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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CEOs and the Changing Technology Around Them

Today’s CEO is challenged in a way that no CEOs were challenged before.  Technology is changing and too fast for even the CIO of an organization to keep up with, let alone the CEO.  Yet those critical decisions of company direction, how and where to grow the business, and what new technology to incorporate ultimately falls in the lap of the CEO.

How does one person do it?  The right answer is, they don’t.  It’s critical for the CEO to be surrounded by the right people to help him make good decisions for the company.  Just like an employee has to answer to their manager or management team, likewise the CEO is subject to the guidance, oversight, and decision-making of his board of directors.  Everyone is accountable to someone.

Making tough decisions

The CEO must make sound decisions on what new market niches to attack.  He’ll look to his marketing team and expect the right decisions will be made based on their analysis of the industry, but ultimately he’s responsible.

The CEO must make sound technology decisions.  He’ll look to the CIO or IT Director for their input on what direction to take, what technology to acquire, who to partner with, etc., but ultimately it’s his decision and the target is on his head.

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Why is it So Hard to Plan Well Up Front? – Part 2

In Part 1 we looked at the problem with up front planning and requirements definition and the first of three key American cultural tendencies that can contribute to this problem … impatience with time.

In this Part 2, we’ll look at two more cultural issues – the acceptance of mistakes and the urge to improvise.

Acceptance of Mistakes

America has often been called the land of comeback opportunities.  Everyone gets a second, third, fourth, fifth chance and so on chance.  In the US, we tend to forget the trials and tribulations of the process and focus only on the end result, saying “Because it worked out okay, there’s nothing to learn.”  In fact, we admire comebacks more than people who never failed in the first place.  We honor them.  We are more loyal to a supplier who quickly fixes a mistake he makes than we are to a supplier who never makes a mistake.

Most people in project and product development assume that mistakes are inevitable.  Some mistakes are.  However, we often confuse preventable mistakes with inevitable ones.  Poor preparation and inadequate understanding of customer requirements result in what I’m referring to as preventable mistakes.  There’s really no honor in scrambling at the last minute and running over budget to get out a solution to a customer when it could have been prevented up front with better planning.

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Five Indicators that Your Project May be in Trouble

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

The world of project management is not always black and white. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. Actually, there are some things that are cut and dried….

• You’re project budget is either green or red
• A milestone is either met or it isn’t
• A customer either accepts a deliverable or they don’t
• You either get to keep your job at the end of the engagement or you don’t

However, so many things in the PM world are not that clear. And you have to learn to look for the subtleties at times to gauge certain things about your project, your customer’s satisfaction level, your team’s focus, etc. New project managers won’t be there yet. Experienced project managers learn – over time – to look for certain indicators that will help tell them how things are going, how the project is being perceived, and if there are some corrective or evasive actions they may need to be taking.

Here are some signs I’ve observed in the course of my career in project management that usually will raise a red flag:

• Executive management has a sudden interest in your project. This one could be good or bad – but it’s usually bad. The project may have taken on a higher level of visibility within the organization due to many reasons or factors. However, it’s also very likely that your customer is troubled by something and has contacted someone higher up resulting in this new interest. This indicates both that your customer has a concern and that they went around you as the PM and discussed it with executive management without your knowledge. Not a good sign.
• New staff has been added to your project without you requesting them. When management starts to add staff to your project – look out. They are likely putting someone senior on the project to baby-sit it and the PM. I’ve seen it happen to project managers on projects. Somehow, along the way, confidence in the PM has diminished. It may be because of something the customer said or because of activities that have been observed, but it’s not usually a good sign. Requests for resources should always come from the project manager.
• Your PMO director has started dialing in to your customer status calls. A sudden interest in your project from the PMO director when they were hands-off before may be a bad indicator. Again, it may mean the customer has gone around the PM and complained about something, but for whatever reason the PMO director is indirectly expressing concern about the project status.
• Accounting is asking you about unpaid customer invoices related to your project. This one is bad because it means that, for whatever reason, your customer has become slow in paying their bills. It’s up to the project manager to engage the customer in a discussion about the outstanding invoices and possible discuss overall satisfaction. Only two things will slow a customer down in paying their bills and both are bad – customer cash flow issues and customer satisfaction issues.
• The customer has been less communicative / more distant. If the customer has been less involved, less communicative, slower in making decisions or you’re just sensing a lack of commitment to the project on the part of the customer, it may be a bad sign. What it can mean is that the project has lost priority on the customer side. Or that it has lost funding. Or that the customer team is about to be re-assigned elsewhere. No matter what the cause, it’s not a good sign because it may mean the project is going to be slowed way down or that it is going to be canceled completely. It’s a good sign that you should contact the customer project team lead and have a serious discussion about the project direction and customer commitment to finishing the project.

Getting the Project Planning in Motion

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

This article is based on information from “The Portable MBA in Project Management,” by Eric Verzuh.

Assembling the who, what, and when of a project can be a difficult task. Even small projects can have an overwhelming amount of detail. Fortunately, project management and project planning techniques have evolved to provide a systematic approach for breaking the project down and assembling the details in an organized, informative format. Let’s look at what I consider to be the six basic steps to go through in the process of planning your project out in detail:

• Build a work breakdown structure (step one). The project manager and team identify all the tasks required to build the specified deliverables. The scope statement helps to define the boundaries of the project.
• Identify task relationships (step two). The detailed tasks are placed in the proper sequence and interdependencies of tasks are identified.
• Estimate work tasks (step three). Each of these detailed tasks is assigned an estimate for the amount of labor and equipment needed and for the duration of the task.
• Calculate initial schedule (step four). After estimating the duration of each work task and figuring in the sequence of tasks, the project manager team calculates the total duration of the project. This is just an initial schedule at this point – it will be the basis for managing the remainder of the project and will need to be revised continually.
• Assign and level resources (step five). The project manager team adjusts the schedule to account for resource constraints. Tasks are rescheduled to optimize the use of people and equipment used on the project.
• Develop the budget (step six). Combine the costs associated with materials, labor, equipment, and external services to create a detailed cost estimate and cash flow projection. Whether this is done top-down or bottom-up depends on your organization, your project management practice and how much control the project manager has. Sometimes the estimate is already in hand and it dictates the schedule, unfortunately.

These steps generate all the information required to understand how a project will be executed. The steps are systematic, but they don’t necessarily always come up with the “right answer.” Again, depending on how much control the project manager has over the project management process this overall process can take on different looks. However, one thing is a given – it may take cycles of these steps to find the best balance between cost, schedule, and quality.