Objectives for Successful Testing

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Objectives for Successful Testing

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Testing your project’s products is a critical step in delivering successful projects – testing is one way to confirm that your project accomplishes what it’s supposed to. An effective testing scheme must meet the following objectives.

  • Validate that requirements are satisfied. There should be a specific test for every requirement to confirm that it has been satisfied. If any requirement proves difficult to verify, revisit the requirement to ensure it meets the SMART test (specific, measurable, agreed-upon, attainable, realistic, and time-constrained). It’s a good idea to use a spreadsheet or tool to track requirements, verification test details, and test status (not completed, completed with error(s), completed and closed). That way, you can ensure that all requirements have a test plan and you haven’t overlooked any tests. 
  • Find and repair defects. Well-structured tests find a defect, if a defect exists, and don’t find a defect if everything works as it should. To ensure your tests work this way, identify what successful test results look like and what errors might occur. That way, when a test produces an error, it should indicate the repair that’s needed. For example, a test for a sales voucher would confirm “boundary dates”. Does an expiration date of July 1st mean that the voucher can be used on July 1st, or that it should be used by June 30? Specific tests will validate that the system correctly interprets the intent for the voucher expiration.
  • Build confidence in the overall solution. In the later stages of testing, schedule test sessions for stakeholders to use and become familiar with new systems and processes. This will increase stakeholder confidence — even when small defects occur in those sessions. Capturing, understanding, and promptly correcting errors can increase confidence. Work with your organizational change management team to schedule these test sessions when you believe products are nearly error-free, at a convenient time and place for your stakeholders. 
  • Improve the product development process. A good testing process notes trends in the types and causes of errors. Analyze the root cause of errors to decrease the number of errors in future projects. Business analysts participating in the testing process can help. As they learn the cause of errors, they can produce requirement details that avoid errors in the future. For example, they can specify that a sales voucher expiration date is the last date on which the voucher can be used. This provides clarity around whether the expiration date mentioned earlier would be June 30 or July 1st.

How do you plan and track your testing? What are the challenges and best practices you’ve found? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about testing, check out Greta Blash’s Business Analysis Foundations course.

Coming Up

Join Chris Croft and me on August 22, 2023 at 9am MT for our live broadcast “Do You Need Project Management Certifications, and If So, Which Ones?”

One of the most frequent questions Chris Croft and I get is “Do I need project management certification?” quickly followed by “Which certification or certifications should I get?” Everyone’s journey is different, just like Chris and I took very different paths. So, we’re going to explore whether project management certifications are valuable, what else you can do to make yourself stand out, and finally, which certifications to look at if you decide you need them. Bring your questions to this informative and fun session. By the way, this topic is just one that we explore in our new course, How to Launch a Career in Project Management. 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 43,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Win-Win: Increasing Project Delivery Capability by Providing Opportunity to Your Teams

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Win-Win: Increasing Project Delivery Capability by Providing Opportunity to Your Teams

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Providing opportunities to team members makes them individually more capable, which leads to more organizational capability for delivering projects. Here are things you can do – TODAY – to create this win-win environment. 

  • Encourage sharing of risks and issues that may arise. Project status can change based on what’s been completed, what’s delayed, what stakeholders are talking about, new ideas, and risks that arise. And you’re more likely to hear about them when you support your teams. Here’s how. Whether updates are positive or negative, thank people who share this information. Your first response should be “Does something need fixing?” followed by “What can we learn from this?” That way, you not only address project issues, but also create learning and growth opportunities for your project team members.
  • Build in discussions of risk and learning. One agenda item for every project status meeting should be the status of existing risks and potential new risks. Periodically, include an agenda item for a team member to share something they’ve learned. This presents project work as a way for project team members to learn and grow. It also improves your project outcomes and provides incentive for people to join your project teams in the future.
  • Help team members understand the business relevance of their project work. A WBS and short task names don’t convey the relevance of tasks to your team members. Take the time to help them understand how their deliverables fit into the big picture to improve the business. The deliverables you receive will be on target and your project team members will expand their business knowledge and opportunities for growth.
  • Share the business’s impressions of your project. Often, project managers shield their project teams from business stakeholders, especially when business pressures cause wild reactions to status changes or preliminary project change ideas. But you, as project manager, should share how the business views the project and how its outcomes will be used. That deeper perspective helps the team grasp the strategic relevance of the project and builds capacity to produce results on future projects.

