Conduct Lessons Learned Throughout the Engagement
A June 2010 survey that I personally conducted of project managers and project personnel showed that 57% of responders indicated that they conducted lessons learned sessions either not at all or less than 10% of the time. Now consider that more than 50% of all projects fail (as much as 76% fail as noted in one PMI survey discussed on LinkedIn) and that’s a lot of lessons that could be learned and shared. Think about all of the project dollars spent on those failed projects that could be more productively spent on successful projects if we were all learning from our mistakes and sharing those learning moments with other project managers. We have good intentions, but the problem is we’re all very busy in our professional world. By the time a project engagement is over either the customer is moving on to other things or the PM and team is or all of the above. We try, but it doesn’t always happen. Because I came to the revelation that it likely would be helpful to learn in mid-stream on a project and because so many of us have to immediately move on to the next project once we’ve completed the present engagement (not to mention continue to manage the other projects we also have going at the moment) - I’ve begun to think of lessons learned as an ongoing activity that needs to happen during the project. I’m not certain if this happens often or if I’m offering a ground-breaking idea here, but it seems to be working for me and my teams and customers as I’ve begun to incorporate it into my projects. Here is my process… Planning the lessons learned sessions into the project During the creation of the initial project schedule, I look at the statement of work and the tasks we need to accomplish and consider whether we’re performing a long project or one that is basically a phased approach broken into several sub-projects. If we’re performing a phased approach implementation – which is more common in the projects I generally lead - then it’s relatively easy to incorporate multiple lessons learned session into one project. At the end of each phase, schedule a lessons learned session – it’s that simple. If there are no such obvious stopping points in a given project, then it becomes more difficult to find appropriate places in the schedule to plan lessons learned sessions to discuss the issues we’ve encountered so far and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. On these types of projects, I look at key deliverables as the break point to insert lessons learned discussions. This could be the delivery of a functional design document for an IT project, or a draft of major marketing materials for a marketing campaign, etc. The important thing is to get them into the schedule and plan for them and to space them far enough apart so as to make them valuable sessions and not just re-dos of a session that happened two weeks ago. And be sure to actually conduct them…being lazy and having people communicate their ideas through a series of emails won’t suffice. Conducting the lessons learned sessions The actual sessions themselves should not be really any different than the post-deployment lessons learned discussions most people are used to. The big difference may be that you actually still have to work with all of these individuals and keep their cooperation and motivation going for the rest of the project. So be honest and constructive, but also be careful. Make the information you share and discuss useful – not just a waste of time. Commend individuals personally for accomplishments, but also provide critical feedback – in the proper manner of course – when necessary because you still must maintain the project momentum. The takeaway here must be to improve project performance as a whole – whether that’s on the next phase or next deliverable. The project-ending lessons learned session does provide the project delivery team and the customer with a nice platform to really dig deep into what was good and what was bad about the engagement. And that should still happen – it’s just not always possible. But incorporating several mid-project reviews can help keep the project on track and eliminate problem areas from continuing throughout the engagement. Summary As much as we’d all like to say we incorporate best practices all the way through a project and we never skip critical steps along the way, we know that’s just not true of all engagements. When the project is encountering issues or the project timeline is in jeopardy, the fundamentals are sometimes the first thing to go. It’s a bad idea because the information you can gain from lessons learned sessions could be invaluable to both your team and to other project teams in your organization. By breaking these sessions down and conducting them in shorter and more frequent meetings throughout the project you can both keep them momentum going and learn along the way to help you deliver even better right now…not just in the future. It may really make a difference in the overall success of the engagement.
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Track time spent on your tasks in Wrike
The time-tracking feature is now released in Wrike, the project management software. We have received many inquiries from our users about ability to track time in Wrike, so we decided to implement this feature. Professional services providers, companies that work with freelancers, implement hourly pay, or have many projects and employees — all of you will find great value in the time tracking feature. Besides time tracking, Wrike offers a powerful platform for collaboration, task organization, task management, reports across diverse projects, Gantt charts, e-mail integration and smart notifications — all in one user workspace. Time-tracking is an essential part of increasing the productivity of your team. Time-tracking helps you keep track of the hours spent on a task or a project and evaluate the effectiveness of your employees. Your team members now can add time entries to tasks easily. They just open the task to edit, choose the date and enter number of hours spent on the task. Then you can create time reports for projects and track the workload of your team members. You can export reports to CSV file format, print and provide them to clients.
