Leadership Project Management Project Team

Stand-Up Meetings

February 21, 2012 – 9:16 am

Here is a question for you: ‘In what way are Agile Projects like the Privy Council of the Queen of England?’
Answer: their meetings are held standing up!
And the reasons for doing this are the same for the Queen and the Agile PM; speed, no waffle, straight to the point, get on with the real business in hand.
As soon as people sit down in a meeting they relax, and the meeting will take longer than necessary.
Agile meetings (certainly the daily ones) should be held standing up, in a room with no chairs (too tempting otherwise). All guests must respect this statutory approach to the daily meeting (I’m trying not to use the term Daily Scrum so as to widen the appeal of the Agile methodology).
Also, to continue the theme of fast and effective meetings, the agenda must be really simple; there are only three questions for every participant to answer:
1. What have you done yesterday?
2. What will you accomplish today
3. What things will stop you achieving your goal for today?
In this way our Agile project will focus on delivery, and not on unnecessary administration.

 

© Mike Watson 2012

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Leadership Project Management Project Team

It’s a rotten task, so I’ll do it myself

February 13, 2012 – 3:14 pm

Oh Dear; how many times do I hear this.
Is the PM put on this earth to do all the rotten tasks? Plainly the answer to this question is a resounding ‘No’.
Also, who says that ‘it’ is a rotten task? You might think that a particular project task has no interest or challenge, and you do it yourself in order not to upset your team members, but one of your team members may be angry that you are keeping to yourself what is to them a really tasty task!
Sometimes there are tasks which really are rotten. However, sometimes there are tasks which are real stars in some way (maybe interpersonal challenge, new technology, glory, exposure etc). If your team see that you are even-handed in the way you delegates ALL tasks then they are more likely to accept the odd duff one as long as they have a chance at the glory ones as well. If you steal the glory they won’t tackle ANY tasks with enthusiasm.
However, I really like the thought that one person’s rotten task is another person’s glory…

 

© Mike Watson 2012

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Leadership Project Management Project planning Project Team

When Projects Go Bad

February 2, 2012 – 11:26 am

Having had a few (mostly minor) disasters over the last few months, here are a few reflections on things to look out for and do when project performance starts to fall.

  1.  They are problems not challenges (I’ll get that one off my chest straight away). Did the crew of the Apollo 13 Moon flight say ‘Houston we have a challenge’? No, because they knew a problem when they saw one.
  2.  Nearly all problems on projects, no matter how large they eventually grow to be, have small beginnings. Often it is something barely noticeable, but you can save yourself a lot of trouble if you have the mechanism to pick up these little danger signs early. To do this use lots of milestones in your projects. They give you an at-a-glance picture of how you’re performing and the more you have the quicker you’ll notice something starting to slip.
  3. Make a positive effort to speak to all of your project team regularly. The majority of  problems that occur on my projects are caused by people. If you don’t speak to them you won’t know what’s going on.
  4. Monitor the issue log like a hawk.
  5. Talk to your Sponsor/Client/Boss about what is going on. One of things that your Sponsor, or any senior manager or client, hate above everything else is surprises. It’s amazing what you can get away with if you warn people in advance!
  6. Don’t let the same thing surprise you twice. If something happens in a project that causes a problem, record it and incorporate it into your next relevant risk planning session.
  7. If you have that person (and everyone does) on your project team who says: ‘I could have told you that was going to happen’ when your project goes wrong, include them in the aforementioned risk planning. They’ll never be able to say it again and it will save you a GBH charge.
  8. There’s no point in trying to put out a conflagration with a garden hose. If things go really badly you and the Sponsor need to take decisive and meaningful action. Don’t make a few token or incremental steps, it just saves up a worse problem for later. EU politicians please take note!
  9. In the immortal words of Coporal Jones: don’t panic!

Anyway, there are my thoughts! I hope you find them useful.

