Here are Five Ways to Reduce Project Stress

It is natural that projects attract a lot of stress, as you have a fixed set of deliverables to produce in a fixed timeframe and with fixed resources – and all with your project sponsor breathing down your neck.

Positive stress can be generated in an environment which boosts productivity and focuses your team on the end goal. But negative stress can demoralize staff, reduce efficiency and de-focus your team. In this type of environment, you need to turn negative stress into positive stress.

Step1. Team Building

Positive stress can be generated when people within teams have positive relationships. These positive relationships can be facilitated by the project manager through team building techniques. This can include lunches, morning donut meetings, positive and fun status meetings, and doing things to help each other. There are many opportunities for team-building during the work day and even after work.

Step2. Rallying

The next step is now to rally your team around a cause – your project. Make sure everyone understands the objectives and outcomes of the project and reiterate them often. Make sure the team sees how their contribution is helping to achieve business value.

Step3. Boosting

Rallying works fine for teams, but may not be enough for individuals. You need to “boost” every team member by making them feel good about themselves and allowing them to gain confidence in completing the tasks assigned. You can do this by:

  • Recognizing great performance when you see it
  • Conducting informal staff reviews and providing positive feedback
  • Introducing team awards and prizes

You usually don’t have the ability to give financial awards, but recognition and attention goes a long way to keeping people boosted.

Step4. Pin-Pointing

Often stressed teams have an “instigator”. This is a person (or people) who generate a lot of negativity and who influence the performance of others around them. Make sure the negativity of an instigator is identified and work with them to be a positive influence if possible.

Step 5: Self-Administering

As the project manager, you need to be in the right “frame-of-mind” yourself. If you are negatively stressed, then those around you are likely to be also. So to “practice what you preach” you need to feel up-beat and positive about the team. You need to feel fit and healthy, focused, yet inspirational. If you can achieve this frame of mind, then you can turn negative stress into positive stress and give your team a real chance at succeeding.

Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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Use These Six Tips to Improve Project Meetings

Use These Six Tips to Improve Project Meetings

It seems everyone dislikes meeting – except when it is your turn to call one. Your job is to keep the meeting focused and make it as valuable as possible to the attendees. Here are the six tips to help you.

Tip 1. Start with the end in mind

To make sure you get the most out of your meetings, you need to plan them wisely. First understand the purpose of the meeting. Is it for status? Is it for a decision? Is it for brainstorming. make sure you and the attendees know the desired outcome of getting together.

Tip 2. Plan wisely

Your meeting should have an agenda that shows the flow of the meeting, the timing and how you are going to the desired outcome. This should be shared in advance with the attendees. Regularly scheduled meeting do not need a customized agenda. They use a “standing” agenda that stays pretty much the dame from week to week.

Tip 3. Open and close thoughtfully

Open and close your meetings carefully. When you open the meeting, state the purpose of the meeting, what you want to get out of it and why it’s important. This gets their attention and sets the scene. When you close the meeting, tell them what has been agreed / achieved in the meeting and the next steps going forward.

Tip 4. Control the meeting

You need to be in complete control of the meeting to ensure that:

  • The meeting follows the agenda
  • You do not get stuck on a single issue
  • One person doesn’t dominate
  • Everyone can contribute as needed

Raise your voice a little to add presence. Jump in frequently when people talk too long. Be polite but strong. If possible, ask someone else to record the minutes to give you time to facilitate the meeting.

Tip 5. Park it

Often in meetings, a single issue can consume the majority of the meeting time. If the issue is not related to your specific meeting goals, tell the team to park it and move on. Record the issue on a whiteboard or paper and address it with the relevant team members separately after the meeting. This keeps your meetings short and focused.

Tip 6. Go short

Keep your meetings short so that they stay focused. You will often find that a 60 minute meeting can be easily compressed to 30 minutes. Thirty minutes keeps everyone focused. Try it. For the next 30 days do not schedule any meetings longer the 30 minutes. You might be surprised that you can still accomplish your meeting purpose.

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Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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Use These Four Steps to Gather Requirements

Knowing how to gather requirements is a skill that every analyst, and project manager, – should have. However, it seems to be a skill that is generally lacking in many organizations. Poor requirements gathering is a major cause of project problems in many organizations.

Gathering requirements is more than just asking a few questions and then proceeding to the next step in the lifecycle. We have a four-step process for gathering requirements that all projects should utilize to some degree. If your project is small, you will go through thee steps quickly. Larger projects may spend quite a lot of time working through the process.

1. Elicitation

The Elicitation step is where the requirements are first gathered. To elicit accurate requirements, the analyst must ask the right kind of questions and then listen carefully to the answers. There are a number of techniques for eliciting requirements and your project may need to use multiple techniques depending on the circumstances. This includes interviews, facilitated sessions, prototypes, questionnaires and more.