How to Combat the 4 Main Sources of Scope Creep
"It might be a good idea to add this feature." "Let's extend the test cycle so we have more data." "I hate adding to your work but can you...?" These sentences, once uttered, herald the onset of every project manager's recurring nightmare — that phenomenon of a project ballooning in size and scope, while budgets and timelines remain the same. It's called scope creep. And it's deadly. But what is it exactly, and how does it get past our defenses to slowly but surely inflate a project's scope? The Definition of Scope Creep In its simplest form, a project's scope is all about parameters. A project's scope should be a documented set of project boundaries, schedules, and major deliverables. These can be outlined in a statement of work. Scope creep (also known as "requirement creep" and "feature creep") has become such a dirty word in project management because it refers to how a project's requirements tend to grow uncontrollably — often dictated by project stakeholders, or internal miscommunication, causing a Frankenstein-like mashup of features that weren't there during the planning stage. And often kill your deadlines. People often confuse scope creep and gold plating. The difference between scope creep and gold plating is that gold plating does not necessarily mean the project's requirements have changed, but that the project team has been working past the point of diminishing returns. How Does it Creep Up on Projects? Let's count the ways: 1. Lack of Details The easiest and simplest culprit to blame for scope creep is vagueness. When there is a lack of a clearly-defined and controlled project scope (you can use a scope document template to create this), the scope will mutate. Don't be surprised if stakeholders and even team members choose to define your project more loosely than you envision. It's because you, as the project manager, didn't communicate the vision and the scope clearly enough in your Project Initiation Document! TIP: The Project Scope Statement that goes into the Project Initiation Document is where you should lay out all project boundaries. Don't gloss over it. Spend time concretizing it so that expectations are managed, there are no surprises, and your stakeholders comprehend exactly what they'll get at the end of the process. 2. Weak Leadership Here's the rub: stakeholders and clients may try to change the scope to get what they want if they sense that you lack experience, or are not a strong project manager. TIP: This is based on their perception of you. Stand your ground if demands are beginning to inflate project scope. Communicate strongly through body language during meetings. And if your meetings are virtual, keep these virtual communication tips in mind. 3. Differing Stakeholder Opinions Another possibility: you may have too many stakeholders, each with differing opinions. Too many cooks spoil the broth, as the adage goes. While stakeholders may all want the same end product, their motivations may vary wildly. And those motivations will affect what they feel should be prioritized during project development, which can wildly alter your timelines. TIP: Limit the number of your stakeholders. Or try to determine their motivations so you can arrive at a common ground. If it makes sense, additional requests from stakeholders can be parlayed into a future project after the current one is done. 4. 11th Hour User Feedback If you don't involve your end-users or your customers from the beginning of the process, introducing them midway through (or near the end of) a project, guess what happens? They may give you feedback you've never heard before, which often adds to your list of action items. Instant scope creep. Take the costly mistakes of the Denver International Airport project as a fair warning not to involve people late in the game. TIP: The word you need to use here is collaboration. If you collaborate with your customers early and often, you run less risk of delivering something they don't need or want. Keep communication lines open so the ideas and the feedback keep flowing. What are other ways Scope Creep creeps up on you? Your turn. What other sources of scope creep did we miss? Add your thoughts in the comments and tell us how you've fought against the scope creep terror. Read next: Lessons Learned in Scope Creep and Project Failure from Denver International Airport Photo credit: Ana Julaton by Mark Sebastian
Wrike For Creatives: How a Music Producer Gets Things Done
