“Broken Meetings (and how you’ll fix them)” from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

The above is a recording of a presentation by Merlin Mann (of, amongst other things, 43 Folders productivity site fame) on how awful meetings are, and how to try to make them better. Merlin comes to this  from a creative technical worker point of view, and points out how hard it can be for people doing creative, technical work to get back into the flow of what they were doing if they have been interrupted by a meeting.

It’s a full presentation, so quite long, but well worth watching.

(From a post on 43 Folders. You can also grab the slides from SlideShare.)

Project work can be tough. Project management can be really difficult, and take a lot out of you. I’m sure you’ve all had your fair share of tough projects, but can you remember your hardest one?

I remember one of my most difficult was a major infrastructure rollout project. It involved people within the business, and a contract with a large external supplier to provide most of the technical work.

Everything went fine through the procurement stages of the project, when there was a tight team inside the business. Once we actually got to the rollout stage, though, problems started to arise.

The problems were nothing that couldn’t have been expected, and the kind of thing that happens with any infrastructure work, particularly one which requires civils work (digging of trenches, gaining permission from landowners, and so on). Delays occurred, because delays will always occur when you are dealing with numerous separate organisations, all with their own drivers and timescales.

Unfortunately, I was a relatively inexperienced project manager, and had an Executive who was even more inexperienced in project work. I failed to explain adequately the realities of project work, and his frustration with the project diverging from the original plan made a year ago grew and grew.

Ultimately, this led to the Executive attempting to impose the management style he used internally onto the external supplier, who was not happy with this. The loss of trust and the breakdown of the relationship meant the rest of the project was a constant battle.

That project taught me that managing my Executive was at least as important as managing my team (something Elizabeth Harrin talks about in a recent blog post on managing up). But the price was a stressful and unpleasant year or so, for me and the rest of my team, and extra work trying to repair relationships and morale on an ongoing basis.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t actually my hardest project! I’ll tell you all a little about that in a future post, but I’m curious as to what you have found to be your hardest project. What happened that made it so hard? What did you learn from it? And what would you do differently now?

Photo courtesy of stuartpilbrow. Some rights reserved.

This is a very quick (3 minutes) TED video from Terry Moore, which just goes to show you should never dismiss the possibility of learning a better way to do something you think you already know everything about!

I think everyone by now knows how I feel about meetings. Certainly they can be very painful to sit through when they are unnecessary, and I think most of us need to cut down on how many we hold.

But one of the biggest issues I have with meetings is actually just to do with organising them. Because I go into a lot of different businesses, I see a lot of methods for arranging meetings. If I’m lucky, they include something like Outlook, and people in the business keep their calendars up to date. If I’m not, then I can look forward to long email conversations trying to arrange a date.

Naturally, this gets harder and harder as the number of people involved increases. Add in people external to the business, and then even the Outlook calendar can’t help you. I can’t even begin to calculate the hours and hours I’ve wasted trying to arrange simple meetings…

Happily, I’ve come across something which gets rid of most of the pain. Doodle is a great service that takes the pain out of scheduling meetings.

It works by letting you give a choice of days and times when you are able to have the meeting. Then it creates a poll, which you can either email as a link to all participants yourself, or even just enter their email addresses and allow Doodle to do that. Each participant is then able to go and select which times they can make.

When everyone has chosen, you get an email telling you, and can go and look what time is best – Doodle will tell you which is the most popular time. Then you can email everyone to confirm the specific time.

No more email tennis, no more phonecalls trying to track down a time everyone can do. Just a nice, simple interface to solve this annoying problem!

Even better, Doodle can interface with very many calendar applications, and if you can’t do it automatically, will even email you a little file which will add the meeting into your calendar.

Doodle is free to use, though it will show you ads. There are also ‘premium’ accounts that have various features, which are well worth considering. The “Solo” version is only €22 / $29, and, frankly, there have been times when I’d gladly have paid that just to get one meeting sorted out…

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of trying to get just a few people to agree on a time and date, check out Doodle. It will make life so much simpler!

There’s a post over at PM Student by Dr Paul Giammalvo comparing project management certifications. I have some more to say about this article later, but I just wanted to put out a quick post about how the PRINCE2 qualifications score in this.

Full disclosure: I hold a PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification.

The PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification scores a lowly 78. (Click through to the article for information on how the scores were assigned.) Compare that to PMI’s PMP qualification which scores 9624. That’s quite a difference. The main reason for the difference is the lack of any pre-qualification training, education or experience requirements to take the PRINCE2 exams.

At first sight, it would look like PRINCE2 Practitioner is an appalling qualification to get, practically worthless. But I think that would be completely wrong.

The problem is that the author is comparing apples with oranges. It’s fairly simple – these are quotes taken from the relevant webpages for each qualification:

“Globally recognized and demanded, the PMP® demonstrates that you have the experience, education and competency to successfully lead and direct projects.”

– PMI PMP Credential

“The Practitioner examination assesses whether a candidate could apply PRINCE2 to running and managing a non-complex project within an environment supporting PRINCE2.”

– APMG-International PRINCE2 Certification leaflet

Put simply, the PMP qualification aims to say “We certify that this person is a competent project manager”. The PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification aims to say “We certify that this project manager can apply PRINCE2”.

It’s an important difference. Certainly when I received PRINCE2 training, it was after I had worked on projects for a number of years. The trainers explicitly started the course by saying the exam does not test your knowledge or skill in project management, but your knowledge of how to apply PRINCE2 to your project management.

PRINCE2 is a methodology, and doesn’t aim to be everything a project manager could ever need to know – as the OGC PRINCE2 website says:

“PRINCE2 does not cover all aspects of project management.  Areas such as leadership and people management skills, detailed coverage of project management tools and techniques are well covered by other existing and proven methods and are therefore excluded from PRINCE2.”

So of course there isn’t a pre-requisite amount of experience or training you must have before taking the PRINCE2 exams – because the PRINCE2 qualification isn’t certifying your competency in those areas, and it doesn’t claim to. It is specifically about whether you are able to apply PRINCE2 to a project.

(In general I’d say there is an assumption you will have a certain amount of project management experience, but certainly it isn’t mandated.)

That’s not to say that PRINCE2 Practitioner hasn’t come to be seen as a proxy for project management expertise – it has, particularly in the UK. But I think that’s mainly because there hasn’t been a ‘professional body’ in the UK attempting to impose a defined set of standards as to what a competent project manager is, whereas there has been a significant amount of work put into improving the PRINCE2 methodology, and popularising its use. Because of its near ubiquity, the market has come to see PRINCE2 as a measurement of project management competency, but the organisations behind it never claimed that for it.

In essence, in many places, being a competent and experienced project manager is correlated with having a PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification, but is not caused by it.

Does this mean we should all rush off and get PMP, and ignore PRINCE2? Well, no. PRINCE2 is, as I’ve said, a methodology. It provides a common set of standards, taxonomy, processes and so forth. It is, in a way, like the protocols used on computer networks – it allows interconnections, and for components, um, people, to be dropped into a new situation and still know the language. There is something akin to a network effect here – the advantages of speaking the same language as everyone else are enormous. It’s something you must be able to do to have any chance of succeeding.

What does that mean? Well, for ‘general’ project management (if there is such a thing), if you’re in a country where PRINCE2 isn’t particularly popular or dominant, especially the US, then yes, plan to gain the PMP qualification eventually. If PRINCE2 is popular in your country, look to gain the Practitioner qualification, but be aware your experience of projects is what will help you get a job, not the qualification.

As I said, I have more I want to talk about regarding this comparison article, and I’ll do that in a later post.

A TED talk by Tom Wujec about the Marshmallow Challenge, where teams of participants attempt to build a tower from spaghetti!

The interesting part for us as project managers comes when we look at who performs well – typically teams who know how to collaborate, and, importantly, iterate their designs based on rapid prototyping. Something for all of us, not just the software project managers, to think about…

You don’t need to be involved in project management for long to come across “scope creep”, which can end up being a major problem. Each extra little suggestion seems like a good idea at the time, and only a tiny bit more work. Soon, though, the extra little things begin to take over the project, and the focus on what was originally planned is lost.

It’s important to spot scope creep starting, and put a stop to it early on. But reading a recent post by Josh Nankivel, called Jenga Project Management Processes, reminded me that there’s another area where project managers need to pay a little more attention, and that’s process creep.