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Leadership Project Management Project Team

Making a First Impression

January 23, 2012 – 9:05 am

As a consultant, I have joined more project teams than many people, and I want to describe to you a common experience. These tips are all about first impressions, and the first day (no, the first few minutes) on a new project team are amazingly important.
I joined a team last year and was greeted on the first morning by the project manager with ‘Oh is it today?’
He had interviewed me 2 weeks before, and, at that interview, he pushed me quite strongly for a joining date. He knew I was coming and he wasn’t ready!
In the first 2 minutes, he had created an impression in my mind, and it was not favourable! I immediately thought that I had made a mistake, but then I remembered that I was only going to be there for 6 months, and I can survive anything for 6 months. What a way to start!
Now, I don’t expect a red carpet and a fanfare of trumpets, but it would be nice to be welcomed by someone aware of the situation, organised and enthusiastic.
Is that too much to hope for? read more »

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Project Management Project planning Project Team

The wrong instinct

January 16, 2012 – 5:09 pm

Sometimes I think that project managers’ instincts can be dangerously wrong.
I was watching a team produce the first plan for their project, and when they had finished they had made a good job. The project could be finished within the deadlines requested by the boss, and would deliver a good quality result for their customers. They all relaxed a little, while they stood back and basked in the good feeling of successful team work.
And then the project manager almost ruined it all. She said ‘OK, now we have an initial plan, let’s see where we can tighten it up’.
I managed to jump in and ask ‘why do you want to tighten up the plan, when it quite obviously works within the given timeframe?’
She gave me a withering look, and said ‘we can do better than this….’
I asked again ‘why; we all know that when the project starts to run it will tighten up all by itself. If you make it too tight now (when it is NOT necessary) you will be creating problems for you and your team later.
The team suddenly looked worried, but fortunately not at me. They began to realise that their Gung-Ho project manager could be really stitching them up by try win some worthless brownie points.
We had a strong discussion along the lines of ‘the boss is happy with this plan’, and eventually she relented.
However, one of the problems of being a consultant is that I have no control over what happens when I leave. I just hope that she managed to control her instincts, and keep a degree of flexibility built into the project plan.

© Mike Watson 2012

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Leadership Project Management Project Team

Another wrong instinct

January 11, 2012 – 3:57 pm

Another project manager’s instinct that needs review and control is that of being ‘helpful’.
Sometimes a person in authority (from a project manager to a parent) can be too caring, under the guise of being helpful.
Many adults (and I class some project team members as adults, at least for some of the time) learn from trying things out (see the classic work by Honey and Mumford and Kolb for more on learning styles), and a leader who is too caring can actually hold back the development of team members by jumping in and ‘helping’.
Obviously there is a balance to be struck, as a wayward and untutored team member can cause a lot of damage to the project and maybe other team personnel, but it may be more effective to create an environment where people are not afraid to ask for help.
An environment where the leader acts as a Mother Hen, making sure that the baby chicks do not struggle, may be very stifling, and the chicks may learn never to take a chance but to wait for direction from the leader.
The problem is that the leader may have to postpone the warm glow that comes from jumping in and helping a struggler. Don’t worry – the glow will come later, when they pay you the ultimate compliment of asking for your help.

© Mike Watson 2012

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Project Management Project planning Project Team

It’s OK to make Assumptions…

January 1, 2012 – 1:30 pm

As long as we all know that they are assumptions.

At the start of any project not all the facts are known, but we cannot wait until everything is clearly understood. So at Project Initiation and Project Planning one of the most valuable documents will be the Assumptions List.

Some methodologies elevate the importance of this list and make it a section of the charter/initiation document. I don’t like this, as when the charter is signed off it becomes the project baseline and as such changes to it will be managed through a change control process. This can trap the assumptions list, whereas we need it to be a much more dynamic document, subject to easy revision every day.

The assumptions list is owned by the Project Manager, but should be freely available to all team members, so that new assumptions can be added on demand. We also hope that some assumptions will be cleared up as the project unfolds.

The assumptions list provides excellent input to the risk management process, and must also be monitored during Project Execution. It is a very valuable document even at Project Closure, as it shows the thought processes used during the project.

And finally, may I remind you of the old ‘joke’. If we ASSUME, then it can make an ASS of U and ME….

Write them down, and keep them published.

© Mike Watson 2011

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Leadership Project Management Project planning

Time management – Padding time estimates, or Buffer Time

December 19, 2011 – 2:15 pm

I have no problem with my team members adding in a little bit of extra time to the Duration of a task, as long as I know what they are doing.

