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.

Strategies for Managing a Mobile Team

I ran across a great document put together by Terrence Gargiulo for Makingstories.net. Mr. Gargiulo discusses what he feels are the top ten strategies for managing mobile workers. His full document is a very good read because he also discusses things such as risks and issues to consider when managing mobile workers.  You can access his full document here.

I’m sharing this here because so many times as project managers we are overseeing the work of a very geographically dispersed team. In the past three years I’ve only managed one project with a team that I could see on a daily basis. Dozens of others involved remote workers all around the country.

Here are Mr. Gargiulo’s Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers as described in his document.

Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers

1.    Focus on building relationships

You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter audit your time. How much time are you spending engaged in activities meant to foster stronger relationships with your mobile employees? Rate each relationship on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is weak and 10 is very strong. Craft a strategy for continuing to develop your strong ones and triage the weak ones. Ask yourself why they are weak and what you can learn from them. Avoid finger pointing and hold up the mirror to reflect on your own opportunities for improvement. Extreme cases of under-performance do not warrant time or effort. These however are few and far between.

2.    Streamline communications

Consolidate and prioritize communications. Use email and IM (instant message), texting, blogging, threaded discussions, etc. for relationship-driven communications (i.e., staying in touch and being personal). Communications of an important nature should be cohesive and never delivered in fragmentary pieces that have to be cobbled together by the receiver. Mutually assess the communication preferences of yourself and your team members to develop a communication plan. Avoid assumptions and revisit your plan on a regularly basis especially when the nature of the work is about to change.

3.    Incorporate less didatic forms of communications

Determining the right amount of detail and when to provide detail is an ongoing responsibility of a manager with a mobile worker. As a general rule, less is more. This leaves bandwidth for the times when lengthy, explicit instructions and information are essential for the work at hand. Try working with more story-based forms of communications. Sharing tidbits from the field and office in the form of stories, anecdotes, case studies (use cases), jokes, innocent productive gossip, and even metaphors will relay context, encode key pieces of information, and give mobile workers a sense of inclusion.

4.    Spend more time listening

Obvious, but counterintuitive. When you are out of easy reach and you are tasked with managing the performance of others it’s easy to get sucked into the trap of needing to transmit lots of information. In most cases the opposite is what is most productive. Make listening a priority. This is the hardest and most tiring aspect of managing others. It is also the single most important thing you can do accelerate the development of strong relationships. Listening is not enough. Keep an open mind. Be present and try to enter the perspective of the speaker. This will help you ask effective questions and identify what direction to go with your own needs and agenda. You’ll be surprised at what emerges.

5.    Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow

Structure is critical. Adopt rules of engagement that place people at the center of their own decisions. Managers provide the boundaries and constraints but let employees define the working and communication styles, tools, and processes that will help them perform at the best. Set expectations on two fronts. First, treat these employees’ defined practices as privileges that can and will be modified if key performance metrics are not hit. Second, let employees know there will be times when a projects or work require less flexible, employee-driven communication and reporting practices.

6.    Manage deliverables, not activities

Lots of project-oriented work is well suited to mobile workers. Even roles that are more task driven can be effectively managed if they are broken into deliverables. For mobile workers this may mean collapsing some of the activities of a business process or workflow that had manual checkpoints and controls associated with them into deliverables. Automation where possible can be used or batching activities into larger groups can transform task oriented jobs into deliverables. Realize that there can be many facets of people’s jobs that need to be adjusted to accommodate a mobile work style.

7.    Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities

When you manage mobile workers, relationships are at the heart of your job. Performance management does not need to be a loathsome, “administrivia” obligation. Designing some unstructured, informal ongoing dialogs with mobile employees about their performance goals and personal development plans is a great way to strengthen communications, and shows an active interest in employees and relationships. This might look and feel very different from one employee to the next. This is another tangible way managers can adapt their style to match the needs and preferences of employees. It works best when the performance management conversation flows in both directions.

8.    Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise

According to a recent survey conduct by HR.com and ic4p, listening and trust are the two most important factors to virtual and remote teams. Without trust, relationships are bankrupt. Abuses of trust can always be found but these occur in spite of whatever systems we put in place. Mobile workers thrive when managers give them complete trust. In some respects managers of mobile workers have no other choice. Use trust to create strong relationships. When some concrete behavior and not just someone else’s word of mouth shows that trust has been violated, then take it away, but not until then.

