Weekly tips form TenStep Inc.

Four Tips for a Nervous Presenter

Are You a Nervous Presenter? Use These Four Tips to Feel Confident.

[image source_type=”attachment_id” source_value=”96″ align=”right” width=”300″ autoHeight=”true”] It is said that all people fear two things – death and public speaking. Having to present in front of others can be nerve-racking – even for experienced speakers. You are not going to find the answers in your Communications Plan. Here are some tips to help you feel more confident.

1. Prepare

Nothing gives you as much confidence as being prepared. Of course, you need to know the content, but you should also understand the structure of your presentation and how you will move from point to point. You don’t need (or want) to memorize the presentation, but you don’t want to forget things either.

You should rehearse the presentation multiple times. This could be in front of a safe audience, or even saying the words to yourself. You don’t want to read content from a slide, but having the overall session framed by some slides with bullet points can keep you on topic and make the presentation more comfortable.

2. On the day of the presentation.

Get yourself mentally and physically prepared.

  • Get a good night’s sleep
  • Eat a healthy meal
  • Try to free your schedule, so you’re more relaxed
  • Before you present, spend 15 minutes going over your presentation one last time. You should have a copy of your presentation that you can review.
  • Relax

3. Use confident body language

Much of your message is relayed through your body language.

  • Make eye contact with people
  • Appear confident using an open stance. Stand tall.
  • Smile and let your personality shine
  • Walk around a little
  • Vary your voice and use slow, open hand gestures.
  • Speak slowly and carefully, but passionately. If you’re enthusiastic about the topic, then your listeners will be as well.

4. Look for opportunities for interaction

Encourage interaction with others during your presentation. When others talk for a few seconds, it takes the focus off you and lets you clear your head and focus on the key points ahead. Interaction also keeps the audience engaged.

Public speaking is one of the hardest things to master. If you prepare carefully, have a great mindset and are enthusiastic, you will deliver a great presentation.

Are you looking for training or coaching to become a beter presenter or are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss how we can help you.

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Know These Ten Focus Areas for Project Success

There are many project management processes and techniques that can help your project be successful. Although there are no guarantees, these tips will give you a better chance to be successful.

1. Requirements

Make sure that your customer defines their requirements in depth. You need to know exactly what must be delivered. Be specific, write them formally, and get them approved. This document will become one of the baselines upon which to measure your success.

2. Scope

Define scope well. Get your sponsor approval for scope changes, making sure the sponsor understands any schedule, budget or other impact to the project.

3. Stakeholders

Involve your stakeholders throughout the project. Get them involved in the analysis and planning, as well as execution. Gain their approval when needed and keep them informed when needed. The more you involve them, the greater their level of buy-in and the better you will manage their expectations.

4. Duration

Keep your delivery timeframes short and realistic. It is easier to be successful if your deadlines are shorter rather than longer. Split large projects into “mini-projects” if possible. Keep each mini-project to less than six months if possible. This keeps everyone motivated and focused.

5. Communication

Make sure you keep everyone informed by providing the right information at the right time. Produce status reports and run regular team meetings.

6. Quality

Understand the expectations of your customer in terms of quality and put a plan in place to meet their expectations.

7. Issues

Jump on issues as soon as they are identified. Prioritize and resolve them before they impact on your project. Take pride in keeping issues to a minimum.

8. Risks

Risk management is a great proactive way to solve potential problems before they occur. Identify risks early in the project and continue to manage risks throughout the project.

9. Deliverables

As each deliverable is complete, hand it formally over to your customer. Ask them to verify acceptance to make sure it meets their expectations. Only then can you consider each deliverable as 100% complete.

10. Your team

Be a great people manager. Show them the project vision and how they can make it happen. Motivate them. Trust and believe in them. Make them feel valued. They will work wonders.

There are your ten tips for project success. Now is the time to put them into action.

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 Three Steps to Create a Resource Plan

A Resource Plan identifies the physical resources required to complete a project. It lists each of the resource types (such as labor, equipment and materials) and how many of each you need. If you would like to define a comprehensive Resource Plan for your project, take the following three steps.

First, identify the different types of resources needed to complete the project. You then need to quantify the amount of each type of resource required. And finally, you need to schedule the consumption of each resource within the project. Let’s describe each step in a little more detail.

