Renewing your passion as a project manager

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Photo by bantersnaps on Unsplash

It’s easy to succumb to the pressure of a steady parade of project challenges and forget the plusses of being a project manager. To regain your project manager passion, consider the contributions a project manager makes:

Driving your business’s success. Projects don’t succeed without project managers and businesses don’t move forward without successful projects. For every new product, customer success story, or happy-dance stock price move for your business, you know projects are behind those successes. Project managers are the on-the-ground tacticians of a business and drive its ongoing viability.

Nurturing your team members. As a project manager, you make a significant difference in the lives of your team members. I have had to protect my team members from business challenges on every project I’ve managed! Poorly thought out changes, management probes, oversold benefits, and priority squabbles are a few examples where you have to step in to protect your team. That way, your team can complete their tasks and advance the project. Plus, you can develop your team members by mentoring them and assigning skill-building tasks.

Satisfying and supporting consumers. Your role in bringing projects to life can affect consumers in significant ways. Project end-products fulfill not only your business’s needs, but also your customers’ needs. Keep in mind that your projects provide new ways of producing work, servicing products, and supporting the community. Your efforts as a project manager move the economy forward!

Growing yourself. Your project management role can be a vehicle for personal growth. I’ve learned something from every project I’ve worked on, like the inner workings of an industry to new technology to best practices for leading people. By definition, a project creates a unique product or result, so learning comes with the territory. Use your projects to take advantage of exposure to new business areas, new technologies and new or enhanced skills. Step outside your comfort zone to learn even more. 

Promoting fun. Curt W. Coffman and Kathie Sorensen, PhD authored the book Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. When you create a positive project culture where fun is promoted, you will realize better results. And that reinforces your purpose as a project manager to: create new outcomes, support the business, and provide opportunities for people. 

To learn more, search for “project management” (or any topic that interests you) in the LinkedIn Learning library. 

Life management = project management

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I manage my life like one long project. Quick review: It’s a project because my life is a temporary endeavour (I don’t want to live forever) that is unique and comes with a budget. Life is messy so it really needs managing! Here’s why I project-manage my life and you should manage yours, too.

Priorities are important – and the primary stakeholder is demanding. Like any project, there are many possible outcomes and multiple ways to reach each outcome. Prioritizing outcomes and deciding how to achieve them is my approach to projects: Understand the possibilities, look at the alternative strategies and choose the best one. For my life project, I decide what I want, how I can achieve those things, and pick my path. The big difference between my life and a project is the primary stakeholder…I’m more demanding and second-guess myself more than any of my other project stakeholders have ever done!

You never get time back. The first question about a project is usually “what’s the schedule?” My first task every morning is to check my schedule. Whether for personal time or a project, every minute is something you can’t redo. Getting the most out of time is important, whether I’m managing deliverables or delivering dinner to friends.

Money creates balance and safety. A budget helps balance income and expenses in projects and in life. Effectively managing finances helps support my lifestyle — my home, car, hobbies travels, and philanthropy. Think cost-benefits. Finances support the tools and people who deliver my “lifestyle” and minimize the risk of my life project being cancelled!

Regular health checks are vital. Exercising, keeping fit, eating properly and regular medical check-ups maintain my vitality. Besides hiring the right people, deploying the right tools, and managing diligently, regularly scheduled life status meetings are important. Not just medical check-ups. It’s important to take the time to evaluate my life and decide whether my goals have changed. Life status meetings are also a good time to identify what’s working, not working, and what I could be doing better. (If you don’t like meeting with yourself, consider creating a board of directors for your life – which is a topic for another article.)

To check out my courses, jump to http://linkedin-learning.pxf.io/bonnie-blog

Things going badly? Have More Meetings!