I’m a big fan of win-win approaches, so I know this is an abbreviated list of how to promote and benefit from a win-win focus. How have you promoted win-win in your organization and what other benefits have the organization and individuals received?

For more about working with teams, check out Daniel Station’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.

Coming Up

One of the most frequent questions Chris Croft and I get is “Do I need project management certification?” quickly followed by “Which certification or certifications should I get?” Everyone’s journey is different, just like Chris and I took very different paths. So, we’re going to explore whether project management certifications are valuable, what else you can do to make yourself stand out, and finally, which certifications to look at if you decide you need them. Bring your questions to this informative and fun session. By the way, this topic is just one that we explore in our new course, How to Launch a Career in Project Management.

Register for the Office Hours session here. (The session recording is available on the event page after the live broadcast ends.)

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 42,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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What Conditions Must Be Met to Close Out a Change Request?

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What Conditions Must Be Met to Close Out a Change Request?

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In project change management, stakeholders might request a change to introduce new functions, modify a requirement, or resolve an issue. Many project managers close a change record when the change control board approves the change to proceed. Others when the change has been completed and included in the project deliverables. Neither approach is valid, because the reason for approving the change request in the first place might not have come to fruition. So, what conditions must be met to properly close a project change?

  • The change is completed within an acceptable cost range. When management approves a change based on estimated costs, they believe the benefits justify the cost. If the change has exceeded estimated costs, you need to re-evaluate the validity of the change request’s business case. That is, does a positive business case still exist for keeping the change in place?
    • If the change will produce value that justifies the cost of the change, close the change request        record.
    • If the value provided doesn’t justify the cost, keep the change request record open for further action. For example, you might back out the change from the project to avoid downstream risks or issues with increased solution complexity.
  • Tests prove the installed change satisfies the stated business need. Business stakeholders should test the products created to satisfy the requirements of the project change request. Also, determine whether stakeholders can follow the instructions in any user documentation produced for those products. You can close the change request record only if both activities have been completed successfully. If not, determine whether corrections can be made as part of the current change request record. Or you can create a new change request record to address modifications required to satisfy business stakeholders.
  • The change doesn’t introduce unanticipated risks/issues. A change request approval process includes estimated costs, confirms the approach for making the change, and highlights risks. If the design, construction, or implementation of a change introduces unanticipated risks or issues, keep the change request record open. Then, determine how to address the issue or mitigate the risks. Review your plan to address the issue/risk with key stakeholders. If stakeholders approve of your plan, take those actions, and close the change request record. If the stakeholders aren’t satisfied, rework the plan until the stakeholders are satisfied. You can close the change request record only when unanticipated issues and risks have been addressed to the stakeholders’ satisfaction.
  • The change doesn’t affect other constraints. A change request might affect other project constraints. For instance, implementing a change might require other changes to make it work. This form of scope creep can be expensive. So, watch out for a change domino effect to get something to work. Quality concerns can also arise from the results of a change. What if an added function in a solution leads to occasional operational errors? Answering that question can be difficult and contentious. Finally, a change might increase the cost of ownership of the product(s) the project produces. Of course, this is something that should have been identified during the analysis of the change request before its approval. If something was missed, re-evaluate the change to determine whether the increased support costs are worth the business gains.

Do you have questions or tips for closing out change requests? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about managing project change requests, check out Claudine Peet’s Change Management for Projects course.

Coming Up

Office Hours: Gen AI: The Project Manager’s Edge July 19, 2023, 9am MT

AI is transforming project management in several ways, such as taking over the creation of complex and realistic schedules through analysis of all available data. As a project manager, you may wonder how to harness generative AI applications in your work and how to implement them successfully. Join me and my fellow LinkedIn instructors, Doug Rose, Dave Birss, and Christina Charenkova to explore how to put AI to work on your projects. Sign up here.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than xx,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Refining Your Project Resource Plans

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The people who work on your project are both a significant factor in its success and a significant cost. So, it’s a good idea to analyze resource plans with an eye to maximizing success while minimizing cost. Here are a few things to think about to make your resource plans shine.

  • Get skill levels just right. Most project managers are concerned about not having enough skilled team members. Turns out, being over-skilled can lead to problems, too. It’s great that highly-skilled folks will “do things right the first time.” But they might not do the job any faster. So, a higher-skilled person (who usually costs more) can increase your project cost without shortening the schedule. For the nest results, review your resource plans to make sure you have the right mix of skills you need. If necessary, supplement skills with contractors.
  • Are your resources really available? You might rejoice when you get a talented staff member assigned to your project. But these rock stars are often busy with day-to-day operational tasks. Work with management to confirm that “the talent” will be available to your project over the long term.

