Projects are temporary, by their very nature. That means all of us are going to have to close down our projects. But this is part of project management that is too often neglected. So what are we actually trying to achieve?

When a project approaches the end of its work (or when a decision is made that it should be ended early) we need to begin preparing to close it down. The basic idea is that every project, and the business, benefits from having a controlled and organised shut down.

By this point, the project will have delivered on its objectives. The products that were supposed to be produced should be finished, and ready to go. The aims of the project should have been met.

This means we need to:

• Confirm we have actually met the project’s objectives
• Alert those areas we drew resource from that their people are coming back
• Formally hand the product over to the business (or whoever is using it)
• Set out any follow-on actions to be carried out by the business after the project is complete (e.g. measure the benefits after a period of time to see if they meet expectations)
• Get confirmation from the Executive that the project can finish
• Archive the project documents

I also like to make sure the team as a whole gets together and identifies any lessons the business can learn from the project – what went well, what didn’t, and so on.

That’s a quick look at project closure – what else do you do? Do you have a formal closure at all, or do you just turn out the lights as you leave? Let me know!

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.
• The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.
• The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get one with their tasks.

Today I want to look at something related to the last concept. We already know we need to protect the project team, and make sure they can get on with the tasks assigned to them. But this also means we need to get on with the tasks assigned to us, the job of project management. The concept I am looking at today is: The project manager doesn’t do the project work. The project manager does the project managing.

Project management is hard work. On all but very small projects, it is a full-time job. And that means you really shouldn’t be being pulled off to do project work.

I’m not saying that project managers don’t have the skills to do some of the project work. Many of us will have worked our way up to project management through project work – we are used to it, and we understand it.

But if a project manager is doing the work, then he isn’t managing the project! We need to remember where our skills lie. Often we will get dragged into doing the project work, but this is a failure of project management (usually on the organisation’s behalf, not the project manager’s), not an essential part of it.

Make sure you are using appropriate resources to get the work done. The project manager is rarely an appropriate resource! And that gives us a project management concept: The project manager doesn’t do the project work. The project manager does the project managing.

(Having said that, I have ended up doing project work for the vast majority of projects I have worked on. This isn’t a good thing, but it is the real world. You should aim to avoid this if at all possible.)

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know this already, but yesterday I passed my PRINCE2 Practitioner Re-registration exam. PRINCE2 has two levels of qualification, Foundation and Practitioner. A Foundation pass lasts forever, and you need to have one before you can take the Practitioner exam. A Practitioner pass needs to be renewed every five years if you want to keep describing yourself as, well, a PRINCE2 Practitioner.

Given that here in the UK PRINCE2 is the de facto standard for project management qualifications, I’m happy to have passed the re-registration exam – it means I can still compete for contract jobs!

But… I have to admit, I wasn’t that thrilled with the exam. More particularly, I wasn’t pleased with the format of it, because I think it reflects a worrying trend from the owners of PRINCE2.

Way back in the mists of time, when I first got qualified, the Foundation exam was a multiple choice exam, which it still is, and the Practitioner exam was essay based, which it no longer is. Now, the Practitioner exam is an “objective testing examination”. Which, as far as I can tell, means it is multiple choice. Complicated multiple choice, granted, but multiple choice all the same.

I’ll admit it, I have a terrible prejudice against multiple choice exams. The last one I had done was the PRINCE2 Foundation exam. Essentially, this was just a memory exercise – it checked you knew what the various PRINCE2 terms were. Which was fine, given the level it was aimed at – it was a first step on the qualifications ladder for project support staff, and others who needed to show they had a basic knowledge of PRINCE2.

But I’ve always thought that to test real understanding of a subject, you need to send someone off with little guidance, to navigate their own way to the solution. And that’s why I liked the essay style Practitioner exam I originally took – the demonstration of understanding was all in your own hands.

That’s not to say that the re-registration exam I took didn’t test understanding. The format of the questions was such that it did require you to have both a knowledge of the PRINCE2 methodology, and an understanding of the processes within it.

However, what it didn’t test was an understanding of the principles of project management, of when it was appropriate to use the various processes the methodology uses, and even more importantly, when it was appropriate not to.

Now, a lot of you will probably be thinking, and quite reasonably, that PRINCE2 is a methodology, so an exam to be registered as a Practitioner of it should only test understanding of the methodology itself. It’s a persuasive argument, but not one I accept.

