As project managers, we’ve all had times when our attention is being pulled from many different directions at once. As well as our day to day tasks, sometimes problems pop up that mean we need to firefight, stakeholders can demand new reports, and team members can seek new direction. All of this can happen despite our best efforts to keep the project on an even keel.

Now, the ability to jump from task to task like this and still be effective is important for a project manager, but I don’t want to talk about that today. No, today I want to talk about the benefit of behaving in the opposite manner, about the benefits of focus.

All of us have had times where we have had to jump from task to task. And I imagine a lot of us have been left feeling that at least some of those tasks were short-changed by us – the pressure we put ourselves under to swap to the next job meant we didn’t spend enough time on the task in hand.

We all know that we should recognise the difference between things that are urgent, and things that are important. But while we all know it, I’m sure many of us still fall into the trap of chasing the urgent, without looking at how important it is.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to resist the demands to switch from task to task. By focusing on one task, you gain the ability to really get to grips with it. You will be able to look deeper into the cause of any problems, and come up with more considered solutions.

So, let’s put these two ideas together: deciding on what is urgent and what is important; and the benefits of focus. So how do we merge them?

Well, when you have a lot of issues clamouring for your attention, take the time to focus on one task first – the task of deciding which of those issues are important, and which are urgent.

Once you’ve done that, you are in a better position to focus on those issues that are important and urgent. Those that are important but not urgent can wait until these are done. Those which are not important, but urgent, can be delegated or renegotiated. Those which are neither important or urgent, well, they can just wait!

One of the ways to think about this is to remember that your time is precious. You are being paid (hopefully well…) to use your time for the benefit of the project. So take just a little of that time to make sure the rest of it is spent in the most effective manner, in the best way to benefit the project.

Of course, this is easy in theory, not so easy in practice. How do you deal with these sort of whirlwind days? Do you end up running around firefighting, or do you manage to find the time to focus on what is important? Let me know!

Today on Project Management Guide we are going to look at quality. In a project, quality has an important and specific role. So, for those beginning project management, what do we need to know?

As we have learned, a project exists to produce certain outputs, and part of the process of gathering requirements for what those outputs are must include information about what counts as an acceptable level of quality.

It is an understandable desire to only ever produce outputs of the highest quality. However, this level of quality is likely to take a lot of time, money, and effort. We don’t need our outputs to be the best, but late and expensive, we need them to be good enough, and on time and on budget.

So how do we go about making sure what we produce is of an acceptable quality? Well, you’ll remember from our post on project plans that one of the areas we need to cover in the plan is quality criteria.

What this means is that at the time of creating the project plan you will have agreed what criteria the output needs to meet, and how this will be measured. This will have been agreed with, at a minimum, the Executive and a representative of the end user, and hopefully with a representative of the people doing the work too!

Remember, quality criteria can be influenced by many things. Your business, or your customer’s, may have specific quality systems in place. Certain recognised standards of quality, such as ISO standards, may be mandated by contract. And, of course, the final use of the output will dictate what is needed – the quality required of a component in a washing machine is significantly different from an equivalent component in a nuclear submarine!

Now, these criteria, once agreed, tell you what success is, what completion of the project is. They need to be SMART:

• Specific – Clearly defined and precise
• Measurable – e.g. not “new computers”, but “computers with 2Gb of memory”, etc.
• Attainable – Don’t ask for the impossible
• Relevant – Is the criterion actually related to the aim of the project?
• Time-based – Enough time to achieve this. There is no point expecting a year’s worth of work in one week!

You will also need to decide who has the final say over the quality of the outputs. Hopefully your work on defining the quality criteria will mean there are no arguments over the quality (i.e. no qualitative judgements, only quantitative).

But quality isn’t something that you worry about only at the end of the project. The quality of what you are producing should be monitored throughout the project. Intermediate steps on the way to the final output, or separate, discrete pieces of that output should be quality checked as the project is carried out.

That’s a very quick overview of quality in a project. What tips do you have about quality in a project? How do you make sure you’re meeting the customer’s expectations, while also meeting your business needs? Let me know!

Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.

But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

This series will look at the various new social media tools available to us, and how we can start to use them in our projects. Some of you will already be using some of these tools. I’d love to hear your stories about how they have worked for you – many of the uses are only now developing, so I’d love to hear your best practices!

