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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Virtual Teams: Key Success Factors – Part 2

As we identified in Part 1 – seven key success factors for virtual teams are:

• Human resource policies
• Training and on-the-job education and development
• Standard organizational and team processes
• Use of electronic collaboration and communication technology
• Organizational culture
• Leadership support of virtual teams
• Team-leader and team-member competencies

In this Part 2, let’s look deeper at the first four of these: human resource policies, training and development, standard processes, and the use of collaboration and technology.

Human Resource Policies

Human resource policies should support working virtually. Systems must be integrated and aligned to recognize, support, and reward the people who work in and lead virtual teams.

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Should Requirement Quality be Measured?

Measuring requirement quality can reveal opportunities for long-term improvements in requirement definition, can show you where to invest for improvements, and can help you develop your team.

Opportunities for improvement

If requirement quality isn’t measured, there will be no future improvement in requirements. Every project – in terms of requirements quality – will be a rerun of the last project. No lessons learned. No forward progression.

Did your last project have rework? Were there any crisis situations in testing? Were there customer complaints? A review of the last project’s requirements may show you how to avoid some of those same headaches on your current and future projects. Read more »

Doing the Right Things for Your Customer

Customers are a demanding group … that’s a given. When we have all of our regular project responsibilities to deal with on a daily and weekly basis, how do we know when we’re doing the right things for our customers? How do we know we’re managing them well, responding to the right requests, saying ‘yes’ when we should and saying ‘no’ when we should, and ensuring that our actions are not detrimental to the forward progress of our project?

You can’t always base it on customer satisfaction levels. Because attentive ‘do-anything-for-the-customer’ behavior may get a project manager and team high marks mid-way through a project. But upon implementation, if they’ve said yes to too many things that ended up modifying scope and delivering a system to the customer that is ultimately not what they ordered, then that customer satisfaction at the end of the project will be low. The end user community will have a product that they didn’t sign up for and that’s a very bad thing.

In order to ensure we’re doing right by our customers, we first need to have confidence in what we’re doing. And we need to have confidence that we’re doing the right things for the project. We can do that in a few ways, including:

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Good Requirements vs. Rework

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

This article is based on information from Hooks and Farry’s book entitled, “Customer-Centered Products.”

“Better, cheaper, faster!” “I want it yesterday!”

Everyone out there has heard one or more of these – how and when you’ve heard them depends on your industry. But they translate into the same headaches for everyone. If you are a product development manager, you must develop and deliver higher quality products in less time and for less money than you have in the past. If you are in charge of procuring products for use in your company, you must procure a quality product faster and cheaper than ever before – especially in this economy. Otherwise, you may not be able to stay in business. Read more »