The Evolution of a Project
Posted by Brad Egeland
Projects typically begin when we recognize that a need exists. From this point on, however, we can often become our own worst enemies—and can lose control very rapidly—if we don’t follow a disciplined approach. Why? Because we’re human. When any of us spots a problem, our natural tendency is to want to solve it right away—often with the first solution that pops into our heads. That’s just human nature. On the surface, this approach may seem admirable, because it seems to resolve problems swiftly and decisively. Unfortunately, it’s counterproductive to good project management. A solid approach for getting your project off the ground consists of faithfully following four basic steps.
Fully understand the problem or opportunity
Problems are ordinarily complex, consisting of many aspects that require analysis and insight. There’s frequently more to a problem than what’s apparent at the first look. We need to invest an appropriate amount of time to fully understand all aspects of the problem. Very often, what appears to be the problem is actually masking a bigger, more fundamental problem. Uncovering that fundamental problem is referred to as identifying the true need.
Identifying the client’s true need—the most fundamental problem or opportunity—is the first and the most important step in the entire project process.
Is Project Cancellation Always Bad?
Posted by Brad Egeland
Having your project canceled sounds like such a horrible thing. A career killer. But, as strange as it may sound, this is a situation that should actually happen more often than it does. There’s a good reason why this is true. Projects are investments that your organization makes, from which they expect a return. In real life, investments can sometimes go bad.
The same thing can certainly apply to a project. Conditions can change in such a way that the project ceases to become the winner it seemed to be at the outset. Simply stated, management no longer expect the project to have the business impact required to make it wise to keep spending money on it. In many cases, a project such as should be terminated, though in far too many cases, it isn’t.
There are at least three reasons why early project termination usually doesn’t occur, even though it should:
Plodding ahead
You should be testing project viability—or financial justification—on a continuous basis throughout the life of the project. Some organizations don’t do this very well. Others don’t do it at all. Once management approves a project, it simply moves ahead until it’s completed. In today’s fast-paced and constantly changing world, it’s always possible that there will be changes that undermine the original business case for the project. That means that you need to reconsider the economic viability of every project periodically. And the organization should terminate projects that have lost their business case underpinnings.
Project Communication Series: Meaningful Meetings
Posted by Brad Egeland
On projects, meetings are usually one of the three primary methods of communication. The other two are emails and phone calls. Given that, conducting high-quality and efficient meetings is important not only to continued project success but also to team member productivity. No one likes to waste time – and often on highly visible, mission-critical projects the project manager can ill afford to waste anyone’s time, let alone their own.
Gary Heerkens book entitled “Project Management” covers the concept of high-quality, effective meeting communications. Though I don’t fully agree with all of it – specifically when he discusses how you should not have a meeting if you have nothing new to discuss, because I think it’s critical to stay on schedule and at least have a brief weekly status meeting with the team and customer even if there’s little to discuss – I still think the text is interesting and worth noting here. Please read on for Mr. Heerken’s views on this topic…
Conducting productive meetings
Meetings can be a very effective way to conduct business. They bring people together for a relatively short amount of time so that large amounts of information can be shared. As mentioned several times previously, you should conduct core team meetings regularly to promote a steady flow of information to and from team members. But you’ll find that there are many other times when you may need to call for a meeting. Meetings are a critical form of communication.
Project Communication Series: Project Schedule
Posted by Brad Egeland
With the project schedule being so important to tracking the overall status of the project, I can’t guarantee that this is the only article I’ll write in this series on it. There may be more to come – so be forewarned. It’s just that it’s such a critical part of any project whether you’re utilizing it to it’s fullest extent with all tasks, resources, hours, dollars, etc. loaded or whether you’re just entering tasks and dependencies and updating it weekly with revised % complete information. It’s all tracking, it’s all project communication, and it’s all good.
Along with the status call and the status report, the project schedule is a form of communication that needs to happen on a regular basis every week. Just like team meetings and customer meetings that become irregular, if you stop producing updates to the project schedule and delivering them to you team and your customer, they’ll never feel confident that they know the current status of the project. They won’t know if what you’re delivering to them is accurate and current, from last week, or just a best guess.
This goes back to earlier things I’ve written on project management characteristics and being organized and doing what you say you’re going to do. In the project kickoff meeting or during planning sessions on the project, you hopefully set team and customer expectations on the communication aspects of the project. Hopefully, you even produced some semblance of a Communication Plan that documents when you’ve agreed to produce regular communication documents and hold specific meetings. The key is to adhere to those as much as possible throughout the project.
Project Communication Series: Customer Interfacing
Posted by Brad EgelandThis 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.