If their longer-term availability isn’t assured, consider a different approach. For example, assign a lower-skilled, yet capable team member to the project. And arrange for the higher-skilled person to review their work. That way, you’re more likely to stay on schedule while still obtaining the benefit of the talented team member’s knowledge.

  • When projects run in parallel. Team members can be pulled into multiple projects. If several projects need the same critical resources, plan your project alongside your fellow project managers. This avoids resource conflicts and undesirable schedule delays.
  • How do key stakeholders perceive your team members. Skill isn’t the only criterion for selecting team members. The right attitude and how key stakeholders perceive them is important, too. When key stakeholders don’t trust someone on your team, their confidence in the project could be low.

What if you need someone with critical, scarce skills who doesn’t have the best reputation with stakeholder? Build and share stakeholder management               plans that address the trust issues and maintain confidence in the project. For example, you might include additional reviews of their work or help the team member communicate more effectively.

  • Leverage contractors to build skill. Project requirements might necessitate hiring contractors because the appropriate skills aren’t available within your organization. To maximize long-term benefits, require contractors to provide skills training for your staff. That way, skill-building becomes part of the resource plan, expanding capabilities and reducing costs.

Note: Some people aren’t good at training others. If you’re going to have contractors provide training, require that the companies you contract with provide people with training experience.

Do you have questions about resource plans or tips for crafting awesome resource plans? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about resource plans, check out Chris Croft’s Managing Resources Across Project Teams course.

Coming Up

Office Hours: Great Meetings Build Great Teams July 11, 2023, 11am MT

Although great meetings won’t guarantee project success, poorly run meetings could lead to project problems. In this Office Hours broadcast, I’ll be talking with Jim Stewart, PMP and Rich Malzman, PMP about how to keep your necessary meetings from becoming necessary evils. Join us for a fun and informative session. (Bring your questions for a chance to win a complimentary eBook of Great Meetings Build Great Teams. Sign up here:

 

Office Hours: Gen AI: The Project Manager’s Edge July 19, 2023, 9am MT

AI is transforming project management in several ways, such as taking over the creation of complex and realistic schedules through analysis of all available data. As a project manager, you may wonder how to harness generative AI applications in your work and how to implement them successfully. Join me and my fellow LinkedIn instructors, Doug Rose, Dave Birss, and Christina Charenkova to explore how to put AI to work on your projects. Sign up here.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 41,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Boost the Power of Milestones

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Boost the Power of Milestones

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Project managers typically show progress with milestones that represent the completion of significant deliverables. But that only scratches the surface of what milestones can show for progress. Here are some other ways to highlight progress with milestones.

  • Progress points on the timeline. Particularly for longer projects, you can create milestones to denote that one quarter, one half, and three quarters of the tasks on your timeline are complete. It’s a great way to show high-level progress on your schedule. 
  • Circumvented risks. Risks make stakeholders nervous. Circumvented risks are high risk items that have been resolved — through successful mitigation or because the risk did not come to fruition. Create milestones to identify these positive events in your schedule. Along with adding these circumvented risks to your milestone chart, be sure to update the overall risk level of the project, too.
  • Positive stakeholder surveys. One way to measure the success of your project is to survey stakeholders about their satisfaction with it. Based on events surrounding the project, stakeholder satisfaction can waiver, particularly early in the project before they see results. Periodically survey your stakeholders. Then, create a milestone when you reach a pre-determined level of stakeholder satisfaction.
  • Significant non-deliverable items on the critical path. Not all critical path items refer to deliverables. Significant critical path items can include sink points where multiple paths through the project schedule come together, the acquisition of critical staff members, or a notable decision by a regulatory body. Add milestones to show these items on your schedule.
  • External dependencies. The acquisition of permits and certifications are worth noting. The conclusion of contract negotiations and other tasks involving external entities can be indications of progress. Use milestones in the project to identify and track them.

Note: Many technical projects use milestones only to show technical task completion. To make sure your progress reports are useful, include milestones for events that are meaningful to the business, such as process finalizations or positive business test results.

There’s really no end to what you can use milestones for. What other events and accomplishments do you highlight with milestones?

For more about milestones, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course.

