Carnival of Project Management #30

Welcome to the December/January edition of carnival of project management.  And for this, our thirtieth edition, we have taken a trip to PMTips.net who is guest hosting the Carnival this month.

So – here is the round-up of the best project management articles submitted to the Carnival this time:

My favourite post this time comes from Elyse Nielsen at Anticlue. Her post is called Taming Chaotic Project Management – Dealing with Changing Priorities posted at Anticlue, saying, “Prioritization is the art of choosing what not to do, and it is hard for organizations without good business governance to choose what not to do. If you find yourself dealing with changing priorities, here are 5 tactics you can deploy.”

Gilad Lev-Shamur presents What are the 5 basic rules of project management? at a relatively new blog called The Project Management’s Thinker.  Not a particularly grammatical title, but it’s good that there are new project management blogs entering the field, and this one looks promising.

Here is another relatively new site, aimed at contract project managers: Steve has been putting some final touches to Contractor Project Manager over Christmas, and the site looks great.  He submitted Advice on becoming a PMO/Project Management Assistant, so if any of you are looking for a career change in the new year, this could be a good starting point.

GeekMBA360 presents Is team work overrated in corporate environment? posted at GeekMBA360. A controversial post that I don’t agree with – in a project environment I believe team work is essential. Granted, there are always people who don’t pull their weight, but bad management (or absent/ineffective management) are equally to blame for allowing these situations to continue. Projects are done with teams, therefore teams are important.

SpiKe presents Productivity Down! An Emergency Response Guide posted at Organize IT. A good post on getting going again when you can’t get a grip on what needs to be done.

Finally, here are two posts about public speaking, which I thought were interesting especially as I have just read Scott Berkun’s excellent book, Confessions of a Public Speaker. First, GreatManagement presents How to use the audience for dramatic effect when public speaking posted at GreatManagement Blog, saying, “Many of us would love to start mastering public speaking.  One particular technique that works wonders in any public speaking engagement is to involve the audience.”  He goes on to discuss how this can be done.

Second, CA has The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs posted at Atlantic Canada’s Small Business Blog, saying, “The glowing feedback after my next presentation indicated to me that following the steps outlined in the book helped. If I can do it, so can you. Here are four tips that, if you adhere to, will ensure your presentation will be a success. To provide some context, my presentation shared the results of a project with senior management.”

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of project management using our carnival submission form.  The next Carnival will be the February/March edition (regular Carnival followers will know that we are down to bi-monthly Carnivals now) and will most likely be back at the Carnival’s permanent home, A Girl’s Guide to Project Management.  However, for this month, we enjoyed the road trip to another host – thanks for your hospitality!

Strategies for Managing a Mobile Team

I ran across a great document put together by Terrence Gargiulo for Makingstories.net. Mr. Gargiulo discusses what he feels are the top ten strategies for managing mobile workers. His full document is a very good read because he also discusses things such as risks and issues to consider when managing mobile workers.  You can access his full document here.

I’m sharing this here because so many times as project managers we are overseeing the work of a very geographically dispersed team. In the past three years I’ve only managed one project with a team that I could see on a daily basis. Dozens of others involved remote workers all around the country.

Here are Mr. Gargiulo’s Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers as described in his document.

Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers

1.    Focus on building relationships

You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter audit your time. How much time are you spending engaged in activities meant to foster stronger relationships with your mobile employees? Rate each relationship on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is weak and 10 is very strong. Craft a strategy for continuing to develop your strong ones and triage the weak ones. Ask yourself why they are weak and what you can learn from them. Avoid finger pointing and hold up the mirror to reflect on your own opportunities for improvement. Extreme cases of under-performance do not warrant time or effort. These however are few and far between.

2.    Streamline communications

Consolidate and prioritize communications. Use email and IM (instant message), texting, blogging, threaded discussions, etc. for relationship-driven communications (i.e., staying in touch and being personal). Communications of an important nature should be cohesive and never delivered in fragmentary pieces that have to be cobbled together by the receiver. Mutually assess the communication preferences of yourself and your team members to develop a communication plan. Avoid assumptions and revisit your plan on a regularly basis especially when the nature of the work is about to change.