We talk a lot on the Wrike blog about businesses needing tools to get their act together. But it's not just construction companies, software development teams, and marketing agencies that have to organize their work to be efficient. There is also a large community of creatives using online project management software to coordinate their projects. Check this out: We didn't have to look far to find examples. One of our customers, entrepreneur and celebrity Redfoo, uses Wrike to run both his clothing line and his record label. And he says: “I couldn’t imagine running a business without Wrike.” I couldn’t imagine running a business without Wrike. —Redfoo, CEO of Party Rock Records and LaFreak Clothing Label Then we have our very own Charles L. Coleman II, Enterprise Sales Executive, who helps bring Wrike to larger organizations by day. By night, he runs The ABiatorz Music Group (AMG), a boutique music production company that creates and releases music for placement with artists, record labels, and advertising opportunities. AMG utilized Wrike in its collaboration with two-time Grammy-award-winning producer Focus and Creative Consultant Amilcar "PRO" Welton of CREATE.Digital Music, which is reflected in the video above. Take a look at another video by The ABiatorz Music Group. It was a placement with the Golden State Warriors during their 2015 NBA Championship run, and it involved Coleman collaborating with Hip-Hop artist, Rich Cole and Amilcar "PRO" Welton once again. The song and video for "Dub Nation (Locked n' Loaded)" was used promotionally across all of the Warriors online platforms. With a demanding day job, a thriving music business, and a growing family, Coleman's time is extremely precious. But he makes it work — and his secret to making the most of his limited time is Wrike. "Time is everything," says Coleman. "You don't have a lot of time as a father, a worker, a musician. So I use Wrike to help me plan out my time efficiently. I use it to manage my family vacations, my sales work at Wrike, and as a tool to make my music business more effective. Anything that needs to be executed, I do it in Wrike." Wrike as a Planning & Collaboration Tool for Recording One way Coleman uses Wrike for creative work is for planning out studio time. When you're paying by the hour to use a recording studio, you want every minute to count. "I use Wrike to plan out all my studio time so that it's most efficient," says Coleman. "I think about the entire recording session before I go in, lay it out in Wrike, then execute when I'm there." [inlinetweet prefix="" tweeter="" suffix="Read more @Wrike:"]"I use Wrike to plan out all my studio time so that it's most efficient."[/inlinetweet] —Charles L. Coleman II, Music Producer This means using Wrike tasks as checklists for every song. He inputs to-do items for specific musical parts, or attaches ideas (i.e. other songs) as pegs for how the final track should sound. This also means Coleman creates tasks for session musicians who will be playing on the track. Bringing them in as collaborators within Wrike allows him to share working versions of the music with them as well as get their feedback without having to email music files back and forth. Wrike as a Music Catalog Tool Another way Coleman uses Wrike is as a music cataloging tool or "library", that helps him document and quickly find all the music he's created and released, as well as what stage each is in. "In my Wrike instance, I have custom fields for every track I make," says Coleman. "This way I can document collaborators (any additional musicians who played on a track), samples I may have used, placement (whether the track has been placed and where), target artist (e.g. "Beyonce" or "Drake"), instruments played (if any live instruments were used). "This also allows me to easily pull reports on what music I have available for placement and quickly find songs via the information in my custom fields. It becomes easier to submit tracks to ASCAP or to get copyrights on the music when you have all your paperwork readily available. "I can also judge efficiency. I can quickly answer questions such as: How many songs did I create last year? How many did I place? Do I need to be creating more? Did we spend too much on musicians last year?" I can quickly answer questions such as... Did we spend too much on musicians last year? —Charles L. Coleman II, Music Producer From Paper Notebooks to Online Project Management Software "Before using Wrike to manage my business, to be honest, I used a production notebook," Coleman shares. "I used to take notes using pen and paper. In fact, I have about four or five old notebooks at home. And it was a PAIN to find things in them. Or even to prepare the paperwork you need to submit music for placement." Now, there's no looking back for Coleman and The ABiatorz Music Group. "These days, my wife and I are able to manage the music production business easily using Wrike. Because of Wrike's tool, I was able to move my music production forward and get more placements. I also was able to move my job forward and get promoted, and even used Wrike to manage work and close out end-of-year business while traveling during the holidays with my family. "Wrike is both a business and personal tool. It allows me to keep things in their respective buckets, and yet have only to deal with one portal for all that work. It has helped me make improvements in my workflow that save me my most precious resource: time." [inlinetweet prefix="Read:" tweeter="" suffix=""]"@Wrike has helped me make improvements in my workflow that save me my most precious resource: time."[/inlinetweet] —Charles L.Coleman II, Music Producer Find Out How Wrike Can Help Your With Your Creative Work Try a free demo of Wrike and see how you can use #WrikeForCreatives.
