Triple Constraints

Any good project manager will tell you that documenting and following up on action items is a key to a successful project. With all the tools at a project manager’s disposal, what should you use to track action items. Below is a list of tools I have run across for managing action items:

Microsoft Excel

Pros

• Small learning curve
• Easy to distribute/collaborate with team members

Cons

• Not web-based
• Tasks are not directly tied to the project schedule
• No automatic notifications
• Easy to get out-of-sync due to team members making changes to their local version
• Project manager has to make all updates to tasks

Microsoft Project

Pros

• All project tasks can be tied to the project schedule

Cons

• Steeper learning curve than Excel
• Requires the project manager to manually update all tasks
• Not web-based

Online To-Do Software (Such as RemembertheMilk.com)

Pros

• Easy to learn
• Very affordable (in some cases free)
• Web-based
• Can share/assign tasks to team members
• Team members can automatically mark tasks as complete
• One central list of tasks for a project
• Tasks can be accessed/updated from mobile phones

Cons

• Tasks not tied directly to timelines
• Data resides on external servers

All of the above tools have their strengths and weaknesses. No one solution is the silver bullet for managing action items, but all of them below in the project manager’s tool belt.  If you have other tools that you recommend to your colleagues, please share them with your fellow readers below.

And remember – No matter what solution you use, make sure that you actively manage the action items for your project. If you neglect the action items, you are acting neglectful towards your project.

One of the toughest challenges for a PM can be juggling multiple projects. You’re trapped on conference calls all day while your inbox becomes cluttered with emails from internal partners, vendors and clients discussing any number of active projects. If you let it get out of control, you could become the bottleneck in your own project.

A common approach is to keep your inbox empty by checking email throughout the day and making some immediate decisions on the ever-growing list. If you’ll never need the email, you delete it. If you can resolve the issue in a minute or two, you take action then delete it (or file it), etc. There are a few versions of this approach, commonly referred to as Inbox Zero. It’s better than complete inbox chaos, but I worry you lose some efficiency by not having immediate inbox access to relevant materials.

I recommend finding a middle ground. I use my inbox like a to-do list. Every item in there needs my attention. If it doesn’t need my attention, I file it away. So it’s never completely empty, but it is also free of clutter. Here are few tips:

• Multi-task and Take Action
  Don’t be afraid to let yourself get distracted. This is similar to Inbox Zero – but perhaps taking this one step further, I think you should multi task by checking email in meetings that don’t require your undivided attention. And if you are working on an important task that takes hours, force yourself to break away from time to time to check your email and resolve any issues that don’t require investigation or effort.
• Create a Filing System
  If I’ve read the email and I don’t need to take action on it, I’ll file it away in a project-specific subfolder. I never delete anything that might need to be referenced later. Emails can be an excellent resource for historical information on a project. File your emails in such a way that allows you to easily search your subfolders for key information.
• Use Email Flags
  If you can’t take immediate action on an email and you need it for future reference, keep it in your inbox and flag it. You can break out your flags by color so you can identify next steps at a glance. i.e. Red = top priority, Green = take action within a few days, Blue = file attachment that will be needed for reference in the near future. Set up the system so it is relevant for you.
• Clean House
  Using this system instead of a pure Inbox Zero approach will allow your inbox to build up after a few days. You’ll have immediate access to urgent materials because they are in your top level inbox, but you’ll also end up with some unnecessary items. That’s why you’ll need to clean up every few days. Go through your flagged emails and file away anything that you no longer need for immediate reference.

With this approach, you should be able to keep your inbox down to 10 items or so, each of which need your attention in the near future. You’ll be better organized, which will help you work more efficiently. And if you have any ideas or recommendations, please add them in the comments.

We all have been on a project where timelines are missed. It is unfortunate, but it happens. We spend all our time scrambling to recover from missed timelines, but we rarely spend enough time looking at the root causes of the miscues. Missing timelines is detrimental to our projects and to our careers.

Below are some of the most common causes for missed timelines during the initiation and planning phases of the project.

Going into battle with the wrong army – we all know the difference a great team can make on your project. Having people you can trust to accomplish their tasks can make a tremendous difference. Spend time in the beginning of the project securing the resources that you need to execute your project. Any effort you spend fighting for resources will be more than offset by the effort you don’t have to spend compensating for poor performers on your team.

Misunderstanding your orders – not knowing what your team needs to accomplish is certain to lead to missed timelines. It may sound obvious, but incomplete or incorrect requirements are too often the culprit for missed timelines. Make sure that you work with your clients to clearly define what is expected of you and your team. This will instill confidence in your clients and will ensure that you lead your team to success.

