Archives for 2003

What is a company’s most cherished asset? If you don’t know the answer, you probably don’t know where you’re going.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

Here are some common answers to what companies value most–all are important, but only the last is correct.

People? Many companies mistakenly say so in their core beliefs.

Profit? Obviously important to a for-profit company, and sound financials are a sign of effective management even for nonprofits, academic institutions and public sector entities.

Products and services? Magnets for clients.

Clients? Without them, the company has no future.

Intellectual property? Past investments help secure future success.

Brand? How will customers know you otherwise?

Marketing? The only way to tell customers about your products and services.

Cash flow? Solid companies can pay their bills and invest in their future.

Productivity? An ever-rising bar.

Quality? Of course.

Creativity and ingenuity? A company cannot rest on its laurels.

Integrity? Getting warmer …

Leadership? BINGO! A company’s most cherished asset is its leadership.

If a company has mediocre leaders and the best employees, it will be a mediocre force in its industry. However, a company with the best leaders and mediocre employees will be a formidable force in its industry. Yes, formidable. It’s all about leadership. Interestingly, companies with the best leaders don’t have mediocre employees. Employees rise to the occasion for their leaders.

We all want to follow a leader even if we are leaders ourselves. We want someone in whom we can believe. Someone who helps give our work meaning, legitimacy and purpose. It doesn’t mean we need to always agree with the leader; we can accept different points of view. But we need to believe in the overall vision and direction in which we are being led.

The best leaders lay claim to their “domain of responsibility”–all actions, responsibilities and commitments that fall within the scope of completing their assignments successfully.

A project manager with 10 direct reports, for instance, must interface with dozens of other people related to the project. Human resources, infrastructure, the client, senior management, legal, purchasing, procurement–all of these groups can impact a project. They are all part of the leader’s domain of responsibility.

An executive with a 100-person company is not only responsible for the performance of those 100. The domain of responsibility encompasses people and groups outside the organization who can influence the company’s performance. Customers, potential customers, trade groups, legislators, unions–the domain of responsibility does not stop at the company’s front gate.

Leaders lay out a clear vision for all those people within their domains of responsibility, so everyone understands their mission and steadfastly remains focused. Moreover, leaders identify the major goals to be attained and provide measurements to establish and track those goals to ensure that the journey is deliberate and successful.

A person’s domain of responsibility almost always is far broader than seems apparent. Recognizing that fact and responding appropriately are keys to great leadership. Companies, organizations, projects that are consistently successful aren’t so by accident. Success is due to the passion, boldness and focus exhibited by its leaders.

Are you leading within your domain of responsibility … or are you waiting for others to lead you?

Continual evaluations cultivate skills and knowledge necessary for today’s leaders. Project review workshops allow you to mentor your staff, bringing them to the next level.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

Institutionalizing project management best practices across an organization is a work in progress. It never ends. Project review workshops are great tools to foster the skills and transfer the knowledge necessary to being a world-class project organization.

The executive is in the best position to drive this practice across an organization and ensure it is routinely applied. The commitment to project review workshops shows the executive both cares about project success and team development.

Project review workshops are a formal classroom technique used to examine active projects and assess their overall health, identifying both areas of praise and improvement.

A project review workshop typically lasts two workdays–any longer and it can be too exhaustive for the participants. Three to four projects are selected, and their project managers and two to three members of each project team are invited to attend. The audience should total about 20, no more than 30.

The team prepares a set of slides describing the state of their project. As the slides are presented, the workshop instructor and attendees probe with questions in order to assess the true health of the project.

Two sets of blank flipcharts–Praise and Problems–are posted on the meeting room walls. As the presentation progresses, noteworthy praise items and problems are recorded.

When a project review is nearly complete, the instructor asks each attendee to assess the likelihood of that the project will achieve its delivery date. Then the instructor openly reviews each of the problems recorded and weighs them according to importance in their impact on the delivery date. The instructor then provides an assessment of the overall health of the project.

After the workshop, a brief report outlines the findings from each project reviewed. The report captures the items that were listed as praise or problems for each project as well as the risk assessments made by the instructor and participants. The project managers whose projects were reviewed then can develop action plans to address the most important problems identified.