3.    Incorporate less didatic forms of communications

Determining the right amount of detail and when to provide detail is an ongoing responsibility of a manager with a mobile worker. As a general rule, less is more. This leaves bandwidth for the times when lengthy, explicit instructions and information are essential for the work at hand. Try working with more story-based forms of communications. Sharing tidbits from the field and office in the form of stories, anecdotes, case studies (use cases), jokes, innocent productive gossip, and even metaphors will relay context, encode key pieces of information, and give mobile workers a sense of inclusion.

4.    Spend more time listening

Obvious, but counterintuitive. When you are out of easy reach and you are tasked with managing the performance of others it’s easy to get sucked into the trap of needing to transmit lots of information. In most cases the opposite is what is most productive. Make listening a priority. This is the hardest and most tiring aspect of managing others. It is also the single most important thing you can do accelerate the development of strong relationships. Listening is not enough. Keep an open mind. Be present and try to enter the perspective of the speaker. This will help you ask effective questions and identify what direction to go with your own needs and agenda. You’ll be surprised at what emerges.

5.    Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow

Structure is critical. Adopt rules of engagement that place people at the center of their own decisions. Managers provide the boundaries and constraints but let employees define the working and communication styles, tools, and processes that will help them perform at the best. Set expectations on two fronts. First, treat these employees’ defined practices as privileges that can and will be modified if key performance metrics are not hit. Second, let employees know there will be times when a projects or work require less flexible, employee-driven communication and reporting practices.

6.    Manage deliverables, not activities

Lots of project-oriented work is well suited to mobile workers. Even roles that are more task driven can be effectively managed if they are broken into deliverables. For mobile workers this may mean collapsing some of the activities of a business process or workflow that had manual checkpoints and controls associated with them into deliverables. Automation where possible can be used or batching activities into larger groups can transform task oriented jobs into deliverables. Realize that there can be many facets of people’s jobs that need to be adjusted to accommodate a mobile work style.

7.    Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities

When you manage mobile workers, relationships are at the heart of your job. Performance management does not need to be a loathsome, “administrivia” obligation. Designing some unstructured, informal ongoing dialogs with mobile employees about their performance goals and personal development plans is a great way to strengthen communications, and shows an active interest in employees and relationships. This might look and feel very different from one employee to the next. This is another tangible way managers can adapt their style to match the needs and preferences of employees. It works best when the performance management conversation flows in both directions.

8.    Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise

According to a recent survey conduct by HR.com and ic4p, listening and trust are the two most important factors to virtual and remote teams. Without trust, relationships are bankrupt. Abuses of trust can always be found but these occur in spite of whatever systems we put in place. Mobile workers thrive when managers give them complete trust. In some respects managers of mobile workers have no other choice. Use trust to create strong relationships. When some concrete behavior and not just someone else’s word of mouth shows that trust has been violated, then take it away, but not until then.

9.    Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers

Every employee is different. Mobile workers make it easier for managers to take a more personalized approach in how they work and interact with members of their team. It takes more work and effort on a manager’s part but the results can be phenomenal. Understanding what enables each employee to perform at his or her best is the most important responsibility of a manager.

10. Leverage technology

Technology drives and supports managing mobile workers. Using technology well is not as simple as it appears. Standard models of communication and transaction should not always be mapped in a simple one-to-one way. Communication and collaboration technologies offer new and exciting models. These need to be purposely exploited in order for organizations to realize the full extent of benefits these wonderful new capabilities and features offer.

Beyond email, IM and phone, Web conferencing plays a key role in virtual team enablement. Take an inventory of “stuff” you need to collaborate on with your virtual team. If the list includes Word docs, spreadsheets, software applications, or anything else on your desktop, Web conferencing will be critical for collaborating in real time. You’re projects will lag if you can’t be on the same page with mobile workers.