9.    Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers

Every employee is different. Mobile workers make it easier for managers to take a more personalized approach in how they work and interact with members of their team. It takes more work and effort on a manager’s part but the results can be phenomenal. Understanding what enables each employee to perform at his or her best is the most important responsibility of a manager.

10. Leverage technology

Technology drives and supports managing mobile workers. Using technology well is not as simple as it appears. Standard models of communication and transaction should not always be mapped in a simple one-to-one way. Communication and collaboration technologies offer new and exciting models. These need to be purposely exploited in order for organizations to realize the full extent of benefits these wonderful new capabilities and features offer.

Beyond email, IM and phone, Web conferencing plays a key role in virtual team enablement. Take an inventory of “stuff” you need to collaborate on with your virtual team. If the list includes Word docs, spreadsheets, software applications, or anything else on your desktop, Web conferencing will be critical for collaborating in real time. You’re projects will lag if you can’t be on the same page with mobile workers.

Project Management from a Distance – Part 6

In Part 5 of this six-part series, we covered the topic of how to go about negotiating a telecommuting situation whether you’re just coming into an organization or already onboard. In Part 6, we will discuss the concept of maintaining the telecommuting or remote working role:

Part 1 – Why remote?

Part 2 – Will it work for you?

Part 3 – What type of job enables remote PM?

Part 4 – What setup do you need?

Part 5 – Negotiating when it’s not an obvious move

Part 6 – Staying the course

Finally, we’re to the topic of what I call “staying the course.” What does that mean in this context? Where I’m going with this is the idea of both staying productive and doing your best to maintain a good balance with your executive team and their plans and expectations. In other words…are you and your projects thriving in this role and serving the needs of both your company and your client?

Maintaining the Balance

Once you’ve decided to work remotely and it’s been approved, you must be sure to assess the situation periodically. If you don’t, your superiors will…actually they will anyway. Keep the situation in check – otherwise it’s easy to move forward while not realizing where you may be failing your customers or your company.

Periodically consider each of the following carefully:

• Am I still maintaining a proper balance between work and home?
• Are my designated office hours productive?
• Are my customers being served well by my working situation?
• Am I free from distractions while conducting work?
• Are deadlines being missed or postponed due to my telecommuting situation?

Corrective Action

If you find that any of these areas – or other key areas I may have missed – are indeed suffering, then it is critical that you take swift corrective action. It may be a simple as rethinking your schedule and what’s conflicting with it home, or moving your home office to a different location in the house. Or it may be as significant as scraping the telecommuting concept altogether. Remember, it’s definitely not for everyone, and it’s definitely not for every working situation. Be proactive in fixing the situation before it reflects poorly on your work performance.

Summary

Looking back, we’ve covered six key concepts of getting you from thinking about telecommuting to actually doing it. Always re-assess your situation because as PMs we know that our environment changes, our customers change and our project needs and demands change. Even if it’s been working well on most of our projects to work remotely, keep in mind that a particular project may come along that it won’t work for. It’s happened to me – when most of my team for a particular project was here in Las Vegas. Those are the times you shift gears and do whatever you need to do to be successful on the project.

Project Management from a Distance – Part 5

In Part 4 of this six-part series, we covered the topic of what type of equipment and setup you would need for handling project management activities from afar. In Part 5, we will discuss the process of negotiating with your management on moving into a telecommuting role:

Part 1 – Why remote?

Part 2 – Will it work for you?

Part 3 – What type of job enables remote PM?

Part 4 – What setup do you need?

Part 5 – Negotiating when it’s not an obvious move

Part 6 – Staying the course

Instigation

Timing is everything. You’ve heard that before and no truer words were ever spoken when it comes to trying to negotiate a remote working situation in your project management role.

Sometimes it will just happen, as with it did for a role I had for over two years with one organization. My project resources were dispersed across the country, the clients I was running the implementations for were all over the country with locations globally as well. The home office is here in Las Vegas, but rarely was it a benefit to me so I rarely worked from a location at the home office. And that was ok with them – well, most of the time. There were a couple of projects where my key resources were located here in Las Vegas and they pushed for me to spend some time at the office…which I did. But 95% of the time, I was managing everything remotely.

