The Importance of Project Management Software

Have you ever wondered how important software is for managing projects? How much time does it save? How much it can help you in delivering a successful project? What parts of it are lifesavers and what parts can you live without?

Having these questions ourselves, our company has conducted a research with a subject “Project management on an enterprise level”, during the past month, supported by Seavus Project Planner and Seavus DropMind™. The main purpose of the research was to identify the needs and requirements of people who are faced with project challenges everyday.

The research has shown some very interesting results that we would like your input on.

Part I

First, let’s share the statistics about the respondents. The first part of the survey was dedicated to analyzing industry the companies operate in, company’ size, location and job title of the respondent.

From the responses provided, most respondents work in companies within Manufacturing (13.40%) and Consulting (11.34%) industries, directly followed by Business / Professional Services (8.25%), Construction / Home Improvement (8.25%) and Government / Military (7.22%). Other industries presented have less than 7 % of respondents.

Regarding the companies size, most respondents work in SME (24.74%) directly followed by companies with 1000-10000 employees (18.56%). However most of these companies have between 1 and 3 offices (51.55%).

The job title of the respondents is summarized in the graphic below:

We believe this reach provides an accurate sample of the PM market, and that the conclusions can be trusted.

Part II

Next part of the survey was connected to the actual usage of the project management software that is chosen within the responders’ company.

We wanted to explore the usage of the Microsoft® EPM within these companies and more or less we were surprised by the answers. It is interesting to see that large number of companies that have been using MS Project Standard are not using Microsoft® EPM and do not even consider implementing this solution within their companies.

However, it was also interesting to see the importance of different parts constituting the project management solutions for the people using Microsoft® EPM (or for those that are considering using it in the future) and for the people who haven’t been using it or are not considering using it in the future. We have divided the most important features in 4 categories: Project Management, Resource Management, Time Management and Collaboration. Follow up the appropriate responses in the tables below:

(The green colored cells are related to respondents who are or will be using Microsoft® EPM and the orange colored cells are related to people who are not or will not be using Microsoft® EPM).

As you can notice all of the features above are important and very important for the biggest number of the respondents, except for the wikis which both groups has indicated as not important feature. Moreover, almost 79% of respondents stated that it is very important or critical for them to track project progress. Assigning privileges/roles is valued with 3, (on a scale from 1 as useless and 5 as critically important), from almost 50% of the respondents and for all respondents is important to know that their project is on budget and on schedule.

Other interesting answers were given on questions such as where the respondents store important documents (.mpp files; general documents and project related documents). The answers were diverse, since this was an open question. However, some of the most frequent answers were: on the Server, SharePoint, Network, and File Server and it is more than obvious that people want to have their pm solution installed on the server in the company (89%) than to have it hosted (10.81%). Moreover, they prefer to install the solution from their own IT department (75.68%) than to have the installation from the solution provider (24.32%), but almost 57% of the respondents are ready to pay for installation and support from third party.

The answers on the question “How the teams update task progress?” were expected. 37.55% of the respondents stated that e-mail is used for updating task progress. Surprising 18.18% of respondents verbally update tasks and 15.58% use MS® Excel. Software programs were mentioned by a small number of people.

Same answers were given on the question “How do you share info about late tasks, risks, or general project related knowledge?” with 75.32% for e-mail, 48.05% verbally and 28.57% MS® Excel.

This survey provided many valuable answers, but as you can notice, there are some conflict areas. We encourage you to share your opinion on the results and moreover your experience in the field. Let’s create together the big picture of this survey.