Underestimating your foe – too many teams fail because they fail to accurately estimate how long their tasks will take to accomplish. Some of this is overconfidence in their abilities, while some of it is due to uncertainty surrounding the tasks or the project. Make sure you work with your team to accurately estimate task durations. Use historical data as an input into your estimates when possible. Instill in your team that the estimates they come up with are what they are committing to. This will force them to closely examine their estimates.

In part 2 of this series I will look at the most common causes of missed timelines during the execution phase of a project.

As the year 2009 comes to an end, many people are getting ready to make New Year’s Resolutions. Many of these are the ones we hear year in and year out:

• Lose weight
• Quit smoking
• Stop drinking
• Get out of debt

These are all noble goals and I wish those people making these resolutions the best of luck in trying to keep them. I too will be making some resolutions this year, but mine are focusing on how I conduct myself as a project manager. Here they are:

#1 Listen more than I speak
One of the key responsibilities of a project manager is to know what is happening with their project. This involves working with all team members and stakeholders to learn the current state of the project. This may seem like it requires extensive speech by the project manager, but experience project managers know that it takes just a little prompting to get your stakeholders and team to open up and provide you with the project’s temperature.

#2 Focus on my team, and not my computer
Project management software is everywhere we turn. It promises to make us better project managers and to make our projects run smoother. Project management software is a useful tool in the project manager’s arsenal, but it is not a predictor of project success. I will admit that in the past I have become enamored with PM software, but I learned that to make my projects truly succeed I needed to focus on my team. The team is what accomplishes tasks. The team allows me to meet deadlines. The team is responsible for delivering a quality project.

#3 Answer questions before they are asked
While it seems to run contradictory to #1, this resolution does not. This year I am going to do my best to proactively address team and stakeholder questions. Project managers often know what the stakeholders/customers need to know, but we often wait for the question to be asked because we hope it will give us more time to remedy any bad situations or increase the positives we can report on.

#4 Accept responsibility for more blame
Project managers are people. As such, we attempt avoid negatives in our lives. One such negative is blame. Many people do anything they can to avoid blame. This may temporarily make them feel better, but in the long run it can only hurt more. By accepting blame during the course of a project, project managers help their team build a sense of camaraderie because they feel that they are working together instead of just being led by the PM. Also, accepting blame professionally can actually help your career because it shows your boss that you understand the importance of accountability. Now don’t get me wrong…I am not saying that you should accept the blame for all things that go wrong on your project. Instead, take responsibility for those things that you could have impacted.

I believe that these resolutions will help me be a better project manager in the coming year and for years to come. I hope that you think about how you manage your projects and come up with resolutions for yourself. Please feel free to share your resolutions with your fellow readers below so that we can all improve ourselves in 2010.

This past Christmas weekend, I visited my wife’s family. It was a lovely time and we had lots of good conversations. One of the conversations we had was about careers. Most of the family is out of college, and we all have different careers. One is a lawyer, one is a salesperson, one is in marketing, one is an engineer, and I am a project manager. Most of the other professions are easy to explain, but mine is more difficult.

After explaining to them the basics of what project management is, I was left to detail how I got into project management. This sounds like a simple topic, but it was not straight forward. I was a psychology major in college and never thought about a career in project management.

My first few jobs after college were not what you would call project management jobs, but they did require many of the same skills that project management requires. And they all seemed to lead me down a path that resulted in project management as a career.

One of these jobs was as the assistant manager of a golf course. One of the responsibilities of this job was to facilitate and arrange corporate golf outings to our resort. The skills that were required for this job were organization, prioritization, and communication. These same skills are essential for the successful management of projects.

Another of my earlier jobs was as an Information Systems Coordinator. This job required that I work with various stakeholders to define business processes and requirements for newly-developed internal systems. This job helped me to gain experience in requirements gathering and stakeholder management. It also shifted my career from more service-centric to increasingly technology-centric jobs.

After this job, I received several more technology-heavy jobs. These jobs all required that I increase my technical aptitude and my ability to manage the deployment of the systems I was involved in. It was this responsibility of overseeing the deployment of systems and projects that ultimately led me to project management. I noticed that my interest and passion laid with ensuring that my stakeholders and customers were satisfied with what I, and the rest of my team, delivered.

It was at this point that I began to more rigorously attempt to increase my project management knowledge:

• I read every project management book I could get my hands on
• I took online training courses that prepared me for the PMP exam
• I listened to project management podcasts
• I attended project management events and conferences

It is this combination of experience, training, and involvement in the project management community that has brought me into the project management fold. It has been a winding path from being a psychology major at Notre Dame to being a project manager for a technology firm, but it has been a path I am glad I walked down.