How to Respond to a Frustrated Project Customer
I'd like to say I never experience customer frustrations on any of my projects, but the truth is I've experienced some degree of customer frustration on nearly every project at some point during the process. It may be a big issue or it may be something miniscule, but at some point it usually happens. Customer frustrations can arise from any one of a number of things. From unanticipated change orders, to error-filled deliverables, to rude project team members, to project budget issues, to just conflicting personalities. Anything – literally – can set it off and it may not be a showstopper, but it should be addressed. The potential issues can be endless – so I definitely can't address all the possibilities here. But we can take the time to understand what is client relationship management. Let's discuss a few possible proactive or responsive measures we can take to try to alleviate customer frustrations if we sense that things aren't going as well as hoped…at least from the customer's point of view…. Step up communication practices Effective, efficient, and timely communication remains, in my mind, the number one responsibility of the project manager. All task assignments, all feedback, all customer interaction, all issues resolution, and all collaboration in general, begins and ends with good communication. In fact, with more than 50% of all projects failing, one survey showed that project managers cite 'poor communication' as the second biggest contributor to project failure – right behind 'bad or incomplete requirements.' If a failure point at the beginning of the project was to skip the creation of a project communications plan and now you're seeing communication breakdown, it may be the right time to go back and create the plan so everyone has the same communication expectations going forward for the rest of the project. Revisit weak areas There may be weak areas of the project that are causing the customer concern like how risk is being handled or possibly the delivery of error-prone deliverables. Revisit those weak areas and add more effort where needed. For example, begin reviewing risk topics and issues regularly on a weekly basis as part of the weekly status call or meeting with the customer. If deliverables have been a problem area, incorporate peer reviews on every future deliverable. Having the entire team review every deliverable will greatly reduce the likelihood of presenting the customer with a document or deliverable with issues or errors. React to team member concerns If the customer is frustrated with someone on the team, meet with the customer to find out why, meet with the team member to work out some corrective action, and then jointly meet with the customer to discuss. Personnel issues rarely work themselves out on their own and if there is friction between the customer and one of your team members it may not even be obvious to your team member. Bring it to the forefront and take the necessary corrective action BEFORE your customer has to request a replacement. If you let it get to that point, then your leadership will definitely be called into question as well. Circle back If necessary, go back to the kickoff presentation and notes to analyze where you are vs. where you should be in terms of process and promises and assumptions. It's never too late to try to get the project back on track and make the customer feel comfortable again. It's possible that you discussed processes, actions and policies that would be implemented or followed and they never happened or were never implemented. If that is the case, it may be frustration point for the customer to see that it was an expectation that was never fulfilled. Often the customer sees it as something they paid for but never received. Call for input Customer satisfaction is one of the three key indicators of project success, so responding to and resolving customer frustration should always be a top priority. When you've experienced customer frustration, how have you responded? What actions have you taken to resolve these issues? What general approaches have worked the best for you? Thanks – we'd love to see your feedback!
How Technology Affects Project Management
It was not that long ago that a printed-out Project Charter would be the start of project approval. The key stakeholders would physically sign the document, which would be passed in the internal mail between parties, finally returning to the project manager to update the version control for the document to version 1.0. She would then file it away for safe-keeping and proof that the initiation phase was over and that the real work could begin. Does that sound like your workplace now? Most project sponsors would now expect the entire approvals process to be done by email. That is not to say that you can skip getting formal project approval. Instead, the way you go about securing sponsor sign off is different, due to the technology available to you – and them – in the workplace. No longer do project managers have a filing cabinet of original functional specs and documents signed off in ink. They are more likely to hot desk with limited storage space for project files. Documentation is stored electronically on a central shared server, with scanned copies of any documentation that has been signed. Copies of approval emails are stored with the rest of the project documents on the server. This is now the accepted ways of working, even in industries like financial services which typically take a while to catch up. The Google Generation This approach to handling documentation has evolved due to the availability of technology of work, and an evolution of the way in which we use it. This has given risen to the ‘Google generation’. You probably fall into this category. It is not to do with age. It is a distinction based on the adoption of new technology. If you want information, you can go to Google (or your favourite search engine), type your question and get a relevant response in a fraction of a second. The Google search engine has changed the way project stakeholders expect to get information. In other words, if you need to find something out, you expect to be able to do so quickly and conveniently. It is no longer necessary to trawl through encyclopædias or take a trip to the library to do research. If you don’t know the answer, you can Google the question on your computer or mobile phone. This phenomena has contributed the rise of cheating in pub quizzes, but it has also made project management more difficult. In the past – and it wasn’t that long ago – the monthly steering group report would be an adequate representation of the project status. It was acknowledged that it was not a real-time project position, but it was accurate enough for the purposes of judging progress