Making Good Project Decisions – Part 1

Everything you do every day is a kind of decision: what time to wake up, what to eat for breakfast, and who to talk to first at work. We don’t often think of these as decisions because the consequences are so small, but we are always making choices. We all have our own natural judgments for which decisions in our lives demand more consideration, and the same kind of logic applies to project management decisions. Some choices, like hiring/firing employees or defining goals, will have ramifications that last for months or years. Because these decisions will have a longer and deeper impact, it makes sense to spend more time considering the choices and thinking through their different tradeoffs. Logically, smaller or less-important decisions deserve less energy.

So, the first part of decision-making is to determine the significance of the decision at hand. Much of the time, we do this instinctively; we respond to the issue and use our personal judgment. Am I confident that I can make a good decision on the spot, or do I need more time for this? It often takes only a few moments to sort this out. However, this is precisely where many of us run into trouble. Those instincts might be guided by the right or wrong factors. Without taking the time, at least now and then, to break it down and evaluate the pieces that lead to that judgment, we don’t really know what biases and assumptions might be driving our thinking (e.g., desiring a promotion or protecting a preferred feature).

With that in mind, here are some core questions to consider when evaluating a decision. This list can be used in the moment to help size up a specific decision, or as a way to re-evaluate your high-level criteria for sizing up decisions.

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A Project Completion Checklist

As the project comes to closure, it’s time to look back and enjoy all the successes you’veexperienced on the project.  All the memorable learning moments and all of those leadership situations that have allowed you to grow as a project manager.  Not!  As the project comes to closure, you’ll usually find yourself knee-deep in administrative and signoff tasks not to mention work related to those tedious remaining issues that make the customer very nervous at deployment time.

Your duties as project manager and leaders extraordinaire certainly don’t cease … they actually increase.  You’re dealing with lots of things going on at once and you’re also dealing with two separate sets of team members – yours and the customer’s – who are being pulled by their respective organizations to free themselves up for new and exciting projects.  They’re working in shutdown mode and it’s difficult to get the productive hours out of them for YOUR project right now.  It can take all of your resource management skills just to keep team members engaged.

Customer Issues

• Complete all deliverables
• Install and test deliverables
• Prepare operating manual
• Prepare maintenance manual
• Train customer’s personnel
• Agree on level of follow-up support
• Conduct formal acceptance review with customer
• Verify customer satisfaction

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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: The Project Status Report

I’d like to go through a communication series and cover every aspect of what’s involved for effective communication on the project with the team and the customer.  Requirements may be the lifeblood of the project, but communication is the beating heart and without proper, effective, and efficient communication no project can succeed.  And that all starts with the project manager.

In the first segment, we’ll start looking at the project status report.  Because it is something that is produced weekly, contains up to date status, and drives the weekly status call with the team and customer (at least in my methodology it does!), it is one of the most critical pieces to your project management puzzle.  Skipping it or slacking on its information is really not an option.

If you share my belief that the project status report should drive the weekly status call, then all relevant project status information should be included.  In fact, look at the status report as something that you – the project manager – could produce and give to just about anyone and they could then drive the project status meeting.  This serves two purposes:

• It allows you to miss a meeting if you have an emergency or another project needs your attention
• It gives you something that you can hand to your senior leadership at any given time and say “here is the current status (within days) of ‘x’ project”

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Do You Trust Your Organization’s Leadership?

This may seem like a simple question, but the answer is bigger than we think it is.  We’ve all grown somewhat immune to the mocking of those in charge – you see the President of the United States mocked on Saturday Night Live all the time.  But really, what about the leadership of your company?  Do you have confidence in them?  Do you think they have your back?  Do you feel like they’re leading you, your co-workers … even your customers in the right direction?

I think the answer for many of us is often ‘no.’  And that’s sad.  Why is that … why do we feel this way?

Let me look – generically – at situations I’ve both encountered personally at organizations I’ve worked with and for, as well as situations I’ve seen at customers and clients I’ve worked with.  I’ll try to not be too specific so you can’t tie a situation back to one of my past employers – but you know who you are!

Examples of leadership failure

One Fortune 500 organization did very little support their PMO.  I was around long enough to see it created, witness it flounder and fail, see it disassembled, and then see it re-assembled.  And through all of this, there were other organizations within the company who were acting in renegade mode leading projects – and getting support from executive leadership to do so (crazy!) – while the actual PMO struggled and disintegrated.  Rarely have I personally witnessed such an extreme waste of time, effort, good people and good money.

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