Now I ask you the same question that was the impetus for this post:

How did you get into project management?

This advice is a supplement to an article posted here recently by Chris McSpiritt.

Project Managers who earn their professional certification through the Project Management Institute (PMI) are required to complete ongoing training to retain the PMP credential. PMs are given three years to earn a required 60 PDUs. There are a lot of ways to complete the training, 12 of which are outlined at PMI.org, but many of these options are expensive. I’m hoping to get you started without breaking the bank.

Free Podcasts
The first thing you should do is start listening to Project Management-related podcasts. Every hour of content is worth one PDU. You can earn up to 15 PDUs this way, in category 2 SDL (self-directed learning). I recommend the Project Management Podcast which is hosted by Cornelius Fichtner, PMP. He provides great content that is worth your time. And there are plenty of free episodes. Listen to the PM Podcast here. And here are the instructions for submitting your PDUs to PMI.

Free Course Downloads
Another method for earning free PDUs is through self-paced online courses. IBM offers a full suite of courses that you can download for free. All together, you can earn 19 PDUs by completing the available e-kits. It’s a great option from a trusted company. You can download the e-kits directly from IBM.

Free Webinars
Certain trainers offer free webinars as an introduction to their service. For example, you can earn up to 8 free PDUs by watching the courses available from IAG Consulting.

Inexpensive Online Training
There are a lot of trainers who offer inexpensive training courses for those looking to earn PDUs in a pinch. PM Educate offers a package that would award you the full 60 required PDUs for $500 – or even less if they are having a sale. PDUs2Go also has a training suite that can earn you the full 60 PDUs for as little as $600.

Training Directly Through PMI
And of course PMI offers online training courses as well. For example, the course titled Project Movie: A Practical Application of the PMBOK will earn you 15 PDUs at a total cost of $500 for PMI members.

So there are a lot of free or inexpensive options out there if you shop around a little. Please feel free to add any suggestions by submitting comments to this article.

A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled “How Football Coaches are like Project Managers“, which compared project managers to football coaches. The article discussed how coaches, like project managers, are responsible for the following:

• Procuring superior talent
• Preparing the team
• Motivating the team

When a coach accomplishes the above tasks, they are likely to have a successful tenure. This is evidenced by trophies, rings, and accolades.

However, it is more often the case where a coach is not able to accomplish all of the above tasks. When this happens, the team does not win enough, and eventually the coach is let go. This recently happened when my alma mater decided not to retain Charlie Weis as head coach. It was not his lack of commitment, effort, or passion that caused him to lose his job. It was the lack of wins over the past few years.

Project managers are also judged by the bottom line.

You may have assembled and trained a dynamic team. You may have motivated the team to work hard for you. You may be liked by your superiors. However, do not be complacent because of these factors. Any project manager knows that he/she is only judged by the success of their last project. A project fails or succeeds because of the entire team, but as the sports cliche says, “You can’t fire the whole team”. When the project fails, it is often the project manager who bears the brunt of the responsibility.

However, there is the flip side. When a project succeeds, the project manager is often the one who receives the lion’s share of the praise. We can all think back to when we were riding high after the success of an important project.

The bottom line is that we, as project managers, know where we stand. We are accountable for the success of a project and we cherish that responsibility. We like assembling our team and going to battle with them. We enjoying helping our players grow on the field of play. And most of all, we like looking up at the scoreboard when time has expired and seeing that we have won.

When many people think of project management they think of rigid adherence to rules and defined process. They often envision a project manager sitting in front of his/her laptop receiving updates from the team, entering it into Microsoft Project, and then creating status reports. While this may be the case for many projects, it does not do justice for the true role of the project manager.

Many readers of this blog, and of other project management articles, believe that project management is all about people and communication management. This hits closer to home in terms of the real responsibilities of a project manager. The project manager is not just a robot who receives information and databases it; rather he/she is an active participant in the conversation that is project management. The project manager is constantly communication with team members and all project stakeholders. They receive constant updates on the project and then work to utilize that information to make sure all parties are informed so that progress can be made.

In reading the book The Speed of Trust by Steven Covey, a book I highly recommend, I came to further realize the role that trust plays in project management. As the author points out in the book, trust is an attribute that can contribute to the success or failure of a project as much as any other.

Let’s examine how trust can impact your project:

The project manager must trust that the project team is being honest about task estimates.