3 More Tips for Working with Virtual Teams

Yesterday I looked at the roles that a clear project vision, excellent communication, motivational strategies and recognising individual differences have on successfully managing a virtual team.  To recap, a virtual team is one where not all the team members are based in the same location: a non-collacted team.  More and more project teams are like this now, as we work in an global marketplace, and with third-party partners.  Here are three more tips for making sure that your virtual team is as successful as possible:

1.   Resolve conflict effectively

Encourage your team to talk to you, and to each other.  One of the problems with virtual teams is that side conversations can take place, and a conflict could be brewing without you even knowing about it.  It’s everyone’s responsibility to handle conflict professionally – and conflict isn’t always a bad thing.  If two members of the team are having a difficult time, you can step in, but only if you know about it.  Therefore, you should encourage an environment where everyone is responsible for proactively identifying and working to resolve conflict.  Issues can be escalated to you where there is the need for more facilitation, but ideally the team can take some ownership for sorting out low-level issues themselves.

Conflict manifests itself in different ways depending on where you are in the project lifecycle.  In the early days, the issue could be lack of cultural understanding or language problems.  Later on, conflict could be caused by differing approaches to solving a technical or creative problem.  The approach to resolving these conflicts is going to be different every time, but you should at least be aware of the possibility that these will happen – and even more alert to conflict than you would be for a collacted team.

2.   Review performance continually

Just because things are going fine today doesn’t mean they will be tomorrow.  You want to be a high-performing team, but that doesn’t happen overnight.  And on a virtual team, it takes even longer.  Think about how you are going to get to a high-performing state – and that means working out what ‘high-performing’ actually looks like.  Chances are it looks like people working autonomously, referring to team members without having to go through you to open the channels of communication, but with regular progress reports and risk and issue reviews – and of course escalations up to you as the project manager.  Discuss what a high-performing team looks like with your team, and then that gives you a starting point on how to get there.

New people joining the team creates an imbalance in skills and experience, so one of your tasks should be to bring new people into the fold as quickly as possible, so plan an induction process as soon as you realise you have a new starter on the way – or someone gives you a clue that they are going to leave!

3.   Handle crises quickly

Projects have crises.  That’s nothing new.  But in a virtual team you have to act quickly to ensure everyone knows what is going on, and how the problem will be addressed.  One of the issues can be ensuring everyone has the same information at the same time, for example, about a corporate strategy change, or a restructure.  With team members in different time zones this can be difficult, and stopping the rumours can be hard.  Virtual team members can feel isolated at the best of times, so you really need to consider getting everyone together for a briefing in these situations, even if it is only on the phone.

Crises and changes can have an impact on the project, and the team will need to work out together how to step up and meet the challenge.  For example, if someone goes off sick and will not be back at work for a while, what impact will this have on the tasks that person will no longer be able to complete?  Who can step in and do those activities, or if no one is available, what impact will that have on the project’s critical path?  Understanding the issues gets you one step closer to being able to minimse the impact on the project delivery.  And of course, make sure you add an entry to the issue log!

These tips are based on my notes from a presentation by Dr Ginger Levin, PMP, PgMP at the PMI Global Congress North America in October 2009, with some of my own thoughts thrown in.  And there are more bits of advice for managing virtual teams in How to Manage in a Flat World, by Susan Bloch and Philip Whitely.

Leading and Following in a Hierarchical Organization

I’m a fan of the show Criminal Minds. Very intense, very intriguing, slightly disturbing. Recently, due to a situation with a very personal case, Thomas Gibson’s character Hotchner, had to relinquish leadership of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) to another character, Morgan. In preparation for this, Hotch started to give Morgan some paperwork-type tasks that Morgan felt was menial. Morgan thought he was being punished when, in fact – as he would later find out – he was just being prepped for his new role. Those paperwork items were things Hotch always had to do, but no one else knew about because he ‘just did them.’

Just Say NO to Busy Work

Leadership of any kind comes with costs. What all organizations must do is understand how much of that extra ‘paperwork’ is really necessary for those that they are asking to lead. Busy work should never – repeat NEVER – be required of a project manager, or any leader for that matter. In fact, many organizations ask that their successful project managers operate with little to no direction and give them quite a bit of autonomy in their jobs. If there’s a PMO in place, then a once per week meeting with all the PMs as a group to go through any company news and specific project-related issues should be sufficient.