Wikis are websites that allow the people who access it to contribute to it, or to change and update the information that is already there. The most famous example of a wiki has to be, of course, Wikipedia, which has harnessed the efforts of individuals around the world to build a resource with a remarkable breadth, though with sometimes variable quality!

But can a similar system be of use to us as project managers? We’ve already looked at the benefits of FriendFeed, most notably that as all the ‘conversational’ information is being captured, it generates a searchable resource of this information. However, sometimes we need to make things more formal.

While we can use blogs to share formal documents, they are primarily a one to many communication tool, in that the person writing the posts has the most control over putting information out. In other words, while a blog is useful for gathering comments on the information, it is not good at allowing collaboration in the creation of it.

When all of your team are close by, this may not be a problem – you can walk over and talk to them! Unfortunately, this is increasingly often not the case, and this is where a wiki can come into its own.

By putting up a wiki page, you enable the people viewing it to add information, to modify what is there, and to improve the usefulness of it. This means you can gather the knowledge and expertise from all of your team members, who can contribute to the generation of this resource.

This is useful when you are looking not only at the documentation around running the project, such as risk logs, but also when you are looking to create the documentation about the product – in other words, the documentation about using the product, which should be part of the output of the project.

A wiki isn’t the perfect answer, of course. While, hopefully, the documentation produced on the wiki will be good, it still needs to go through a quality process before release, and this may uncover problems. And, of course, actually getting your team to contribute needs discipline on both your and their parts. There may be a temptation to set up a wiki and leave it alone, assuming that the documentation will magically now get written. This works about as well as you would expect.

But while a wiki brings some challenges, the benefits of using one can be great. Having the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the project team around this project put down in an organised manner is incredibly valuable. And if it is done throughout the life of the project, it is likely to be much more successful than when tacked on the end.

Have you used a wiki in project management? Was it useful? Or did it just mean another thing that had to be monitored? What do you think? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

I’ve been writing recently on my thoughts about what project managers need to do now to grasp the opportunity (yes, opportunity) that the current economic climate gives them, and move from being a good project manager to being a great one.

And I really do think this climate is an opportunity for project managers, one we should grab hold of. For one thing, we get to shine by delivering for our businesses. For another, governments around the world have been announcing huge stimulus packages that will involve many new projects that need managing.

Something else, though, has got me thinking about this being an opportunity. And that is a book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

This is by Malcolm Gladwell, he of Tipping Point (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference) and Blink (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking) fame.

Outliers is a fascinating book. Malcolm Gladwell looks at successful people, and how they got there, in an interesting way. Some of the conclusions are perhaps what we have suspected, but he has done the legwork to find the data that backs it up. I really do recommend you take a look at it.

Now, some of you may have seen some of the buzz around the book, most of which focused on the assertion that someone successful needs to have practiced something for about 10,000 hours before they get really good at it.

Yes, 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours of work and practice. 10,000 hours, day after day, month after month, year after year, of sheer effort on whatever it is they are now successful in. The figures seem to hold for everything from music, to law, to ice hockey. People start to get good, really good, when they have spent 10,000 hours doing what they do.

Now, this isn’t really that surprising an answer. It may be a little disappointing, but it’s not surprising. It’s disappointing because all of us secretly would like to think that the people who are successful are somehow gifted – that their success has literally been given to them. But it turns out that successful people really aren’t that different than the rest of us.

But what I think we need to pay attention to now, with the economy as it is, is the other aspect of what makes successful people successful. And that is the environment they are in.

Outliers has a compelling section where Gladwell talks about the rise of Jewish lawyers, and law firms, in New York. And the reason they rose was, at least in part, because they were lucky enough to face a harsh environment.

It was precisely the difficulties they faced getting into one of the supposedly prestigious New York law firms in the 60s and 70s that placed these lawyers into a position where they could take advantage of the changing legal scene in the 80s and beyond.

Reading this book made me think about what we really mean by an opportunity. Often, opportunities come to us disguised as a challenge, a problem, maybe even a disaster. I’ve been writing elsewhere about the pros and cons of being a contractor, precisely because for some, the disaster of losing their job may really be an opportunity for more success.

It is all about being in the right place, at the right time. And, crucially, about grasping the opportunity, recognising it for what it is.

Right now, right here, I believe that project managers, good and great project managers, have the opportunity to make the best of this economic challenge. To make the best of it, to be successful not despite it, but because of it.

