We all want to have successful projects. But what do we mean by successful? It’s not just a matter of hitting our milestones, on time and on budget. It’s also about making sure that the project goals are of value to the organisation we are working for.

At the start of every project, you will produce, or help produce, a document that sets out what success looks like, the business case. That means you need to be able to examine the situation the organisation is in, and identify what problem the project will solve.

But this work doesn’t just stop there – while you may be working away on your project just fine, there will be other things happening in the world! It’s important that you remember to revisit the business case often, to check that the project is still meeting a need.

Remember, a project that is managed perfectly won’t necessarily be a success. Don’t forget to look up now and then, and take a look at the wider picture. A successful project isn’t about perfect documentation, it’s about delivering something that benefits your organisation.

Project management is about creating change. All projects invole some sort of change, a change that will be beneficial to the organisation running the project. That’s why we have to be comfortable with change.

Embracing change is one of the ways that project management is different from other sorts of management. In a business as usual situation, management is supposed to keep things the same. Unleashing change there can be dangerous and chaotic.

Project management, though, is about controlling that change, as much as we can. We work to channel the change in useful ways, to make sure it doesn’t descend into chaos. But the thing about change is it will always lead to some unexpected consequences.

That means we need to be relaxed about facing those consequences. Sometimes, they will be issues that need to be solved, and solved quickly, to keep the project on track. But other times they will be opportunities instead, and we need to be flexible enough to recognise them, and divert the project to take advantage of them.

We are always dealing with change. And that’s one of the best things about project management – because it means we’re making a difference.

I’m pleased to announce the release of my audio lecture course, “Understanding Project Management”. The course is designed to help give newcomers to project management a solid foundation. It covers all the essential concepts and techniques you will need, and help get you started on your project management journey.

You will also learn about some of the common pitfalls you will face – and how to deal with nay-sayers in your own organisation!

You will learn:

• to begin a project – defining what you want to achieve
• to get to where you want to be – planning
• to recognise when problems are coming – and how to deal with them
• to deal with risks by spotting them early, and taking the right action then – not when it is too late
• to review your project regularly – recognise where you are, what you have achieved, and what there is to do

As well as the 11 lectures, the course also includes project management document templates, enabling you to get up and running quickly. As a special offer at launch, there is currently 20% off the list price – don’t delay, this will only last until the end of next week!

For more information visit the Understanding Project Management site, or go straight to the order page.

Recently, I wrote about a preliminary study that had been done attempting to compare the value of various project management qualifications. I pointed out that, at least in part, it seemed to comparing apples with oranges, in that one qualification considered (PRINCE2) doesn’t try to sell itself as a general project management qualification, but specifically as a qualification in implementing one particular methodology.

But there is a wider issue here. The explicit statement was made that those qualifications which require longer levels of experience before being awarded were inherently better than others. I think the important point to consider is: better for whom?

Some of the bodies involved with project management at the moment are perfectly clear that they are trying to professionalise the career. When I say this, I am trying to use the precise meaning of professionalisation. This is not a matter of taking pride in your work, of always trying to do the best you can. No, this is about defining a set of formal requirements that someone must meet before they can even become a project manager. It is, in effect, an attempt to raise the barriers for entry into the profession considerably.

On the one hand, this is fantastic news for project managers who meet these requirements. By raising barriers to entry, they naturally decrease the total amount of people considered project managers. By decreasing the supply of project managers, it is likely, almost inevitable in fact, that the average salary of project managers will rise. I make no bones about it, professionalisation of a career is very good news financially for people in that career.

But the flip-side of this is that there are costs to the rest of society for doing this. Traditionally, these costs have been tolerated and accepted because society also gains a benefit. Let’s consider some of the traditional professions. Medicine is highly professionalised, allowing doctors to charge more, but that is accepted because the cost of having amateur medics running around was very high. The law is professional, because there needs to be a defined set of rules, and people who can interpret these rules, to allow society to function effectively.

Over time, as society has become more complex, more and more careers have professionalised. Accountancy, architecture, engineering, dentistry, and so on, become professions. It is possible to point at all of these and see how the benefits to society have developed, meaning the higher financial costs are accepted. Importantly, it is also possible to see how there were few external factors, other than the drive from within those careers, for regulation, of which professionalisation is one. Often, in fact, there is a pressure against professionalisation, and regulation, because the upfront costs would be lower (as generally people are poor at taking into account the future costs of, for example, a poorly engineered bridge).

We can see, then, that professionalisation can be seen as a deal between a particular career and society – if society is willing to pay more, they will, overall get a better service, to the benefit of all.

But, importantly, in those cases there were no other clear and immediate external pressures to ensure quality. Yes, poor medicine will cause problems, but often only after a significant time has passed. The punishment for accepting poorer work came much later than the reward of getting a cheaper deal.

With project management, however, I am not sure whether this holds. Often, poor project management will lead to a relatively quick poor result, as the project fails, or costs rise dramatically. Organisations that use project management already have a significant incentive to ensure good project management, because the cost of poor project management is quickly felt.