Coming Up

Office Hours: Great Meetings Build Great Teams July 11, 2023, 11am MT

Although great meetings won’t guarantee project success, poorly run meetings could lead to project problems. In this Office Hours broadcast, I’ll be talking with Jim Stewart, PMP and Rich Malzman, PMP about how to keep your necessary meetings from becoming necessary evils. Join us for a fun and informative session. (Bring your questions for a chance to win a complimentary eBook of Great Meetings Build Great Teams. Sign up here.

 

Office Hours: Gen AI: The Project Manager’s Edge July 19, 2023, 9am MT

AI is transforming project management in several ways, such as taking over the creation of complex and realistic schedules through analysis of all available data. As a project manager, you may wonder how to harness generative AI applications in your work and how to implement them successfully. Join me and my fellow LinkedIn instructors, Doug Rose, Dave Birss, and Christina Charenkova to explore how to put AI to work on your projects. Sign up here. 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 40,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Creating Achievable Project Goals

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Creating Achievable Project Goals

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Want to make project goals achievable? Start by making sure they’re clearly articulated and supported by key stakeholders. That’s no guarantee though because other conditions can affect their achievability. Here are actions to help ensure your project goals are reasonable and motivate your project team.

  • Include training and experimentation tasks in your plan. You will attract the best team members if your project offers learning opportunities. Include training and the chance to practice new skills with some experimentation in your project plan. This expands team members’ understanding. New skills also pique team member interest in project goals. Businesses must innovate to remain competitive. So, treating projects as learning opportunities in addition to enhancing business capabilities means more value that your projects can deliver to stakeholders.
  • Develop success measurement approaches before creating success criteria. A common mistake made by project managers is to define success criteria without understanding how those criteria will be measured. For example, some criteria can be assessed only with subjective measures. This often causes conflict instead of uniting the organization around success. Create the measurement process first, then determine what result will be considered success. Your success criteria will be meaningful and allow you to track your degree of success.
  • Focus on business processes, not tools or IT systems. Project staff are more likely to understand project goals when they’re tied to existing business processes. Focus on the new or revised business process objectives. This helps team members understand the direction they need to take to meet project goals. Difficulties occur when goals focus on tools. For example, the goal “Implement a new warehouse security software system” leaves out the problem that needs to be corrected, or what opportunity the business wants to achieve. 
  • Set practical timelines. Project team members are more likely to support practical, non-arbitrary deadlines. A practical deadline means the timeframe reflects durations proven achievable in past projects. However, a tight deadline for legitimate reasons can be considered practical if management supports new approaches to help meet the deadline. Tight, but practical timelines require motivated teams, so explain the rationale to them to gain their support. (Think Apollo 11 landing on the moon prior to the end of the decade!)

What else do you do to create achievable goals and obtain support for them? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about defining goals, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Great Meetings Build Great Teams

Although great meetings won’t guarantee project success, poorly run meetings could lead to project problems. In this Office Hours broadcast, I’ll be talking with Jim Stewart, PMP and Rich Malzman, PMP about how to keep your necessary meetings from becoming necessary evils. 

Find out why you should create a project plan for a meeting, how to handle people who behave differently in meetings. Learn about the science of meetings and how to use it. Listen to lessons learned from real-life meeting experiences. 

Join us for a fun and informative session. (Bring your questions for a chance to win a complimentary ebook of Great Meetings Build Great Teams. Click here to sign up: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7079138489325268992

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 40,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Organizational Factors to Consider in Project Requirements

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Organizational Factors to Consider in Project Requirements

The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash

Business needs aren’t the only things you need to look at when developing project requirements. Organizational customs and characteristics as well as the regulatory environment within an industry also come into play. Here are other elements to analyze as you work on project requirements. 

  • Language and process variation across the organization. To create requirements that benefit everyone, you need to look at and address variations in processes and terminology. Smaller organizations often don’t document processes. As a result, different people may perform the same job in different ways. They also might not use the same terms for describing events and process steps. To overcome these issues, plan to interview multiple people. You also need to do this in large organizations, but for different reasons. Large organizations might have process variations based on local laws and local habits. 
  • The regulatory environment. Many industries, such as banking and healthcare, have regulatory obligations, which will affect project requirements. However, there is a key point to identify with regulatory requirements: Do the regulations dictate processes that must be used to generate an outcome, or is it just the outcome that’s regulated? This distinction has a significant effect on project requirements. For example, investment bankers might need to produce a report on the changes they make to their client’s investments. How that report is produced might not be regulated, as long as the outcome is accurate and meets regulatory requirements. 
  • Decision-making customs. How requirements are developed will differ within organizations that use consensus-based decision-making versus hierarchical decision-making. (For a funny example of dysfunctional hierarchical decision-making, check out this Mr. Show sketch video.) The difference is sometimes referred to as “power distance.” In other words, the organizational distance between decision makers and non-management stakeholders. Let’s say a second-level manager in a hierarchical organization approves any requirements. However, the requirements should be more reviewed by others before that approval. For example, first-level managers and the “worker-bees” (non-management personnel) that report to them need to examine and provide feedback on the requirements.