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When your project isn’t going well, you and your stakeholders need information. FAST! As counter intuitive as it sounds, the best thing to do is to have MORE meetings. Not just any meetings, however. Here are a few effective meeting strategies when things are rocky:

Run short, focused data-sharing sessions. Project conditions change rapidly when problems and unexpected circumstances surface, so constant communication is needed. Try holding multiple 15-minute meetings, for example, one at the start of the day and one right after lunch. These meetings help you provide team members with what they need to know and what they need to do to recover the project. Frequent focused meetings also help ensure you have the latest status of recovery tasks.

Skip the “everyone is invited” norm. People often complain that meetings are a waste of time—and that’s a legitimate complaint. Meetings usually run too long and aren’t useful. When your team is under pressure, determine who needs to be at your short, focused meetings. Set conditions for team member attendance and communicate those expectations so people who don’t need to attend can continue working on critical tasks. For example, a team member is finishing a critical deliverable and can miss the meeting to get it done.

Hold separate meetings with content relevant to specific attendees. To avoid wasting time, hold meetings for different groups providing information relevant to that specific group. Divide your stakeholders into teams of people that need to work together and have separate meetings for each team. To maintain synergy with your full team, consider having your entire team attend one of the daily meetings each week. Set the agenda for that meeting with items relevant to the entire team.

Talk about the “elephants in the room.” Information is key to success. The more transparent you are, the more transparent your team will be. The earlier you share good and bad news, the more information you will receive in return. Above all else, accurate and complete information can help you recover your project.

Remember that you are leading humans. Effectiveness comes from team members who know and understand each other professionally and personally, especially when things are challenging. Recognize birthdays, significant accomplishments, not so significant accomplishments, and instances when stakeholders acted as a team. On occasion, bring food to your team meetings. Remember, people with fears and concerns are in the room with you. Be thoughtful and calm, and your stakeholders will mirror that behavior.

For more about meetings, check out Dave Crenshaw’s Leading Productive Meetings course.

How projects fail and what to do about it

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Photo by Mauro Sbicego from Unsplash

You don’t have to look far to find project failures. While many circumstances contribute to project failure, a few common circumstances often are the culprits that make good projects go bad. Here are the most prevalent management failures that lead to failed projects:

A lack of proper management. Projects without professionally trained —and supported— project managers are like sailboats without a rudder. Eventually they will crash. The only question is what they will hit before sinking. Proper project management is mandatory.

Poor stakeholder management. Generating deliverables that don’t meet the expectations of stakeholders usually results in project failure. Disenchanted stakeholders rarely use deliverables they didn’t want or expect, no matter how good they may be. Making sure stakeholders buy into the products you’re producing is vital to delivering successful projects.

Throwing good money after bad. One of my favorite phrases is, “Fail early, it’s cheaper.” Nowhere is this more accurate than with projects. Once a project becomes troubled, cancellation may be the best outcome, because it saves money, time and, in the long run, can enhance your reputation. Justifying spending more money to validate the money you have spent so far is foolish. Look at where the project is today, and the time and money it will take to generate business value. If the money it takes to recover the project stands up to the scrutiny of a business case, then continue. If not, cancellation is the best alternative.

Avoiding the perception of failure while you are already seen as failing. Managers rarely understand that failed projects that take forever to “go away” do more reputational damage than one cancelled to minimize corporate impacts. Project cancellation is a proactive alternative to failure. When things go bad, understand the root cause and stop the project. Then, perform better project definition, risk management or other alternatives to start a new project with an increased chance for success.

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

Top 5 team building tips for PMs

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Photo by Leon from Unsplash

Project managers set the tone for their project teams. The best team building occurs when you take advantage of everyday opportunities to boost your team’s morale. Here are some project management team building tips:

Use your kickoff meeting to shape your project team. Anytime you get your team together is an opportunity to build team morale. The kickoff meeting is the first – and in many ways the most significant – opportunity to develop team synergy. Hold a contest to pick a team name. Have your sponsor give a motivation speech to the team. Or schedule time to get to know one another.  