2. Validation

The Validation step is where the “analyzing” starts. The purpose of validation is to make certain that the information conveyed during elicitation accurately represents the needs and expectations of the clients and stakeholders. The work here includes consolidating requirements, rationalizing them, looking got overlaps and gaps and creating models to help visualize processes.

3. Specification

During this step, the analyst prioritizes and formally documents the requirements in a Requirements Definition Report. The requirements are also numbered in a way that allows them to be tracked through the rest of the lifecycle. Finally, they are checked to make sure that they can ultimately be tested.

4. Verification

The final step in the requirements gathering process is verifying that the documented requirements accurately and completely communicate the needs and expectations of the client. The requirements are reviewed and formally approved. During this step, the analyst can also develop acceptance criteria and start to write test cases for the final solution.

The truth is that all team members need to appreciate the value of good business requirements and should have some fundamental skills in gathering them. Gathering good requirements up-front saves.

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Contact us today to help you implement the right requirements process for your organization – traditional or Agile.

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Follow These Basic Steps to Formally Close Your Project

When you start your project you need to make sure you include the activities, time and budget to formally close the project. This is true regardless of whether the project is successful or not. In fact, even if your project is cancelled, you should still go through a formal close process. Here are the things to consider.

Step 1: Confirm Project Completion

The first step in closing a project is to confirm that the project is ready to be closed. You should have defined ahead of time what it takes to be complete. This is the formal project completion criteria. Examples of completion criteria may include:

  • All the project objectives have been met.
  • The final solution or deliverables have been formally accepted.
  • Any pre-agreed post implementation criteria have also been met.

When the acceptance criteria are met, the project should be ready to close.

Step 2: Perform Closure Actions

Now that you’ve confirmed that the project is ready for closure, you’re ready to complete the actions needed to close the project. This includes activities such as:

  • Deliverables transitioned to operations
  • Supporting documentation handed over to the business
  • Resources reassigned
  • Project artifacts archived
  • Contracts closed
  • Project conclusion meeting held and lessons learned documented

If you don’t think about project closure until the end of the project you will be scrambling trying to determine what to do with rapidly disappearing staff. This is the beauty of thinking this through up-front during the planning process. If you have planned for a structured close process, you will have the information you need to validate it is time to close, plus you will already have the activities defined to complete the closure.

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Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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Five Ways to be Try to Turn Around Marginal Performers

One problem that many project managers never get comfortable with is dealing with poor performers. Some people are such poor performers that they ultimately fire themselves. Maybe the bigger challenge is trying to improve marginal performers. These are people that constantly disappoint. They miss a high performance bar, but when you lower the bar they miss that as well. In spite of these marginal performers, you still have to complete your project successfully. You should look at a number of possible causes for marginal performance.

Does the person have the right skills and experience?

Sometimes people do not deliver up to expectations because they do not have the right skills to do the job. For instance, you assign a person to complete the analysis for a new set of reports, but he is not sure how to ask the right questions or frame a discussion with the clients. If anyone falls into this category, you need to decide whether he could do the work with the right training or coaching or whether he should be replaced.

Do they understand your expectations?

If people have the right skills, ask whether they really understand what the expectations are. For instance, sometimes when a team member misses a deadline, he might come back and say that he did not think the work was due at that time. If there is some confusion on the expectations, you can have the person confirm back to you in writing his understanding of the expectations for deliverables and dates.

Are they motivated?

Some people are not motivated to do a good job regardless of the assignments and skills needed. You can take one shot at trying to motivate the person. but after that you would need to being this to the attention of the person’s functional manager.

Can you assign them other work?

Perhaps the person could do better – perhaps excellent – if they were assigned different type of work. Look through your schedule to see if you have flexibility to assign work that is valuable to you and that they can do well.

Are there extenuating circumstances?

Another area to consider is whether there are any business or personal factors that could explain a person’s performance. For instance, a member of your team may not be very motivated to work if his spouse is very ill. If you can find a cause, it will give you some ability to respond or at least acknowledge the cause.

If people have the right skills and the right expectations, then the project manager’s options become more limited, and you start to enter the realm of the performance management. It is possible that some team members are not going to do be able to perform up to expectations. They may not be willing to do the job, or they may not be able to do the work regardless of the training and support you provide. If you feel you are at this point, you need to get the appropriate functional manager involved.

It is difficult and frustrating to work with and rely upon people who do not come through. After you look at the problems and try to determine the cause, you may just decide if there are things that you can do as a project manager or if there is a performance problem that needs to be brought to the attention of the functional manager.