Things are different with consensus-based decision making. You need to consult more people to ensure requirements are accepted. In most cases, you need to involve teams that feed into or receive information from a process. With consensus decision-making, that audiences that review requirements are more horizontal than vertical, such as across departments or business units.

  • add this link behind the text “sketch video” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g
  • Degree of individual empowerment. Some organizations are very rigid about their processes. Employees must follow process to the letter, regardless of the circumstances. Other companies empower their employees to be more agile. Companies with empowered employees focus on outcomes over compliance. So, in the occasional case when a business process won’t produce the intended outcome, employees can vary standard processes. When writing requirements, understand the degree of empowerment employees have. If rigid compliance to process is in place, requirements should have restrictions around what people can execute. When embracing more agility, the ability to diverge from process standards should be part of the requirements.
  • The risk tolerance of the organization. When organizations are risk-averse, people might be uncomfortable with change, so they avoid proposing big changes that could be needed to meet business objectives. In this environment, persistence is helpful. To expand possibilities, ask stakeholders for options beyond conservative requirements that they request. The project team can then figure out if those requirements can be delivered within an acceptable level of risk. The benefit of doing this is to increase the value the project can deliver to stakeholders.

Do you have tips or questions about developing better requirements? Add them to the comments section.

For more about requirements, check out Angela Wick’s Requirements Elicitation and Analysis course.

Coming Up

Watch for more Office Hours broadcasts in July!

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 38,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Are You an Overloaded Project Manager?

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Are You an Overloaded Project Manager?

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Project managers usually manage more than one project at a time, which means they provide more value to their organization. But problems can arise when a project manager has too much work to do.  The Project Management Institute’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct recommends that project managers be honest and work within their skills and capabilities. So, if your workload is excessive, you should ask for help. Here are some indications that you are or could soon be overloaded.

  • Your PM workload adds up to more than your expected work hours in any given timeframe. A rough estimate of your PM workload is to calculate the total hours for all project work tasks (non-project-management) and then add 15% for project management. For instance, if the total hours for work tasks is 100 hours, 15 project management hours is a reasonable estimate. When you manage multiple projects, add up the 15% PM estimates from each project. If the combined total for any timeframe exceeds your expected work hours, there is a risk of overload.

    project hours.jpg

    Project manager workload with possible overload

  • Stakeholders feel ignored. Stakeholder management is an important activity for project managers. An early indicator of PM overload is key stakeholders saying they don’t know what’s happening on a project or say they are frustrated by their questions not being addressed. If this happens, look at the type of issues stakeholders raise and the complexity of your projects. Overly complex projects, even small ones, could require more time than the 15% rule of thumb suggests, which could cause PM overload.
  • Schedules aren’t updated. As a project manager, maintaining the project schedule is a fundamental, administrative project management task. As tasks are completed, you record progress and re-estimate project cost and completion time. If you’re overloaded, schedule updates are one of the first things that drops off your radar, even if you have a scheduling person to help you. If you don’t have time to update the schedule, it is time to ask to have some of your projects to be reassigned or to get some additional help.
  • Team synergy problems arise. Project managers need to ensure their team members are on board and working well together. They must understand their role, the responsibilities of other team members, and the relationships between deliverables. If this understanding breaks down, a PM typically notices these problems quickly. If not, you haven’t been paying attention to your team’s status, which could be due to your being overloaded.
  • Technical project issues arise and aren’t addressed. If you haven’t addressed technical issues that arose, this could be an indication of project manager overload. However, it can also mean you don’t have enough training or that you don’t have access to an experienced technical team member to address those issues. If that’s the case, you should ask for a technical resource to help you (because by that time training will take too long). 

Note: If you are supervising project managers, you can use these overload indicators to identify project managers that need help or to reassign projects to others.

What do you look for to determine whether you or one of your project managers is overloaded? Share with us in the comments section.

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

Coming Up

Keep on the lookout for more Office Hours broadcasts in July!