Everyone Benefits from Standardized Reporting

The idea is that your PMO processes and your project management policies already in place will mean that you have a somewhat standardized status reporting process already. And those standard reports should be sufficient information for the PMO Director to see without requiring tedious other reporting information or mechanisms. I believe that a PMO Director should be always trying to clear paths to success for his or her project managers.

Never should they be requiring project managers to create extra reports in different formats to satisfy their own reporting needs. Figure out a standard report on project status that fits all needs and ask that PMs use that as a general template as they move forward in their projects…then just have the PMs cc the status report to the PMO Director every week as they deliver them to the team and the customer.

I’ve been a part of organizations and PMOs that seemed to want to load down employees with meaningless paperwork and reports. Micro-management has no place in organizations I work for…it drives me crazy. That’s probably why – self-admittedly – I’m sometimes not the best person to have as an employee. I’m an independent thinker and hate doing things that get in the way of doing what is right for the project…meaning what is best going to serve the project, my organization and my customer. Am I stubborn…yes. But I also feel that stubbornness and independent thinking are two very critical characteristics organizations should be looking for in their project managers.

Summary

With all this rambling, what exactly am I trying to say? Basically that project managers who are part of an organization – either in a formal PMO or distributed throughout the company – are always asked to lead and often asked to follow (such as with a PMO Director). We’re responsible for a lot – sometimes it seems like the world – as project managers as we try to satisfy the customer, our team, and our company leadership.

The key for the PM is to be a good leader and a wise and efficient follower. Do what is expected, but protect your team, your project and your customer. Therefore, if you’re seeing processes that do not make sense…question them. But when you do question them, also come with a proposed solution. Think proactively. Processes within organizations seem to cycle through significant changes every 2-3 years. Be a change agent for efficient processes within your company…everyone will benefit.

Skills of a Successful Project Manager

In his book, “The Little Black Book of Project Management,” Michael Thomsett identifies his version of the skillset of a successful project manager. I’m providing it here to give you yet another take on some of the key characteristics and capabilities that go into being able to effectively manage an engagement and a team of highly skilled resources.

Mr. Thomsett’s version comes mainly from the viewpoint of a department manager being thrown into the project management role, so understand that this is assuming an experienced manager is handling the engagement, but not one well-versed in project management.

The Successful Project Manager

A successful project manager knows how to bring together the definition and control elements and operate them efficiently. That means you will need to apply the leadership skills you already apply in running a department and practice the organizational abilities you need to constantly look to the future.

In other words, if you’re a qualified department manager, you already possess the skills and attributes for succeeding as a project manager. The criteria by which you will be selected will be similar.

Chances are, the project you’re assigned will have a direct relationship to the skills you need just to do your job. For example:

• Organizational and leadership experience. An executive seeking a qualified project manager usually seeks someone who has already demonstrated the ability to organize work and to lead others. He or she assumes that you will succeed in a complicated long-term project primarily because you have already demonstrated the required skills and experience.
• Contact with needed resources. For projects that involve a lot of coordination between departments, divisions, or subsidiaries, top management will look for a project manager who already communicates outside of a single department. If you have the contacts required for a project, it will naturally be assumed that you are suited to run a project across departmental lines.
• Ability to coordinate a diverse resource pool. By itself, contact outside of your department may not be enough. You must also be able to work with a variety of people and departments, even when their backgrounds and disciplines are dissimilar. For example, as a capable project manager, you must be able to delegate and monitor work not only in areas familiar to your own department but in areas that are alien to your background.
• Communication and procedural skills. An effective project manager will be able to convey and receive information to and from a number of team members, even when particular points of view are different from his own. For example, a strictly administrative manager should understand the priorities of a sales department, or a customer service manager may need to understand what motivates a production crew.
• Ability to delegate and monitor work. Project managers need to delegate the work that will be performed by each team member, and to monitor that work to stay on schedule and within budget. A contractor who builds a house has to understand the processes involved for work done by each subcontractor, even if the work is highly specialized. The same is true for every project manager. It’s not enough merely to assign someone else a task, complete with a schedule and a budget. Delegation and monitoring are effective only if you’re also able to supervise and assess progress.
• Dependability. Your dependability can be tested only in one way: by being given responsibility and the chance to come through. Once you gain the reputation as a manager who can and does respond as expected, you’re ready to take on a project.

