Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
"What if they assign you to a critical project that will really affect your career and you don't want anything to "fall between the cracks"? Watching every little detail is the way to go, right?"
Micromanagement is the dominant style used by project managers though it does not yield the best results or even provide tight control
Read the whole article here.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Summary:
There are a number of organizational factors that support or inhibit the ability of your project managers to be successful. Granted, “culture” is a broad term, but your organizational culture plays the biggest role in whether or not you are generally able to deliver projects successfully. You cannot attack a culture of mediocrity (or a culture of failure) one project at a time. You need to address it in a broad and multi-faceted way. Your organization structure can also help or hinder your success rate. Your organization structure can determine how well you focus on projects and how easy it is to share resources between different organizations. If you attack the broader cultural problems, you will have a positive impact on many of the organizational barriers to success as well.
It should come as no shock to learn that some organizations are better than others at managing projects. There are probably no organizations that have a 100% success rate, and hopefully none have a 0% success rate. However, some organizations definitely perform at a higher level than others.
Source & Content Detail: e-Mail Newsletter from the Rothman Consulting Group President - Johanna Rothman.
About the Author:
Johanna Rothman is a pragmatic thinker about project management, the founder and principal of Rothman Consulting Group and author and co-author of several books and numerous articles. She is passionate about helping technical managers, solving problems and has an interesting sense of humor.
Back Issues of the newsletters can be found here.
Summary:
"At the Agile 2010 conference a couple of weeks ago, I heard many people say, "When QA gets the software, ..." In an agile project, that makes no sense to me, unless the team has not developed its own definition of done.
In more traditional projects, the people in the testing group, whatever that group is called, often make the decision about whether or not to release the software. With these statements and decision-making power, you might think that the testers are in charge of quality.
They are not."
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Summary:
When our project planning with customers is like letting them order at a fast-food drive-up window, we get an endless list of requirements. Then we can't control scope, finish on time or produce any business value. Customers may be happy when we start fast but are dissatisfied at the end when they get of value.
Read the whole article here.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Summary:
Even though you may commonly think of project risks as having a negative connotation, you can also use risk management to identify and quantify potential positive risk. You can determine if you want to accept the risk after understanding the risk plan, the chances of success, the payoff if you are successful and the impact if you are not successful.
Source: Method123 - MPMM Project Methodology
The role of a Project Manager is to "Deliver the project on time, within budget and to specification". So in other words, you need to specify clearly upfront what must be delivered by the project, and then you need to produce it within the schedule and budget assigned. But it's not that simple. You might meet this objective but totally fail as a "top notch Project Manager". We believe your role is much more than that. It is also...
1: To recruit the best
Great projects are delivered by a great team. Your role is to recruit the best people you can find and make sure that their skill sets are perfectly complimentary so that you have all of the experience you need to deliver the project successfully. You need to document a detailed Job Description for every person in your team so that they all know what is expected of them, at every step in the journey. Only with a great team and everyone knowing what is expected of them, will you deliver a great result.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Summary:
Project failure is not always the fault of the Project Manager. Most of the lessons learnt analysis we do identify problems with the performance of executives and team members as well. The solution is an organisation wide methodology with clear roles for everyone and some coaching by Project Managers.
Read the whole article here
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Communication - Just Do It!
Project managers must get over the fear and reluctance to communicate proactively. Communication is a powerful arrow in your project management quiver. I have seen projects where the project manager thought he had done a good job, but the client was not satisfied because he or she did not know what was going on. I have also seen projects that went badly over budget and deadline, but were still viewed as a success, because the client knew what was going on and the expectations were managed well.
You have all heard the simple saying, “communicate, communicate, communicate”. Project managers should take this to heart. There are many aspects of a project that are not totally within your hands. Communication, however, is something that is directly within your control. You might be surprised how smoothly your project progresses when you communicate proactively to the team, clients and stakeholders.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Practice Good Meeting Fundamentals
In general, all meetings should have an agenda. The creation of the agenda takes a little extra work, but it can be as simple as writing it in an email and sending it to the meeting participants. Regularly scheduled, ongoing status meetings do not necessarily need a published agenda every week if they stick to the same agenda format. In those cases, the formal agenda is of most value while the team is first meeting. Once everyone understands the purpose and the regular flow, the standard agenda model can be reused every time. Other meeting considerations include:
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Summary:
It is important to consider your particular situation, such as position openings and your company’s staffing philosophy, when deciding what type of staffing to use. Consider some of the pros and cons of each option, and then discuss this matter further with your manager. One company may choose to fill a position with an employee, while another company fills the exact same position with a contractor. Much of the decision depends on the company’s current staffing strategy. Once you better understand that, as well as the characteristics of the opening you have, you should be able to determine how to fill your particular positions.
