Project Management War Room
Does This Project Management Shoe Fit?
Project Management is a hot topic. Businesses often suffer from a dearth of Project Managers in-house.
What Kind of Projects Are We Talking About Here?
Projects that increase revenue, reduce opex and increase margin.
Some examples:
- Enterprise Technology Implementations (ERP - CRM)
- Post Merger Integration
- Multi-region Business Process Redesign
If your project is one of these, you will find the tips on this website useful.
Global English is a Competitive Advantage
Women and men of the global econosphere please listen up! When you work with people for whom English is a second (or third, fourth or fifth language), do you:
- Speak softly even when people are conferenced in and listening to you via cell phones or speakerphones
- Establish subject matter mastery via sophisticated or technical words and complex sentence structures
- Talk at the speed of light either because you are under 30 (or want others to think you are) or because you think it makes you sound smart
If you answered YES to any of the above, PLEASE HEAR THIS!: YOU ARE THE RUDE CAUSE OF POOR COMMUNICATION – SO STOP IT!
We all know that failure to communicate is a primary cause of business failure to execute on strategy. For the sake of your expensive McKinsey strategic reports, your BHAGs and your visions of market leadership, it is time to learn and practice the rules of Global English. Do your L.A.P.S.S.S.!
- Loud – Speak loudly so people can at least receive the soundwaves.
- Attention – Look directly at the person you are speaking to. If you are not sure they are paying attention, use their name. If they are not awake, use their name plus rule #1.
- Pause – Many non-native English speakers are “translating in their head”. Give them the grace of a slow feed.
- Slow – Speak slowly . . . very slowly…with occasional pauses (see rule #2)….That’s…better.
- Simple – Use simple words. Native English speakers use over 5000 different words, but non-native speakers use 500 – 1500. If you have a native English speaker’s vocabulary, surely you can come up with simple synonyms in the interest of being understood.
- Short – Use short sentences. Do not speak in long, run on sentences, even if they are technically good english, because this will require the listener to catalog backwards to your earlier phrases to try to find the simple noun-verb-object through-line that will help them to make sense of what you just said. – Capiche?!
- Smile – If they can’t understand you, maybe you can make them feel comfortable enough to ask you to repeat it one more time.
For more specific examples of how to apply Global English go here:
http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/139/5/
How To Get Senior Executives to Support Your Project
What do you do when the company’s senior executives who own your project resources don’t fully understand or support your project? These senior leaders, more than any other group will influence project success or failure. How can you influence their buy-in?
Here is a Now-Next-LaterTM approach to helping your senior leaders understand and support your project.
Now: Meet with the senior stakeholders one-on-one. Ask what they understand about the project. Clarify any confusion. Ask what they are concerned about. Find out the details of how the proposed changes will affect them. Find out their concerns. Communicate their concerns to your project sponsor. (Of course you will get permission from the stakeholders to share their concerns with the project leader).
Next: Have a second meeting with the senior stakeholders as a group. Your goal is to help them reach agreement on the project purpose, approach and roles. As you facilitate, help, but don’t push. You need to keep the door open for future opportunities. What is not resolved today may be resolved tomorrow.
Towards the end of the meeting invite the project sponsor to join the group. With the sponsor present, work with the group to discuss and document a “Preferred Future”. The sponsor can highlight the risks of the status quo and focus the group on the urgent need for the project.
Later: As the urgency of doing nothing becomes clearer, and the commitment of the project sponsor is felt, and your senior team feels that their concerns are being heard and addressed, they will be much more likely to support the project. It is often useful to repeat this exercise as a way of re-energizing the senior team and ensuring they will go the distance with your project.
Can This Project Be Saved?
I received this question in my inbox today from a past client:
Barbara, please help! We have just started 7 days of unit testing. We expected to log around 30 errors a day. After the first three days we have logged over 200 errors. What could be causing this? We are a bit panicked.
Here’s my two cents:
Dear Panicked:
You are right. This situation is not good.
There are several possible causes. It is your job to figure out which one(s) are driving your dismal testing performance. I offer the following:
1. Best Case Scenario: Bad Data (Garbage In/Garbage Out)
Fix: Reorganize your team to clean up the dirty data. Each functional lead needs to own their data mess. Help them by prioritizing the most critical data that is make or break for project success, review the cleansing process and provide your team with clearly articulated guidelines and examples, set up a rolling cleanse/build schedule, track your progress daily.
2. Painful but Manageable: Bad Build (Your developers either a. were not able to easily interpret your signed off, functional design documentation, b. were not skilled at coding for your particular type of design or c. failed to test their code before they handed it over to you for unit testing.
Fix: Feed your vendor a meal of carrots and sticks. (I am assuming you have outsourced the coding of your system). Carrots first: Work with them. Partner with them to understand what went wrong and let them know that you trust they will do the right thing i.e. address the root cause, fix the mistakes, test their work and give you their most aggressive and realistic estimate of when they will hand you a ready-for-unit-testing system that meets your design requirements. Have Sticks ready to deploy: Review your contract and memorize the part where it says they are responsible to deliver to you a system that meets business requirements and can be maintained by any developer team that is certified by your software vendor.
3. Locate Your Suitcase: Flawed Documentation i.e. The developers cannot understand what the business intends because you don’t have clearly articulated design documentations standards, nomenclature and iconography.