You may not have heard it called that before, but I bet you have come across process creep. You start off with a project with a tight, lean set of processes – just enough to make sure the project is under control. And then someone makes a suggestion…

Suddenly, you have a process for checking in and out project files – even though there’s only one person that does it. Then there’s a process for asking a question about the requirements, and a form to fill in. Then a process for confirming you’ve received a work package, and another one for confirming it has been submitted when you finish.

Eventually you find yourself with a process to go through before a process can be updated or removed or added or you can even go to the bathroom!

Don’t get me wrong, I can see a place for all of these processes – well, almost all. But that place isn’t on most projects. Large, complicated projects need a lot of work to make sure they are kept under control. When you have many people working towards the same goal, perhaps fity, a hundred people, or more, you need to make sure they all know what needs to be done, and how to do it.

But each of these processes is an overhead. In a large project, you have to accept the overhead, because the likely outcome of not having these processes is much more costly, in terms of mistakes, and reworking, and so on, than just having them.

Most projects, though, just aren’t that big. If only one person is updating project files, then they don’t need to check them out – they just need to do it. If someone has a query about the requirements, ask the person that wrote them for clarification, don’t fill in a form requesting that he or she be asked. Make a note of the answer, sure, but don’t make a novel out of it.

Every process has to be looked at in terms both of the benefits it provides, and of the costs it imposes. Generally, the benefits are about avoiding duplicate work, avoiding wrong work, and making sure everyone knows what they need to be doing. But the costs are about lost time, both yours and your project team’s – every time they are filling in a form, or following an unnecessary process, they aren’t getting on with the actual project work.

So keep an eye out for process creep. Remember, a process is just a tool to help you get the project done successfully. If it’s getting in the way of that instead, then you need to fix it, or bin it.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about the difficulties there can be with getting good information about project management when you’re starting out.

Naturally, there are some great resources on the internet. To blow my own trumpet for a moment, my own New to Project Management? page offers some good pointers. Equally, there are a lot of other sites which offer very short introductions to the discipline.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised that that is probably not enough for many people. When I first started my career, I was lucky enough to work for an organisation that understood the importance of project management, and had excellent mentors that could help me progress.

But there are many organisations out there that don’t understand this, or don’t have the resources to be able to pay for expensive training courses for their staff. What about prospective project managers in those places? What about the people in those organisations who have already had a project dropped on them, but are beginning to realise they haven’t got the tools to tackle it?

It seems to me that what these people need is a simple guide, not just to what project managers do, but to why they do it. An inexpensive pack of information that not only gives them the tools to tackle project management, but an understanding of when to use them. That understanding is really valuable, and it’s what you need to make all the processes project managers use make sense.

A couple of months ago, I started work on something to hopefully help those people. The more time I’ve spent on it, the more I’ve realised how useful it could be. I’ll be releasing it as my first information product, and I’m pretty excited with how it’s turned out. I hope you will be too.

I’ll be finishing it in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll keep you updated about how you can get your hands on it.

I’ve been looking around at a lot of websites recently that yell about how hard project management is, how difficult it is to figure out. They talk about the complex processes, the confusing techniques, and the baffling methods.

The truth is, though, that project management isn’t difficult. No, really, it isn’t.

At the most basic level, all project management needs is a fairly logical mind, and an ability to keep an eye on what is happening. That’s it. You use the logical mind to figure out what needs to happen, and in what order, and then, once you’ve assigned the work, you keep an eye on it to make sure it does.

Of course, that’s not to say project management can’t be complicated, but that’s a different thing to difficult. The basics above will serve you fine for the smallest projects, but as the projects themselves get more complicated, so do the techniques you need to use to keep on top of them.

Unfortunately, that means a lot of people jump straight into learning a large, cumbersome, and over-the-top project management methodology, complete with its own particular terms and way of approaching a project. While you may need to know these things later, they’re not what you should start with straight away.

The best thing to do is to gain a solid understanding of the foundations of project management, the reasons why project managers do what they do, not just the how. The reasons for doing something will always be more useful to you than just one view of how to do it.

By learning why, you’ll be able to tailor your approach to differing situations. By learning why, you won’t be one of those dreaded project managers that apply one methodology in full, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. By learning why, you’ll be a better project manager.