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Less Well-Known Benefits of Scope Management

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Scope management is all about ensuring your project produces what is required — and only what is required — to satisfy project objectives. It also delivers additional benefits you don’t often hear about:

Helps manage risk. Talk to an experienced project manager and you’ll likely hear a hard-earned lesson: the bigger your project, the riskier it becomes. For initiatives that require a lot of organizational change and project deliverables, you can break down scope into phases to make things more manageable. This breakdown into smaller chunks reduces risk and makes it easier for the organization to absorb the changes because they are applied in progressive steps. In many respects, the most effective way to manage project risk is to work closely with your stakeholders to manage scope.

Expands understanding of business requirements. Scope management is best performed through conversation. And conversation not only helps the project team understand business needs, but also helps the business recognize what is straightforward and what is difficult for the project team to produce.

In addition, good scope management means prioritizing requirements. This helps the project team understand what’s vital to the business and can enhance the business’s perspective on its own requirements! So, the business and the project team are better positioned to produce what’s most important, reducing scope and risk.

Builds confidence in the project. Detailed conversations about scope, including well-crafted questions to gain detailed understanding of business needs, can help build stakeholder confidence in the project team’s ability to meet its objectives. Good questions that inspire analysis and understanding of business needs can build trust that the project team knows what needs to be done. And starting off a project with trust from business stakeholders is a big plus.

Helps adapt to available resources. Skill shortages are everywhere and have been amplified by the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Scope management helps everyone be realistic about what can and cannot be done. Discussions about available skills help craft a realistic project schedule. Scope and resource management drive productive discussions about prioritizing work, particularly for scarce resources. The earlier these conversations and prioritizations are made and understood, the easier it will be to build a sound schedule and proceed through the project lifecycle.

Have you obtained other benefits from scope management? If so, share them with us in the comment section.

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

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Quality Management

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Photo by Tool., Inc on Unsplash

In addition to producing products without errors or functional issues, quality management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of quality management:

Defines a fundamental requirement. The information needed to complete a quality plan ensures that you understand a fundamental requirement’s grade. Grade, which represents the degree of optional features available in a product, is a significant element of quality and of the product(s) you produce. The required grade can significantly alter your project approach. For example, an entry level car is one that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It includes basic features that helps you get from point A to point B. That is a low-grade vehicle. However, when that entry level car is designed well and lasts a long time, it is a high-quality, low-grade vehicle. In contrast, a top-end luxury car with extra features that breaks down frequently is a low-quality, high-grade vehicle.

The required grade identifies whether the car has a requirement for those multi-way adjustable heated seats! Deliver successful projects by focusing on producing both the desired grade and quality.

Drives fact-based discussions about cost, time, intent and outcomes your project will produce. The degree of quality you build into a product depends on three things; money, time, and skill (and skill costs money.) This interdependence gives the project manager a way to justify requests for additional funding and/or time for higher quality items (which typically require more development, construction, and testing time). In addition, more expensive resources or parts may be required. 

Helps define sound completion criteria. Successful projects share a common characteristic: well-defined completion criteria. The required quality of your deliverables (including grade), components needed, and relevant performance characteristics are vital elements of sound and quantifiable completion criteria.

Protects your reputation. Producing a product for the marketplace without understanding the quality that help it sell would be foolhardy. Producing a deliverable without quality criteria is similar. You’ll waste money and time without proper descriptions of required quality and well-defined quality verification processes. Quality plans protect your business from waste and can highlight the importance of good project management by ensuring that you produce deliverables fit for their purpose. 

Have you achieved other benefits from focusing on quality in your projects? If so, tell us about them in the comments.

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

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Communication Management

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Communication management is all about making sure project stakeholders understand the purpose, status, and value the project brings to the business. And it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

  • Greater understanding of stakeholders. Sound communication strategies go both ways and provide excellent opportunities for the project team to understand stakeholder needs and perspectives. This helps create better deliverables today and can help increase the value future projects bring to the business.  In addition, stakeholders who feel understood by the project team are more confident about the current project – as well as in project management as a discipline.
  • Increased project sales prowess. Half the battle for project managers can be selling the value of a project. Executing well-crafted communication plans generates ideas, recognizes business concerns, and identifies valuable business objectives to help define viable projects. 
  • Provides a periodic “project perception management” tool. A foundational piece of a communication plan is the project status report. A status report can shape and manage stakeholder perceptions. Less-experienced project managers view this report as a way to share progress compared to a published plan, which, of course, it is. However, more experienced project managers include other information such as short success stories, opportunities that have arisen, and other news that can improve or reinforce a positive perception of the project and its value to the business. 
  • Identifies vocabulary that gives you the greatest influence. The words stakeholders use to describe business problems and opportunities helps your outgoing project communication to be more meaningful. For example, the information technology lead for your project may draft reports using the phrase “data redundancy and operational integrity.” But if a stakeholder describes their concern with the phrase “data backup and restoration,” it is more effective to use the stakeholder’s terminology in your reports. That way, your communication will be understood and produce the desired reaction.