PRINCE2 is in the interesting position of being the de facto project management standard in the UK and much of Europe. This means, I believe, that it not only should try to spread itself as a methodology, but also to spread an understanding of what project management is, the principles behind it. In my experience, PMI just isn’t well established enough over here to do that job.

To me, the key to working with and using PRINCE2 effectively is a thorough understanding of the principles behind in. Maybe I was lucky in the way I was taught it originally, but the emphasis of the trainers was very much on why certain processes and procedures were used, not how to use them. And the reason for this was that they continually stressed the need to ensure you were applying PRINCE2 in a flexible and light touch way.

I can practically hear the howls from the Agileists out there at the suggestion PRINCE2 can ever be light touch or even flexible. But it really can. If you just took the PRINCE2 manual and tried to apply everything in there to a project, you’d kill all but the largest projects straight away. But PRINCE2 is designed to be scalable – and that’s where it gets tricky.

Because the only way a methodology can be scalable is by using the judgement of the people applying it, by using the experience, understanding, and plain common sense of the project manager to decide what is needed for any particular project. And the ability to do that is something that is very hard to test.

I’d also say it is impossible to test in any sort of multiple choice exam.

And that’s why I preferred the essay based exam. By having the ability to write an open-ended answer, the person being tested can not only demonstrate an understanding of the processes, but also explain how he would apply it in the specific scenario given. He can, in short, demonstrate his abilities as a project manager, not as a PRINCE2 regurgitation tool.

Now, I can understand why the people who look after PRINCE2 would want to move to this “objective testing” exam format. If nothing else, it’s an awful lot cheaper to grade a paper when all you have to do is scan the answer sheet for the right marks in the right places (or, in my case, just have it all done online). And it moves it towards the style used in many other qualification exams.

But I think they are ultimately storing up a huge problem for themselves. There is already a body of opinion out there which thinks PRINCE2 is simply awful, too heavyweight, too inflexible, too much of a pain. I’d argue the real problem these people have come up against is poor project management, poor project managers, where a methodology has been applied without much understanding of the principles behind it.

Worryingly, this style of examination seems, to me, to be encouraging more of this type of project manager. All it will produce is someone who understands the processes very well, but doesn’t really understand the reasons for them. Essay based exams are much harder to grade, but the reason for that is that they need to have a real live human being doing it. And that ‘problem’, of needing a human being, seems to me to be, in fact, the greatest strength of them.

Because a human being is able to read the essay and get a real feel for whether the person writing has understood what is actually happening in the scenario, has understood more than the right cookie cutter to pick up from the PRINCE2 tool box. And being able to assess that seems to me to be incredibly valuable.

If it becomes the common view that all a Practitioner qualified project manager brings you is someone who will blindly apply a methodology with no thought as to whether it is appropriate, all qualified Practitioners will suffer. In short, I worry that this style of exam is, ultimately, going to devalue the PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification.

What do you think? Am I just being snobbish about multiple choice? Am I wrong in thinking a PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification should be about more than memorising the PRINCE2 manual? Is PRINCE2 already seen as too heavy-handed a methodology to ever use? Do you think PMI is in a position in Europe to take up the mantle of spreading awareness of the principles of project management?

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.
• The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.

Today, I want to look at what is controlled, the resources that a project manager uses to carry out the work of the project, and particularly the most important resource. The concept I am looking at today is: The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get on with their tasks.

We’ve already seen that the project manager can, within limits, control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled. But how are they controlled? Essentially, we are looking at the control of the resources that a project has. A project manager will have a certain amount of time and money to achieve a certain amount of scope.

But the key resource, the one which effects all of the project, is, of course, the project team, the people who are actually doing the work. In them, the three areas of control are combined.

Each of the team members has only a limited amount of time they can work on the project. Each of the team members will need to be paid for. And each of the team members will have different skills, and different abilities.

Project management, then, needs to be able to guide the work of the team in the right way. The project manager must allocate the work to the right individuals, giving guidance as to how long to spend on it, what quality is needed, and, if expenditure other than that on the team member’s salary is needed, how much can be spent.

So, project management needs control of the resources allocated to the project, and that includes the project team. But, unlike money and time, team members can easily be distracted and pulled off to work on something else. But a project manager needs to retain control.

This leads us to another project management concept: The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get on with their tasks.

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.

But how can we control a project? What tools do we have available to us to exert control? What can we do to effect the path we are taking?

In general, we have only three areas we can work with in project management. We can vary how long we spend on a task, how much money we spend on it, and what the finished output of that task actually is.