Step 1: List the resource required

You should start by listing the resources required to complete the project.

  • Labor. Identify all the roles involved in performing the project, including all full-time, part-time and contracting roles.
  • Equipment. Identify all of the equipment involved in performing the project. For instance, this may include office equipment (e.g. PCs, photocopiers, and mobile phones), telecommunications equipment (e.g. cabling, switches) and machinery (e.g. heavy and light machinery).
  • Materials. Identify all of the non-consumable materials to complete project activities such as materials required to build physical deliverables (e.g. wood, steel and concrete).
  • Hardware/software. Identify if applicable.
  • More…

Step 2: Estimate the number of resources required

The next step is to estimate the number of each resource.

  • Labor, estimate how many hours you need per role
  • Equipment, estimate how many pieces of equipment needed
  • Materials, estimate how much material, in terms such as square meters, kilograms, number of units, etc.

As much as possible, also indicate the date the resources are needed and the consumption rate per day, week or month.

Step 3: Construct a resource schedule

You have now collated all the information required to build a detailed Resource Schedule. Create a resource schedule which specifies the:

  • Resources required to complete the project
  • Timeframes for the consumption of each resource
  • Quantity of each resource required per week/month
  • Total quantity of resource consumed per week/month
  • Assumptions and constraints identified

That’s it – your three steps to creating a resource plan.

Need help understanding resource management and other aspects of project and portfolio management? Contact us today to discuss bringing a training class to your organization.

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Four Ways to Manage the “Project Grapevine”

Back in the 60′, Motown’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” was a huge hit, made famous by Marvin Gaye. Marvin may no longer be with us, but the grapevine he sang about is alive and well. The “grapevine” is a great metaphor for the way informal and unofficial news travels from person to person. Official news comes through official channels. Informal news, rumors and gossip travel though the grapevine.

In a project environment, the circulation of unofficial information and rumors can be disruptive and destructive. Your Communication Plan addresses the formal communication content and paths, but it can be hard to manage the grapevine. The following tips help stop the confusion and manage the grapevine effectively.

Tip 1 – Become Part of the Grapevine

People love talking about what goes on within their work environment. As a project manager, you cannot monitor and manage the grapevine unless you can be a part of it, or at least aware of what is being said.  Assume the projects you manage are one part of that conversation, insert yourself into it and ask people what they are hearing about your projects. Then be sure to add your own facts into the mix. A little bit of accurate information never hurt anyone.

Tip 2 – Combat Negative Messages

Negative communication sometimes gets spun into a mile-long email thread. Inaccurate information and intensity of emotion continue to escalate the longer the email thread grows. The best antidote to negative communication is to get the facts out as quickly as possible. Compose a thoughtful and precise message with a handful of relevant facts to get everyone in sync. Ask your team members to carry the message forward in their grapevine discussions.

Tip 3 – Stop the Bad Press

Much of the talk on the grapevine is harmless babble, primarily serving as an interesting diversion during a long day at work. However, sometimes the message can be very negative and detrimental to the project. In this situation try to track down the source, and discuss the situation with the person formally. The rebuttal is much more effective if the person that started the bad press is also the one to put out the correction. Even if you cannot find the source, put out a positive rebuttal to the people that can carry the message forward in the grapevine.

Tip 4 – Fill the Vacuum

You may have projects that aren’t impacted by negative communication. However, you may then have a vacuum of communication. It’s up to you to fill this void with positive and factual information about your project. Send out pertinent emails, give appropriate updates at company meetings, and have one-off conversations. That way, people will have something positive to talk about when your project gets tangled up in the grapevine.

The grapevine has been around since the time the 3rd person walked on this Earth. There’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening, so include it as part of your unofficial communication plan. You’ll notice a big difference with the buzz on your projects.

Need training on project soft skills – leadership, negotiating, communication, change management? Contact us today to discuss bringing a training class to your organization.

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Use These Six Steps to Resolve Project Conflict

A manager once told me that they could be a better manager if they had better people to manage.

Of course, good people managers can work with all kinds of people, and don’t shy away from the challenge of working through difficulty. This is especially true when there is conflict on a project. You need to face the conflict and not ignore it. Ignoring it only makes the problem worse. The earlier you face it, the easier it will be to resolve.

Conflict can occur with your managers, your peers or your staff. Here are some examples of conflict you might experience on projects.

