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: 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.

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Five Signs You’re Not Cut Out to be a Project Management Consultant

Consulting, in general, is not for everyone.  Likewise, consulting it the field of projectmanagement is not something everyone is ready to handle.  Even if you’re a 15-year veteran of project management, that doesn’t mean you have the tools, the stability, and the make-up to go out on a limb as a consultant in your given field.

We all know that project managers have a few skills and characteristics that they must have to some degree to be successful:

• Leadership
• Communication
• Organization
• Confidence, etc.

The list can go on for quite awhile.  Those are still necessary for the project management consultant, but let’s look at five key signs which can point to individual characteristics that should be present to help enable you to be a successful consulting project manager.  If you don’t have them, it’s probably not a field that you should be in.

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March Survey – Remote Project Management

If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time you’ll know that I’m somewhat passionate about remote project management and green or sustainable project management practices.  And I believe that one supports the other.

For my March survey – or at least March survey #1 (there may be more) – I’d like to get an indication on where our readership stands on remote project management.  How many of you out there are independent or involved in an organization that supports the management of projects in a primarily remote situation.

And for those of you who are, or have been, involved in the remote management of projects, I’d like to hear what you liked best or least about them.  The capabilities of my website right now still limit my surveying options, but I’ve put up what I think are common pluses and minuses with remote or virtual project management in a team environment.

Please take the survey – it’s completely anonymous and it’s brief … only five questions.  But I think the results could be very interesting.  I’ll close this survey down in 10-15 days and then do a follow-up article on PM Tips analyzing the results.

Please go to this address to complete the survey…

http://www.bradegeland.com/march-survey.html

If any of you survey takers have feedback or something you’d like to add after taking the survey, please feel free to comment on this article or email me at Brad.Egeland@pmtips.net.

Thank you in advance for taking this survey.  Your participation is greatly appreciated by me and everyone at PM Tips and Seavus – the creators of Project Planner and Project Viewer.

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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