against milestones and budget. This data would be sufficient for steering group, and if anyone else wanted a formal project status report, the latest steering group report could be handed over as a snapshot in time. Most of the time, people were happy with this level of detail, even though implicitly they knew it could no longer be true. Only in an emergency would any one ask to see anything more up to date. Project info at your fingertips Today, project stakeholders have different expectations about project information, because they can get other information at the click of button. You want to know the weather in Bangalore? Google it. You want real-time stock prices on the FTSE? Google it. You want up to date project status reports. Here’s last month’s steering group report, precisely 19 days out of date. This lack of real-time data is no longer acceptable to project stakeholders who can get everything else in a fraction of a second. Sixteen per cent of the workforce is what research group IDG calls ‘hyperconnected’. These people have “fully embraced the brave new world… They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.” IDG also estimates that the amount of workers falling into this category could soon be up to 40%. The fact that people are connected at work and at home has a knock-on impact on the way in which we provide project data. Now project stakeholders expect real-time, up to date status reports. Or at least, they expect you to give them that information whenever they ask for it, by return of email. Project managers now have to deal with those raised expectations and always be on top of project status in case anyone asks. And I think we should be. Project managers who don’t know what is going on — and are not able to communicate it — aren’t serving the needs of the project team or the wider stakeholder community. Of course, accurate and timely information works both ways, and we need it from sponsors too. So how have you adapted your project management practices to the evolving needs of your hyperconnected stakeholders? About the Author Elizabeth Harrin has ten years of experience managing projects. She’s a member of PMI’s New Media Council, and she writes about projects on her award-winning blog A Girl’s Guide to Project Management. She’s also the author of Project Management in the Real World, a case-study based book that tells you what you really need to know to succeed in project management.
How to Build a Culture of Sharing in Distributed Project Teams, and More Questions from PMI Dallas Chapter Dinner
After the short holiday break, the new year quickly gained momentum. The first event on my 2013 speaking calendar was the dinner meeting at PMI Dallas Chapter. The topic of remote collaboration and its efficiency brought up a great discussion. The engagement of the audience is a clear sign of how many project managers face the challenge of dealing with mobile workforce today. And the trend will only expand: as Wrike’s survey revealed, every fourth worker foresees his or her office going virtual in the near future. Of the numerous post-presentation questions, there were a couple that were especially interesting, and I’d like to share some takeaway notes with you. One of the efficiency tips that I talked about during the session was the importance of remote work monitoring and sharing within a distributed team. According to our survey respondents, bad visibility into colleagues’ actions is one of the biggest problems in remote collaboration. Learning to share tasks, ideas, file and other work-related info is critical to making the workflow transparent to the team. The audience asked how to build up that culture of sharing. The word “culture” here implies that it’s not a rapid shift to make. One of the working tools is leadership by your own example. Say, when you assign a task or finalize an important document, make sure that your workers are aware of it and can easily check it out. Then, when you have some “champions” on the team who follow your example, you can use some peer pressure, too. As with many other changes, you can slice the big change into smaller steps that are easy to reach. You can approach it from two dimensions: horizontally (begin with a part of the team and then step-by-step roll it out to the rest of the employees) or vertically (in this case, the idea is to start by sharing a certain type of item, and then add more of them to the mix.) For example, it won’t be too much trouble for your team to exchange important documents they worked on before your weekly meeting. Adopted gradually, this practice should develop into people’s working habit that will naturally solve the challenge of poor visibility and siloed project data. Another remarkable question was asked about granular workload management. I spoke about the convenience of splitting work into smaller, tangible deliverables, instead of big tasks where a worker reports on what percent has been completed. One of the attendees asked how to make it work if you need to report on the progress to your customer? Once again, visibility is the key word for answering this question. Here’s a simple, real-life example. Imagine you’re having your house remodeled, and you want to check on the progress. “50% completed” doesn’t give you, the customer, any insight into what’s really happening. Is the bedroom ready, and can you bring the furniture in, or was it the kitchen, or is it just an abstract number, and none of the rooms are actually finished? So the point is to bring your customer in and give him or her more visibility. With smaller tasks, tracking progress (for managers, stakeholders and customers) and reporting (for workers) becomes easier. When the team reports on a more granular level, you don’t need to run meetings so often (which isn’t that easy for a virtual team!) to clear up the details. If you don’t want to overwhelm your customer with too many updates, or don’t want to share some operational details, then you can share the major milestones with him or her. One of the positive aspects of giving customers visibility into your projects is the opportunity to get earlier feedback from them and to make sure you’re moving in the right direction. One of the greatest things about conferences and other professional get-togethers is hearing first-hand what challenges fellow project managers currently face and seeking for efficient solutions to them. So I’m looking forward to the upcoming events on the calendar. This week, it’s IBM Connect in Orlando. In February, I’ll be speaking about remote collaboration at PMI Los Angeles Chapter dinner meeting. In April, you can meet me in PMI Chicago Chapter and at Stanford’s Strategic Execution Conference in Silicon Valley, where I’ll discuss how to make open innovation work in project management. Hope to see you there!