Boost your team during weekly status meetings. Status meetings are great opportunities to generate enthusiasm. Recognize achievements such as consecutive periods of “all status targets met,” handling a sensitive customer situation, or a technical idea that moves the project forward. When things aren’t too great, use the status meeting to generate new ideas to rescue the project and encourage the team to keep moving forward. 

Celebrate milestones. Recognize the team when you reach a milestone. When a milestone was late or over budget, acknowledge the obstacles that were overcome and the lessons learned. That helps boost morale. For longer projects, create milestones to recognize progress, which will help maintain morale and forward momentum.

Reach out to team members – particularly remote team members.  Hold one-on-one conversations with project team members on both a business and personal level.  Here are two great questions to enhance a team member’s sense of belonging and purpose: “What does this project mean to our customer?” and “What does this project mean to you?” Listen carefully to the answers. The first question can confirm team alignment. The second question can help you choose the best assignments for your team members to maximize the value the project provides to them.

Formally recognize the value your team members deliver. Write a one or two paragraph summary of each team member’s contributions and send it to their manager. This helps you earn a loyal team member for future projects. Do this diligently and you’ll have a team with high morale before your new project even begins, because team members will pursue a position in your projects!

For more about team management, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course or Cyndi Snyder-Dionisio’s Leading Remote Projects and Virtual Teams course.

The Top 5 Skills of Senior Project Managers

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Senior level project management is more than competence. The myriad responsibilities that come with this role require broader skills.

Razor-sharp business focus. Senior PMs understand and manage their project priority against other active initiatives in the portfolio. Senior PMs clearly articulate this information to negotiate with stakeholders. They also keenly leverage their sponsor’s strengths to successfully launch and guide their projects.  Senior project managers also deeply understand their project’s products and how they’ll impact their stakeholders.

An easy manner with all stakeholder types. Senior project managers readily deal with all kinds and levels of stakeholders, even the ones who don’t share the same agenda.  They advise senior leaders to influence their decision making.  They also work well with entry level team members because they generate trust through straightforward communications. Senior PMs can manage stakeholders because they fully understand the status and role each stakeholder plays in their projects.

Delegation and coaching to support their projects and team members. As larger, more complex projects require more management, the Senior PM delegates – especially technical items – to team members with specialized skills. They also rely on others to directly manage the project, including the coordination of status reporting, detection and resolution of project issues, and handling some customer interactions. The Senior PM takes time to understand other’s capabilities, so they know when to intervene to get tasks accomplished. The best senior PMs use coaching to develop team members. Skillful coaching allows the Senior PM to support and enhance the skills of others and get the best out of their teams.

Change Perspective.  Senior project managers determine the degree of organizational change their stakeholders can handle. This involves both the short-term impacts and how the project’s deliverables fit into the business’s strategic direction. Senior PMs design their projects to successfully deliver change with both sound business processes and technical deliverables. 

Change from a business perspective requires the Senior PM to understand the actions of competitors, new demands from customers, and other changes in the marketplace that require the business to respond. They also understand the capabilities of their business team members, so the project’s new tools and processes are understandable to business stakeholders and can be readily deployed. 

Mastery of risk management. Senior project managers cope with risks that aren’t in their direct sphere of influence. They utilize risk response plans that are tailored not just to the outcome of a risk event, but also the multiple causes that can trigger it. For example, purchased components may not show up in time. The lesser experienced project manager will order extra product from another vendor to mitigate the risk. That’s a good response strategy…unless delivery drivers are on strike. Senior PMs anticipate and accommodate the different events that can turn risks into issues.

For more about being a project manager, check out the courses in the Become a Project Manager learning path.

Stakeholder Management: 5 Ways to Resolve Conflict

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This week’s article comes from my fellow LinkedIn Learning author Natasha Kasimtseva.

Projects are the vehicle of change, and a key project manager competency is leading the team through rough waters of learning and evolving. Resource constraints, competing priorities and requirements, differences of opinion – these are a few examples of the sources of conflict that can impede project delivery. So how do we reconcile differences and resolve conflicts on a project? 

