We all want to deliver successful projects.  That’s why we became project managers, after all.  But sometimes the right thing to do is to stop a project.  When is this the right choice?

1.  Too expensive

Maybe the costs weren’t estimated correctly at the beginning.  Maybe a supplier has hiked their prices dramatically.  Maybe it turns out you need more people working on the project for longer.  Whatever the cause, sometimes it turns out that a project is going to cost too much, in terms of money, time, or staff.  If your project starts moving in this direction, you should consider recommending spiking it – better to stop the expense now.

2.  Not good enough

This one is trickier.  One of the possible responses to the fear of a project costing too much could be to try and have the project do less.  Sometimes this is a sensible response – cut out the extras, leave only the vital parts.  But if this goes too far, and you start reducing the costs by cutting so much that the project starts to become useless, then it’s time to stop the project.

3.  Competitor beats you to market

If you’re working on a project to make a product for the marketplace, you need to keep an eye on what the competition does.  If you are trying to be first to market, but get beaten by a competitor, you need to re-evaluate the position.  Will the product you produce be able to compete?  Do you need to improve the quality?  Perhaps the cost of continuing no longer makes sense when compared to the possible returns.  It may be time to stop the project.

4.  More important project

You’re doing the project for the business – you are trying to make sure they get a benefit.  But for the business, it’s about getting the most benefit for the money they are spending.  And sometimes that means the resources being used on your project will give a better return on a different project, and the project gets stopped.

5.  Changed business plans

This one is more general.  A business can undergo many changes in its lifetime.  And sometimes such a change could involve a dramatic change in their business plans.  Your project may be excellent, with a great chance of financial return – but if the business has decided it wants to change which markets it is involved in, then it still may face the chop.  Ultimately, the business gets to decide what projects it wants to do.

An interesting video from TED. Philip Zimbardo here talks about how our outlook on time can affect our behaviour, and our chance of success.

What I find particularly interesting is the apparently optimal position, which includes drawing a lot from the past, a moderately high amount from the future, and a moderate amount from the present. In a way, this fits in with what we do as project managers.

We need to draw on our experience from the past, and learn from it. We also need to plan where we want to get to – I’m sure you all see how planning for the future links in to project management! But importantly, we also need to be happy to live in the moment as well – to grab opportunities when they arise, to be flexible enough to recognise when we should take advantage of the changing environment around us.

There are three broad types of project manager – the Courier, the Facilitator, and the Thinker.

The Courier is, I am afraid, the worst type of manager.  He doesn’t actually add value to his team, and in fact often gets in the way.  But what does he do?

Well, the Courier just acts as the communication point between the project team and the senior management.  But he adds no value to that communication.  For example, if senior management puts pressure on him to deliver the project sooner, all he will do is pass the message on.  If he then gets pressure back from the team that what he is asking for just isn’t possible, he just passes that information back to the senior management.

In other words, he doesn’t make a decision.  When he is pressured from above, he doesn’t try and negotiate to get, say, more resources to enable a shorter timescale.  When he is pressured from below, he doesn’t try to explore different options with the team.

The Courier could be replaced by a telephone – it would be quicker, and cheaper.

The Facilitator is a big step up from the Courier.  While he may still sometimes get in the way, in general he is good at helping the team.  How does he do this?

The Facilitator is great at solving problems.  When an issue hits the project, he works with the team to find a solution, and implements it.  For example, if a supplier falls behind, he will work with the team to see how the tasks can be juggled to lessen the impact.  He would also go to the supplier and either help or chide them along.

In other words, he is a fire-fighter.  When problems crop up, he is excellent at solving them – but not so good at avoiding them in the first place.

The Facilitator tends to be appreciated by his team, and by management, but they sometimes wonder if life shouldn’t be a little less stressful.

The Thinker is another step up from the Facilitator.  He doesn’t seem to swoop in and solve as many problems as the Facilitator, but oddly there don’t seem to be as many problems either.  Why is that?

The Thinker spends considerable time thinking about the project.  He works with his team to identify potential problems, and also uses his own experience to identify possible issues.  Then he works to prevent these issues occurring.  For example, if he knows from previous experience that procurement takes longer than it should, then he will start that process earlier.

In other words, he removes problems before anyone else sees them.  He uses the project management tools, such as the project plan, the work breakdown structure, and lessons learned from previous projects, to gain foresight of the project.  He uses this foresight to make the whole process smoother.

The Thinker tends to be seen as unnecessary by his team, and by senior management – until they don’t have him anymore.

Of course, these are just the broad types, there are many sub-types for each one.  Do you know of some more?

(Image courtesy of gerlos. Some rights reserved.)

Quality is an odd thing. What we mean by it varies by situation, by product, by person. It can be very difficult to know what someone means by quality when they talk about it.

For example, two people could ask for high quality clothes. For one person, this may mean durable work wear, strong enough to cope with use on building sites, to stand up to the punishment of hard manual labour. Another may be asking for highly styled and attractive fashion items, clothes which give them more confidence in social situations, which simply make them happier.

Either of these definitions of high quality clothes is valid, in the eyes of the person buying the clothes. The validity of the choice depends on the person, and most definitely by the situation the clothes will be used in!

In other words, the concept of quality is highly fluid. Yet one thing we can agree on is that project managers are constantly being told to ensure they deliver high quality projects.

The problem is knowing what is actually meant by this. The possibilities are wide. Is a high quality project one that delivers a high quality end result – whatever that means? Or one that delivers high quality management products? Or one that does the job, but at a low cost?

