| Watch as a project manager walks in on a raging conflict among his team members and uses best practices techniques to get the team focused on their deliverables. | |||||
| Dick Billows, PMP | |||||
It is astounding how few project managers use critical path analysis. It's a simple tool to ensure that you don't waste resources and that your schedule is optimized. It's also great for answering the question that project sponsors and clients always ask which is, "How can we finish sooner?"
Why don't all project managers use this marvelous critical path tool to optimize? Well, your project schedule has to be built on a predecessor network, work estimates and resource availability, not due dates plucked from the sky. In other words your project schedule has to reflect reality and not be a fairytale. Meet that simple criteria, as you'll see in the story, and all the benefits of critical path will come to you.
In this month's article, a simple critical path story, you will learn about using the critical path to do all kinds of good things for your projects.
To learn how to build project schedules the way the professionals do and master the art of optimization with the critical path, consider taking one of our project management courses. You'll get personal, 1-on-1 instruction and work at your own pace and schedule. Look at our certifications too.
Regards
Dick Billows, PMP, GCA
President 4PM.com
The project management website
The illusion comes from one blindingly stupid assumption…that people will work themselves to death to turn out high quality work by the dates that the sponsor and PM have plucked out of the sky.
If a PM assigns me task #523 on a project and tells me I have to be done by the 19th of January, two things happen. First, I will start work when I have time between my real job and the other four projects I’m on. Second, every time the PM walks past my cubicle and wants to know how I'm doing on #523, I will give the PM the thumbs-up sign and a 50-tooth smile. I do this despite the fact that I've forgotten the name of the project, the PM and what #523 actually involves. This status reporting works because the PM has no way to measure my progress.
While the grammar in the title is offensive, I think it captures the attitude many project managers have towards their communication skills. Everybody thinks they're a good communicator, particularly those with well recognized technical skills. But the vast majority of project managers are poor communicators largely because they use the same communication techniques and style for every stakeholder, team member and sponsor with whom they deal.
Project managers must communicate with people who possess a wide range of personality types. We deal with extroverts who enjoy discussion, debate and like to think on their feet. The way you communicate to the extroverts in your meeting is very different from the best communication technique for the introverts who want time to think and internalize the information before making a decision or even expressing an opinion.
These differences in communication techniques are not just how you talk but also how you organize your PowerPoint presentation, what body language techniques you should use, the structure of the presentation, what kind of information you give them advanced and how you follow up afterwards.
Take a look at the video lecture on presenting to diverse personality types with 10 minutes the scene from project meeting with project managers who are failing and then see them adapt their communication style to the audience and they are much better securing approval in building support.
Very truly yours,
Dick Billows, PMP, GCA
President 4pm.com
The phrase "duration and cost estimates" sends shivers down the spine of most project managers because no matter how carefully you qualify the numbers they are instantly carved into stone. The most difficult estimates are the ones that you're asked for at the beginning of the project. You may be 10 minutes into your first conversation with an executive about a brand new project when you're asked, "how long will this take and what will it cost?"
For some reason executives have convinced themselves that anybody who's a project manager can come up with accurate estimates with little or no data. The gut wrenching part of this is that your project will be view it as a failure, no matter how fantastic the deliverable, if you miss those initial estimates.
Read the article about estimating and then add your comments and ideas to the blog.
The best regards,
Dick
Dick billows, PMP, GCA
President 4PM.com
Savvy project sponsors know that putting too much pressure on project managers or their team members doesn't produces benefits. Instead, the most common result tis that he project manager or team member hides problems until they're too big to conceal and much more difficult to solve.
Project managers have to learn to cope with project sponsors and other executives who use intimidation as their technique for improving project results. Take a look at the Status Meeting Video. Then add your evaluation of how the project manager did in the status meeting.