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Do you need help assessing your organization, deploying project management, coaching or other processes? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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Four Steps to Keep Your Project Plan Up-To-Date

Thee “project plan” refers to your schedule, budget and all the other project management deliverables that you use to manage your project. Whether you’re managing small, medium or large projects, you need to keep your project plan up-to-date on a regular basis. We recommend you update your Project Plan on a weekly basis.

It takes discipline to make sure all the project management processes and deliverables are up-to-date. But, on the other hand, if you do this work weekly it will not be so time-consuming.

Step 1: Update the schedule

The first step taken when updating your Project Plan is to identify the state of the currently assigned work. This may be captured through a combination of time reporting and weekly team status updates. Use this information to update the schedule. Each week the schedule should represent current reality of the project. Each week you should also validate that the schedule includes all the work required to get from today though the end of the project.

Step 2: Update financial status

On a weekly (or perhaps monthly) basis you can reconcile all of the expenditures of the project and compare to the work completed. You also need to understand the work remaining and the cost of the remaining work. This will help you get your hands around how your project is progressing against the budget.

Step 3: Update all tracking logs

In addition to schedule and budget the project manager should have a number of other logs that are used to manage the project. These include the risk log, issue log and scope change logs. These tracking logs should all be up-to-date to make sure you are on top of areas that could impact your project.

Step 4. Determine if any other project management artifacts need to be updated

There may be other documents that are used to provide guidance for managing the project. These are usually created during planning. They may need to be updated as the project progresses. Examples of those planning documents include:

  • Communications Management Plan
  • Stakeholder Management Plan
  • Risk Management Plan
  • Resource Management Plan
  • etc.

These documents are not needed for all projects but if you created them as a part of planning, you should also review them from time to time to make sure they still provide the best guidance. If not update the plans, and update your project management processes accordingly.

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Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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Three First Steps to Deploy Project Management Practices

Project management methodology is a framework that allows project managers to successfully manage projects of varying sizes. Many organizations do not follow a formal, consistent methodology of any kind. How do you start with an initiative to introduce project management practices within an organization?

From a project management perspective you would probably start the project by identifying stakeholders and formally planning the initiative. But let’s assume that work is done. Where do we start in the actual work associated with this type of culture change?

Step 1. Current State Assessment

When you are planning to change organization behavior it is usually good to understand the current state. This gives you the perspective and baseline to understand what needs to change. The Current State Assessment looks at project management practices, enablers, barriers, roles and responsibilities, tools, skill levels, portfolio processes, etc.  You can uncover the nature of the current state through a formal assessment. The assessment could involve talking to many people in the organization and reviewing evidence from current projects. The assessment could also be as simple as a workshop discussion with a cross-section of staff members that can form a consensus of the current state.

Step 2. Define the More Desired Future State

While you are looking at the current environment, you also need to ask what the future vision would look like. This is usually not so difficult in may areas. For instance, if the current state shows that project managers have weak skills, the future state will probably be that all project managers have a basic skill level, and perhaps a certification. Seeing the weaknesses of the current state will help paint a picture for the more desirable future state.

Step 3. Define the Gap Between the Current and the Future State

Many change initiatives start off by trying to define what the future vision looks like. However, describing the future state of project management in your organization is not the major deliverable at this point. The ultimate deliverable is a Gap Analysis that shows what you need to focus on to move the organization from where it is today to where you want it to be in the future. This is important because you do not want to spend your time implementing in areas where your organization already does well. At the same time, you don’t want to implement a number of changes and still see your effort fail because you did not address other important areas as well.

Next Steps

Once you have the Gap Analysis, everything else flows from there. You can describe the work required to close the gaps, the resources needed, the priorities and timeframes, etc. You can also define the organizational change management components that are required to move to the organization to your future state. You now at a point where you can move forward with the deployment project.

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Do you need help assessing your organization, deploying project management or other processes? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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The Big Three Steps to Manage Project Quality

Being a Project Manager is a tough job! You not only have to produce the deliverables on time and within budget, but you also need to ensure that they meet the quality expectations of your customer. To do this, you need to define and execute a quality management process.

By implementing a quality process within your project, you will not only be able to control the level of quality of your deliverables, but you can also provide your customer with assurance that the project will result in a solution which meets their expectations.

Formal quality management is hard to implement. It takes time and a lot of work. Fortunately there are not a lot of elements to a quality management process. In fact, there are three.

Step 1. Create a Quality Plan

Before you begin to manage quality on your project, you should first create a Quality Plan. The Quality Plan describes how you will understand quality requirements and expectations, quality tools, quality roles, how to measure quality, how to validate process acceptance, and more.

