Project Management’eur

The other day I attended a presentation on Time Management offered by the local Houston chapter of the Project Management Institute. This was an overview discussing how to manage your time considering all aspects of your life from a unique and interesting perspective. What struck me was that there were several attendees who were noticeably stressed and distraught, seeking answers to these two questions:

1. How to I get all of these extra monkeys off my back? Even though I am already overloaded with work, my boss keeps handing off more to me.
2. How to I manage the multitude of emails that keep showing up in my in box in ever increasing volume?

The presenter acknowledged that these are common problems in corporate America and offered some advice for each.

For the first problem, the presenter suggested compiling documentation of all of the projects you are currently working and seeking a meeting with the boss to discuss them.  During the meeting, present this documentation in a positive manner so that the boss can see the reality of what is expected of you and in what time frame.  Then the boss can either prioritize the list and/or offload some of the work to someone else.  The boss’s expectations of you then become more realistic and your stress level goes down.

For the second problem, the presenter suggested that you must control how people communicate with you.  As an example, he noted that he only gives his cell phone number out to his family and close personal friends.  But in the work environment, everybody has your email address.  How then do you control communication with you at work?

Project Management for the Real World , an online project management application, can assist with both of these problems.

For the first problem, your project data can be gathered into a comprehensive printer friendly report with a few clicks and printed for your meeting.  Better still, you can set up your boss as a project owner user, giving him/her the ability to view all aspects of all of your  projects online at any time.  With this ability to quickly reference the detail of all your projects, the boss can better plan how to prioritize and add new ones and prevent the extra monkeys on your back problem to begin with.  For a large organization where the projects of multiple departments need to be tracked, and account can be set up for each department.  The manager who must track the work of all these departments can be given the appropriate permissions in each department’s account to enable an overall view of the projects in a company.  This data is presented in a hierarchical view so that the manager can easily drill down to points of particular interest at any time.

For the second problem, you need a way to control how people in your organization communicate with you.  Large volumes of email can be caused by redundancy of requests and responses for information.  This redundancy can be caused by not including everyone who has a need to be involved on a copy list, by the difficulty of organizing emails by topic or thread, by not communicating effectively or thoroughly in your emails, and by individuals loosing important emails.  To implement some control on this, use the project discussion area of Project Management for the Real World to host your discussions, organizing them by project and by task. Insist that this is the place for these discussions. Set up guidelines to make the knowledge base developed by discussion participation more useful; for example:

• Read your task requirements thoroughly first.
• Search the project discussion posts to see if some of your questions have already been addressed.
• Be thorough about including all of your remaining questions to date in your post. Avoid posting one liners when possible to reduce the number of individual posts making it easier for the team to find what they are looking for.
• In responding to questions, address all questions, even if you have to say you can’t answer some now and will post the answer when available. I can’t begin to count the times when I have sent an email with a list of questions and the response will simply not address some of them, causing me to have to send a follow-up email for all the questions not answered in the first email.
• If your post applies only to one or more specific tasks and not to the project in a general sense, link these task to the post.

Combining a centralized discussion area accessible at any time by team members and the intelligent, thoughtful use of the content of your communication can go a long way to solve communication overload in project management. It is easy for an overwhelmed manager or team member to be tempted to quickly fire off an email that just gives minimum attention to some particular hot button. But taking the extra time to be more thoughtful and thorough in your project discussions can save much time and confusion in the long run, helping your projects to be completed faster and more efficiently with much less stress on all participants.

When a project is ready to begin, typically care has been taken to communicate with the project owner and other stakeholders to define the project requirements in as much detail as possible. Various documents are published describing what needs to be accomplished and the methodology or plan to accomplish the objectives. This plan usually involves the breakdown of the project work into various tasks which can then be assigned to various team members.

For many years project managers have struggled to solidify the requirements at this point, avoiding what is commonly known as “scope creep” in an attempt to ensure the ability to meet the deadline and be able to clearly articulate the details of various tasks to the assigned team members. However, it is beginning to be recognized that in the real world, it is not possible to know every detail before embarking on the project, and that there must be a way to build some flexibility into the project as it progresses.

In 2008, we are now seeing a paradigm change occurring in project management as the project community settle around a new contingency based paradigm for project management. This new paradigm embraces both traditional and complex project management. Key to the new paradigm is recognition that projects vary in their levels of certainty and emergence, and that fit for purpose strategies, architectures, competences, contracts and tools need to be used.
– Redefining Our Profession Part 2: The History and Future of Project Management by By Professor Dr David Dombkins

In software development, new methodologies, such as Scrum have emerged which recognize the inability to know everything up front and prescribe ways to deal with emerging requirements. Part of this approach involves regularly scheduled team meetings for planning work for the next specified time interval, reviewing status, and reflecting on the past interval’s progress in order to improve progress in the next interval.