How have you pushed the benefits of communication within your projects? Share your tips with us in the comments!

For more about communication, check out Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes’s course, Communication Foundations.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Resource Management Strategies When Skilled Resources Are in Short Supply

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Skill shortages have made resource management a significant challenge throughout the business world. That means, you need to ensure that your resources deliver the right output when it’s needed. Here are some tips to manage your skilled resources and make that happen.

  • Define workload priority with management. It’s rare to have a team member fully dedicated to your project; multi-tasking is commonplace. As you get team members assigned to your project, work with their managers to prioritize their assignments. That way, you and your team members will be in sync regarding the time they’re allocated to your project. For example, maybe a team member’s number one priority is to help the finance department close the monthly books, and their second priority is to work on your project. The best approach is to refrain from scheduling that team member on your project during the first week of every month. While inconvenient, it isn’t as painful as getting behind schedule because you scheduled your resource when they aren’t available.
  • Select team members whose skills match the difficulty of the task. You get the best results when a team member has skills that align with the difficulty of the work. If the task is too challenging, your team member could struggle, take too long, and become demoralized. Too easy and the task becomes more annoying than enjoyable—plus, this resource could be used to complete a more difficult task. In other words, the “best and brightest” staff member isn’t always the right person for a task.
  • Embrace positive conflict. Project managers sometimes avoid using team members who have a history of conflict with their colleagues. If the issue is a personality clash, it’s appropriate to find someone else. However, if the conflict relates to how to solve a problem or design a solution, conflicting opinions can generate more and better ideas. Although managing this positive conflict takes more time and effort, the project outcomes can be much better as a result. Take a page from the philosophy of former US President Abraham Lincoln; assemble a “team of rivals” to get the best project results.
  • Temporarily trade duties with team leaders or technical managers. Some team leaders and technical managers often wish they could drop their leadership and administrative duties and return to producing technical deliverables. Why not give them a chance to do just that? As a project manager, I’ve often temporarily taken administrative duties from a team leader or manager in exchange for them working on a technical task on my project. That gives a valuable resource the opportunity to practice their craft, and you get a better result for your project. It’s a win-win!

Do you have any tips or tricks for using skilled resources to the best advantage? Add them in the comments section!

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

Less Well-known Benefits of Procurement Management

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Procurement management is all about bringing control to acquisition of parts and skills required for projects. But it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

Find long-term partners. Organizations often require parts or skill-based services on an ongoing basis. Well-crafted Requests for Quotation (RFQ) or Requests for Proposal (RFP) enable vendors to share their skills and abilities as well as the culture and business approach they take to serve their clients. Your RFQ or RFP can not only reveal the best alternative for your current need and can also identify a go-to business partner for the future.

Identify other solution options. Speaking of RFPs and RFQs, send requests that encourages vendors to provide a response to your specific solution request along with alternative solutions. That way, you might discover ways to address business needs better. The information you get can draw attention to the potential for a long-term business partnership (see point 1). 

Discover skill mixes available in the marketplace. While working on a leading-edge technical project, a vendor introduced me to a technical-skill mix that I didn’t know existed. I worked with my procurement team to describe the technical installation skills I needed to implement a set of technical tools. The vendor proposed experts with both technical implementation expertise and business analysis background required to fully configure and implement our tools more efficiently than if we did it ourselves. This skill mix decreased the project’s forecasted duration and made for a stronger business case to launch the project.

Support an efficient supply chain. Supply chain challenges are everywhere today, affecting virtually every business. The entry point to your supply chain is the vendor(s) who provide parts and products for your project. Being mindful of your supply chain requirements and performing sound procurement management helps you select vendors who can minimize or eliminate supply chain issues that can impact your project outcomes.

If you have other benefits you have obtained from procurement management, share them with your fellow project managers by posting in the comment section.

For more about procurement management, check out Oliver Yarbrough’s Project Management Foundations: Procurement course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Schedule Management

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Photo by Elena Mozhvilo from Unsplash

Besides bringing control to your project schedule, schedule management delivers additional benefits. Here are a few rarely-discussed benefits of schedule management. 