The first place to start is with some perspective at a higher level. It is hard to provide advice about whether a contractor or employee should be utilized on a particular without knowing something about the staffing strategy for your whole company. Some companies do not want to utilize contract labor at all. However, most companies use contract staff when it makes sense, based on their staffing philosophy. There are both pros and cons to using employees and contract staff. After considering these, you will be able to have an intelligent discussion with your manager about what type of staffing makes sense for your particular circumstances.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Believe it or not, there are many fine companies in the world that have great products and treat their employees well. There are also many companies that are just plain rotten. Of course, most companies fall somewhere in the middle.
One of the reasons that employees don’t like working at their companies is that their companies are not intellectually honest with them. They say one thing and do another thing. They have lofty ideals or principles on paper, but then they do not follow through and actually implement policies and processes to back up their words. This disconnect can happen within a team, within a department, within a division or within an entire organization.
Source: Article by Terence Creamer
Any doubts about the building prowess of South Africa's construction industry were dispelled decisively by the impressive delivery of the World Cup stadiums ahead of the 2010 FIFA tournament, which reached its dramatic conclusion late on Sunday night when Spain snatched a dramatic, late winner against the Netherlands at Soccer City.
However, a comparison offered by the Aveng Group's Dr Hylton Macdonald at a recent Engineering and Construction Risk Institute conference, coincidentally held in Madrid, Spain, provided insight not only of the domestic industry's technical competence, but also its relative competitiveness.
In a colourful slide presentation entitled, ‘The makings of a successful project', Macdonald analysed how "Soccer City stacks up against China's Bird's Nest Stadium".
The comparison between the two iconic structures makes for interesting reading.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Prevention: Not Lots of Paperwork
A few minutes of risk management on even the smallest project gets a good return for the effort. We just need to scale risk management so the payback is proportional to the cost. Here is are 3 tier approach for projects of different scale and significance.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Multiple Project Approval Fantasy Land
Both Executives and Project Managers kid themselves about what goes on in a project approval process. Let's look at two Executive fantasies and one PM fantasy and see how they cripple a Project.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
If you are considering purchasing a software or hardware product from a vendor, you are going to perform some sort of evaluation. Of course, the amount of time you spend doing due-diligence is directly related to the investment you are making in the product. Purchasing a simple scheduling package that costs $2,000 may not require the same level of diligence as a Customer Relationship Management package that costs over $1,000,000.
One of the activities that should be on your evaluation checklist is talking to companies that currently use the product. The purpose of checking references is to get past the marketing and sales hype and hear some real opinions. The theory is that these companies will give you a more honest picture of how the product and the vendor actually perform in the real world.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Managing Contractors
There are lots of ways to work with vendors on your projects and several contract types to choose from. But the best of all is a performance & achievement "triangle" that ties contractors to the project with the right incentives and penalties.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Obviously your project is in trouble if you are missing deadlines and consistently exceeding the estimated effort and cost to get work done. However, you may have a project that actually appears to be on schedule, yet you are concerned about potential problems down the road. There are things that you can look for that will give some sense as to whether there are potential problems lurking. At this point you cannot really call them issues or problems, but they can be identified as risks that have the potential to throw your project off in the future.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Project Team
The difference between a high performance team and one that performs poorly is often determined by three moments of truth [MOT] with the Project Team. Handled properly, these MOT's produce team members who actually try to finish assignments early and who take responsibility for solving problems and figuring out better, faster ways of completing their assignments.
Source: Article written by Ron Holohan, MBA PMP - an extract from the pm411 Project Management Podcast Episode 054: The complete PMO (part 1 of 2, which can be downloaded here.