Two key elements to this approach are:

• The need to adjust quickly to emerging changes, which requires
• The need to quickly and accurately disseminate the new information to all the team members to eliminate having to backtrack

This rapid dissemination of new information can be especially problematic with virtual teams perhaps located around the globe where face to face daily meetings are impossible and video conferencing can be expensive. When a team member runs into a problem that requires an answer before proceeding, waiting for the next meeting or teleconference can cause delay. But when getting this answer via email, typically the new information is not immediately shared with all the team members, if at all. Even if all the team members are copied on the email, the information is not stored in an organized and readily retrieval format, and runs the risk of being deleted before the team member realizes that he/she needs that reference information at a later time.

One solution to this problem is to have a blog-type discussion area, accessible by all team members, including the stakeholders. With a few well thought out guidelines from the project manager, the team can work together to build a central web-based knowledge base in real time, with every update accessible immediately to everyone in an organized format with instant email notification to all team members of each update.

Keeping this central knowledge base current can reduce time spent in meetings and reduce video conferencing expenses. In fact since everyone has easy access to this information, it may be possible to get by with audio conferencing, at least some of the time.

The following video demonstrates how Project Management for the Real World can be used to create such a web-based central knowledge base for a project team.

Project Collaboration Team

This post will deal with communication as it applies to project status. A subsequent post will discuss general dialog among the team members regarding the project.

Many projects involve collaboration with others. For many companies, especially small businesses, this involves collaboration with skilled personnel outside the company in order to either acquire access to skill sets not found among internal personnel, or simply to augment the internal resources in order to achieve project completion within a deadline.

Assembling this team should not only consider technical skills, but socially compatible personalities with a commitment to team cooperation to complete the project on target with the business goals and on time.

But however skilled and well-intentioned the individual project team members are, it is up to the project manager to provide the cohesive glue that keeps everybody on target throughout the project life cycle.

One thing a project manager will strive for is keeping the team motivated throughout the project. A big factor in this objective is involving each member of the team in the “big picture” so that each member can feel an ownership in the project. A project manager must be clear about the goals of the project, giving the team members a clear picture of what they must accomplish as a group to instill ownership at the outset.

Involve them in the big picture of the business and the project, so they’ll understand and participate properly in higher-level decisions that affect their technical work. They shouldn’t be handed a schedule; they should participate in making design tradeoff decisions and planning the entire project.
- Cinda Voegtli in Being Relative as Managers

To keep this motivation throughout the course of the project, all team members should have a comprehensive view of project progress, including task dependencies so that they can follow the progress of the group and contribute meaningful dialog to ensure continuous forward progress.

Teams working at a sustainable pace should be able to sustain that pace indefinitely and continue to make an appropriate amount of progress without inviting burnout. Members of the team should be able to stay focused while at work and not get too worn down—occasionally working overtime when it is needed, but only in short durations.
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Once the team can focus on specific items within a reasonable window, and can make commitments rather than be handed deadlines, sustainable pace is a critical element to helping the team reach those commitments. Most project activity is very relaxed at the beginning and becomes increasingly frantic as the end nears—a very unstable, and unsustainable, level of activity. If you set your time boxes to the right length, the team may have a brief ramp up period at the beginning to do their planning, followed by an extended period of focused but controlled activity, ending up with a brief decompression period at the end of the time box, where the team can reflect back on what they did and make adjustments. Many teams refer to this as having a nice rhythm. – Kent McDonald in Keeping Up the Pace

It should be noted that the team members should have input on what is “reasonable” for each of them to accomplish within a time window.

If one or more tasks is falling behind, there should be some indication of this early on to avoid the need for extensive overtime toward the end of the project in order to meet a deadline. Working extensive overtime adds stress and burnout to the team making them less productive per hour of work, feeding the stress factor in an endless cycle that can quickly get out of control and cause the project to fail.

Project Management for the Real World can help with these issues.

• It is possible for everyone to have a full comprehensive view of the project, all tasks including the detail of all worked logged against them
• It is possible for all documents related to the project to be stored on line under the project so that everyone has a view to the current version of each document.
• Unlimited task dependency chains can be established allowing team members to easily track tasks upon which their assigned task(s) depend or tasks which depend upon completion of their assigned tasks.
• The display for percent complete on a task is color coded to show early on when a task may be falling behind. This is determined by a rough calculation of a ratio of percent complete over elapsed time from task start date. This assumes that a task due date has been assigned.

