Project Management

By Lou Russell

As much as we think we can, you cannot avoid the phases of change. Regardless, you will go through the columns below no matter what project you are working on.

Project success is imagined in our heads as starting at the beginning moving steadily to the end without drama. The diagram above shows that emotions drive projects. The ups and downs are what makes a good project outcome. Clarity, Conflict, Consensus, Delegation, and Recognition are examples of emotions that will ensure quality if you are willing to collaborate. In the diagram below, you can see how this influences success.

The Committed Team Performance

At the start of the committed project, everyone is excited. A committed but not competent team will struggle with extremes. The blue lines indicate this type of project team. When starting, they’re on a high with unreasonable expectations for the project. Certainly, everything will go well. Their commitment that they will have success by sheer will locks them into an expectation of little trouble or variance. In project reality, stuff happens. Stuff ALWAYS happens; it doesn’t just happen to dumb people. Quickly people start blaming each other and it starts to degrade until the bottom is hit. There is no way and no amount of commitment that protects you from surprises. Throwing the project over their collective shoulders, the project team struggles to get the project done, pushing productivity uphill. The team believes that wanting it to be perfect will make it so. Not being perfect is a surprise that creates rework and churn on a project that takes too long to finish with less quality than expected. The secret is that there will always be surprises.

The Competence Team Performance

The Competence Team has the maturity to understand that surprises will occur. They are always waiting for the next shoe to drop. If you are a mature project manager, you’re always watching for signs of a surprise. It’s not a problem, it’s expected. The red line shows the Committed and Competence teams start from very different directions but end at the same place. The Competence team knows how to be agile and collaborative. The line of red is shorter, and less expensive, then the dotted blue lines.

Perception of Projects: The Two-week Dump

 There is another thing that commonly happens in projects when they are about two weeks out from finishing. That’s right when you can see the finish line, and the team are starting to plan what they’ll do next. Suddenly, some stakeholder comes out of the woodwork with a large change. This

usually happens because there is a stakeholder who is afraid to ask for a key requirement and ends up having to blurt it out when the project is almost done.  Change at this point in the project is always likely to break something else.

Bad News Early is Good News

When working on projects, seek out the bad news as early as you can. If there are stakeholders who aren’t showing up for the meetings, talk to them 1-on-1.  Collaboration is the key to project success..

By Lou Russell

It’s always exciting when you start a new project until you realize that it’s going off the tracks just like it usually does. There’s lots of reasons for this, so let’s look at how you can be more productive. The key to good project management is to:

• Clarify what is a project
• Identify the three roles of project management
• Intentionally launch work for the right person at the right time
• Don’t get too complicated – simplicity RULES

Clarify What IS a Project

It seems simple enough, but most people don’t really understand the difference between a task, a project, and a process. If you confuse these three, your project will fail.

• A task is the smallest piece of work – it should be done by one person and should take less than a half day to complete.
• A project is a combination of tasks that builds something that didn’t exist before
• A process is a collection of tasks that repeat over and over – for example, taxes

Tasks and projects are the key components of project management. When the project completes whatever is being built, it is passed on to the process person or team, who will maintain it for as long as needed. This handoff can be tricky if not clearly planned.

Identify the Three Roles of Project Management

To keep tasks, projects, and processes straight requires clarity of roles for people. There are three (and only three) roles in project management:

• The Project Sponsor is an executive who manages the budget and high-level issues and normally isn’t involved in the moment to moment project work
• The Project Manager is responsible for making sure all the tasks are done for the project, and the transition to process is successful
• The Stakeholders represent everyone else on the project. These are people who may contribute something to the project, or receive something from the project, but are usually part time. They can include business analysts, software developers, instructional designers, and more, but it’s simpler to call them all stakeholders

Intentionally Launch Work for the Right Person at the Right Time

The project manager is responsible for enforcing the roles. When everyone knows what their job is, the project can continue with less chaos. Be careful to match the person to the job, not the job for any person who is available. There will always be issues to deal with, but when the right person is in the appropriate role, things flow more smoothly.

Don’t Get Too Complicated – Simplicity RULES

The secret to success is: don’t sweat the small or medium stuff. Instead of building lots of rules and processes, keep the process high-level and the roles bounded. Collaborate constantly with your stakeholders. Communication is the key to finishing well. There will still be two steps forward and one step back, but if you start well and stay the course, your project will finish well.