PMO's were originally created to help support the technical function within an organization. However since that time, the function of a PMO has grown to include more business management. Ideally, a PMO within an organisation is situated to deal with both the project management environment as well as the business environment. On the project management side, there are the project executives, the project management, the technical members on the team and the PMO. On the business side, you have the business units and clients or customers that the PMO helps to represent.
Five Progressive stages of the PMO Competency Continuum:
There are five progressive and advancing stages of maturity for a PMO’s capability and responsibility.
Stage 1 of PMO maturity is The Project Office. This is a essentially the project manager and project team working as a project office. This project office provides its own oversight of project.
The Stage 2 PMO, called The Basic PMO, contains process control in addition to project oversight. The Basic PMO provides a full-cycle and repeatable process that can be used across all projects in an organization. The Basic PMO would most likely be led by a program manager and might have several project managers and projects involved.
The Stage 3 PMO, called The Standard PMO, is the level that most organizations need and want to have. This level includes project control, oversight, as well as support. The Standard PMO creates the infrastructure and capabilities to support a cohesive project management environment. The Standard PMO has multiple projects, project managers, and perhaps even program managers under its control. The head of the Standard PMO is usually a program director or senior program manager.
Stage 4 is The Advanced PMO where business processes are truly integrated with project management processes. This stage includes dedicated staff, including a PMO director that oversees the technical and business aspects of the project management environment.
The final stage, Stage 5, is The Center of Excellence. Here is where you manage continuous improvement and project management process implementation across the organization for the purpose of achieving strategic organizational goals.
Source: Article by Michelle LaBrosse, PMP - Founder of Cheetah Learning
Summary:
We live in a world where we are often pressured to take shortcuts to save time
and cut costs as much as possible. However, if you’re not a skilled and
experienced project manager, the wrong shortcut could end up costing you a lot
more.
Source: Article by Jacqueline Dasso Haddad, PMP - Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
My fellow community members, I have a confession to make. For the last several years I have shied away from a project manager title for fear that I would be pigeonholed. We have all been there, limited in what people think we actually do based on a title. Now let’s look at this past year. The economy tanked, many of us lost a good portion of our savings and unemployment continues to hover around 10 percent. So what is a project manager to do today as many companies have held off on hiring and starting many projects for that matter? The answer is use this time to hone our skills, discover new roles that really require a project manager to be successful and learn how to market (or “re-market”) our skills for a changing economy. Whether you are a seasoned project manager, a self proclaimed PM or finding yourself wanting to enter the profession, read on. Although I never claim to have all the answers, I hope this article will offer a different perspective as well as a bit of hope.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Project Planning
The very traits and talents that earn people their promotion to Project Management often prove to be the barriers to effective project planning. Poorly done planning leads an otherwise talented Project Manager to a project riddled with dissatisfied customers, overruns and lost credibility. We'll look at a project planning session and the typical mistakes project managers make by getting carried away with the technical details and falling into the activity trap. Then we'll look at the "best practices" way of conducting project planning and the kind of big picture thinking that's required for success.
Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal
Summary:
Quality management processes must be scaled to the size of the project. Remember that there is a cost to managing quality, as well as a benefit. The effort and time required to manage quality must not exceed the overall value that you expect to gain from the process.
Quality management requires an investment of time and resources. However, you make this investment with the belief that your project and your deliverables will be of higher quality in the future. This higher quality, in turn, will lead to less rework and a more satisfied client. The basic value proposition for quality management is that you will save more cost and time over the life of your project than the cost and time required to set up and manage the quality management process.
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Selling Projects
Project managers need soft skills and effective techniques to secure approval and gain support from stakeholders and commitment from their team. The foundation is an understanding of what business benefits the executives value.
Source: TechRepublic - by Brad Egeland
Summary
"Brad takes issue with HR departments that overlook qualified project manager applicants simply because they aren’t PMP certified."
The feedback I hear from project manager job seekers is that some HR organizations are weeding out any applicants who don’t have their Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. I think this is a lazy hiring practice. I understand that these organizations sometimes get 10,000 applicants for one position, but HR might be overlooking great project managers with years of successful experience leading projects simply because they don’t have this certification.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the PMP is a valuable certification; I believe that any certification is good because it shows dedication to your profession. However, not having a certification doesn’t automatically mean you aren’t a good candidate to manage a project.