  • Your boss is frustrated with progress and takes it out on you openly, in front of others in your team.
  • Your colleague wants something from you that you can’t provide, or can’t do for them within the timeframe required so they get angry.
  • Your staff think you’re being unrealistic about timeframes, so they handle it badly by raising their voice and being obstructive.

When conflict occurs, take these steps:

  1. Take a time out. If you or the other person is getting heated, tell them you need to take five minutes to collect your thoughts. Even though you asked for the five minutes, it is really for the other party to cool off as well. Make a coffee or go for a walk. It might be surprising how a short walk (or a long one) can help you relax. This will help you both to calm down and reflect on what has happened.
  2. Defuse the situation. When you restart your conversation, start with a disarming comment such as “Sorry. I have been under pressure.” or “Let’s start over again.”. This will make the atmosphere more positive.
  3. Identify the cause of the conflict. Many times when emotion is high you may lose site of the actual cause of the conflict. State your perception of the cause and see if the other party agrees.
  4. Solve the problem. The nature of “confrontation” is that you need to “confront” the problem and solve it. Both parties need to work together to resolve it constructively. Discuss the various solutions to the problem and try to agree on the pros and cons of each before deciding on the best course of action.
  5. Observe body language. While all this is happening, you need to focus on your body language. Use open stances. Take your hands out of your pockets and never fold your arms. Try and use slow hand movements. Use a passive voice. Maintain good eye contact. Listen carefully and watch their body language as well.
  6. Agree on a course of action – and follow-through. This helps to ensure the conflict is resolved and also builds trust that will help defuse similar situations in the future.

You can utilize this process to turn a conflict into a team-building and learning opportunity.

Need training on project soft skills – leadership, negotiating, communication, change management? Contact us today to discuss bringing a training class to your organization.

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Five Ways to Describe a PM

Here are a number of ways to describe a project manager using some unconventional terms (Not in the PMBOK® Guide.)

  1. Plain Talker (communicate clearly)
    It’s critical that a Project Manager manage expectations by communicating items that are factual, timely, and relevant. You are responsible for removing any ambiguity or confusion around a project through plain talk and crystal clear communication. A successful Project Manager also employs a variety of communication methods ranging from face-to-face meetings to chat to group presentations.
  2. Risk Averter (manage risk)
    Identifying, analyzing and managing risk is a key responsibility of Project Managers. You can have the best plan in the world, but there are many potential problems that will get in your way. You need to ensure your project remains viable regardless of these potential problems. This can be accomplished by monitoring and managing risks throughout the project.
  3. Obstacle Remover (manage issues)
    There are often real and current obstacles that will slow down your project. You cannot always prevent or foresee problems. However, once they occur you need to address and resolve them quickly.
  4. Morale Builder (manage staff)
    The project environment can be hard on team members. Things may not be going as planned and your team may be buckling. It’s your responsibility to keep morale high that they can get through tough times. This can be simple things like talking to people, telling them they are doing a good job and looking out for their interests. Use levity and humor where appropriate.
  5. Bottom Line-er (manage schedule and budget performance)
    It is your responsibility to keep your projects within budget and schedule. Projects consume resources and resources cost money. You need to be a financial steward of these valuable resources and manage them carefully. Always manage a project with an eye on your budget and deadline. When you start to drift, do everything you can to get back to baseline.

What do you get when you focus on the meat and potatoes of these five main responsibilities of a Project Manager? You become a plain talking, risk averting, obstacle removing, morale building, bottom line-er Project Manager! Who wouldn’t want to have someone like that heading up their next project?

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Use These Five Tips to Manage Your “To Do” List

There are many tips and techniques to help you with personal time management. However, the one that seems to be universally recommended is the to-do list. It is hard to take control of your day if you don’t have a plan for what you want to do. These to-do lists can be completed daily, weekly, monthly or longer.

For now, let’s focus on the daily to-do list. Here are five tips to help you manage this list.

1. Consolidate on only one list

If you have lists on your desk, in your car, or on post-it notes, merge them all into one list. Then group the items in your list and put them in a logical order. As soon as you’ve done this, you’ll immediately feel like a weight has been taken off your shoulders, because one list seems easier to manage than multiple.

