How to Make Project Management Work in Your Company

I ran across the list below – which is actually a subset of the original list – while reviewing the book “The Fundamentals of Project Management” by James P. Lewis. This book was published in 1995 so thoughts and processes have changed a little. I’ve selected what I believe are the most relevant items from Mr. Lewis’ original list for inclusion in this article. I’ve made some changes and additions as well. Read on…

It is one thing to know how to manage projects effectively. It is another to get people actually to manage them that way. Running by the seat of the pants seems a lot easier than doing all that planning, scheduling, and monitoring. Even when people invest three or four days in project management seminars, you find that they soon forget what they have been taught and go back to the old ways.

I have struggled with this problem for over fifteen years, and I finally have some answers. Here are suggestions on how to make the principles of project management work in your company.

• Get top management involved in the process and the projects. They should be asking questions about how projects are doing. In other words, show an interest in the subject.
• Build into performance appraisals items that evaluate a project manager’s use of the tools of effective project management. Reward people for practicing the methods. But be careful. Be sure upper management is not keeping managers from practicing good methodology.
• It helps to have the entire team trained in project management basics.
• Senior management need to understand the company’s PM process and methodology to effectively set their expectations. One of the ten most common causes of project failures is unrealistic expectations on the part of senior managers.
• Practice a lot of MBWA (management by walking around – or at least very frequent communication) as the project progresses, but do it to be helpful, not in the blame-and-punishment mode. Give people strokes for letting you know about problems early, rather than after they have turned into disasters. Don’t be too quick to help, though. Give people time to solve the problems themselves. Just ask them to keep you informed, and tell them to let you know if they need help. Be a resource, not a policeman.
• Do audits to learn, and try to improve whenever possible. Verify that processes are being followed, status reports are being produced, customers are getting the info they are supposed to get, and project plans are being updated regularly. Make sure the processes that are in place are being followed.
• If you find you have a problem individual on your team, deal with that person as soon as possible. Don’t ignore the problem, as it can wreck your entire team.
• Be very pro-active, not reactive. Take the lead. Break roadblocks for your team members. Go to bat for them.
• Have team members make presentations to senior management on their part of the job or periodic presentations on their key projects. Give them credit for their contributions. Build ownership.
• If you are running a project to which people are temporarily assigned while still reporting to their own bosses (matrix organization), keep their managers informed about what they are doing. Try to build good relations with those managers. You may need their support to get the job done.
• You may find that you have to co-locate the people doing activities on the project’s critical path so that you don’t have them constantly pulled off to do other jobs. This method is being used more and more by major corporations for highly critical projects.
• It is also possible to appoint a project administrator to either do the project support or delegate it and to sit in on project review meetings and hold the team’s hands to walk members through planning, audits, and so forth. Naturally, you need to be running quite a few projects (at least ten to twenty) to justify creating this position, so this depends on the size of your organization.
• Benchmark other companies to find out what they do with project management.
• Have individuals take responsibility for championing various parts of the project management process. One person, for example, the earned-value champion, might go around the company trying to get everyone to use the method. Another might take responsibility for dealing with WBS notation, and so on.
• Read PM Tips and follow everything on here! (ok, just kidding, I added this one….)
• Look at managing projects as a challenge – keep it exciting. Stick to a process, but change things as needed to accommodate the project and the customer.

Not Everything is a Project

It’s hard to tell a project manager that not everything that comes their way is a project.  When I first started using Project Workbench – a few years before I started using MS Project – I took a copy home and tried to figure out a way to use it for tasks around the house.  My wife nearly killed me so that experiment was short-lived, thankfully.  But still, my brain was working that way which is the point I’m trying to get across.

I’ve since come to the realization that not everything is a project.  I don’t mean that for everyday life – that’s obvious.  But what I’m referring to is the work that we do as PMs, the customers we work with, the tasks that we lead.  Not all of them are typical projects needing project schedules, status reports, budget management, etc.  Some just need leadership and management.  Since it’s all I have experience with, I’ll examine a couple of examples from my career that were large undertakings that I was in charge of, but that didn’t really need detailed schedules and status reporting and detailed resource loading and management.

Government Program

My first experience with project management was actually more like program management leading significant portions of long-term government contracts processing student financial aid records.  These contracts were 3 to 5 years long worth $30-50 million.  They weren’t typical projects – they were on-going production processing, customer support and occasional contract modifications.  It was really only the contract modifications that involved some of the regular tasks that I would call part of normal project management.  These were the portions of the project/program that would necessitate creating a project plan and managing resources and tasks.