What this means, then, is that there is already a significant pressure on project management to be good, and effective. Is, therefore, a move towards full professionalisation something that would be welcomed by the rest of society – if society is already paying for good project management, because it is in their interests, would they really want to pay even more as the career raises the barriers to entry through professionalisation?

I’m not saying here that the professionalisation of project management is a bad thing. I am saying it needs to be considered. Some of the best project managers I have met are people who never expected to start out on that career path, but instead, after a period of years or decades doing something else, they were able to enter the career, bringing fresh thinking, and new techniques, which ultimately end up enriching all of project management. Would they still have done that if there was a major barrier for entry later in their career? How many people do you know who train to become a doctor in their forties?

Professionalisation would have benefits to the project management career, but we’d be foolish to think there weren’t also costs. Excluding effective people from outside is a cost. Even the higher salaries could be a cost, if they simply turn some businesses away from innovating with new projects.

What we as project managers have to do is make sure we go into this with open eyes. And if professionalisation is a path the career wants to go down (and, frankly, once the process has begun, I don’t think it could be stopped even if a significant number wanted it to) we need to remember that this is a deal between us and society. That means we need to be better at showing what the benefits of project management, and of people experienced in it, are, not only to the business we are directly working for, but to wider society.

In essence, much as professions such as medicine and the law have a wider duty to the public good, project management would need to as well. That means a clear formulation of what that duty is would need to be distilled, and that, when asked to do something that goes against it, we would have to be willing to say no.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what that formulation would look like. I’m open to suggestions.

How do you find out the requirements for a product in your project? How do you find out how long a certain task will take? How do you make sure your Executive is up to date with where the project is?

Communication is a vital part of project management. To me, it is the most important part. Without good communication, you won’t know whether you are on track, or miles off course. Without good communication, issues can arise that completely surprise you. Without good communication, you won’t know what your project is supposed to achieve.

There are many tools and techniques you can use to improve communication. I’ve talked about some of them in my series on social media tools for project managers. But sometimes it’s important that we go back to basics. And the most basic communication tool we have is talking.

Talking is fantastic. When you are face to face, you can really explore issues, you can tell when there is a pressure point that needs to be discussed, and you can rapidly get to the bottom of any issues. Talking is an amazing tool in our arsenal, but one too many project managers don’t use enough.

Emails and status reports are useful, but they can never beat a good face to face talk. Get out from behind your computer and talk to your team.

Last time, I talked about my hardest project, the production of Understanding Project Management.

The work was hard, but so far feedback on the sneak preview has been good.

The whole process has also given me a new insight into the difficulties faced by our team members. If they are too personally invested into what they are producing, they may shy away from working on the difficult areas, the parts they are concerned about. This is particularly true if you are part of an organisation that has a low tolerance of failure among its staff.

As a project manager, you need to make sure that your oversight of the project let’s you spot these problems early, and that you make sure the project environment is one that supports the team – even if they do make the ocassional mistake.

Ultimately, any project will be better if the team members know they have the opportunity to try new ideas, and won’t be berated for failing. As I keep saying, all projects feature change of some sort, and all change involves some risk. Don’t be surprised if sometimes risks actually occur, just be prepared to help everyone fix it.

Last week, I wrote about a difficult project, and asked you what some of your hardest project was. I also promised I’d tell you about my hardest project, and here it is.

My hardest project is actually a small one. Just one person was needed to do the work on the product, and the project management of that work took only a small amount of my time – theoretically. In fact, I found myself spending longer and longer on the planning of the work.

Soon, the project management load of this one small project started to crowd out other work. I spent more and more time assessing the risks the project faced, planning what tasks needed to be done next, and thinking about quality tests.

The reason for all this was, of course, that I didn’t want to face the person who was supposed to be actually doing the work, and hadn’t been. Mainly because that person was me.

The project I am talking about is one I’ve mentioned a couple of times here. It is creating an information product, a simple course to help you get the foundations of project management clear.

As I was writing it, a strange thing happened. Despite being pretty confident in terms of my knowledge of project management, I started to become more and more uncertain about what I was writing. Doubts would beset me, from everything from the concepts I was explaining to the words I was using to get my message across.

Now, I know this is a pretty special case when it comes to project management, because the Executive, the PM and the team are all the same person. But I still think I’ve learnt something from the experience.

Because, like any human being, I had some self-doubts, I retreated into something I was comfortable with, something which I knew I could do well – in this case, project management. The actual work of writing what I had planned to was getting pushed aside so I could focus on what I did well – even if that didn’t actually move the project along.

Luckily for me, the thing I am good at was also the thing telling me I wasn’t making progress, so it was pretty difficult to ignore. (Though, believe me, I made a good stab at it.) Eventually, I forced myself to knuckle down, to step out of my comfort zone and work on what needed to be done.

I’m actually pretty happy with what I’ve produced, and you’ll get the chance to judge for yourself. I’m releasing a sneak preview today, and you can go to this page to download it. (I hope you like it!)

“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!