Best regards,
Dick Billows, PMP, GCA
There is nothing wrong with executives asking a great deal of their project managers. The problem comes when executives deflect project managers away from best project practices. In the videos we made available this week, you see three project managers trying cope with a project sponsor who doesn't want to plan or discuss scope. Instead the executive wants due date commitments without defining project outcomes, the resources the project manager will have to deliver it. See how they handle it.
Take a look at the Sponsor from Hell video then critique the performance of the PMS.
Best Regards,
Dick Billows, PMP, GCA
But when we go in to rescue a failing project, the techniques are little different than starting with a clean slate. In my mind a couple of issues are critical:
First, the most important way to increase your odds of success in the rescue is to get senior management agreement's that the scope of the project must be re-examined and almost certainly changed. You need this authority because failing projects have scope problems. The easiest way to free up resources, restore focus on the business value the project should deliver is to slice away the blubber surrounding the core business value. So you start by going through the scope planning process all over again. This is not popular as it unearth's problems and that's why you get authority to spend your first week or so cleaning up the scope until you have a crystal clear and measurable definition of the business value the project should deliver.
Second, with the scope defined with clarity you can start to carve away the blubber that almost always surrounds it. It's not that projects are filled with bad ideas. It's that they're burdened with good ideas that are not necessary for delivering the scope. Once we clean away the blubber we suddenly have resources we can reassign critical path tasks and maybe gain some improvement in duration.
That's always our starting point. What ideas do you folks have to contribute?
Dick billows PMP, GCa
President 4PM.com
One of our bloggers asked about the level of technical expertise required of project managers.
10 years ago, most organizations felt their project managers had to be the most expert member of the project team. The PMs were the technical gurus and the theory was they would have influence to direct the team due to their technical mastery. This didn't work too well when the team was bigger than 2-3 or when they involved people from non-technical areas who thought the guru was a geek.
This thinking provided a nice career path for subject matter experts but far too often the technical experts wanted to do the technical work of the project. This was just fine on very small projects with one to three people. However, as the size of the project team increased the technical guru had to move into the people management business and deal with other functional areas. Very often the gurus were not too good at cross-functional stuff and did not want to manage people in the first place.
Today, many organizations have suffered through the mis-management and failed projects led by technical gurus. They recognize that project management is a separate set of skills and that a project manager can control a team made up of people who are more technically expert in their disciplines than the PM.
So I'm a strong advocate of having PMs who are expert in managing projects and don't feel they need to know more than everybody on the project team.
Regards,
Dick Billows, PMP
President 4pm.com
I had an interesting conversation this past week with a new project manager who works for one of our project office clients. Our staff was reviewing newly submitted project plans and found one that was extraordinarily detailed (it may be a new record for micro-management). I called the PM and asked why her work breakdown had so many tasks of such short duration; some as small as one and two hours in durations.
She said, "My boss wants no mistakes on this project and really tight control."
I asked, "But will your team members be submitting twice daily status reports?"
She laughed and said,. "That would be ridiculous; it'll be hard enough getting weekly status information on all these tasks."
I agreed and said, "Then don't you think you're going just a touch too far to have one and two hour tasks that we'll never actually track while they were in-process."
"I guess that's right. But how will people know what to do?," The new PM asked.
What's the answer to her question? Can we save her from micro-management?
Third, subject matter experts and managers need to know how to develop requirements, not in terms of wish lists but in terms of the business value that is needed.
Only when this foundation is in place can project managers and team members achieve consistent project success. Does your organization have all these pieces?
Best of all there is no new paper work, everything gets done in AdPM digital templates.
Here are a few more ideas on project offices
Best Regards,
Dick Billows PMP, GCA
President 4PM.com
That kind of due date setting leads to high failure rates but the project managers are also to blame because they give executives only one corner or dimension of the project to quantitatively manage.
These PMs don't quantify the scope, risk or budget so the executive only has one dimension to manage that has hard-edged data. Read the article about Project having 4-Corners and cure your executives of the dates only disease.
Best Regards,
Dick Billows PMP, GCA
4PM.com
Best Regards,
Dick Billows PMP, GCA
4PM.com