So, for example, we could spend a week on a task, or a year. We could spend pennies, or millions. We could make something which just about works, or a gold-plated solution.

By working with these areas, we can try to influence how the project progresses. But remember, a project manager would not have ultimate control over any of these areas. They can only vary what is done to a limited extent.

A project manager can’t decide to spend a year on a task if the project is supposed to be finished in 6 months. A task which is supposed to cost pennies can not have millions spent on it on the say-so of the project manager. And the minimum quality required is set by someone outside, not by the project manager.

This brings us to the next project management concept: The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.

Recently, I put together a little series on the social media tools that project managers could use to help manage their teams and their projects. I’ve distilled some of this into a presentation, which you can see here:

You can get more information about any of the tools and techniques at The Social Media Project Manager – Roundup page. Hope you find it useful!

Estimating how much work there is in the project, and how long each part of it will take, is a vital skill in project management. You can’t sensibly manage a project without having at least some idea of how long you think each piece of work will take!

But, of course, it’s practically impossible to sit down at the start of a project and pronounce when it is going to finish. Issues crop up, the environment changes, tasks take longer than you thought, and so on.

I’ve already written about the scheduling process for a project. This should help you arrive at a list of tasks. These are your starting point for estimating.

Because you have a list of tasks, you are able to begin estimating the length each one will take. Immediately, this is more useful than trying to estimate the length of the entire project, or major sections of it. Bringing your thinking down to the level of specific tasks makes it much easier to mentally grab hold of the work, and have a sensible idea of how much time is involved.

(This also works as a sanity check on your task list – if you can’t visualise what has to be done to complete a task, maybe you need to break it down a little more.)

Remember, you are not necessarily the expert on how long the tasks will take. You have a project team who will actually be doing the majority of the work – use their expertise and their knowledge of both the work and themselves to come up with estimates of how long each task will take.

And don’t forget: you’ll have these estimates wrong. I’ve been using the word “estimate” in this post, but don’t forget the simpler version – “guess”. Yes, you are using experience and knowledge to try and make it a reasonable guess, but it still is one.

It’s a fact of project management life that at the start of a project the estimates will be off. The reason I suggest only scheduling in detail for a few weeks in advance is that you can learn from how far off your estimates are. The accuracy of your estimates should improve as the project goes on.

What about you? What techniques do you use for estimating? Let me know!

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

Two weeks ago, I suggested a first project management concept, and last week I suggested a second project management concept.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.

These suggestions tell us why we do projects, and why we need to manage them. Today, I want to look at the two pillars project management needs to deliver to us. Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.

I’ve already spoken about project management being about bringing change into a business, in a limited fashion. In other words, we attempt to control change, to stop it being chaos.

But to be able to do that, to have that element of control, we also need to understand what is actually happening with the project. We need to have an awareness of what is going on.

Without that awareness, control becomes impossible. You simply cannot know what direction you need to steer the project in if you don’t know what direction it is currently going in! You can’t know if your attempts at control are working unless you can see what is happening.

And that brings us to our third project management concept: Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.

What do you think? Do you have control and awareness of your projects? Which is hardest to get?

The G20 summit has just ended in London, with an agreement every representative there has signed up to. The leaders of the 19 leading countries in the world, and a representative of the EU, have agreed to collectively contribute $1 trillion dollars for various schemes designed to help the global economy, and to tighten up regulation of the financial industry.

Now, I’m not going to try and critique the agreement, or pronounce on whether or not it will be successful in helping the global economy. For one thing, I’m not an economist – and not even economists seem agreed on whether this will help or not. More importantly, that isn’t what this blog is about!

Instead, I want to look at something we can all learn from – the process that the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, seems to have gone through to try and get an agreement. (Well, not just him – mainly his staff and officials, but you know what I mean.)

Negotiation is something we all have to do in our jobs, though I’m assuming generally your negotiations don’t have quite as much impact as his…

What did Gordon Brown do to get agreement?

First of all, he had to clarify to himself exactly what he hoped to achieve. In this case, he obviously had to work with a wide variety of experts in the subject matter. His time as the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK Finance Minister) presumably meant he had some experience, but he is a professional politician, not an economist.

But his experience in this area means that, if nothing else, he already had a circle of advisers he knew and trusted, who he could turn to to get the information he needed.