These features can aid a project manager in being effective in keeping the team members involved in the big picture, and thus taking more ownership of their pieces of the project. They can also alert a project manager sooner rather than later if any tasks are lagging behind so that he/she can take steps early on to get these tasks back on track, thus reducing the chance of heavy overtime toward the end of the project.

business application developers

Business application developers spend a great deal of time planning the functionality and user interface for their applications in order to create a tool designed to assist the business in implementing its business objectives. Historically written user documentation is created as part of the application in order to convey to the application users how to use the application to achieve the business objective. This is because developers know that no matter how well the application is designed, if the application users don’t know how to effectively use the application to meet the business need, then the ROI in the software development or purchase is diminished, thus diminishing the business’s ability to operate efficiently or effectively. But no matter how carefully the documentation is written and organized, some users still have trouble gleaning the needed knowledge about operating the software from it.

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. That is why many developers are augmenting their documentation with video tutorials. In a video tutorial, the audio can address business functions and objectives while showing interactive use of the software to accomplish the functionality. Well planned videos will carefully script the audio dialog to relate the software functionality to the business objective and describe and display its use in language that the end user can understand and at a pace that allows users with first time exposure to the application can grasp. The screen displays should be readable, even if zooming is required at times to highlight the information being discussed. Although music may be added to a video for style, it should not detract from the audio message. This visual and audio input uses more of the viewers’ senses than words alone and can help deliver the instructions more effectively than words alone.

Windsong Enterprises uses these principles and others to create effective software instructional videos.

This post will discuss the need to keep project stakeholders up-to-date during the life of a project, and how the web-based application Project Management Tool for the Real World can facilitate this process, which we will refer to as the application.   The attached video will demonstrate how to use the application for this purpose.

During the execution and monitoring of a project, a Project Manager must be sure that the stakeholders are kept up-to-date about project progress and any changes to the project, such as due dates, changes in scope, or any changes in the details. Everyone involved must have a clear understanding of the expectations in terms of what is to be delivered, when and at what cost.  At the start of the project these expectations may be set out in a Project Definition document.   This set of expectations may be used as the project description in  the application, and can be updated as necessary throughout the life of the project by the Project Manager.  If there is a Project Definition document, this may be uploaded to the documents section of the project, and new versions can be uploaded over the original as necessary.  This may be done by the Project Manager or another individual who is assigned to update the document.  In both cases, stakeholders who view these items in the application will be assured that they are viewing the current version of the expectations.  The Project Manager and/or the document author  must take care to be comprehensive, organized and clear in the presentation of this set of expectations, keeping in mind that people will be making decisions based on this information.  The expectations must be laid out thoroughly and in language that is understandable by the stakeholder audience.  Well though out Project Definitions can minimize questions and revisions, and ensure that stakeholders have the information they need in a timely manner to support their decision making process.

Alhough projects need to be somewhat flexible to be able to handle unforseen changes, the Project Manager must be mindful of excessive “scope creep”. An individual “minor change” may not be a big deal, but when compounded to excess it can grossly effect project completion time, project resources, and project budget.  Keeping all stakeholders in the loop from inception with effective communication and sharing of project details will help to mitigate scope creep.

In the application, when viewing a project description or a document record, the last updated date and time is displayed so that any stakeholder viewer can quickly see if there has been an update since his/her last view.

Based on the project description, the Project Manager will create tasks in the tasks section of the project.  These tasks can be assigned start dates and due dates, and have progress records logged to them, which are also automatically time-stamped.  Again, this progress log information should not be short and terse, prompting a lot of follow-up to determine what is really going on.  If it is believed that the task cannot be complete by the due date, this should be documented as early as possible to avoid the stakeholder frustation of having to make last minute adjustment decisions.  The project manager can then update the due date and  description, if rqeuired, reflecting the current conditions.

The task record allows for the updating of the task description, as may be required after a project description update.  It allows the storing of an hourly rate for the task.  When a task progress log is entered, the number of hours worked is also entered so that cost-to-date information can be calculated.  The percent complete can also be updated.

Task logs may be entered at any time, but it is recommended that this be done on a schedule, such as daily or weekly unless there is critical information that must immediately be disseminated.  Stakeholders will then know when to expect updates and view the updated status of their projects.  They may in fact wish to schedule meetings or teleconferences to discuss project status after the updates have been entered.  Every stakeholder will be able to view all aspects of the project that they have been given permission to view by logging on to the application during the conference.  Then in a coordinated fashion, with everyone having access to the same current project status information, they can make whatever adjustments are necessary.  The Project Manager can record changes in the project, tasks, or documents.