Fix: This could represent either a show stopper or a mere bump in the road depending on the degree and nature of your documentation challenge. It is up to you to know what best practice functional design documentation looks like. If you don’t, search for examples or ask a qualified consultant to educate you. With this in mind review your documentation in detail, decide how it does or doesn’t measure up and to what degree it could be affecting the ability of your developers to turn your business’ design concept into coded reality.
4. Start Packing: A Flawed Design i.e. Business didn’t agree, or didn’t understand what it agreed to when it signed off on the Design. You did complete a formal Design Sign Off process right? Symptoms to watch that may indicate this as the source of your pain include: testers are surprised by what they see – testers are flagging screen design and functionality as issues – testers are arguing about what the screens/functionality should look like/do.
Fix: OK. You may not have to pack if only a part of your design is flawed. If you are quickly able to identify and bound the flawed design aspect, you may be able to scramble your testing order to pull testing forward on some better defined functionality while you review, re-write and re-sign off on a flawed section. This is time consuming and, even for a small, discreet part of your functionality will likely take testers away from testing. Scope, plan, estimate, escalate, decide, communicate. …and pray.
Take a breath and remember never let them see you sweat.
Word Magician
My client just sent me a note thanking me for helping rewrite a document for our project. She said, “Thank you for updating this. It is very good. You are a real word magician.”
Is this a good thing? Is this an added value for project management? I think the answer is yes…and yes. Using language clearly is very, very helpful on projects when you need to be sure you are saying exactly what you mean so that people in multiple locations can understand you. It is critical on global projects where English is not everyone’s native language. Words may or may not be your strong suit but either way, it is worth it to take some extra time to re-read your emails and your project documentation and make corrections. It is worth it to spend a moment to try to say what you mean. This should not require more than an extra few moments of focused attention. It is not about using descriptive language and big words. What is needed is almost always in the direction of simplifying and organizing your thoughts. Once you are very clear about what you do and do not mean, writing them down clearly is pretty easy and quick. So here is the magic ingredient for clear writing:
Think first, then write, then check what you wrote!
Now I am going to re-read and edit this post!
Role Forward
Do you think writing a detailed description of project roles is a boring waste of time? OK, maybe you are not that extreme. Do you think it is a good idea but not a top priority say, ahead of creating the project work plan? You are wrong on both counts. If you don’t do this up front and use it every time you introduce new team members, and if you don’t make sure that everyone is actually working according to their roles, you are sowing chaos into the fabric of your project. Does this mean that everyone has to ONLY do what is in their role? Of course not. There is always some overlap and always a need for people to pitch in and help on activities beyond their role. But if you don’t get clarity about each person’s primary responsibility, you are asking for trouble. So don’t wait. Just DO IT!
Who’s On First?
While you are running the bases of project management, your stakeholders are wondering “When are we going to see the benefits of this project?”
Deployment Planning is the process of figuring out which business units will receive which new system functionality, business processes and tools and when they will receive them.
Why invest in deployment planning?
To ensure that you optimize costs and benefits over time.
Some changes to roles, processes, technology must take place right away – NOW!
Some are better planned as your short term follow-on activities – Next
Some may occur in a second phase of the project or initiative – Later
Here’s a little Deployment Planning Algorithm for really geeky project managers:
Optimized Deployment = (Now+Next+Later)/Time
This probably seems really obvious and simple. It is if your project is small. It gets exponentially more complicated with scale. Given the multitude of dependencies you are balancing such as business requirements, customer requirements, budgets, process hand-offs, training development and executive schedules, a step-by-step approach to your Now-Next-Later Deployment Plan is a critical success factor for most large projects.
Herding the Executive Cats
How do you solve a problem called Executive Alignment?
They said they were on board. So why don’t they show up? And most importantly, why are their direct reports fighting you on the assignment of needed resources ? You’ve written a clear project strategy with clear objectives and a business case that demonstrates your project’s value proposition. So, why does everyone still seem so confused?
What’s Going On?
Imagine that each of your stakeholders is a magnet capable of uniting or splintering their extended network for or against your project’s objectives. The power of the magnets may differ, some are positively charged and some are negative but the ability to control their combined effect on your project is the single greatest lever in your change management toolkit. Are your stakeholders pulling towards a common objective or is your company’s management team its own worst enemy? Once the negative energy starts it will spread invisibly and swiftly and it will create havoc in the white spaces of your project.
Are your stakeholders impotent or worse?
- The VP who practices public support but behind the scenes bets against your success
- The Director who believes in the project but can’t commit any of her people to its implementation
- Your peer in a lateral department who led a similar project last year, knows you are underfunded but hasn’t told you he can help you find more money because he doesn’t want to insult your intelligence.
With these kinds of friends, who needs enemies?
What’s a Project Leader to do?
Executive Alignment uses project management, soft skills, hard data, simple logic, coaching and business acumen to help you get the support you need to succeed.
Sound easy? You’re right. It’s not. It’s really hard. That’s why most projects come in late and over budget, with all kinds of bugs and failures.
The Good News is if you take it step by step, it may not be easy but it is doable.
Shannon Solutions Launches a New Website
Shannon Solutions is pleased to announce the launch of this website on March 19, 2010. The new ShannonSolutions.com site features a clean, modern look and streamlined navigation.
The new format provides exceptional flexibility and enables me to use videos and podcasts as well as down-loadable content for registered users. I have also included a blog and with comments providing a forum for sharing best practices and war stories front.
This is my new global communication tool aimed at establishing a closer relationship with you.
I look forward to your feedback and to using this site to help you manage your projects and transform your business.
~Barbara Shannon