Defines elephant bites. The adage about eating an elephant one bite at a time works with projects, too. However, the phrase doesn’t mean much unless those bites are defined and are seen as reasonable. The work breakdown structure – as the basis for the overall project schedule – is the perfect tool for defining reasonable bites. Tasks represent the small chunks or bites that need to be produced to deliver the project. A good schedule helps you deliver a project successfully, because people can grasp those small bites and how their tasks contribute to the overall project objective.

Facilitates great how-to discussions. A company’s IT upgrade project team faced a dilemma: should they upgrade the network connections first, then the PCs, or the other way around? While there were technical pros and cons to each option, the schedule ultimately decided the sequence. Vendor resource restrictions determined the best approach — in some parts of the business, the PCs were upgraded first; and in others, the network was upgraded before the PCs. Without considering the schedule in the decision, it would have taken longer to complete the project. A better approach to completing the project was identified because of scheduling discussions.

Provides a defense against unreasonable expectations. A common challenge for project managers is handling expectations of the timeframe required to deliver project outcomes. The best tool for fact-based discussion of timeframe is a set of tasks defined and sequenced along with a reasonable time estimate for each task. That discussion becomes even more powerful if you’ve captured history of task completions, which reinforces your estimates for the current project. If the timeframe is too long,  you can use that information to ask your sponsor which tasks to cut or convey the risk from reducing the hours allocated to a task.

Gives you a map! Successful initiatives all share a common trait — there is a known and understood path from where things stand today to where you want to be. For projects, a sound schedule is that map. A complete schedule includes milestones and closing tasks, which serve as “X marks the spot” tasks that tie things together and confirm you’ve reached the treasure you were seeking. 

Have you come across schedule management benefits?

For more about schedule management, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course. You might also want to watch my recent LinkedIn Office Hours session about evaluating schedule quality.

You Don’t Have to Feel So Alone

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As a project manager, you have to make decisions, resolve conflicts, manage aggressive timeframes and make the most of small budgets. It can feel like you have to deal with these responsibilities all alone. Yes, your responsibilities are monumental. You won’t feel so alone if you follow these tips:

  • Work with your team members. Take time to work with your team on issues, idea generation, and solutions. It’s even more effective when you chat informally with team members at least 10 minutes each day. You won’t face obstacles alone and you’ll build stronger relationships, develop trust, and foster dedication with your team members. 
  • Show gratitude. Look for opportunities to say, “thank you.” When appropriate, acknowledge accomplishments with formal recognition programs or by taking a team member(s) out to lunch. Expressing gratitude helps build a unified team that will support you as a leader – and you won’t be on your own should things go astray. Do the same with your key stakeholders and project sponsor to build support you can count on when you need it.
  • Enhance your leadership approach. Project leaders have no choice but to rely on others. As you manage larger, more complex projects, the need to rely on others grows. View this dependency as an opportunity to delegate, train and learn from others. Your team members become stronger resources; you grow more familiar with your team’s deliverables; and project management becomes more of a team effort.
  • Leverage your network. Discuss your project with fellow project managers and get their perspectives. Use status reviews with your manager and/or project sponsor to share ideas and perspectives. Attend project management gatherings, like Project Management Institute® chapter meetings and network with other attendees. You might pick up a great idea to make you look like a hero on your project!

If you have more suggestions for reducing your sense of isolation, add them in the comments section.

For more about team building, check out Mike Figliuolo’s Building High-performance Teams course.

The Fine Art of Documenting Lessons Learned

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Crafting lessons learned can be tricky. Lessons learned should help future projects without criticizing anyone publicly. Here are a few guidelines for achieving those lessons learned goals. 

  • Identify recurring issues. Issues that are likely to re-occur if they aren’t addressed are significant lessons learned because they will help many future projects. Conversely, issues related to one-off technology or unique business processes won’t be that helpful in the future, creating useless entries to wade through in your lessons learned library.
  • Identify an avoidance or risk reduction strategy. Nothing is learned if you don’t document how to avoid the issue. Describe the issue or risk and explain what to do differently. Future readers need to understand the context, so be specific and include early warning signs for the issue. Entries with these details will help your project management peers (or yourself if the issue crops up after you’ve forgotten about it).
  • Improve project methodologies and guidelines. Lessons learned might present opportunities to improve your project management methodologies or templates. Write your lessons learned entries with this in mind. If your lessons learned entry can’t be applied to your methodology, there may be gaps in your project standards. For example, if your methodology doesn’t handle working with your procurement organization on vendor contracts, write your lessons learned entry to add that process to your project management methodology and template set.
  • Refrain from mentioning individuals or roles. Appropriate lessons learned talk about the issue that occurred and the approach for avoiding or reducing its impact to the project. Talk about outcomes and processes, not specific decisions or inaction. Don’t mention individual’s names. Mention roles only if absolutely necessary. 