A few years ago I was asked by a company in Brussels to run a training course for a new customer just outside Copenhagen, in a village called Hillerød. The client in Hillerød organised the travel and hotel, but as there were no available hotel rooms in Hillerød I was booked into a hotel in the centre of Copenhagen.

I asked the Brussels person to find out how long it would take by taxi in the morning to reach the client’s office in Hillerød (all trainers are paranoid about not being late for a course). She asked the client in Denmark, who (I later found out) said ’20 minutes’. The woman in Brussels added on her own padding or buffer (why, for Pete’s sake – it was nothing to do with her…), and told me ’30 minutes’. I immediately think 45 (paranoia).

I arrived in Copenhagen the day before the course was due to start, and whilst registering at my hotel I asked the receptionist ‘how long to go to….’. She said ‘40 minutes’, so I now think 1 hour! The course was due to start at 09:00, and I want to be there at 08:00 (the office opens at 08:00), so I booked a taxi at 07:00.

How long do you think the taxi ride took? – Yes, 20 minutes….

It was November, and, in Copenhagen in November at 07:20 it is dark, and it was raining. At what time did the office open? Yes, 08:00. I stood outside in the rain for 40 minutes, cursing all the people who tried to be ‘helpful’ adding on buffer time that was NONE of their business.

I want the project team environment to be open and trusting, so that when I ask a team member ‘how long will this take?’, and they say ‘5 days’ I want to know if this includes some contingency padding or not. I can then decide what to put into the schedule for this task/resource combination.

Open and trusting; more about to create that in a later tip.

© Mike Watson 2011

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Project Management Project planning Training

‘It’s a bad plan that can’t be changed’ – Publilius Syrus c.100 BC

December 14, 2011 – 11:36 am

‘It’s a bad plan that can’t be changed’ – Publilius Syrus 1st Century BC. One of the fundamental truths of project planning from over 2000 years ago.

Just because we plan a project doesn’t mean that the project will follow the plan! A plan is like crossing your fingers and saying ‘please, this is how I want my project to run!’ Unless you are  clairvoyant (and if so please come and work on my projects!) you can’t see the future. All we can do is try and look forward and prepare, but we know that the actual project won’t work out like we say it will.

So why do we plan then? I’m certainly not suggesting that planning is a waste of time.

A plan is like a road map of where we want to go, we know that there’ll be the odd traffic jam or ‘road closed’ sign, but that’s fine because we can navigate around these things if we can see the big picture. Without the plan it is difficult to see round these obstacles and hard to judge how serious their effect on the project will be. In short the plan enables us to be flexible.

In order to be flexible employ the principles of ‘rolling wave’ planning. Don’t plan ahead too far in too much detail. What ‘too far in too much detail’ means is a bit beyond the scope of this blog (come on one of our courses!). Getting too far ahead of ourselves in planning either means a lot of work as we re-plan and re-re-plan the project to allow for the everyday occurrences or, even worse, the plan becomes inflexible.

If we have a good outline milestone plan then planning in detail a phase at a time, to the next milestone, enables us to change the plan easily while still keeping the overall ‘road map’ (the overall objectives, time and cost constraints etc.) in view and achievable. It enables us to learn from the project work and feed this into our later planning.

Doing this will keep your plan flexible, and therefore effective, for the minimum effort. As the quote proves this is not new advice, but none the less valuable for that.

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Leadership Project Management Project Team

Time Management – Kill the Time Bandits

December 5, 2011 – 4:01 pm

I was trained in the old-fashioned type of time management, which seems to have faded out of sight nowadays. I would like to share 3 concepts with you, as they help me all the time, and may help you deal with some of the more common time bandits.

The three concepts sound like 3 demented Welshmen (try saying their names with a Welsh accent): DIN, DIR and DIO.

DIN stands for Do It Now, and, whilst this may seem obvious to all you go-getting types, let me tell you what it really means. It means ‘if you are not ready to do it now, DON’T DO IT’; stop fiddling with it. Don’t keep peeping at the attachments, or reading the email, just to remind yourself how interesting or challenging it will be. Decide when to do it, and then leave it alone until then. read more »

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