A project review workshop benefits all who participate as well as the executives who make it happen. Project managers learn a great deal about how well they and their teams are performing, and they walk away with specific items to address. All participants learn from the other presentations and take back new ideas and thinking for current and future projects. The executive team witnesses the continual improvement in applying project management best practices across the organization contributing to lower costs, increased productivity, improved schedule and budget commitments–all leading to improved customer relationships.

The project review workshop develops more than skills. It can be difficult to hear others publicly call your baby “ugly,” no matter how constructively the analysis comes across. The lessons learned will not soon be forgotten. Furthermore, often just preparing the presentation forces a project team to think through and solve many of their problems before publicly exposing the state of their work.

For maximum benefit, project review workshops should be conducted every four to six months. The goal is to focus on the major projects across an organization, as well as provide follow-up reviews on longer-running projects to ensure progress.

The project review workshop is one of those defining tools that transitions an organization from good to great. It is the sort of tool that executives find themselves constantly in search of.

There is no better method than mentoring to develop effective project managers and teams. But the special note here is that this technique does not focus on helping an isolated project succeed; it helps projects across the whole organization achieve success. Project review workshops push the envelope on continuous positive change required across an organization by which all stakeholders benefit. Sponsoring never felt so good!

Are you leading to success?

Abraham Lincoln said, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

I have collected project management-related tips from among my favorite and most promising–many learned too slowly and too painfully. These tips can offer pause for thought and help promote job performance effectiveness. Adopting one can benefit your project; adopting many can benefit your career.

• It’s not about the ability of those around you to lead; it’s about your ability to lead, in spite of what is happening around you.
• Mind your own business first. Behave as if you own the business and your business is defined by your domain of responsibility. This not only serves to strengthen your behavior and effectiveness, but, if everyone behaved similarly, your company would greatly benefit as well.
• Define your roles and responsibilities and obtain agreement from your boss. You are far more likely to rise to expectations when those expectations are clearly defined. We achieve according to that which we are measured.
• Treat all project members equally. Whether they are clients, vendors, contractors or company employees, a project suffers when preferential treatment is given to any group or person. A project’s success is dependent upon the success of each and every project member.
• Boldness! You cannot be a consistently effective leader if you don’t have it. The person who consistently displays bold behavior will far out-perform the person with similar knowledge and experience who does not. Bold behavior includes doing what is necessary, within legal and ethical parameters, to accomplish your job.
• Become a benevolent dictator. Micromanaging, consensus management and democratic rule all can be highly ineffective leadership styles in a business or project. A benevolent dictator leads, first, by actively soliciting information and opinions from team members and others, second, by listening, and third, by demonstrating the leadership, courage and boldness to personally make the right decision, and standing accountable for that decision.
• Practice the Golden Rule. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is the best time-tested behavior to adopt while performing on projects.
• Perform post-project reviews and ensure that the resulting lessons are applied to new projects. Lessons cannot be considered “learned” until they have been appropriately adopted.
• Seek out a mentor. There is no better way to learn than by having a mentor who has been there, done that, messed up and learned from the experiences. A mentor’s advice can positively impact your career and help protect your projects.
• Ask for help or become part of the problem. Asking for and obtaining help is a sign of professional maturity, not weakness. It sends the signal that you take pride in your work and care about the success of the project.
• For consistent success, focus on your top three priorities each day rather than your bottom 30. The top problems of a project are the areas that can cause the most harm. They must be effectively dealt with according to the urgency they require.
• Inspect what you expect. Don’t “trust” that things are progressing smoothly or will work out okay on their own. Plan it, measure it and, if necessary, mitigate it.
• Don’t delay or avoid escalating issues that are at an apparent impasse; escalations are a healthy and essential part of business. If you and another project member are unable to see eye-to-eye, then after an earnest attempt to negotiate a resolution without success, you must call on higher levels of project leadership for help.
• The No. 1 reason why leaders fail: being too soft! If you are too soft, your stakeholders will not learn effective behavior, nor will they respect you. Projects fail because their leaders fail.
• It’s not about being liked; it’s about doing the right thing. It’s called integrity!
• You are what you perceive yourself to be. Your vision of yourself becomes your reality.