We all hear stories where project teams pad the estimates for how long tasks will take to complete only to have the project manager reduce the time because they know the team is padding the estimate. This is counter-intuitive in that it requires additional time/energy to complete the estimation/planning phase of the project. If the team and project manager trust and respect each other, then the process can be smoother and no one will feel that they are being manipulate.

The project manager must trust that the stakeholders are being honest about requirements.

When a project is in the requirements phase, the stakeholders have a great deal of input into the direction of the project. If this direction is not accurate, then the entire project is off-track from the onset. Sometimes the stakeholders are not sure about all requirements, and this is ok. There are entire agile methodologies designed to handle situations where all the requirements are not known or clearly understood. It is up to the stakeholders to define the requirements clearly up front or to alert the team that there are many unknowns.

The project team must trust that the project manager is keeping them informed of all changes to the project(requirements, schedule, etc.)

The project team is responsible for the creation of all project deliverables. As such, they need to be aware of any changes that may occur to what and when they must deliver. This ties into communication, but the project manager needs to instill confidence in the team that they are heading in the right direction. This can most easily be accomplished by being open and honest with the team. This trust will help the project manager manage and motivate the team as well.

The stakeholders must trust that the project manager is keeping them informed of all changes to the project (costs, schedule, etc.)

The project manager is ultimately responsible for the success of the project and they are accountable to the stakeholders. The stakeholders hate nothing more than to be surprised on the date of a deadline with the news that the project is missing its milestone. Also frustrating for the stakeholders is to be informed by the project manager that the project is significantly over budget. Both of these situations can result in the project being terminated prior to completion. One way to ameliorate this situation is to be honest and open with the stakeholders whenever things are slipping. Don’t get me wrong, they won’t enjoy hearing this unpleasant news. But at the same time, they will respect you for being honest about the situation and this can lead to them giving you a little more slack.

In Conclusion

We have examined some high-level ways in which trust and honesty can improve the health of your project. It is not always the easy thing to be honest at all times with your team and stakeholders, but the benefits of establishing truest are worth it. A team that trusts you will often work harder for you. Stakeholders that trust you will often give you the benefit of the doubt.

The effects of not being trusted are not something that you  want to encounter. They are manifested by a team that does not put full effort into the project and stakeholders that hedge their bets when it comes to the project and your career. So be sure that you treat trust as a resource that needs to be vigilantly protected.

In August, I penned an article that discussed the differences between waterfall and agile project management methodologies. As stated in that article, waterfall is more appropriate when requirements are clearly understood and there is not much fluctuation. Agile methods are more appropriate when there is flux and when requirements are not clearly understood.

One of the most popular agile methodologies out there is Scrum. Scrum was originally designed for the management of software projects, but has since been applied to other genres of projects. Scrum was first described in the 1980’s but did not become mainstream until the 90’s.

The scrum project is conducted by a product owner, a Scrum Master, and the project team (oftentimes developers).

The product owner is responsible for supplying the requirements from the viewpoint of the users. The Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating (not managing) the project and making sure the team is in a position to succeed. The team is responsible for the execution of the project.

The basic flow of a scrum project is the following:

1. The product owner creates a list of desired features. This is known as the product backlog.
2. The project team then determines how many of these features they can deliver within the Sprint (timebox of development and testing). They call this list of features they will deliver in the sprint the Spring backlog.
3. Each morning the team meets to provide an update to eachother on the status of each item within the Spring Backlog.
4. After the Sprint has completed (and hopefully all items developed and tested) the team provides a demonstration of the system to the product owner and other stakeholders. The team receives feedback and incorporates this into the product backlog.
5. Steps 2 through 4 are then repeated until the product reaches a final state.

If you would like more information on Scrum, please visit http://www.scrumbasics.com.

The science of project management is obvious. Calculating resource needs against upcoming work, mapping the critical path for your project timeline, or managing your budget based on a fluctuating scope. But there’s also an art to project management. It’s an area that goes beyond what you learn from the PMBOK – it’s something that requires confidence and finesse.

The art of project management is all about managing relationships. You must ease your clients’ concerns, whether those clients are internal partners or external customers. You must push back carefully when your clients’ pipe dreams force scope creep. And you need to create a strong rapport with your internal project team in order to help prioritize your own project tasks when they may compete with other concurrent projects.

In my opinion, the art is far more important than the science. It’s also more difficult to master. You learn these soft skills over time. Your first project with a challenging client can give you invaluable experience. A dozen more, and you are on your way. And those skills translate beyond project management. They’re useful in nearly any profession.

My recommendation is to force yourself to balance your project management training with direct relationship management. Don’t expect your peers or clients to follow the rules of project management. People are unpredictable, and adding some art to your project management science can help you prepare for any challenge.