Archive for category: Project Management

The people on each project team have unique skills and strengths. To increase the effectiveness of your teams, look for opportunities to leverage and expand those attributes. Here are four approaches for expanding team member capabilities.  

• Identify and leverage team member strengths. Take time to identify your team members’ strengths and weaknesses. Ask them questions to uncover their individual talents and preferences. Use what you learn to assign tasks that are best suited to their skill set. Also, look for opportunities to expand their experiences. Assignments that increase skills generate enthusiasm and loyalty, which can help you achieve better project results . 
• Create a learning culture. Establish a culture of learning and continuous improvement. Set up opportunities to learn from you (the PM) and from other team members, such as lunch and learns, or cross-training sessions. Set up sessions where team members present their work and share their expertise. This can expand knowledge and perspectives throughout your project team. In addition, it will increase your team flexibility if a team member will be absent. When practical, support your team members when they try new approaches or work out of their comfort zone. You’ll improve team dynamics and project outcomes. 
• Facilitate candid and courageous risk-based communication. Encourage team members to share their experiences, even when challenging the status quo. Every team member’s experience is valid. To reduce risk, use their collected pool of experience to determine the best direction . Make sure that stakeholders who are risk-averse don’t discourage team members from voicing their concerns. You will reinforce the value you place on team experience and enhance their sense of project ownership.
• Focus on formal professional development. A learning-focused project environment creates significant professional development opportunities. You can go further by supporting team members in their pursuit of formal training and certifications. That way, they can increase their skills and stay up to date with industry trends. In turn, this helps you deliver better outcomes.  

Whether you are a project manager or team member, what are your preferred approaches for expanding capability? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about team building, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.

Coming Up

On May 18th 4PM MT, I will be joining Christina Charenkova to talk about how Project Managers and Change Managers collaborate on things like scope, communication, and stakeholder management. We’ll discuss how to leverage and clarify roles and plans, avoid pitfalls, and collaborate better for awesome outcomes! Sign up here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7056412593510363136

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 35,000 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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The world gets more complex and intertwined, which creates more projects involving complex integrations. What is an integration? It’s when separate systems or components are brought together to build a seamless solution. For example, building a satellite means integrating a propulsion system, navigation component, scientific instruments for research, communication components, and others. Here are crucial keys to managing an integration project successfully.

• Approach the project in four phases: Define-Decompose-Build-Recompose.

1. Define the entire integrated solution in detail. 
2. Decompose that solution into pieces that separate expert teams can work on. 
3. Build the solution, where the expert teams construct those pieces (systems or components).
4. Recompose the components or pieces into a solution. 

Less experienced project managers might try to shortcut these steps. For example, they don’t decompose the solution fully and overlook an integration element. Let’s take our satellite example. Say the communication component is combined with the scientific instruments. That could lead to overlooking the integration between the communication system and the propulsion system (so people on the ground can reposition the satellite).

• The best management flow is Centralize – Decentralize – Recentralize. Experienced integration project managers understand that success means giving up some control.
•  As the total solution is defined, management is centralized and controlled by the project manager. 
• When the product is decomposed and the expert teams are working on their components, management is decentralized. The project    manager releases control. Teams still report status and risk status to the project manager. But the teams work under their own management, exercising their specialized expertise. 
• When components are integrated (recomposed), control is re-centralized. This affirms the accuracy of integrations. It also resolves any discrepancies between the expert teams. 

You can hamper the build effort and increase time and cost if you try to exercise too much control while components are under construction.

• Understand the start-and-stop points of each component. The project phases and management flow depend on one critical element: the clear definition of components. It’s crucial to know where each team’s responsibilities begin and end, and where the technical component integration points lie. Using our satellite example, the scientific experiments include a communication element to share the output from the research performed. The overall communication module shares those research results and other data with staff on the ground. So you need to define in detail where the communication role of the scientific experiment modules end and where the primary communication module takes over. 

Integration projects amplify the risk of errors occurring, particularly when the expert teams are not co-located. Risks expand further when multiple unrelated vendors need to come together to integrate an overall solution. Carefully define your components and integration parameters!

• Ownership of testing needs to be defined specifically. Don’t try to ask two teams to build their individual components and be responsible to “test the integration.” That usually ends badly. Project managers need to decide who specifically will take the lead on testing each integration in the solution. Often, an independent test owner works best. This person isn’t a member of either team with integrated products. With an independent test owner, you reduce the occurrence of pre-conceived ideas about how the integration should work. Also, the independent test owner will evaluate results more objectively. 
• Add a lot of time and money to manage integration risks. This is the most under-estimated aspect of any project. Be conservative when estimating the cost of testing and completing integrations. Add at least 50% (yes, 50%) of the cost of building the separate products that will be integrated — to accommodate testing and correcting integration. Lots of unexpected things can happen. Errors often take a lot of time and effort to resolve. It’s better to surprise stakeholders with a less costly integration event than to explain why you need more time and money to make something work. 

