Archive for category: Project Management

There are hundreds of things you can do as a project manager to deliver a project. How do you prioritize what’s on your project management to-do list? Here are tips from the pros:

Let the environment guide you. Monitor your project environment and respond to concerns that arise. Things change day to day in a project. Teams can get stressed. Key staff can argue. Stakeholders hear rumors and get fearful. Unexpected issues arise. Ensure you address these concerns, and you’ll create a positive environment for project delivery.

Accommodate your senior stakeholders. Design your to-do list around what your stakeholders need to trust in your project management. Understand their desires. Are they detail oriented? Do they want frequent status updates, or alerts only if there’s a problem? The last thing you want are worried senior leaders, so accommodate their needs – but don’t hide bad news from them!

Focus on risk. Keep risk monitoring in the forefront. Talk about risk often with your team. Watch for risk triggers and be proactive with your response strategies. Supporting a risk management mindset is powerful – make it a significant part of your to-do list.

Complement your project team. Every project team has strengths and weaknesses. Use your experience to make up for team shortcomings.  When appropriate, offer your help and teach your team members. Ensure you aren’t taking over their responsibilities —  you already have enough to do as the PM!

Support your team. Your team is crucial to project success. Take care of them. Pay attention and support their needs. Thank them when they do well and guide them when they go astray. It’s easy to forget this in hectic project environments, so ensure supporting your team is a to-do list priority.

For more info, watch my course Project Management Foundations.

It’s irresponsible to promote early estimates as being accurate. Early on, there are too many unknowns. A responsible approach focuses on communicating our estimates as gradually more accurate. Here’s what you can do to produce responsible estimates.  

• Label your estimates. An estimate without a label implies the value is accurate. Label your estimates to indicate their accuracy, such as rough order of magnitude, budgetary, or definitive. Define the accuracy range for each label, such as -20% to +50%. Then, indicate when a more accurate estimate can be produced.
• Re-estimate at key points in the project. Events like finalizing a contract provide significant information to improve your estimates. Produce refined estimates after each of these events. Develop and communicate a schedule for re-estimating, tied to the events, to demonstrate a clear rationale for how you intend to incrementally improve your estimates. 
• Keep refining estimates during project execution. Don’t stop estimating after planning is complete. As major deliverables are produced and costs become known, continue to refine your estimates. This further demonstrates that estimation accuracy evolves, and reflects your concern for the money and time you spend.

Project management entails managing expectations. You can set expectations about estimating by creating an estimating schedule and estimating to that schedule as your project progresses. That’s a responsible and rational way to manage estimating.

To learn more about estimating, check out the estimating movie in my Project Management Foundations course.

#projectmanagement #projectpointers

Bob McGannon and I talk about whether a project manager can have too much authority. We also talk about what to do to make sure everyone understands the authority the project manager does have.

Tracking project progress is part of a project manager’s job. Gantt charts aren’t always the best way to report progress–they provide too much detail for busy leaders. Using milestone charts are better for reporting progress. Here are my recommendations.

• In your project schedule, create at least 2 milestones per reporting period. Capture dates the milestones were completed and share the rationale for early or late completions. The milestones don’t have to be significant events, just tangible partial or full deliverable completions. If necessary, break down longer tasks into shorter ones to allow for these milestones.
• Don’t abandon the Gantt chart! Manage your schedule and share details with a Gantt chart. It’s your best management tool. Use it whenever detailed tracking information is requested.
• Create “super milestones” for major project events. Identify significant events with milestones in bold or capital letters. Use these to share high level progress. Continually track planned dates, and revised projections for completion of super milestones to show overall progress.
• Update your milestones as the project progresses. As task completion actual dates can vary your schedule, ensure you continue to have 2 milestones per reporting period. Add new milestones if necessary. Also, add or revise dates for all your milestones as any project change requests are approved and added to your schedule.

Tracking progress isn’t the traditional way to apply milestones, but they create two levels of project tracking detail with minimal additional work. Share your intent to use milestones for tracking with leaders, especially if they have only seen milestones used for significant events.

To learn more see the “Learn to use milestones” movie in my course Project Management Foundations.

ProjectManager.com goes into more detail about what you need to track project progress. Check out Project Tracker: The Ultimate Guide for another take.

Bob McGannon and I talk about project manager styles and the best one to choose in this video

To learn more about project management, check out the Become a Project Manager learning path at LinkedIn Learning.