11 Quora Questions on Team, Product, and Project Management to Put on Your Must-Read List
In addition to learning from your own experience, it’s often useful to know how other professionals in your field coped with particular management questions and challenges. That’s when Quora, the popular Q&A service, comes in handy. From its massive knowledge base, we made a selection of threads with the most stirring and insightful discussions on project, product and team management. Check them out – maybe you’ll find the answer to the question that stole your sleep! And don’t be too shy to contribute your own thoughts and earn some karma points from the fellow Quorians ;-) 1. What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make? Doing your homework about others’ mistakes might save you from bigger or smaller failures in your own experience. Read this thread to know what organizational, communicative and other traps a beginner manager needs to avoid, such as, for example, taking the credit and forwarding the blame. Some of the answers might interest management pros, as well. 2. What questions should one ask oneself on a regular basis to make one's product better? When you’re working hard to improve your product, adjusting your course could be easier if you had some check list at hand. Discover what questions and check points product managers came up with to create a precise product development compass. 3. What is the single most important aspect in creating and managing a high-performing team? The biggest number of votes here belongs to Dave Carvajal, a popular business consultant and advisor to top VC firms, who said that the only way to get people to do something well is to get them to want to do it. Check out the thread for more details on how to make it happen, as well as some other interesting opinions. 4. What should a product management team do to share best practices and learn? As one of the commenters mentions, sharing best practices is something that any team larger than two people should be concerned about. See which of the suggested conventional and creative methods of knowledge exchange would work best for your team. 5. What are the best ways to get a stagnated project going again? Suggested solutions range from just re-naming the project to completely abandoning it. But, as product management veteran Cliff Gilley emphasized, the first thing you have to do is figure out why the project got stagnated in the first place. What’s your remedy against project stagnation? 6. How long is your backlog? It’s a touchy question for all of us involved in product development. As you can learn from the commenters’ experience, prioritization is not enough to keep your backlog under control. Peek in the thread for more solutions. 7. What are the three qualities you liked most about the best manager you ever had? At first glance, this thread might seem like a Hall of Honor for people’s favorite bosses. But if you look closer, you may see it as a source of some tips on earning your team’s love and respect. After all, we bet most managers, secretly or not, long for their team’s appreciation. 8. What are some good tips for 1:1's with your employees? One-on-one meetings with your employees are not just helpful for resolving work issues. Apart from that, they might be a good way to increase your employee’s engagement. The thread revolves around various ideas on making such meetings work best for both parties. 9. How can I delegate efficiently? Delegation is one of the most important (if not mission-critical) skills for a manager. However, according to our recent survey on working habits, more than 50% of managers either have trouble sharing work or prefer doing everything by themselves. If this seems to be the case for you, too, don’t miss this thread. 10. How can you run a great meeting? 37 answers – looks like there are plenty of examples and recommendations to learn from! For instance, one of the tips from the top-rated answer is to start every meeting by tackling short and easy topics. 11. What are some creative ways to recognize employee performance? Sometimes just saying “thank you” is not enough, and giving a cash bonus might be beyond your authority. But as you can see from Quorians’ answers here, you just need some imagination to come up with cool new ways to appreciate your workers. And as a bonus… Of course, Quora isn’t only about work. It has lots of threads that are just fun to read while you’re having your morning coffee. For example, here’s a discussion that made us smile: What does it feel like to be a project manager on the Death Star construction site? Did you come across any other inspiring threads or feel like an important management aspect got left out? Don’t hesitate to add to the list!