  • Recognize that conflict is not always a bad thing. Conflict can be an opportunity to enhance clarity and alignment. Say your team is resource-constrained and your key stakeholders disagree on which features to build first. This can be a great opportunity to go back to the drawing board and evaluate and rank features to make sure the ones with the most business value get implemented first. 
  • Pay extra attention to communication. Building lines of communication becomes more critical in the era of remote work. Information exchange that used to happen organically (“water-cooler” conversations, team lunches, informal touch-points) now have to be engineered using communication technology. Invite your team members to have coffee over Zoom or schedule an informal touch-point using MS Teams. 
  • Keep the project team on the same page. A Single Source of Truth for the team to lean on is a great way to reduce confusion and potential conflict. Project management software with real time reporting can be a great investment. Tools like JIRA and SharePoint can provide virtual space where the team members can retrieve necessary information to stay informed. 
  • Try short interactive meetings rather than lengthy project debriefs. More interactive methods like SCRUMS and STAND-UPs resolve misunderstanding between technical and business teams.  Shorter, more frequent meetings provide teams an open forum to remove roadblocks and collaborate. 
  • Focus on belonging and inclusion to create trust and respect within the team. As project managers, we often work with multi-disciplinary teams and have to be aware of different layers of diversity, including organizational and cultural. Aligning your team around common project goals and team values will build a stronger synergy and break up the silos. 

If you would like to learn more about managing project stakeholders and conflict resolution, check out these LinkedIn courses:

Project Management Foundations

Managing Project Stakeholders 

Mistakes to Avoid When Resolving Conflict 

Developing Cross-Cultural Intelligence

5 Ways to Increase Project Quality

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Photo by Adeolu Eletu from Unsplash

A big part of project success is meeting business objectives. Project quality is the degree to which a project meets its objectives. Here are five tips to ensure the quality of your project outcomes.

  • Don’t jump to the solution too quickly. The foundation of delivering quality is ensuring that your project solves the problem or supports the desired opportunity. To ensure that you deliver a quality solution, take the time to research the current tools, processes, strengths, and weaknesses in your business area.
  • Unfortunately, projects are often launched with a particular solution in mind. For example, if your organization runs a project to implement a new finance system when lack of financial control is due to poor control processes, the project is a waste of time and money. Do your homework to identify the problem and root cause before launching a project.
  • Build customer engagement from the project start. You need input from the right people to deliver a solution that supports the stakeholders’ needs—not only knowledgeable people, but people from each affected stakeholder group. Include those people as you gather requirements and don’t assume you understand the stakeholders’ needs. Otherwise, your project deliverables could go unused, when the unsatisfied stakeholders declare them unfit for the business.
  • Don’t shortcut testing. Testing is often scheduled at the end of the project. As deadlines loom, testing is often reduced to keep delivery schedules on track. Although that approach may deliver on time, the probability of product issues is high. To ensure quality project outcomes, make testing time sacred and include testing activities throughout your project lifecycle.  For example, reviews of paper deliverables, engineering models, mock business walkthroughs, and software prototypes will save you save time and money in the long run.
  • Focus on business processes. Two process-related activities are crucial, yet often overlooked. First, be sure to capture as-is processes, so your project doesn’t overlook business activities it needs to accommodate.  Second, update to-be business processes as deliverables are built and changes accommodated. If you don’t, staff training won’t cover the changes, which could lead to misunderstandings about what your product can and cannot do. To achieve business outcomes,  implement standard project activities to capture and document as-is and to-be business processes. As the team produces deliverables, it should also create and document the corresponding new or altered business processes.
  • Take human factors into account. Peter M. Senge said, “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.” The perceived quality of your deliverables depends on your ability to bring your stakeholders along on your project’s change journey. Involve your stakeholders early, keep them informed as you progress, especially as changes are made. By doing so, you will increase your chances of your outcomes satisfying the business objectives.

For more about project quality, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Quality course.

Project sponsor and project customer: what’s the difference?

