Project Communication Series: PM Communication Skills

I’ve long talked about the need for the project manager to be an effective communicator.  I’ve professed that I believe it is the single most important characteristic of the project manager – their #1 skill.  If a person is not an effective communicator, I simply don’t see how they could possibly hope to make it as a project manager.

As I read further in Mr. Heerkens’ book “Project Management,” I came across his list of the communication skills of the project manager.  It’s an all-encompassing list.  It’s his list for of the abilities – in terms of communication – that all of the successful project managers have possessed that he’s come across in his career.

As Mr. Heerkens states, developing the skills needed to effectively communicate takes time, practice, and feedback.  Here is his list for those abilities he’s witnessed in successful project managers:

• Ability to express themselves effectively in conversations with organizational management
• Ability to express themselves effectively in conversations with peers and team members
• Ability to express themselves effectively in conversations with subordinates and support personnel
• Ability to speak naturally in front of a large group
• Ability to prepare and deliver formal presentations
• Ability to speak “off the cuff” effectively
• Ability to negotiate Read more »

Project Communication Series: Customer Interfacing

This is more of a general thought in the entire communication process than any one specific communication strategy.  If you subscribe to the same notion that I do – that the process of effective communication is the single most important thing that a project manager does – then you understand that how we interact with the customer is critical to the overall success of the engagement.

Just as important as the project manager’s communications with the customer are the individual project team members’ communications with that same customer.  The part that becomes hard is that as the project manager you’re responsible for ALL communication, but you can’t always police that which you are not a part of.  Nor do you really want to, but it does all come back to you.

So the questions then become:

• How do we (the project manager) best interface with the customer
• How do we prepare our team to interact with the customer
• What actions do we take to oversee all communication
• What do we do when the communication goes wrong?

Project manager – customer interface

The primary function here is to practice frequent and effective communication with the customer.  Most of this done through the creation of informative and accurate weekly material: status reports, project schedules, issues and risks tracking sheets, status calls, and status call notes among other things.

Read more »

February 2010 PMP Survey Results

First, I want to thank all of our readers who took the February PMP certification survey.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was very pleased with the number of responses and found the results interesting.

Certified or not?

Since this was basically a survey on PMP certification, I thought it might draw more certified PMPs to the site to take the survey.  I fully expected a majority of the responders to be PMP certified project managers.  I was somewhat surprised to see that a solid majority of the responses were from non-certified project managers.  60% of the survey responses were from non-certified PMs.

Passed on the first try?

45% of responders indicated that they have taken the exam by virtue of their ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to this question.  In all, 88% of our survey takers passed the PMP exam on their first try.  PMI statistics have shown that 72% of PMP test takers pass it on their first try.  Therefore, we definitely have an above average group of PMP readers on this site.

Read more »

Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 1

The business justification for virtual teams is strong. They increase speed and agility and leverage expertise and vertical integration between organizations to make resources readily available. Virtual teams also lessen the disruption of people’s lives because the people do not have to travel to meet. And in today’s business world that’s big.  That’s green.  Team members can also broaden their careers and perspectives by working across organizations and cultures and on a variety of projects and tasks.

Although the effective use of electronic communication and collaboration technologies is fundamental to the success of a virtual team, virtual teams entail much more than technology and computers. When virtual teams and their leaders are asked about successes and failures, they rarely mention technology as a primary reason for either.  While it’s important that software packages such as Seavus’ Project Planner or Project Viewer are used to keep virtual teams informed and in sync, it’s not all about technology.

Read more »

Considering a Phased Project Delivery

As we’re delivering on a project for a customer, there may be numerous reasons why the project would be best moved to a phased project delivery situation.  The most common is the result of numerous requirements changes or change requests initiated by the customer while initial functionality is still badly needed by a specific date.  In a situation such as this, where the project cannot deliver the complete project or product by the deadline, there is still the possibility that it might deliver some useful part of it by the original promised date or close to it.

Technical projects composed of several subsystems, for example, often implement one subsystem at a time. Tenants can move into some floors in a new office building while there is active construction on other floors, and sections of a new freeway are opened as they are completed rather than waiting for the entire freeway to be complete.

Phased delivery has several benefits:

• Something useful is delivered as soon as possible – and in the case of many changes affecting the project, some critical base functionality may still be deliverable by the original agreed upon date.

• Often, as in the case of information systems, phased delivery is actually preferred because the changes introduced by the new system happen a little at a time. This longer time frame can reduce the negative impacts to ongoing business operations.

• Feedback on the delivered product is used to improve the products still in development.

• By delivering over a longer period, the size of the project team can be reduced; a smaller team can lead to lower communication and coordination costs. In addition, because the people are working for a longer time on the project, project-specific expertise grows. These factors should lead to increased productivity in subsequent project phases and to an overall lower cost for the project.

• Phased delivery allows for phased payment. By spreading the cost of the project over a longer time, a larger budget might be more feasible for the customer.

Modularized products, whose components can operate independently, can be delivered in phases. To determine how to phase a project or product delivery, you need to look for the core functionality—the part of the project that the other pieces rely on—and implement that first. The same criteria may be used in identifying the second and third most important components. When multiple components are equally good candidates, they can be prioritized according to business requirements.

Trade-off: Phased implementation increases functionality at the expense of schedule. If the approach requires old methods to run concurrently with new methods, it could also temporarily lead to higher operating costs.

Impact on risk: When components of a solution are delivered over time, the connections, or interfaces, become high risk. For technical solutions, that could mean corrupted data.

Information for this article was derived in part from Eric Verzuh’s book “The Portable MBA in Project Management.”