2. Be aware of the target dates

Just because an item is on your daily to-do list, it does not mean the work can be done in one day. It is okay to partially complete an item and then check it off for that day. For example, it might be that an activity is worked on over five days and completed at the end of the week.

You may identify a to-do action that does not need to be started today. Great, you can add it to your to-do list a few days from now. It is okay to have to-do lists for the coming days as well.

3. Set priorities

You don’t want to complete 19 out of 20 to-dos, when the 20th is the one that is really most important. Be sure to identify the most important work for the day. You can do this by listing the to-dos in priority order, or perhaps placing numbers on the high priority work. For me, I simply place an “*” next to the to-dos that are the most important.

4. Be aware of dependencies

Sometimes you get fired up to start a to-do action and then you realize something else needed to be completed first. The work on your to-do list should not be so complicated. Be sure to think about the work and recognize any to-dos that need to be done first.

5. Manage your list

As you complete your work each day, check off the work as it is completed. This gives you the sense of accomplishment. If you do not finish all of the to-dos, carry the remainder over until the next day. Tomorrow, start the process over again.

There are many other elements of time management – personal organization, eliminating time wasters, removing clutter, etc. The daily to-do list is perhaps the key. Use it and use it wisely.

Could your organization use coaching on how to get more work done in a day? Contact us today to discuss how to identify and remove time wasters to allow you more time to get your work done.

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Eight Characteristics of a High-Performance Team

Have you ever been on a project team that had everything going right?  The team members all got along; they all had the right skills; they had the right processes; everyone worked hard and pulled together to get the project done.

Those are just some of the characteristics of a high-performing team.  High-performing teams can sometimes form by themselves, perhaps even in spite of a manager that gets in the way.  It is also possible that a manager can facilitate a team through a process that leads them to become high performing. The following actions can help the team’s growth.

  • Set common objectives.  Teams will have a hard time performing at a high level unless they are all striving toward a common set of objectives.  Even if members of your team do different jobs, a set of objectives can usually be written that will encompass all of them.
  • Establish good internal work processes. You cannot build consistently good products, or deliver good services, with poor work processes.  The high-performing team has a set of internal processes that guide how members act and react in particular circumstances.
  • Instill good work ethic. High-performing teams find the challenges associated with their work and work hard to complete their assignments within expectations.  Members get more work done in a typical day than their counterparts.
  • Keep everyone focused.  Team members understand the work they have on their plate today, as well as what the remainder of their work is.  They don’t get sidetracked by rumors or politics.
  • Maintain a high level of motivation. The high-performance team relies on both self-motivation as well as a reinforced motivation through the entire team.
  • Keep organized. Team members know where to find the things they need to do their job, and they know where to put things when they are done.
  • Strive toward a balanced set of key skills.  A high-performance team has the skills needed to complete the work on its plate. People understand their strengths and weaknesses, but they also are willing to work outside their comfort area when needed.
  • Foster mutual respect. Team members have mutual respect for each other and trust that the others are working as hard as they are.

In the right circumstances, a manager can take the lead to move a team toward high-performance status.  It takes time. If it were easy, every team would be high performing, instead of the one or two that you may have worked on in your entire career.

Contact us today to discuss how we can help you strengthen your project, portfolio and PMO processes.

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Practice These Three Key Ways to Control Project Politics

What happens when your project sponsor wants a different outcome for the project than your other management team and stakeholders want? The answer is that each party tries to influence the project to get what they want. This is one way you get into project politics. The result is that the team is constantly pushed in different directions, trying to keep everyone happy, but not really doing what they were originally asked to do. The project team becomes stressed, confused, de-motivated and inefficient. It’s your job as a Project Manager to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Having a well defied set of project management processes will help you manage politics. People will know they can’t go around the processes to get done what they want. However, project politics can’t be solved by processes alone. You need to first work on the people element.

Step 1: Build relationships

It is easier to resort to office politics if you do not have personal relationships with the major stakeholders. It is possible that you have a relationship with some or all of them to start. It is also possible that you don’t know any of the major stakeholders very well.

When a project starts, you can reduce the politics by building relationships with the major stakeholders. Building relationships makes it easier to work in a friendly and transparent manner. This starts off with stakeholder identification and stakeholder management, but goes beyond. Stakeholder engagement is about building relationships. These relationships will help when there is conflict and can keep you from getting into the dark side of project politics.

