October 20, 2009

Project Management from a Distance – Part 6

Posted by Brad Egeland

In Part 5 of this six-part series, we covered the topic of how to go about negotiating a telecommuting situation whether you’re just coming into an organization or already onboard. In Part 6, we will discuss the concept of maintaining the telecommuting or remote working role:

Part 1 – Why remote?

Part 2 – Will it work for you?

Part 3 – What type of job enables remote PM?

Part 4 – What setup do you need?

Part 5 – Negotiating when it’s not an obvious move

Part 6 – Staying the course

Finally, we’re to the topic of what I call “staying the course.” What does that mean in this context? Where I’m going with this is the idea of both staying productive and doing your best to maintain a good balance with your executive team and their plans and expectations. In other words…are you and your projects thriving in this role and serving the needs of both your company and your client?

Maintaining the Balance

Once you’ve decided to work remotely and it’s been approved, you must be sure to assess the situation periodically. If you don’t, your superiors will…actually they will anyway. Keep the situation in check – otherwise it’s easy to move forward while not realizing where you may be failing your customers or your company.

Periodically consider each of the following carefully:

Am I still maintaining a proper balance between work and home?
Are my designated office hours productive?
Are my customers being served well by my working situation?
Am I free from distractions while conducting work?
Are deadlines being missed or postponed due to my telecommuting situation?

Corrective Action

If you find that any of these areas – or other key areas I may have missed – are indeed suffering, then it is critical that you take swift corrective action. It may be a simple as rethinking your schedule and what’s conflicting with it home, or moving your home office to a different location in the house. Or it may be as significant as scraping the telecommuting concept altogether. Remember, it’s definitely not for everyone, and it’s definitely not for every working situation. Be proactive in fixing the situation before it reflects poorly on your work performance.

Summary

Looking back, we’ve covered six key concepts of getting you from thinking about telecommuting to actually doing it. Always re-assess your situation because as PMs we know that our environment changes, our customers change and our project needs and demands change. Even if it’s been working well on most of our projects to work remotely, keep in mind that a particular project may come along that it won’t work for. It’s happened to me – when most of my team for a particular project was here in Las Vegas. Those are the times you shift gears and do whatever you need to do to be successful on the project.

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