When You’re Coming In

When you’re coming onboard at an organization, look for a time to mention it during the hiring process. If you wait till you accept the job, it may be too late. You need to ask yourself, “would I accept this position even if they won’t allow me to telecommute?” If the answer is ‘yes’, then it may be better to accept and then try to ‘sell’ the idea after you’ve been there awhile. If the answer is ‘no’, then you’ve got nothing to lose – bring it up late in the discussions when it’s apparent that they love you and want you badly. You may even offer to take the position for less money if you want that telecommuting option bad enough – they may see it as a win-win for them.

When You’re Already In

If you’re already inside an organization and want to change to a telecommuting/remote working situation, then you’ve got a different beast on your hands. Your best route is to put together some assumptions and numbers to help you sell the concept to your supervisor or executive management staff. Ballpark some overhead numbers that you’ll be saving them and if you can’t come up with numbers, at least be sure to provide a lengthy bullet list of benefits to you working remotely. And none of them should focus on YOUR benefits…they must all focus on the company’s benefits. That’s all they’re going to care about. The list should include:

• Increased productivity (stress your productive home office setup) due to fewer office distractions
• No driving time means more available work hours
• Greener setup – less fuel consumption, less pollution, smaller carbon footprint for the company (heck, they should allow all their workers to do it!)
• Decreased overhead for the company
• Healthier work environment – fewer sick days because as we all know many sick days aren’t really ‘sick’ days

Get creative, there are a lot more things that can be included on this list. And if you want it bad enough, you can always revert to requesting a pay cut in order to have the telecommuting option. One key note – if you think your request is going to meet heavy resistance, just go in initially asking for 2-3 days per week of remote work. Eventually move it to 5 days if it’s been successful.

Summary

Your approach is important. Be sure to stress to your management staff how much this situation will benefit them, not you. Point to your work record and your trustworthiness, and your dependability. Ensure them that they’ll always see that same level of leadership from you, but this new situation will make you even more available to their main concern – the external customer who you are ultimately running the project for.

Project Management from a Distance – Intro

In this upcoming six-part series we’re going to look at and discuss everything about being a remote project manager. For the most part, it will likely apply to other members of the project team. I’ve made little secret of the fact that I believe remote project management is good, is practical for many situations, is green, and can be very rewarding. However, it must be done by the right individual with the right intentions, under the right conditions and for the right reasons.

The Six-Part Series Overview

Over the course of six articles, I intend to cover the following topics (however, I make no guarantees that I won’t shift course, remove parts or add parts depending on how the discussion is progressing):

Part 1 – Why remote?

Part 2 – Will it work for you?

Part 3 – What type of job enables remote PM?

Part 4 – What setup do you need?

Part 5 – Negotiating when it’s not an obvious move

Part 6 – Staying the course

Recognizing that remote work is not in everyone’s interest level and it’s not for everyone, I’d like to cover these topics in order and get feedback from readers on their own thoughts and experiences. It’s not a secret that this economy lends well to creativity in the workplace – it’s often necessary to stay employed and for companies to keep as many employees as possible.

In the coming articles, we’ll examine why you should work remotely (both from the employee viewpoint and from the employer), what type of individual and mindset it takes to successfully work remotely, what type of projects work well in a remote management situation, what do you need to setup shop to work remotely, how to go about negotiating a remote situation when it’s not an obvious option, and staying on course and remaining both happy in this type environment as well as relevant in the workplace and to your employer or clients.

Some Interesting Data

Before move any further in the discussion of remote project management – here are some interesting numbers on remote IT workers (source in parentheses):

• 70% said they would rather get their work done on a secure connection even if it meant their work would be late (CIO.com)
• 78% say their IT dept. has provided them with the technology to work remotely on their own PC rather than needing to rely on a company-issued laptop (I personally don’t see this as a good thing) (CIO.com)
• 43% of downloaded personal pictures, videos, or software for their own use on company-issued laptops (CIO.com)
• 25% admitted they’ve visited blacklisted of inappropriate websites on their company-issued laptops (CIO.com)
• 74% said they can’t get their work down without the internet (CIO.com)
• 65% said it would be easier to live without their car for a week than live without the internet for a week (CIO.com)
• 12% admit hacking a neighbor’s wireless connection when necessary (Cisco study)
• 21% allow friends and family to access the internet on their work-supplied computer (unknown source)

These figures weren’t meant to scare anyone away from remote work but rather to inform you of what’s going on in and out of the workplace. Whether you use your own equipment or company-supplied equipment, be aware that you’re responsible for critical data and for the timelines of the projects you manage – be prudent in the way you handle yourself and the resources you utilize.