Build close relationships by meeting each stakeholder regularly to find out what they need from the project and why they need it. By listening to their needs, you’re securing their buy-in and you may be able to save unnecessary conflict in the future.

Step 2: Create a Project Board or Steering Committee of key stakeholders

One way to get competing stakeholders on the same page is to create a Project Board or Steering Committee. This allows the key stakeholders to agree to the same project scope and objectives. The Project Board should include your sponsor, major customers and other people that may influence the project. The purpose of the board is to set direction, resolve issues, control the scope and make sure that specific targets are set and achieved.

By forming a Project Board, you create a space where the senior stakeholders can thrash out the politics themselves and come to a consensus. You then have one common group to manage. If you include all of the “influencers” within the Board, you can task them with giving you a single, consistent vision. That way, there is no confusion as to what must be done to deliver the project and people are not pulled in different directions all of the time.

Step 3: Manage Change

A big risk to a project is that the goal posts move, causing continuous change to the project scope. This is a breeding ground for project politics, because every stakeholder will have their own wants and needs to be met—and they may not all be consistent with one another.

You need to manage change carefully by putting in place a formal process for managing it. Your change process should involve documenting each Change Request, why it’s needed and the impact to the project in implementing it. The Change Request should then be presented to the Project Board for review and approval. You need to make sure that when it’s approved the board also approve the extra time, money and people needed to implement it.

Summary

Building relationships, creating a Project Board and proactively managing change  will help you cut through politics to ensure your project success.

Do you need help assessing a project to see where it has gone wrong and what is required to save it? Contact us today to discuss how we can help your organization choose the right projects.

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Use This Five Step Approach to Manage Project Finances

Some projects have a large budget and require rigorous management and tracking. Other projects don’t have a budget component at all. When you do have project finances to manage, think about these simple steps.

  1. Estimate expenses

The first step towards managing your project finances is to estimate the costs. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You need to forecast the total amount of people, equipment, materials and other expenses needed to deliver the project. You then need to estimate the costs of these resources and when in the project plan, these expenses will take place.

  1. Set the budget

Estimating the costs is not the same as setting your budget. The budget shows how the money is allocated according to your company’s financial rules. The budget shows the expense accounts, allocates capital versus expense dollars, shows when funds are allocated to your project, etc. Ultimately you need to manage project costs according to the budget.

  1. Determine if you can get contingency funding

Project estimates are rarely 100% accurate. A contingency represents the estimating uncertainly. Even if you think your estimate is 90% accurate, this means you have a 10% uncertainty. A contingency budget represents this estimating contingency. For example, if you estimated your project to be 100,000 with a 90% confidence, you could also ask for a 10,000 contingency budget to represent the uncertainty. This 10,000 is not used for risks or scope change requests. It can be tapped if it turns out you underestimated work on your project. Not all organizations allow contingency budgets. If you do not have this budget flexibility you can add the uncertainly factor back into your baseline estimate.

  1. Track weekly

The next step after setting your budget is to start tracking your spending on the project. You need to track every expense. This could be a manual process but is usually handled by your accounting system. Ask your team to complete expense forms and submit them to you for approval when they spend money on behalf of the project.  You need to pre-approved any large expenses before they are incurred so you can more easily control expenditures on the project.

You also need to track your people costs. The total cost of the hours taken by those people can be tracked on the Project Dashboard, so you can see whether your people cost is under or over budget.

Make sure you always have enough funds available to cover your spending over the months ahead. Cash flow management is about managing the cash needed to deliver your project. Make sure your Sponsor has approved the next 1-2 months of work ahead of time, and that the funds needed to manage the project have been made available. Then track the spending of that funding every week.

  1. Manage expectations

When you start spending more than your budget, you have four options available to help you stay within budget.

  • Reduce costs. This means spending less to get the same job done.
  • Reduce scope. See if your Sponsor will agree to a reduced scope, so that you have less to produce for them.
  • Use your contingency if you have one
  • Re-forecast your expenses and present a new budget to your Sponsor for approval. This is the last choice and means you have to give up on hitting the prior budget baseline.

Managing costs on a project can be difficult. It is made more difficult if the project manager does not keep up on tracking and managing the budget. Use these four simple steps to stay in control.

Do you need help with project management budgeting skills? Contact us today to discuss how we can help your organization choose the right projects.

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