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.

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.