency. Correct it by developing an action plan to implement the overlooked process. If there is time before the review or audit begins, document progress against your action plans. The team may still ask questions about this oversight. However, reviewers and auditors usually react positively to proactive corrective actions.
• Document important conversations. A project management best practice is to document key conversations, especially when the people involved made decisions. However, you might discover that some conversations slipped through the cracks. If you discover gaps in your documentation, go back and fill them in including signatures from the parties to the agreement. DON’T backdate the documents you create. (Use the current date, even though that highlights belated documentation.) If the reviews or audit team discovers your backdating practice, your integrity will be in question, which results in more scrutiny that will cause interruptions and delay you from returning to the job of delivering your project.
• Answer questions.– If the review or audit is focused on compliance and not supportive of you and the project team, answer only the questions asked. Based on the approach of a supportive review team, use your judgment and share information you believe is constructive. You should manage auditors differently, because they are searching for compliance items to scrutinize. “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” should be shared with auditors…but don’t go beyond the scope of the question asked. Doing so will raise more questions and potentially expand the scope of the audit. Coach your project team members to follow this practice and things will be easier to manage. It’s also wise to debrief team members questioned by auditors and log the exchanged questions and answers. That makes it easier to respond to follow up queries from auditors or get clarification when an audit team comes to a conclusion that doesn’t reflect reality.
• If auditors are on track to discover something, share the issue and ask for advice. Trying to hide something ends badly when auditors discover deception. (We’ve watched enough police procedural TV shows to know that!) Develop an action plan to address the problem and then share the issue and plan with the audit team and ask for their advice. Using the audit as an improvement opportunity is a positive outcome, which is much better than being seen as someone who didn’t pay proper attention to project governance and tried to hide it. Be as open as possible with a supportive review team. You might find they have experience, hints and tips that will help your project and help you in your project management career.

If you have any tips on how to handle audits and reviews, share with us in the comments section!