But then, I’m a born optimist.

What do you think? Am I just fooling myself? Let me know!

Today in the Project Management Guide we are looking at our day to day work, the real meat of what it means to be a project manager. This is where we really earn our keep. Not surprisingly, there is a lot to this, far more than be covered in one blog post!

However, as part of helping brand new project managers, I want to give you a very rough overview of what I try and make sure I do on a regular basis. These things help me make sure I have a grip on what is actually happening with the project.

The most important thing to do is make sure you have a clear idea of progress. The best way to do this is face to face. Now, many project managers, particularly in software development, like to have a very short stand-up meeting at the start of every day. It is done standing up as this helps to naturally speed the meeting up!

This frequency of meetings may not be appropriate for your project, though. While it may be possible in a software project to break all of the tasks being done into bite-sized chunks which can sensibly be reported on every day, it may not be possible in other industries. For example, while it would be possible to get a daily update on the number of bricks laid on a construction site, is this information worth getting?

If you gather progress information too frequently, there is a danger that you will get an exaggerated view of progress – no-one wants to come to a meeting and report only tiny progress, but if a task is large, that is all that can be reported on a daily basis!

The key message to take away is that the progress updates you get need to be timely, useful, and accurate.

• Timely – so you can take any action needed at the right point.
• Useful – so you can do something with the information, rather than just get swamped by it.
• Accurate – so that you are actually getting the truth about your project.

Now, the frequency that will hit these criteria will vary for you, both on the industry you are in, and on the individual project. It may also vary depending where in the project you are, so don’t be shy about changing the frequency when it makes sense.

I’ve worked on one project that had daily updates when we were negotiating contracts with three possible suppliers, because we needed to make sure everyone knew where we were, and to share information about issues raised by the suppliers. The same project dropped to a weekly schedule once we got into the rollout of a very large network infrastructure, because that was the most sensible way of sharing that information.

And, of course, think about whether these meetings actually need to include the whole team – I’ve already written about my dislike for meetings, so only have everyone there if it makes sense!

Now, one reason for having getting this information is to give you a clear idea of progress. Another is to find out about the issues team members are having. Getting this information is vital – you want to know about all issues as soon as possible, because, in general, it is easier, better, and cheaper to deal with the issues early.

Whenever a new issue is raised, you must make sure you log it. We’re going to need to figure out how we deal with this issue later, so make sure we capture it.

The next thing I do, now I have all this info, is to assess progress. This means taking a look at what we have actually achieved, against what we had planned to achieve. Are we miles away from where we should be? Have we made some error in our estimation of the work?

Now, I need to examine the issues.

• What sort of issue is it? A change in requirements, a problem we didn’t foresee, an unavoidable risk occurring, a new risk spotted, a change in the external environment?
• What impact is it going to have? Will it effect quality, timescales, budget?
• What can I do about it? Are there actions I can take as project manager to solve this? Or do I need to refer it up to the Executive?
• What impact would there be in taking action to deal with this? What cost? What timescales? What quality impact?

We’ll go into more detail on risks and issues in a later guide.

On a regular basis, I want to make sure the Executive, and anyone else selected by the Executive, gets an update on the project. I do this by condensing the information on progress and issues I have already gathered. I should put in to this report information about issues we have come across, both to keep the Executive informed, and to flag up issues that may require action later.

And lastly, I need to receive any completed sections of work, and assign new ones. Obvious as it may sound, it bears repeating: No work should be going on that the project manager a) isn’t aware of, and b) hasn’t approved. The point of having a project manager is to make sure that the effort in the project is guided sensibly to achieve the aims. That becomes an awful lot harder when people are doing things on an ad hoc basis!

That’s a brief (a very brief) overview of what you need to be doing. I’ll be going into more detail on these in later guides. For now, it is over to you – what else do you try to do on a frequent basis? What are the must do things I have missed out? Let me know!

A quick update today, looking at an example of a business using Twitter and FriendFeed in the same way I suggested in earlier posts. The company in question is Humana.

Chris Hall has a blog post up, Meeting of the Minds, where he talks about how this came about. He was in a meeting, essentially a project kick-off meeting, about the social media strategy for Humana, when someone suggested that they record the event on Twitter – in the public domain.