So, to put the cert in more concrete terms, this is what it takes to achieve the PMP certification:
* 35 hours of verifiable project management-related training
* 5 years of verifiable hands-on project management experience
* Successful completion of the PMP certification exam (must correctly answer 61% of scored questions)
Source: Articles by Dick Billows of 4PM
Multiple Project Fantasy Land
Projects multiply like weeds in an organization, they devour the time of technical staff and line supervisors leaving little time for people's "real jobs." Yet despite a project failure rate that can inch past 70%, some executives and project managers continue to live in a fantasy land. Let's look at the fantasies and then the survival techniques you should use in a project dense organization.
Source: PM Forum Articles
An Article written by Kathleen B. Hass for Project Management World Today. A pdf to download.
Published in PM World Today - May 2007 (Vol. IX, Issue V)
Source: Agile Advice by Mishkin Berteig
Agile Work consists of seven core practices. These practices form a solid starting point for any person, team or community that wishes to follow the Middle Way to Excellence.
The Seven Core Practices. An insight into how Agile Work is performed.
Agile Axioms & Practices. A pdf to download
Agile Work uses Lean Thinking. A pdf to download
A little flash video of an Agile team vs a Waterfall Project Development Team. The message: Join the agile revolution - it appears to be better and more flexible.
If you have difficulty in rendering the video, you will find it here
It has become clear to me that Project Management in the "brick and mortar" game [Construction of large Infrastructure related projects such as buildings, dams, bridges, roads etc..., or Minerals Extraction projects such as mines, processing plants, smelters etc...] has not got the monopoly on Project Management skills, methodologies or systems.
A number of new approaches, techniques, skills and systems can be found in the softer sciences or endeavours - such as those in HR, IT, NGO's Project Management. Techniques being used such as Agile Development, SCRUM and Timeboxing may well prove to be superior approaches than that used in traditional PMBok or PRINCE methodologies
I will be investigating these in more detail in 2010 - watch this space.
Len Pretorius
Source: TenStep Tom Mochal
Benchmarking is the ongoing process of improving performance by identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices and processes found inside and outside the organization.
The following are five common myths about benchmarking:
Source: Catia Community Feature written by Don Creswell
Welcome to ValuePoint™, a column featuring tips and techniques for improving the economic value of New Product Development (NPD).
This first column concentrates on what I call “The Missing Element in PLM”: getting a handle on the expected economic value to be created by investments in new products, enhanced products, and product portfolios.
PLM – Product Life Cycle Management – addresses virtually everything that needs to be managed to conceive of, develop, and bring a product to market. The scope of PLM is immense: from innovation to computer aided design (CAD), to computer aided engineering (CAE), to project/portfolio management (PPM) and on and on. But, there seems to be a missing element: where does management address the fundamental question: what is the bottom line result of doing all this?
The project manager, in the broadest sense of the term, is the most important person for the success or failure of a project. The project manager is responsible for planning, organizing and controlling the project. In turn, the project manager receives authority from the management of the organization to mobilize the necessary resources to complete a project.
The project manager must be able to exert interpersonal influence in order to lead the project team. The project manager often gains the support of his/her team through a combination of the following:
Three resources are required to accomplish any given task; information (knowledge); work (energy) and time. These three resources are interrelated; e.g. we use less energy if we do something slowly and require more information and knowledge if we don’t have enough time. Remember the call in the USA during the oil crisis in the seventies for drivers to drive more slowly (55mph) so as to conserve the energy in their petrol. At the extremes we may think of a thoughtful retired philosopher who has a lot of time and knowledge and uses little energy to accomplish a task; primitive man who used lots of time and energy doing things because he had no knowledge of labour saving devices and our modern technological society where there is lots of information, knowledge and energy but very little time.
Projects, loosely defined as single endeavours that utilise resources with definite starting and finishing dates, have been undertaken for thousands of years. Emerging technologies of the time have been used to create unique and wonderful outcomes, structures like the pyramids, bridges and various machines. People have also undertaken projects to embark on great expeditions and journeys like circumnavigating the world, discovering new lands and conquering distant and challenging places. These were all forms of projects that required initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing.
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