In particulate, the Quality Plan describes the overall quality control and quality assurance steps you will implement to ensure quality.

Steps 2: Control the quality of your deliverables (quality control)

Quality control (QC) activities are those that focus on the overall quality of the deliverables being produced. Quality control is usually the responsibility of the project manager and the specific person responsible for a deliverable. Examples of quality control activities include:

  • Deliverable reviews (also called peer reviews)
  • Product checklists
  • Testing

Quality control is also called “inspection”. The deliverable must exist in some form to validate its quality level through inspection.

Steps 3: Assure the quality level of your deliverables (quality assurance)

Quality assurance (QA) refers to validating the processes used to create deliverables. It is especially helpful for managers and sponsors. Managers may not have the time or expertise required to validate whether deliverables are complete, correct and of high quality. However, they can discuss the processes used to create the deliverables to determine if the processes seem sound and reasonable.

Overall, project quality is obtained through quality planning, having good work processes (QA), and checking the results to be sure (QC).

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Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

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Use These Five Reports and Logs to Show Overall Project Status

I think most people are asked to create regular project status reports. Really, status reports are the minimum expectations for project management communication. However, when communicating status, there are other elements that should be communicated in addition to a formal status report.

When you communicate project status, you should include the following project management documents as well.

1. Status Report

Yes, you need to actually send a status report. This provides a recap of the project status today and communicates anything interesting that the reader should know. This report should be detailed enough to answer questions about the current health of the report, yet not-so detailed that people who read it are lulled to sleep with trivial details.
This report should answer the following questions:

  • Where do things currently stand with this project?
  • What are the next steps on this project?
  • What obstacles are in the way of this project coming to completion?
  • What is the current state of key project metrics (schedule, budget, etc.)?

2. The Risk Register

The risk register is another vital report. Risks are always lurking in the background of any project just waiting to knock it off course. The risk register identifies those risks, quantifies the potential impact they could have on a project, and then offers mitigations plans for each of the identifies risks.

3. The Issue Log

The issue log report is your way of identifying, tracking and managing current problems that require help outside the project team.　 This log should show what is actively being done to address each issue and prioritize them by area of impact on the project.

4. Scope Change Log

This log shows a prior and current scope change requests, and their resolution. This is important to keep the management stakeholders aware of how their scope approvals are changing the nature of the project over time.

5. Other tracking logs not included in the Status Report

Generally you don’t want to track and report project information in two places. For example, you should place schedule and budget information on your status report. But the Status Report is for the summary information. You may have reports or logs that you are using to track schedule and budget details. If your stakeholders would like to see these details you can include your separate tracking logs.

You don’t want to copy/paste this information from your detailed logs to the status report. The status report contains the summary information. If your stakeholders want to see the details, just attach the separate logs for their review.

Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.　

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Three Ways to Ensure You Collect the Right Metrics

Most companies want to collect more data to be used for fact-based decision making. However, companies struggle actually implementing a strong metrics program. There is a reason – it is really hard! However, there are things you can do to ensure you collect good metrics without going overboard.

1. Make Sure Your Metrics Add Value

Identifying, gathering and leveraging the right mix of metrics are ways to add value to an organization or a project. The value can be quantified in a number of areas including:

  • Improved performance of the overall project fulfillment and delivery process
  • Improved estimating for future projects
  • Validation of duration, cost, effort and quality objectives for the project
  • Identification and communication of best practices

Metrics provide a more factual and quantitative basis for understanding how you are doing and the things that can be done better. Without at least some basic metric information, all discussions on performance and improvement are based on anecdotal evidence, perceptions and guesses.

2. Use the Metrics that You Collect

You don’t want to collect metrics just for the sake of collecting them. That doesn’t make sense and it just ends up being a waste of time. If certain metrics are required by your organization, collect them. In addition, you should collect any other metrics that are needed by your particular project. However, if you don’t have a purpose for the metrics, or if your project is not long enough that you can really leverage the information, these customized project-specific metrics are not worth collecting for your project.

3. Compare the Cost of Collecting a Metric vs. the Benefit

Just as there is some cost associated with most project management activities, there is a cost to collecting and managing a metrics process. In many cases, the cost to collect and leverage a certain type of metric is prohibitive. These metrics should not be pursued. Other metrics are interesting, but do not provide the type of information that can be leveraged for improvement. The bottom line is that the cost to gather each metric must be balanced against the potential benefit that will be gained. Start by gathering metrics that are required by the organization. Then add metrics that have the lowest cost and effort to collect and can provide the highest potential benefit.

If you want to discuss the collection of metrics for your project to be in control and gather them to improve estimating for future projects contact us today.

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