These project management qualifications read like a list of evaluation points for every department manager. If you think of the process of running your department as a project of its own, then you already understand what it’s like to organize a project—the difference, of course, being that the project takes place in a finite time period, whereas your departmental tasks are ongoing. Thus, every successful manager should be ready to tackle a project, provided it is related to his or her skills, resources, and experience.

Criteria for Successful Project Management Offices

I was recently reviewing articles that I’ve written about successes and failures of Project Management Offices (PMOs) and some of the things that make that success or failure happen. I started making a list of these items and thought it might be helpful to share that info with the readers here on PM Tips again in this very condensed format. Remember, these are just my opinions that I’ve expressed in some of my articles along the way.

For PMO to be Effective:

• Director must be a key role in the organization
  • Must have backing and support of executive management
• Director must champion the efforts of the PMs
  • Don’t take credit for their actions
  • Provide ongoing support
  • Assist on critical/visible projects
  • Help breakdown resource acquisition barriers
• Director must run the PMO, not many projects
  • Project focus for the director should mainly be on the highly visible projects where exec decision-making is going to be needed on a regular basis or the business is extremely critical to the organization
  • Organization must value the PMO enough to ensure the director is not bogged down too much to be a successful leader

PMO Promotion

It is the responsibility of the PMO leadership to properly promote the PMO and help ensure its viability and visibility. Its viability is maintained by doing the following:

• Implementing proper and repeatable processes to consistently and successfully manage projects
• Implementing consistent templates for managing project and reporting status to customers and executive management
• Hiring competent, experienced Project Managers to lead projects for the organization
• Implementing proper compensation plans to retain good PM resources
• Implementing adequate training and on-boarding programs and processes to ensure that PMs are well-trained and up to speed on the PMO processes and practices

The PMO’s visibility is maintained by doing the following:

• Reporting project portfolio status on a regular basis and in a meaningful and useful format so that executive management realizes the PMO’s value
• Implementing solid PMO practices to ensure that the high-visibility customers are happy and referencable and the high-visibility projects are successful
• Inviting executive leadership to regularly attend weekly PMO meetings and sit in on project status meetings for the critical, high-visibility projects
• Managing project budgets thoroughly and reporting budget status up through executive leadership to show bottom-line PMO and Project Manager value

The PMO Director, as the leader of the PMO, must be a strong leader with pull inside the organization to ensure that these things happen. Otherwise, the PMO runs the danger of becoming obsolete or, at the very least, insignificant…and the mission critical projects will pass right by the PMO to special teams outside the PMO’s jurisdiction. Executive leadership must see value and ensuring that happens begins with the PMO leadership.

PMOs fail usually for one of the following three reasons:

• Lack of strong, focused leadership
• Lack of repeatable process
• Lack of executive leadership support

Five Signs Your PMO is not Meeting Your Organization’s Needs:

• Executive Management is not Included in the PMO Process
• Training Plans are Non-Existent
• Common Templates and Processes do not Exist
• Poor Upward Project Reporting
• Major Projects Circumvent the Process

All successful PMOs feature four basic components:

• The right processes
• The right tools
• The right people
• Executive level organization support

You can always hire different people. You can bring in consultants to help define better processes or identify better tracking tools. But without the executive-level support, none of it will happen or at least it won’t succeed.

Successful PMOs make an impact on organizational success by performing the following tasks:

• Aligning project delivery with strategic business goals and priorities
• Requiring that every project have an effective PM
• Implementing an appropriate PM methodology
• Consistent management and oversight of the project portfolio
• Obtaining and maintaining company leadership support