Have any good stories about integration projects to brag about? How about horror stories that we can all learn from? Share with us in the comment section.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 34,000 subscribers. 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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Sponsors provide financial support, champion the project and make key decisions. So, it’s crucial that you understand how your project sponsors make decisions. By watching for these types of decision-making, you can adjust your approach to get the best decisions and support your project’s success.

• Fact-based decisions. Project sponsors want facts and data they can use to guide their decisions. For fact-based decision-makers, you need to know the data sources they value most. For example, internal trusted advisors or external entities like consulting companies. Find the data and the data source that your sponsor values to help them make decisions.
• Intuition-based decisions. Leaders with sponsorship experience are often swayed by their intuition, which helps produce quick decisions. To support this type of sponsor, identify when they’re using intuition for decisions and then validate the assumptions they make. That way, you reduce the risk that flawed intuition presents.
• Decisions based on team experiences. Many sponsors will poll their team members before making decisions, because they value the team’s experiences and opinions. This typically results in more buy-in from the project team. However, attempts to  gain consensus can delay decisions. For this approach, add buffer time to the schedule to offset these delays.
• Political decisions. All too often, sponsors make project decisions from a political standpoint. Their bosses or other key stakeholders have expectations and sponsors hesitate to make decisions that may disappoint those stakeholders. While these decisions can be sound, they may add risks. Work with your sponsor to make sure you both understand those risks and their potential impact.
• Market-driven decisions. The driving force for a sponsor’s decision making could be what’s happening in the marketplace. That makes sense because project success often depends on leap-frogging the competition. With a market-driven sponsor, keep a close eye on the status of the triple constraints (scope, cost, and time). Scope is often fixed, so you need to watch how that affects cost and schedule.

Have you seen other types of decision-making? If so, what advantages and disadvantages did they present? What can you do in those situations? Share with us in the comments section.

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 33,000 subscribers. 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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Feasibility studies help to show the potential viability of a proposed project. A feasibility study should recommend initiating a project if business conditions are right. If conditions aren’t right, the study should help management understand the risk they’re taking if they approve the project anyway. Here are do’s and don’ts when you run a project feasibility study.

+ Do focus on risks. The purpose of a project feasibility study is to identify and understand project risks. Provide management with a detailed description of the risks you identify along with mitigation activities that could be used to reduce them.  Also be sure to include opportunities (positive risks) that the project provides.

x Don’t skip risks that you consider insignificant. A feasibility study should identify circumstances the project might encounter. That means you need to include all risks, even the ones of lesser concern. With these less significant risks, explain why you believe they aren’t important. This shows you’ve been thorough in the feasibility study.

+ Do share the likely path the project will take. Telling a story is the best way to do this. When management sees how the project might run through a believable story, you can ease their concerns and help a reasonable project move forward.

+ Do include an executive summary. Storytelling doesn’t typically start by giving away the ending. But, it’s a good idea in a project feasibility study. Executives appreciate high-level overviews.

+ Do build a milestone plan. A milestone plan enhances your project story and highlights the approach you think makes the project feasible.

x Don’t create anything deeper than the milestone plan. You still don’t have enough information to do that. One thing a feasibility study does is determine whether you should undertake a deeper planning exercise.

+ Do understand what the person who will approve the project cares about most. Think about the triple constraints of time, scope, and cost. Talk with project approver(s) to determine which of those constraints is the most critical. Make sure everyone understands how those constraints will affect project viability.

x Don’t neglect the less important project constraints. Of course, you want to emphasize what is most important. But finish the job. Describe how all the triple constraints might affect the project quality.

+ Do focus on external factors that might affect the project. It isn’t only the conditions within your organization that can affect a project. Evaluate and describe external factors, like market conditions, as well.

x Don’t skip things like environmental and community concerns. These can be make-or-break items when it comes to project delivery.

+ Do make assumptions during your feasibility analysis if necessary. There are too many variables to research to cover everything. Do a thorough feasibility study. If a “deep dive” is needed to validate a point, make an assumption and be sure to mention in the documentation that you made an assumption. (You can also provide detail how you could validate the assumption.)

Do you have any other tips – or questions – about feasibility studies? Other results that help feasible projects get approved and weed out the rest? Share with us in the comments!