You already know I think this is a good idea. The meeting agreed to use a hashtag (#hcoc) to make the tweets easier to find, and an interesting thing is that co-workers not in the meeting were able to follow along, and even suggest ideas. This kind of wide-ranging collaboration is a great benefit of this openness.

In addition, Chris created a FriendFeed room to enable everyone to find the information easily – providing a more stable and helpful resource.

I really encourage you all to go along to the blog post Meeting of the Minds and read more about it.

Do you know of any other examples of organisations using social media in an innovative way? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

In the past posts on this guide to project management in a social media world, we’ve looked at blogs, Twitter (twice!) and FriendFeed as ways of helping us manage our projects. Today I want to look at something which we wouldn’t apply directly to our projects, but which we can use to be better project managers: Social Networking.

Social networking is about joining a group of people you have something in common with, and building a community with them. The most famous social networking sites are probably MySpace and Facebook. The “something in common” those sites promote is, of course, friendship. You are encouraged to join so you can be part of an online community with your existing friends, and so find new ones.

But that isn’t the be all and end all of “something in common”. As project managers, we have, not surprisingly, project management in common. And as readers of Project Management Guide, I’m going to go ahead and assume you also want to continue to improve as a project manager! So where can we go to be part of this project management community? I want to talk about two places.

Firstly, there is LinkedIn. This site was set up specifically to be about professional networking – about connecting with the people you already do business with. In this respect, it is doing really well – it has over 35 million members! And because it is pulling in all sorts of business people, there is a natural desire to build smaller communities within it.

On LinkedIn, these are called “Groups”. A simple search on LinkedIn for project management groups yields hundreds of results – some of these groups are generalist, some are very focused on a specific industry. You’re bound to find one you’re interested in!

Secondly, there are more focused business networking sites. In particular, there is the Professional Project Managers Networking Group (PPMNG). This is a fast growing new site, and is already attracting some interesting people and fascinating content. It has a busy discussion forum, and all in all will help you connect with project managers everywhere.

I’ve put some blog posts over there about Life as a Contractor, and I hope you enjoy them too!

Social networking can provide you with a new community of fellow project managers you can learn from, have discussions with, and find support from. It really is a great way of making sure you continue to grow and develop as a project manager. And if you’d like to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn and on PPMNG. See you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Last week I blogged about the going getting tough for project management. In that post, I suggested that we, as project managers, needed to start doing some new things.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s a few other views out there. Pawel Brodzinski posted Why the Hell Project Management Should Be Different During Recession? where he points out that the principles of project management don’t change just because there is a recession.

The thing is, that’s not wrong. The principles of project management haven’t changed – we’re still aiming to deliver projects successfully. But thinking a recession doesn’t mean we need to change, that’s not right.

I’ve blogged in the past about how I believe project managers can do well in a recession, and I still think that. Good project managers have the chance to show how project management contributes to successful projects. And successful projects can contribute to business success.

But here’s the thing: good isn’t good enough.

With companies in financial straits, with organisations looking to cut costs, with jobs being lost, being a good project manager is now the bare minimum. If you really want to shine, you need to be better than that. You need to show how your skills benefit not only your project, but the business as a whole.

That doesn’t mean you need to short change your project. It certainly doesn’t mean you should change the principles of project management. But it does mean you need to be even more sensitive to what is going on in the company.

Example: All companies are likely to find it much harder to access credit. But they have got used to getting it easily over the past decade. Suddenly, it’s not possible to fund day to day activities from credit in the expectation of a bigger pay-off later on. Instead of being able to wait for a project to produce a product in 6 months which they can sell for $500, now they need to cut costs and gain cash flow. Instead of waiting for an executive to tell you your project is canned, build the options – maybe you can deliver 80% of the features in half the time, and start selling it for $200. Overall, the company would make less money – but it would gain cash-flow.

A good project manager would keep his project on track. A very good project manager would see that the economic situation changes the business case. A remarkable project manager does both of these, and provides options to his executive – such as delivering less, but earlier.

The aim of a successful project isn’t to deliver a product. It is to deliver a product which itself delivers a benefit to the business. For most businesses this benefit is going to boil down, in some shape or form, to money. Saving it, or making more of it.

The aim of a good project manager is to have the project deliver a product. The aim of a very good project manager is to deliver a product which delivers a benefit. The aim of the remarkable project manager to is deliver the benefit.

