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.

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.