Now go make a difference!

PM Network is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

You get from others what you invest in others.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

As a leader, do you both preach and practice professional behavior? Are you role-model caliber? You should be. In my experience, most leaders have a credibility gap in this area with coworkers. By coworkers, I mean the full range of organizational hierarchy from people who work under you, to your peers, to higher ups.

Here is a starter list of professional behaviors to embrace that can help you be a more effective leader.

Develop great working relationships. Make relationships with your coworkers not just work, but work well. The higher you report in an organization’s hierarchy, the more you are expected to solve problems without requiring help from higher-ups. If something you did gets back to your superiors, you want it to be because of the good it provided, not because of a problem you caused, contributed to or could have diffused.

Make your boss look good. Your actions are a reflection on your boss. Your job includes helping to make your boss look good and making his/her job as easy as possible.

Be a role model to your peers. Strive to act and behave in a manner that motivates people to emulate your style. You want your peers to look forward to being in a work meeting with you or including you as a welcomed contributor who can help bring harmony and effective resolution to the challenges at hand.

Be a role model to your staff. Show your staff (don’t just tell them) how you expect them to behave. You want your staff to ask themselves often, “How would [your name] handle his.”

Count to that proverbial 10 before saying or doing something that will cause problems. Once the words leave your lips or your actions have been shown, you cannot pull them back. Moreover, it can take weeks, sometimes months, to recover from a moment of indiscretion. For example, consider not sending potentially inflammatory e-mails at the end of the day. Your patience is lessened, and you may not be at your best in demonstrating good judgment. Write the e-mails, but wait until morning to reread them before sending them. More often than not, you will change the wording or not send them and handle the problem is a different way.

Meet your commitments. Whether to your boss, a peer or a subordinate, meeting commitments is one of the best things you can do to establish a great reputation. If you cannot meet a commitment, then reset it before the original due date when the collateral damage can be minimized.

Ask others for their advice. Bouncing ideas off others serves two great purposes. First, it improves relationships. People are flattered and feel important to be asked. Second, you will learn in the process. Sometimes the lesson learned is a validation of your original approach, but other times you will walk away with a better idea.

Look for solutions. Don’t become an obstacle. Search for all the reasons that something can be made to work, rather than focusing on why it cannot.

Expect from yourself what you expect from others. Hold yourself to the same high standards that you expect from others. Practice what you preach. Some examples: Arrive at meetings on time and prepared; be timely in returning phone calls; increase person-to-person communications while decreasing over-reliance on e-mails.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a start. Think about the leaders you know that you admire the most. It’s not just about being nice, it’s also about being effective.

Now go make a difference!

The project manager should not allow project-related problems to drift.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

How does a project get behind schedule? “One day at a time,” wrote Frederick Brooks in his classic, The Mythical Man Month. Many of us have been associated with projects that completed late or not at all. It is not unusual for projects to be days or weeks late, but some projects are–yipes!–months or years late.

Reflect on this for a moment: Based on recurring industry statistics citing that a large number of projects finish late, the likelihood is high that you will experience–perhaps cause–one or more of your future projects to finish late. Not a comforting thought.

Obviously, there are many causes for late projects: incomplete/misunderstood requirements, poor planning/estimating, weak change control that allows unmitigated scope creep, ineffective project tracking and problem management, and weak project sponsor, to name a few. A big problem is that, in spite of our desire to have an effectively run project, it is not unusual for the project to “get away from us.”

A powerful tool to help keep your project on track is to reserve one day each week for work and escalation meetings. The day that immediately follows your project tracking meeting is best. All project members should be available on this day if called upon. By reserving the day after the project tracking meeting, project managers also buy a few more hours (between the tracking meeting and the scheduled work/escalation meeting) for the principals to resolve the problem. However, avoid scheduling the day before or after a weekend because it is common for project members to be away from work due to holidays and vacations.

Let’s say that in last week’s project tracking meeting, some project members were behind on completing an activity, but appeared to have reasonable explanations and plans to recover by next week’s project tracking meeting. Next week has arrived and they still have not recovered as committed.