Good Project Management Doesn’t Guarantee Project Success

We all know this to be true. If it weren’t true, then most of us would have project success on every project since we’re all pretty good project managers here, right? If you’re reading blogs about PM, then it’s likely you’re either a dedicated project manager or you want to become one…either way you’re on the right track.

No Guarantee

Back to success. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could guarantee success on our projects just by being good at what we do? A good plumber or electrician can pretty much know they’ll eventually achieve success on every project just because they’re very experienced. Some jobs may take more time, but they’ll get it done right eventually because they know their job and they know what works and what doesn’t.

As project managers, we’re not so lucky. We are one piece of a million-piece puzzle. There are about 50 factors (rough guess) that we could probably list that we know of having a hand in the successful or unsuccessful outcome of a project. And there’s probably a few hundred more that we can’t even fathom and that can depend heavily on the customer and the specific project that have some determination in the overall success of the engagement. How can we possibly manage all of these factors? The answer is, we can’t fully manage them…we can only do our best using sound practices, manage issues as they come up and rely on others to do their jobs properly.

What We Can Do

Here’s what we can do as project managers to help ensure project success on the engagements we manage:

• Practice good customer management and communication
• Delivery on what you say you will – project status reports, status calls, project schedule updates
• Track risks and issues as if you’re life depended on it – these are known potential derailing factors to your project so manage them very carefully. They’ve already been identified so you have no excuses if they arise and devour your project without evasive action on you or your team’s part.
• Follow a PM methodology or hybrid methodology that your organization and your customer understands and accepts. If it’s sounds and followable, then it should help your project run more smoothly. If it’s difficult to follow and manage, then you’ll be fighting a losing battle from Day 1.
• Manage your resources as carefully as you manage the issues and risks. They are the ones executing the work on YOUR project. Keep them happy and engaged….and replace them if they are a cancer to the project or the team. You should have that power…if not, speak to your executive management immediately and get that power.

Summary

As I said, there are probably 50 factors we could brainstorm and write down that you can be aware of and try to manage and control as you attempt to keep your projects on track. And there are literally hundreds of other, unseen factors that are out there and probably depend on the customer, the project, and the technology…among other things.

The best we can do is practice good, sound, fundamental project management, manage our customer and team well, do what we say we will do and hope for the best. In the long run, you’ll be happy with your performance and hopefully others will see through the issues and recognize a good project management effort for what it was.

IT Leaders Struggle with Bringing Social Networking into Formalized PM Processes

The July 20, 2009 issue of InformationWeek brings us an article by John Soat on how IT leaders are wrestling to bring informal collaboration into rigorous processes such as global project management and product development. I’ve included a portion of that article – including a discussion on how one company is using IWMS vendor Skire’s Unifier product to managing their project, collaboration and communication needs.

I’ve personally worked with several people at Skire during an evaluation of their product and found this article very interesting. Please read on….

The Right Place for Social Networking?

Nevsun Resources is a mining company with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, and its biggest project is developing mines in Eritrea, a small country on the east coast of Africa. Using a browser-based, software-as-a-service project management tool, logistics clerks, engineers, and project managers are sharing documents, cost outlines, and project schedules across continents, giving CFO Peter Hardie in North America what he calls a “real-time review” of the project in a fairly remote area of Africa. “The spectrum of people using it is broad, and that’s what we were hoping we would get out of the system,” Hardie says.

The system – called Unifier, from the vendor Skire – lets Hardie “bridge the time and distance gaps that exist between the project principals in Vancouver, Eritrea, and South Africa,” he says. It helps Nevsun control costs and track expenditures down to the invoice level.

Social networking norms increasingly are creeping into formal project planning and product development tools and processes. And at many companies, the rules both formal and informal for how to use those social computing tools often aren’t written down. Nevsun’s system let’s people comment and ask questions about a record or specific aspect of the project. But there’s always a way to opt out of the collaboration flow. Asked if he uses the ad hoc communication capability in the Unifier system, Hardie says: “Me, personally? No.” Instead, if he’s reviewing specific costs and has a question, he’ll simply pick up the phone and call somebody.