Everything else on the program was management of on-going production processing, customer service activities, configuration management and change control, and financial management of the all of the billing and costs.  None of these activities fit well into any type of project management activities – aside from providing the government with formal weekly status reports and leading face to face quarterly project reviews, there really no other needs for regular project management activities.

Business Unit Sell-Off

While working for a major aviation and engineering firm I was asked to lead a project that involved transferring all documents, records, test info and drawings to an external organization that had purchased an internal business unit.

Leading this activity required that I gain knowledge of the business unit that was being sold so I understood what records and information could potentially be transferred.  It also required that I meet extensively with the purchasing company so I understood what records and information they were expecting.  The plan was to only transfer what was necessary – what the purchasing company was interested in.  But I needed to know what they could potentially be requesting. 

Actually, I entered this process well after it originally started.  At the point I came on board, the purchasing company was withholding nearly $250k from the purchase till they obtained all of the materials they thought they were due.  It was my job to make them happy and get that money from them.  By engaging the purchasing organization and thoroughly understanding their needs, I was able to extract exactly what their needs were and then mobilize teams internally in my organization to get that data, records, etc. for them as quickly as possible. 

This engagement ended well, but the nature of the activities and the work that needed to be done did not necessitate the creation of project schedules and status reports.  It was too chaotic because the information coming from the purchasing organization was sketchy – mostly because they really didn’t know or understand what they wanted – which is why making them happy enough to pay was not an easy task.

Summary

These two scenarios were both large efforts worth significant amounts of money.  However, in my best professional opinion they were not set up in such a way to lend themselves well to regular project management practices.  What they required was good investigation, excellent communication and customer management, and solid leadership.  Most things we encounter as PMs will require the regular tools of the trade – but I’ve learned that not everything is a project.

Project Manager

Location: Shrewsbury, Shropshire
Salary: £35000 per annum + Car
Company: Fusion People
Job type: Permanent
Date posted: 17/06/2009 15:45

Description:      A small to medium refrigeration and air conditioning company is looking for a Small Works Project Manager to be responsible for small projects up to £30k but typically under £10k. Working on mostly retail projects you will be expected to survey the sites, cost the jobs and possibly carry out design if necessary. A competitive salary and a company car are on offer to the successful candidate.

You will be able to demonstrate a solid project management background within air conditioning and refrigeration. Ideally you will be used to running multiple small projects at once and be comfortable surveying, estimating and pricing jobs. A formal recognised qualification in a related industry discipline is also required.

Fusion People is committed to promoting equal opportunity to people of all ages in the workplace and operates as both an employment agency and employment business.

Apply here…

Project Management News

Stanford and Salesforce.com Present “Project Management 2.0” in Action

Project management has no “one size fits all” approach, but the agile rollout at salesforce.com holds lessons for many companies looking to change their production processes to meet today’s challenges. Stanford University’s Advanced Project Management Program now presents the company’s compelling success story as a real-world example of core principles taught in the certificate’s overview course, Converting Strategy Into Action. In today’s complex, fast-paced business environments, traditional “project management as usual” practices don’t work; companies need to combine proven approaches with emerging concepts to align their project initiatives with strategic goals.

Chris Fry, salesforce.com vice president of Platform Development and Steve Greene, senior director of Tools and Agile Development, present the company’s successful switch from a waterfall system to an agile-based system — from the traditional, sequential system to an emergent, iterative and empirical system. The conversion is one of industry’s largest and fastest agile transformations.

In 2006, the seven-year-old software company was growing at an extremely fast pace and experiencing growing pains within the R&D organization. Fry and Greene suggested a pilot program to incrementally transition to an agile-based system. After listening to their description of the proposed changes, Parker Harris, a salesforce.com founder and executive vice president, felt drastic change was needed. He charged the two managers to go for broke, and complete the transformation throughout the R&D organization in three months.

Noble Denton gets Spanish project management contract

SPAIN: Offshore engineering and marine consulting firm Noble Denton has been awarded a EUR 15 million (US$20.9 million) contract from ACS Cobra Castor UTE in Spain. The scope of work includes the provision of project management and procurement support services for Castor’s underground gas-storage development initiative.

The project will run over a four-year period and involve up to 25 Noble Denton personnel.

The technical specification of the work will comprise a wellhead platform bridge linked to a production, utilities and quarters platform in around 60 meters (196.8 ft) of water. The platform will support gas injection into the reservoir at flow rates up to 8 MMscm/d (282.5 MMcf/d) and gas withdrawal and transfer to shore at up to 25 MMscm/d (882.8 MMcf/d).