What makes someone credible?
Posted by Elizabeth
I produced this Wordle for a presentation I am working on for the BCS Young Professionals Group. I’m not actually going to use it for the presentation in the end, but I like it so much I wanted to share it with you!
Concern for others, competence, consistency and commitment are the things that drive credibility as a project manager (or any manager). Once you’ve got it, look after it, as it’s very difficult to get back.
Are You Using the Tools, or Are the Tools Using You?
Posted by Brad Egeland
We have all kinds of tools to get information concerning our project distributed to the right people, don’t we? We have MS Project or similar projects like Seavus’ Project Planner to use for managing our project schedule. Word helps up put together project status meeting notes, project document and plan deliverables, and status reports. Sometimes Excel can do the same – plus it’s great for project budgeting and forecasting. For resource management it’s back to MS Project or another project scheduling tool or you can do it the old fashioned way with a spreadsheet like Excel. And Visio helps us put together meaningful flowcharts for functional and technical design documents and other related project materials. Finally, email is often our primary communication tool on projects. Since communication is probably the most critical function of the project manager, email is in heavy use throughout every engagement.
Throughout the project, the project manager and the rest of the project team are utilizing these tools to create visual, professional, and hopefully meaningful and useful project documents to give to the customer and show to the organization’s executive management. In fact, if the project manager is overseeing five or six or even more projects at once, the creation of these documents and files with these tools can end up taking most of his available time. Especially if accuracy and perfection is a goal – and it should be.
Don’t forget the personal side
What we need to always be aware of, however, is that our customer needs more than just information about the project. And for communication they need more than daily emails. It isn’t always about what we can produce for them and how professional it looks. The project manager must be able to connect with the customer on a more personal level than with schedules, charts, and reports. In order to maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction, the customer must feel like they are ‘in touch’ with the project and the project team. That isn’t likely to happen if all they see are emails coming their way with information and professional-looking document attachments.
Running a Project is Sort of Like Raising a Baby – Sort of
Posted by Brad Egeland
I have a large family – and thankfully that family became a little larger three weeks ago today so this article topic seems appropriate. It came to me earlier this week that running a project from start to finish is kind of like raising a baby from infant to adulthood. Ok, it’s a stretch, but there are similarities.
It could be that this all came about in my mind as a result of several straight relatively sleepless nights. Or maybe I am on to something. Who knows? But the more I thought about it the more I realized that there are some relative similarities.
Pregnancy = pre-engagement/sales
Think of all the work that goes into the pre-engagement portion of the project … basically the sales portion. This is what happens before handoff of the project to the project manager. So, Sales = 9 months of pregnancy. Are you staying with me so far? When handoff is ready to happen, you kind of know what you’re getting – or at least you think you do. In reality, it may be close but there are lots of details that you really have no clue about and you have to dig deeper so you know what you’ve just gotten yourself into.
Delivery = kickoff
The actual delivery is somewhat like project kickoff. It’s when you finally see some early details of the project up close … live and in person. Just like you get some new and very key information from the customer you also get some initial information from the doctors and learn if there are any conditions of your baby that need immediate attention.
Infanthood/toddler = design
The infant and toddler stages = design, in my opinion. Just as you’re designing the system to the requirements of the customer, you’re also training your infant/toddler what’s right and what’s wrong and hopefully molding them to meet yours and God’s requirements for a well-rounded individual. And, just like designing to the customer’s requirements, it’s not very easy and it does often involve some re-work and change orders!
Dealing with Project Failure
Posted by Brad Egeland
I’ve mentioned in recent articles that the many surveys and studies are putting the project failure rate in organizations at anywhere from 51% to 75%. Given this alarmingly, but not surprisingly, high rate of project failure, it seems only fitting that we discuss how to deal with project failure. After all, when a project fails it doesn’t just happen and then you move on to the next project. There’s always an aftermath …. there are always repercussions.
Some of these potential repercussions can include (depending on the size and visibility of the failure and the reasons behind it):
- Reprimanding or termination of the project manager
- Reprimanding or termination of project team members
- Lost future business with the customer
- Bad press for the organization damaging its reputation
- Bad feedback to other current or potential customers
So how do we deal successfully and proactively with project failures? When you’re a project manager, even if you’re an incredibly skilled, successful, and lucky project manager you’re going to experience failure at some point. So we all need to know how best to deal with this impending failure both for our sake and the sake of our team members who we may end up working with again on a future project.
I can’t say I’m always successful at performing these steps and thankfully the failures have been fairly small in very infrequent, but these are the processes that I believe the project manager needs to go through in order to best deal with the project failure in terms of his customer, the project team, and his executive management…
Lessons learned session with the project team
Hold a lessons learned session internally with the project team. Let them all air their issues. Better here than in public or in front of the customer. Many may feel that the failure is the customer’s fault and that can and should be discussed, but aggravations should be aired here, not in front of the project customer or even executive management.
Is PMP Helping Your Job Hunt?
Posted by Brad Egeland
Whether you’re employed right now, independently consulting, or unemployed, we’re all really looking for a job, right? No job is safe in this economy so if you’re employed you can’t afford to raise any flags for fear you could lose the job you have. But we’re all looking just in case. Or looking for our next gig. And even if you’re independent, you’d still probably take a W2 position – especially in this uncertain economy – if the right option presented itself to you, right?
So, here’s my question. For those of you who have the PMP certification after your name… are you finding that it is helping your job hunt? I actually had one recent comment to one of my articles from a reader who stated that the PMP designation actually hurt his job hunt. He started getting interviews based solely on the PMP certification (insert my comment here about lazy HR reps) only to have the interview end early when they found out that he had very little experience. Sometimes that hadn’t even bothered to check out his actual PM experience – they only included him in the interview process because he was PMP certified.