Do you have tips for describing helpful lessons learned from your experience?

For more about lessons learned and project closure, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Successful Eating Plans and Project Management Have a Lot in Common

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Photo by Dan Gold from Unsplash

I enjoy cooking — and eating – and I also believe in the benefits of a healthy eating plan. A recent conversation reminded me of the similarities between successful eating plans and project management. So grab that acai bowl (or rice cake if you insist on dieting) and have a read.

  • The correct amount is ideal. Sufficient, not excessive calories are key to effective nutrition plans and project plans. Fewer people on a project are easier to manage, reduce communication problems and are more likely to work as a team. Just as you don’t want to eat more because you have low-cal foods on hand, don’t add project team members unless they have expertise you need. Using the correct amounts in your eating plan and your project will yield better results. 
  • The right mix is crucial. An eating plan includes a mix of nutrients to keep you healthy. A project also needs the right mix of technical leads, industry expertise, and action- and planning-oriented team members. Your project is apt to stall with an out of balance team. 
  • The timing of consumption matters. When you eat can be as important as how much you eat. Likewise, when you deploy project resources is important. Bring in experts too early and you might suppress your team’s ideas, because they defer to the expert. Bring in experts too late and you risk spending time and money on dead-end approaches they would know to avoid.
  • Produce early results. Eating plans that don’t generate recognizable early results might be dropped as unsuccessful. When stakeholders dedicate budget and critical staff time to the project, they want reassurance that they are making a wise investment. When you deliver early project results, your stakeholders will stick with you, just as you will stick to the menu when you feel healthier, stronger, and more energetic. 
  • Keep your eye on the goal. Persistence pays off! Whether your goal is health, strength, energy, or weight loss, keep your eye on your objective—and remember that progress won’t be consistent. That way, your chance of success increases. With projects, monitor performance and accept that business priorities and issues might impede project progress.

If you can think of other similarities, post them in the comments section. I’d love to add them to this list.

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

 

Must-have Hard Skills for Project Managers

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Photo by Leon on Unsplash

A solid team can contribute to the broad range of skills needed to complete projects successfully. However, project managers must possess several skills to ensure project success:

Construct risk response plans. Although team members can identify risks, the project manager handles building and managing sound risk responses. Because the PM is the project liaison to the sponsor and senior leaders, the PM must be able to discuss, adjust, and deploy risk responses effectively.

Recognize schedule feasibility. Lots of schedules that are built don’t reflect reality. For example, feasible schedules include realistic expectations for team members’ weekly allocation the project. Schedules must also include realistic estimates of the effort to complete tasks. And fast-tracking or crashing built in the schedule must be sensible and doable. The PM must be able to spot these pitfalls and correct them. 

Domain expertise. The PM must know enough about the project’s technical domain to work with technical domain experts. In other words, the PM shouldn’t be fooled by experts trying to escape probing questions. For example, a project manager experienced in IT won’t have an issue talking to experts deploying new IT tools. That same PM, assigned to a construction or mining projects could easily be deceived by “the experts.” Project managers can successfully manage projects without specific domain knowledge. However, that situation introduces risk and increases project personnel costs because domain experts need to partner with the PM.

Knowledge of both the technology and business environment. A project’s business outcome often requires different knowledge than what you need to know to build the deliverables that facilitate that outcome. Consider a hospital project to provide advanced medical diagnostic services. Understanding the financial and marketing objectives of the project is much different than understanding the technology used in the sophisticated medical diagnostic equipment that interprets medical test results. The project manager, who works with the team and customers, needs to understand both: what’s needed to produce deliverable as well as the viability of the business outcomes. 

Vendor and contract management. In projects involving significant contracted skills or components, the project manager must be able to manage vendors and their contracts to ensure that deliverables are created efficiently and interactions between vendors are in the project’s best interest, not the vendor’s. For example, customized technical components built for a project require the project manager to validate contracts as well as integrations between those components and other parts of the project solution.

Strategic thinking. In projects that significantly alter business direction, the project manager must be able to think strategically to ensure the approach supports specific project goals and fits into the sponsoring business’s strategic direction.

What other hard skills do you think project managers absolutely must possess?

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