As almost all business becomes global in nature and business processes increasingly are managed online, companies continue to push the limits of technology created to manage projects and teams across time zones and geographies. The goal is to communicate more effectively, work more closely with partners, leverage ephemeral information sources, and ultimately get as close as possible to the feel of what’s really going on.

Nevsun’s experience with Skire is just one cross-continent example. In product development, vendors such as Dassault Systemes, Siemens, and others are plowing Web 2.0 capabilities into their product life-cycle management platforms, adding collaboration and complexity.

Running alongside these formal platforms is the aggressive use of Internet-centric social networking platforms and tools – wikis, blogs, instant messaging, presence awareness, peer reviews, search – to foster internal teamwork and tap into wider communities of knowledge. Yet IT teams are wrestling with how these tools function in concert with collaboration technology, such as document management, project management, and product development systems. Are they adjuncts, integral parts, or even replacements for tried-and-true software?

Plenty of CIOs also are wary of the data integration, security, and productivity issues raised by the introduction of social networking technology in the enterprise, especially when tied to a process as critical as developing a new product or completing a project. Yet some of embraced the dynamic nature of social computing and turned it to their advantage.

Four Challenges to Ad Hoc Collaboration

Creating Norms. When you have a wiki and formal project or product development software, what conversations happen where? One idea: If it’s tied to a process step, keep it in the formal tool. If it’s about improving that process, go to the wiki.

Breaking Convention. Product development is a high-stakes process. Injecting social networking conventions adds risks. Yet it could be vital to global teams that innovate ideas as well as execute.

Finding Insights. Done wrong, wikis can create islands of insights that the right people will never find.

Conquering Fear. Subject experts might be wary of sharing hard-earned insights, since they see that as their value.

PMTips: What We’re Here For

After 372 posts, nearly 500 reader and author comments and almost a quarter of a million words written over the past 7+ months, I’d like to take a moment to step back and discuss what we’re trying to do on the PMTips site.

First, let me say that this has been an extremely interesting and challenging twist on Project Management for me. To actually put thoughts to writing on past experiences, ideas, headaches, mistakes, frustrations and of course successes has been very rewarding for me. I find myself always looking forward to the next article and working to come up with fresh ideas to share or information from favorite articles or books that others may not have run across yet.

The PMTips “About” tab states the following….

PMtips.net is a blog about project management, collaboration, knowledge management and all other work 2.0 concepts present in today’s web 2.0 world.

This is a collaborative project that has several authors each of them master in the field. The purpose of this blog is to offer practical tips, tricks how-to`s and to serve as a resource for shedding light on the tools, trends, and practices that can make the life easier for many of use dealing with different challenges on a daily basis.

Its wished-for audience are those who do not use PM tools and are not seeing themselves as PM’s, but actually they do their work; people who just started being PM’s in organizations, small, medium, or larger, and are constantly searching out answers that can help them do their work more efficiently and profitably.

At PMtips.net every day new posts are posted which will help you win in your business. We invite you to visit us often and to share your insight with this community as well, since without having you as part of the conversation our aspiration to be helpful will become harder to achieve.

Looking at paragraph #3 I think we’ve gone far beyond that. We strive to be a good, useful resource to new PMs, but the comments and challenging feedback we get from experienced PMs helps to motivate the writers here and has forced our readers and our authors to think about certain PM topics in new and innovative ways.

As always, though, were are here to help PMs who are struggling or need information and answers. I’ve personally sent out more than 50 copies each of Risk Management Plans and Project Communication Plans after writing articles about each and offering templates. We’re just PMs like everyone else out there, but if there are needs for these types of tools – whether we’ve written about them or not – or questions that need answered on topics not yet covered, always feel free to send us those thoughts either through a comment or directly to an author at their email address. The door is always open.

Thanks again for reading and I am personally looking forward to much more interaction with our reader base.