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 39,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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How to Leverage Organizational Change Management in Your Projects

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How to Leverage Organizational Change Management in Your Projects

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Projects drive change, so good change management is important for delivering project objectives successfully. Integrating project management with organizational change management means  that you manage the development of deliverables while also  making sure that stakeholders can use those deliverables to deliver business value. Here’s are some tips for  leveraging change management in your project plans.

  • Assess your organization’s change readiness. Success won’t be achieved if your organization isn’t equipped to handle the change that your project will introduce. One challenge for successful change is too few internal experts to both run the business and participate in the project rollout. Another challenge is change fatigue, which ambitious management teams often ignore. Your change manager should conduct a readiness study to ensure expertise is available and change fatigue won’t hamper your project.
  • Appoint technical experts as change agents. The change agent role often falls to the best communicators in the organization. This makes sense, because communication from and feedback to the project team is vital. However, technical experts have some advantages as change agents. Their technical expertise gives them influence. When they share their rationale for a change publicly, it carries weight with employees and management. If public speaking isn’t their strong suit, ask your change manager to help construct and deliver the technical expert’s message.
  • Leverage milestones. Like a project, change management is a journey. And just like a project, change management plans should include milestones to indicate progress. Change models such as ADKAR* have natural points for milestones, which you can include in your project plans. Emphasize the importance of reaching those milestones to make progress in your project schedule.
  • Deploy specific change-readiness criteria. Completion criteria are important for the change components of your plan. Tailor completion criteria (or readiness criteria) for different stakeholder groups who must absorb different types of change. Overall criteria like “the organization is ready” aren’t enough. Look at what each stakeholder group that’s absorbing change must accomplish. And create specific change readiness criteria for each group. Discuss the importance of meeting these criteria with management in advance. This will make it less likely for management to push out a solution without proper change readiness.

For more about change management models, check out the ADKAR site.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 38,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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Managing Virtual Team Members

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Managing a remote (virtual) team has some nuances over managing an onsite team. A few adjustments can make a big difference in your success with virtual team members. Here are a few techniques that can help your remote resources work as part of a productive team.

  • Hold frequent short meetings. Schedule meetings 3 times a week for 15 minutes. These meetings provide quick opportunities to understand what’s happening —  like conversations you have when you’re co-located with your team members. These discussions can identify problems early so remote team members don’t get stuck solving problems on their own. These meetings can be with small groups or 1-on-1 depending on the number of team members and their role on your project.
  • Foster a team the same way you do when you’re co-located. Reserve time for checking in on how your team members are doing and give them a chance to share with each other. Consider virtual coffee breaks where you don’t spend much time on business. Instead, encourage each team member to talk about what they’re doing outside of work or what their favorite work activities are. Or they can describe a book/podcast/video that they enjoyed.
  • Insist on good video conference capabilities. Phone calls are good, but video conference meetings are better…when the technology works. Seeing someone’s non-verbal cues helps you understand how meetings are going and connect with remote team members. If you don’t have video conferencing, make sure speaker phones work well. Nothing is worse than being remote and not hearing discussions, or not being able to contribute because you can’t be heard.
  • Arrange participation in meetings for all attendees. Give each attendee a purpose in meetings. Consider a role for every attendee in your virtual team meetings. Rotate coordination responsibilities for the meeting, such as delivering project status items or stakeholder perceptions. This approach relieves some project management workload while increasing meeting engagement.
  • Increase the frequency of feedback sessions. All team members benefit from feedback delivered by the PM. Virtual team members need this feedback even more, because they might not participate in other deliverable discussions. The sessions don’t have to be extensive. They can focus on one or two specific deliverables or presentations, and the impressions they generated. Feedback keeps virtual team members engaged and comfortable about their contributions.

Have you encountered problems dealing with remote team members? Or have you found ways to engage remote team members and improve their productivity? Share your questions or tips in the comments section.

For more about working with remote teams, check out  Cyndi Snyder Dionisio’s Leading Remote Project and Virtual Teams course.

Coming Up

Project success is driven to a large extent by healthy relationships within your project teams, which is why a lot of people skills go into project management. In this Office Hours on June 1, 2023, at 11:00am MT, Todd Dewitt will join me to talk about how to build better relationships – by learning to overcome our own fears and by building rapport with others through empathy and mutual respect.

Todd will be sharing some of the insights and strategies from his new book, Dancing with Monsters. I’m a big believer in relationship-building, so I’m looking forward to this conversation. I hope you’ll join us and bring your questions and challenges! Here’s the link to join: https://www.linkedin.com/events/betterrelationships-betterresul7060330084796170240

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 38,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

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.

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