Once he knew what his aim was, Gordon Brown began a tour of many countries around the world. He made sure he visited strategic countries, those who were regional leaders, to both sell his idea to them ahead of the summit, but also to gather information from them, to see what modifications he might need to make to his own position.

This was a vital step – it showed he was willing to be flexible, willing to listen, and willing to work with others to get to a solution all could agree to.

Importantly, one of the main early visits was to the United States. Any agreement absolutely had to have the United States on board, otherwise it would be doomed to fail. Gordon Brown had to make sure very early on that the UK’s aim fit with the aim of the United States, and that the two countries could work together.

After this worldwide tour, the summit itself began. By this point, Gordon Brown knew that his aim was in accord with that of the United States, and knew how close it was to the aims of the other countries who would be attending. His work beforehand also meant he knew what was important to each of the other countries present.

This enabled the horsetrading aspect of the negotiation to work. The final communique is a balance of the positions of the participants. Some things from the original UK position were presumably dropped (increased spending by all countries to stimulate their own economies?) while others were strengthened (tighter regulation of financial institutions?).

By making sure everyone could identify something in the final communique that they wanted to have, Gordon Brown could make sure everyone present was happy to put their name to it, and be seen smiling in the final ‘family photo’ at the end.

So what can we learn about negotiation from this?

Well, we can identify some clear and simple steps we can apply to our own negotiations:

1. Define your position.
   Before you go into any negotiation, you want to make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve. What would be the best result you could hope for? What areas are you willing to compromise on? Which aren’t you? Talk to your own circle of advisers and experts to decide what is important to you, and which isn’t.
2. Understand the position of the other players.
   To reduce surprises in a negotiation, make sure you spend some time gathering information about the likely position of the other participants in it. Sometimes you can only do this by putting yourself in their shoes, and trying to decide what they will be trying to achieve. Other times, you can actually go around and have meetings with them, to listen to their point of view. Regardless of how, always try to understand where they are coming from, and why.
3. Get the most important players on your side.
   If there are key players in the negotiation, whose lack of agreement on its own could scupper the whole deal, make sure you get them on your side early. Going into a negotiation without knowing if the most important person there agrees with you or not is risky at best, and foolish at worst. It may not be possible to get agreement beforehand, but at least make sure your position fits with your belief of what they want.
4. Be flexible to get agreement.
   Play off the various positions against each other. If one aspect is important to one player, compromise on that to gain something from them that is important to you. With a multi-party negotiation, this can become very complex! But because you have gathered the information beforehand about their positions, you will have a clearer handle on their aims, and will be able to plan ahead some of the concessions to make.
5. Make sure everyone can claim a success.
   There are very few negotiations that are a simple battle, that can lead to a winner and a loser. It is better by far to make sure everyone gets something, that everyone can claim the negotiation as a success. By working like this, everyone in the negotiation will be working together to make it successful, rather than having some acting defensively.

By keeping these steps in mind, hopefully we can have more successful, and you never know, maybe more pleasant negotiations in the future!

What do you think? How do you approach negotiations? Do you use the same approach for negotiations internal to your business as those involving someone external, be it a supplier or customer? Let me know!

One of the important skills we need to have as project managers is the ability to handle problems that crop up in the execution of a project. Much as we might work to make sure that problems don’t arise, it is inevitable that something will go wrong. So how do we handle it when it does?

These unforeseen problems are called issues. The first thing we need to do is make sure we capture these issues as they arise. By definition, issues are unexpected, so to make sure they don’t get lost in the rush of day to day events, we need to log them as they arise – to simply write them down, and make sure we don’t forget them.

Next, we need to look at the issues we have captured.

1. 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?
2. What impact is it going to have?
• Will it effect quality?
• Will it effect timescales?
• Will it effect budget?
3. What can I do about it?
• Are there actions I can take as project manager to solve this?
• Do I need to refer it up to the Executive?
• Is taking no action a possible response?
4. What impact would there be in taking action to deal with this?
• What cost?
• What timescales?
• What quality impact?

Depending on the answers to these questions, I may then be able to deal with the issue. If there is action to be taken, and I can do so while keeping within my contingency on the project, in terms of money, time, quality, and so forth, then I will do so.

If there is action that can be taken, but would take me beyond my contingency, then I need to ask the Executive for guidance. Remember, any changes to the project outside of contingency need to be agreed – it is entirely possible they could take the project from a worthwhile use of company resources, to a waste of them.

Finally, I need to make sure that I update my log of issues with action taken, and any other information on the issue.