When viewing a task in the application, the percent complete is displayed graphically with color coding to indicate whether a task is proceeding on schedule, may be falling behind,  overdue, or complete, providing a quick indication of tasks that may need attention.

The Project Manager will have access to drill-down and printer friendly reporting that includes cost roll-up by task, project, and project owner (customer).  The drill-down report will help the Project Manager determine if all updates have been completed on schedule and show the color coded percent complete as described above to highlight tasks needing attention.  The printer friendly version may also include the detail of the task progress logs.  The printer friendly version is in HTML format and can be saved and emailed to stakeholders who desire a comprehensive report on the project status.  This will give a stakeholder a quick view of the cost-to-date that may be available before their internal accounting systems have produced the information. Learn more on managing project stakeholders with a 30 day free trial.

Project Management Software released for online subscription-based web application product featuring. Our online Project Management software application is designed to help professionals who collaborate with others – locally or remotely. Try it…FREE project manager trial!

Professionals who perform services, whether B to B or B to C are always looking for ways to save time, reduce effort, and overall cost of projects. One part of that effort is to find ways to execute the project more efficiently. This would include the ability to communicate to all the project participants, including team members within the company and/or around the world – including the stakeholders – up to the minute project status, detailed requirements, and clearly defined individual responsibilities required for successful completion of the project.

Collaborations can flounder months after they have launched, sometimes simply because conditions with one or both of the partners change or because one of the parties doesn’t meet the terms of the agreement—unknowingly or otherwise. — The Economist Intelligence Unit in Collaboration Transforming
the way business works

With better communication among all participants it is more likely that:

1. The project will succeed because the results will reflect the goals of the stakeholders’ business objectives.
2. The project will be completed in a more timely fashion because common errors can be avoided, such as:
   1. Team members can often be referring to wrong versions of documents when distributed to the team members via email. Scenarios I have seen are:
      • Various team members who distribute the documents don’t always have a complete distribution list since these lists are often kept in their individual email clients.
      • When multiple versions of a document are distributed, some members lose track of the most current document.
      • Wasted time and money is spent on conference calls to correct the above.
   2. When team members are assigned a task or tasks for the project, they are only given information about what is expected of their specific task(s) without being given the context of how their task(s) will contribute to meeting the overall project goals. This discourages team members from taking “ownership” in the project as a whole, and conceals information from them resulting in a possible negative affect on the team members’ analysis of how to perform their portion of the project, preventing them from asking important questions that may prevent them from going down the wrong path with their work and later having to make corrections. This omission by the project manager may not be intentional, but not carried out due the extra work in communicating all of this to the members and keeping them all current on changes in requirements in a timely manner as they occur. This can also result in wasted time and money on conference calls to make course corrections.
3. Because of the improved success of the project meeting the stakeholders’ objectives, and probable more timely delivery, improved customer loyalty and a more competitive advantage can be achieved.

It is no wonder that project managers are beginning to actively seek out project management software to aid in project communication. With the trend toward outsourcing on an international scale on the rise, many are seeking web-based project management software that can be accessed and run by anyone with a browser and an internet connection, thus eliminating the need and cost of setting up an IT info structure that can bridge across various participants’ platforms in a seamless and user friendly architecture.

A web-based project management tool can provide the means to facilitate this project communication in an organized manner and make any updates immediately available to all participants, sharing the knowledge in real time. This can be done in a secure setting so that the information is only available to those who have a need to know.

Effective communication
is the single biggest enabler of effective collaboration among companies. –The Economist Intelligence Unit in Collaboration Transforming
the way business works

One of the complaints about some project management software is that they are too complex. They contain many features that are not commonly used in the “real world” and are difficult to learn and use. Also in some applications as you delve into some features, you lose the “big picture” of what you are trying to manage.

One project management tool , Project Management for the Real World developed by Windsong Enterprises addresses the issues of communicating detailed project management data in a simple to use, organized fashion with a minimum amount of data entry, and the ability to delegate some of the data entry to other team members while protecting the integrity of the data by imposing limits on what may be updated by these other team members.

The hierarchical view of the project(s) is always in view in the left pane in collapsible tree format so that you can quickly drill down to areas of interest.

Color coding on percent complete data for projects and tasks quickly highlight areas that may need extra attention.

Windsong Enterprises believes that with careful project planning with clearly stated project goals and requirements and by gaining the commitment to success of each participant including the stakeholders, The Project Management for the Real World web-based project management tool will make it a snap to empower your team to easily stay on the same page and have more successful projects.