The project manager now becomes directly involved as a catalyst–a facilitator–to ensure that these problems are resolved appropriately and as soon as possible. The parties involved had the first crack at resolving the issues, but failed to do so. The project manager is not upset with anyone. It’s not personal, it’s business. The team members may have performed as well as they could. However, the project manager has no intention of allowing these problems to drift any longer. As the last action of a project tracking meeting, the project manager schedules the appropriate work or escalation meetings for the next day to help move the problems to closure.

Reserving one day each week to conduct work and escalation meetings does not mean allowing problems to drift until that day arrives. On the contrary, problems should always be resolved with the sense of urgency they require for project commitments to be successfully met. The one reserved day per week is a safety net to address the problems that escaped a quick resolution and may require special attention.

When a project manager reserves one day a week for closing out problems that are drifting, the project can reap noteworthy benefits, which include:

• Resolving problems that could eventually delay or sink a project
• Instilling a sense of urgency for project stakeholders to deal with their problems
• Providing a support system to help stakeholders obtain the attention they need
• Demonstrating a level of discipline that project stakeholders expect and need from the project manager.

Brooks is right, of course, to say that a project gets late one day at a time. But a project also remains strong or gains strength one day at a time. The reserved day can provide a gate for project stakeholders to open and use when problems require special attention. This gate can significantly help project stakeholders corral their problems before they fester and cause serious harm to the project.

Now go make a difference!

You must have a target—otherwise you won’t know what to hit.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

Ever have your boss, client, product sponsor or someone else in a position of authority give you the delivery date for a yet-to-be-planned product/service? This is common practice, but is it a good practice? In other words, should you be given a target date or should you be left to determine the most appropriate date for you and the project team?

In almost all cases, it is good business to provide the project team a target end date. An end date yields two primary benefits:

• The target date will likely have special meaning to the business. For example, it may coincide with an important trade show, allow revenues to be earned before the fiscal year ends, meet or beat a competitor’s date for the launch of a similar product, or it may meet a legal deadline such as a regulatory date.
• The target date will stretch the project team to be more creative. Left to our own preferences, many of us will take the path of least resistance, that is, a comfortable plan rather than a more aggressive (but achievable!) plan. We often perform our best work when we are being challenged.

Picture this scenario: The boss provides a target end date of six months. This gives your team a solid goal upon which to focus. Planning decisions are balanced against the requirement to complete the product in six months.

But what if the best plan that you and your team can create requires eight months? What do you do? You present the eight-month plan to your boss and articulate why the plan’s duration cannot be reduced. And if it is reduced, you identify the negative consequences that are likely to result. However, be prepared for an onslaught of questions about whether you and your team have fully exhausted other options such as outsourcing, acquiring off-the-shelf components, reducing the features offered and hiring proven experts to help in the implementation.

If you can professionally defend your eight-month plan, then most bosses will yield to your due-diligence and accept the end date moving out an additional two months. However, some bosses will say, “I want it in six months! Find a way to make it happen or …” (“I will find someone who can” is the inference). This is bad business! All stakeholders lose!

Demanding that the proverbial 10 pounds be placed into a five-pound sack does not make it possible. Laws of physics will not change just because someone wants them to.

It’s All About the Target

Notice that I have used the phrase target end date throughout the article. It is good business to provide a target end date. It is bad business to demand an end date that is not achievable.

Target dates are good business—as a starting point. Moreover, the project manager, while working with the project team, can apply the same concept to creating a project plan. For example, say the boss requests a target date of six months for the delivery of an improved product. The project manager, in working backwards from the six-month delivery date, determines target dates for the project’s major milestones. These target milestone dates help the project members focus on building a plan that can meet the six-month end date. Most project members likely can meet the target milestone dates. For those who cannot, the project manager works with them creatively to either meet or modify the dates somewhat to achieve the best possible delivery date for the project.

Setting target end dates for final delivery or for intermediate major milestones is good business so that the best plans can be created. But be prepared to defend your plan, especially if you believe that you cannot achieve the target dates. Offer alternatives, but do something. As a project manager, all eyes are on you to ensure the right plan is committed.

Now go make a difference!