How to Choose the Best Project Management Software for Your Company
The best project management software for small businesses should include a few key features. Find out some core capabilities you’ll need whether you’re looking for project management software for startups or another type of organization.
Three Ways to Minimize Your Project Budget Exposure
Keeping the project budget in line is one of the most difficult things in project management – and yet it is a huge factor in determining the overall success of the project when the engagement winds down. The goal is to keep it in line throughout and avoid falling into emergency mode at any point with a huge budget overrun that you have to either fix or find yourself at the brink of project shutdown. Through my experience, I've found that the following three processes are extremely helpful to me as I try to keep my project budgets in check on the multiple projects I'm usually managing at any given point in time. Project managers are busy with many things beyond managing the budget on our plate. Developing good processes and habits will help you significantly reduce the likelihood that your project budget will turn into a catastrophe. Let's review each of the three ways to minimize your project budget exposure more closely…. Review and revise the project budget at least weekly The first thing you can do to protect your project budget is probably the easiest thing you can do and it is definitely the least invasive thing you can do. All it requires is you – and the proper information provided to you on a weekly basis. Get weekly information from Accounting concerning the charges to your project and revise your information diligently every week. This may seem simple…even mundane. But it always amazes me how many project managers get lazy and let this slide for a week or two and then eventually longer. "Hey, it wasn't a problem three weeks ago and nothing significant has happened on the project so why should my budget be in jeopardy now?" Well, it's amazing how the little things build up – and they can build up fast. Stay on top of the budget – don't let a week go by without comparing forecast to actuals and re-forecasting, if necessary. It's much easier to fix a 10% budget overrun now before it gets out of control than it is to fix a 40% budget overrun a month from now after it is already out of control. And which one is management going to be more pleased about hearing? Which one will the customer be more understanding of and flexible in working with you on? Make your project budget high profile This is also a fairly easy one and it has worked extremely well for me. And if you're organization is a matrix organization with everyone working on multiple projects at once, even better. Here's the scenario…. You are a project manager running five projects at once. Each of your technical team members are on – on average – three different projects at the same time. And let's remember that – in all honesty – 80-90% of all employees calculate their project charges for the week at the last minute, usually on Friday. Very few accurately document their time during each workday or at the end of the day. And we all remember most of what we did each week … but there's always that four or five hours that we really can't pinpoint exactly what we were doing. We know we worked 50 hours this week, but can only accurately account for 45 of them. They have to go somewhere. Where do they go? They go to the project that they feel those hours will be least noticed in. And that is usually the project that those personnel know is not being monitored closely. So don't let that be your project. Make sure your team members know you're watching the project budget – and the hours that they charge to it – like a hawk. Discuss the budget with them at every weekly internal team meeting and give them a status update on how the project budget is standing up to the original forecast. Share your concerns with them. Periodically question them on charges just to keep them on their toes. Don't be accusing, just ask them questions about the charges and the work that was being performed. If they know you're that aware, it's highly unlikely that any of your projects will be recipients of the 'grey' hours at the end of each work week. Manage scope closely This is probably the hardest one to do and can have the most devastating affect on the project budget. The problem here can be two fold. You have the issue of managing the project scope from your project manager perspective and negotiating changes and change orders with the customer. But you also have the task of managing your project team members closely as they work with the customer. On at least a third of my projects I've run across potential scope issues through discussions I've had with my project team members who were in close communication with the customer. They tend to develop a relationship with the customer and then you have the ego trip issue of your developer 'knowing' they can do anything quickly and easily. The customer makes a small request, your developer thinks it will be no problem to incorporate this 'new' request quickly and you end up having a developer spend a few hours – which can mean a few thousand dollars - of your precious project budget on a customer request that is likely beyond the original scope of the project. None of this was malicious or even on purpose – they were just helping out the customer on a small request. Inform your team, warn them of these situations, and then ask them about their customer interactions and any requests that may be coming their way when you meet with them internally on a weekly basis. Call for feedback Let's hear from our readers. What budget issues have you experienced? Do you find it hard, at times, to rein your team in when trying to keep costs down. What steps do you take to keep your project budget from getting out of hand?