Sure, we need to use the same project management techniques and principles as always. But we also need to recognise that the environment all of us work in has changed. That has implications for our projects: assumptions need to be checked, business cases need to be verified, timescales need to be examined, and so forth.

But it also has implications for us, as project managers. With fewer jobs, fewer companies, fewer projects, there is increased competition for all jobs. There’s competition just to keep our jobs.

Put yourself in the shoes of a businessman. You have the choice of lots and lots of good project managers. But what you really want isn’t someone who will deliver the project. You want someone who will deliver the benefit. You want someone remarkable.

This is a time for remarkable project managers to show that project management skills enable them to be remarkable business leaders too.

Because in a recession, our new project is to deliver, at the end of this recession, a company that is stronger, better, and fitter. A company that is ready to expand into the growing economy. A company that has survived, and is now ready to prosper. A company that is remarkable.

What type of project manager do you want to be? Good, or remarkable?

So, you’ve been working hard. You have a clear project plan and schedule. You have got a good management structure in place. Everyone is clear what success means for this project. And off they go! Work starts, and then… well, then what?

Today in Project Management Guide, we are looking at how to monitor the progress of your project – are you getting closer to a successful finish?

Now, we know we want to monitor progress on the project. But how do we actually do that? Asking everyone on the project team if they are finished yet is unlikely to produce a happy team, or any useful information.

No, first we need to define what we are going to monitor. What can we point at as showing that work has been done, and more importantly, that useful work has been done? What are the indicators that the project is progressing?

The choice of indicators can be helped by looking back at your project plan. The Outputs and the Quality Criteria will give you ideas for what you want to monitor.

This is going to vary from project to project, and from industry to industry. In software development, you may track the number of features implemented. In construction, storeys built. In advertising, storyboards produced. In IT upgrades, machines completed.

None of these measure the amount of work – they measure something that has been done. They measure an output of that work.

My point is that you need to:

• monitor something useful.
• monitor the project, not the individuals.
• monitor more than one indicator.
• monitor what you actually want.
• monitor your monitoring.

Why?

• You need to monitor something with really shows you how you are doing. The indicator should be relevant to getting to success. It would be much easier to monitor hours worked, time elapsed, and so on, but these don’t actually tell you if you are any closer to success!
• Indicators shouldn’t be tracked back to an individual, because all that will do is encourage them to find ways to ‘game’ the system. You want your team to be working towards a successful project, not successful indicators of themselves!
• Indicators can too easily become an aim in themselves, meaning other important aspects get ignored. Because of this, you need to make sure you aren’t allowing your delivery to be distorted by what you are monitoring. So, for example, track features implemented, but also track the number of defects. Then there is incentive to get the features done, but not at the expense of lots of defects.
• Following on from that, it is clear that as our team are always, to some extent, going to build what is monitored, make sure you are monitoring what you want to build!
• Monitoring a number of useful indicators means you’ll get an earlier warning if things aren’t going right. But monitoring too many means that your team starts to spend more time monitoring than doing. Get the balance right.

Remember, this is about monitoring progress. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t measure other aspects of the project as well – time elapsed, budget spent, etc. But those measurements are useful in managing the project itself, not in telling you if you are moving towards success.

Hope you’ve found this installment of the Project Management Guide useful. How do you go about measuring progress? What tips do you have to share? Post a comment below!

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was bringing a certain stream of messages from Twitter into the Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room. This is just a short post to let you know about those messages, and also gives me a chance to talk a bit more about Twitter.

One of the ways Twitter users have developed to help each other is something called hash-tags. These are simply tags created by prefixing a hash (#) onto a word. The advantage of this is that it makes it much easier to search for tweets on a specific topic.

The reason for adding the hash is that it means you won’t get all tweets that happen to use that word, but only those which are talking about that topic. For example, the #superbowl tag allowed Twitter users everywhere to search for others talking about the game!

Now, these tags are also used to help create ad-hoc groups. One of these groups is Project Managers on Twitter, also known as PMOT. When members of this group send a tweet they think will be of interest to other group members, they add the tag #pmot.

Group members can find these tweets in various ways (through certain clients, through RSS feeds, through the group webpage, etc.) but the simplest way is just to use the search functionality of the Twitter web site. In the search box, just put in #pmot and click on search to see what is being said.

I hope you find this quick guide useful! Let me know if you join the PMOT group, we’d love to see you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.