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In a recent LinkedIn Live session, someone asked, “What exactly is the difference between a project sponsor and a project customer? Sometimes, the sponsor is also the customer, but the roles have notable differences: 

Authorizing or terminating the project. The project comes about because the project customer has a problem to solve or opportunity to pounce on. And the project customer’s needs must be met for the project to be a success.

However, it’s the project sponsor who authorizes the project launch, usually by signing a Project Charter. (The Charter also names the project manager and lays out their responsibilities and authority to manage the project.) The sponsor can also cancel the project should business conditions change or due to poor project performance. The project sponsor typically consults with the project customer before launching or terminating the project. Bottom line, the sponsor makes the final decision.

Directing project governance. The sponsor owns responsibility for meeting the terms of the project’s business case.  The sponsor is responsible for managing the project manager, sharing project status, ensuring customer needs are met, authorizing risk response actions, and handling issues that the project manager can’t resolve. While much of the work related to these responsibilities sits with the project manager, the project sponsor has the ultimate responsibility to ensure the project is managed with sound business judgment.  On the other hand, the customer’s role is to comply with project governance and inform the project manager if governance is being compromised within the business area they represent. For example, customers need to analyze change management requests to ensure they are in the best interest of the customers’ business areas.

Funding. The source of funding may come from the sponsor’s budget or from the budgets of project customers. The project sponsor, however, controls allocation of funding for the project and management of any project contingency funds. Decisions on the release of funding to obtain project-related equipment, supplies, and contracted skills or to pay employees assigned to the project are made by the project sponsor. If finances are constrained, the customer typically helps prioritize deliverables. The customer and sponsor will discuss different business scenarios, and then the sponsor decides on the final prioritization.

Assigning and prioritizing project resource work. The customer informs the project manager of staffing constraints due to existing workloads, but that’s where their responsibility stops. The project sponsor allocates the skilled resources needed to complete project tasks. This allocation often involves prioritizing workloads, because many project resources don’t work full-time on projects. They have their “day jobs” and project work represents responsibilities over and above their normal workloads. The project sponsor often needs to relieve staff of some of their normal work responsibilities to allow project tasks to be completed on schedule. Project resources often report to managers other than the project sponsor, so negotiation is required to get the resources necessary to meet project deadlines.

For more about project sponsor and customer roles, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Managing change in agile projects

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A learner in my LinkedIn Learning online project management course asked, “Is it true that agile methodologies don’t require change management to handle new requests?” Actually, change management is baked into the Agile approach. Here is how Agile manages change using the terminology of traditional project methodologies. 

There is a Change Control Board. In Agile, the team plays the role of the Change Control Board. When features are being developed and improvements are suggested, the team accepts or rejects them. When new features are proposed, the team determines whether they will be included in the product backlog. Like a traditional project approach, the team consists of both technical and business team members, so appropriate backgrounds come together to make change-related decisions. 

Change requests are received and evaluated. During each sprint, the team examines the work in progress and discusses improvements. This serves the same purpose as the submission and evaluation of change requests in traditional methodologies. Similarly, when additional features are added to the backlog, the team examines and prioritizes them. If the team prioritizes them to be completed within the project’s schedule and budget constraints, the features are delivered. 

The impacts of change are assessed. When a new feature is accepted, sized, added to the backlog plan and prioritized, the impacts on time and scope are evaluated. Sizing the feature describes the impact to cost. Adding the feature to the backlog changes the scope. If no features are removed when the new feature is added, then the scope is increased. If another feature is removed when the new feature is added because of time and/or cost considerations, that means the scope is managed according to the business value. 

Change requests are resolved and communicated. Features that are developed come from the backlog. Any feature added to the backlog during sprint cycles is the equivalent of a change. Delivery of that feature is essentially the same as resolving a change request. Communication of change resolution occurs through the backlog status boards, iteration plans and release plans.

For more about Agile projects, check out the LinkedIn Learning Agile learning path.