The problem is one of definitions, and of communication. Because our Executive, or project board, or whoever, have one particular way of looking at quality is, it is far too easy for them to assume their view is shared by everyone else. Naturally, this can cause a lot of problems when, somewhere down the line, this assumption is found to be untrue.

The way to avoid this, as with many problems in project management, is communication. Make sure that you have really talked with your Executive, and effectively drilled down to what he or she actually wants.

There’s no high quality substitute for communication.

The refresh of PRINCE2, the internationally used project management methodology, is now complete. The updated PRINCE2 was launched this Wednesday, the 16th of June. The event was streamed live from the Best Management Practice website, and the slides from the presentation are still available. (That page also says you can watch the footage of the event, but I’m getting nothing. Maybe later?)

It may be a bit geeky to be excited about the launch of an update to a project management methodology, but I am. I’ve always liked PRINCE2, no doubt because it was how I learned project management in the first place. But as I’ve moved from big, technical projects in a bureaucratic organisation to smaller, people-based projects in more relaxed organisations, I’ve seen a lot of people feel exasperated that PRINCE2 is too prescriptive, and obsessed with the paperwork rather than the project.

Now, I’ve always thought that was the sign of a poor project manager, not the fault of the methodology, which has always seemed to me to be a toolkit you can dip into as and when it is needed, not a mould you have to try and force every project to fit into. The great thing about this update is that it is much less prescriptive, and much more about the quality of what we produce, and lessons we can learn through the project.

In other words, the flexibility I thought was always there in PRINCE2 has been made much more obvious, and brought to the forefront of the methodology!

You can get more information on the latest version of PRINCE2 from Andy Murray, who was the lead author of the refresh. There’s a great post by Elizabeth Harrin on PM Tips about the launch of PRINCE2:2009, and she also has a video she made at the launch event (which includes the all-important look at the goodie bag!) on her own site, A Girl’s Guide to Project Management.

(Image courtesy of Port of San Diego. Some rights reserved.)

Richard St. John has a successful marketing company, and a career as an author. In the video below, he explains how success isn’t a destination to get to, it’s a process we have to carry on all the time.

(From TED.)

Project management isn’t just about project managers. We are just part of a team that works on the project. Our job is to help the rest of the team to be successful at their job. So what are some of the signs of a project team that successfully works together?

I’ve come up with ten different characteristics of a team which I think will be successful:

1. Pride in their work – no project is perfect, but that’s no reason not to try. The team is committed to producing the best output they can, and are willing to put the case for the right decisions to get there.
2. Members support each other – they really are a team, not a group of individuals. Team members trust in the skills of the other members, and support them in tough situations.
3. Understanding – the team knows what they are doing, and why.
4. Competent and confident – the team members are all able to do their work, and confident in their abilities.
5. Communicate openly – the team understands that project management thrives on good communication.
6. Accepts final decisions – the team understands that the people making decisions for the project are doing so in good faith, and while they may make a decision the team disagrees with, they have a good reason for doing so.
7. Solve the problems they can, and deal with the ones they can’t – the team understands that problems will occur, no matter what. There is no point in complaining about them, all the team can do is handle them.
8. Clear direction – the team knows where the project has come from, where it is now, and where it is going.
9. Embrace project management – the team understands that project management is about helping them achieve success, not blocking it!
10. Loyalty – members are loyal to the project, to the business, to the team, and to themselves.

What do you think? What have I missed? Which of these aren’t important? Let me know!

Last week, I ran a little mini-series about the role of risk not only in projects, but in a business. This is just a quick round up post, making it easier to find the three parts of the series.

In Part 1 we talked about how much I liked risk, and why you should too.

In Part 2 we explored the two different kinds of risk, and why it was great to get rid of one, but not good to get rid of the other.

In Part 3 we talked about how the difference between business risks, and personal risks means project managers can sometimes get too hung up on reducing all risk. We also looked at a few ways to help project managers stop seeing project risks in personal terms.

I hope you enjoyed the series. If you have any comments, let me know!

(Image courtesy of kyz. Some rights reserved.)

Following on from the previous video on the PRINCE2:2009 refresh (New Publications), here is a video in which the PRINCE2 chief examiner, Emma Jones, explains the impact of the refresh on the examinations. The video is from Best Management Practice.

On Wednesday, I told you all how wonderful risk is. Yesterday, I talked about the two different types of risk a project can face, and why a business should be happy to embrace one of them. But should project managers be happy about this type of risk?

Well… it depends. As I said yesterday, the competency type of risk, that involved with making sure you and others have done their job, should be ruthlessly fought. But the other type of risk, the business risk that any project will face, needs to be balanced against the possible rewards.

For a business, this is simple, even if it isn’t easy. You look at the likely rewards if the project is successful, the cost of doing the project, and the chance of the project being successful or, in other words, the riskiness of it. Then, you use a simple calculation to get the expected value – multiply the likely rewards by the probability of success, and if the answer is greater than the cost of the project, go out and do it!

That’s all well and good for the overall business, but what about you, one project manager inside it? This is where it becomes more complicated. And it becomes more complicated because people are much more complex than a business.

As a project manager, you are naturally going to want your project to be a success. But the reasons for wanting the project to be a success are a lot more complicated than the reason a business wants the project to be a success.

A business gets (usually) a clear and obvious financial reward from a successful project. A certain amount of money goes into running the project, and at the end of it, hopefully a larger amount of money comes out as a result. This is pretty much the only concern of the business.

For a project manager, though, it goes beyond that. Yes, you will want to deliver value, and profit, for the business. But you will have other reasons for wanting the project to be a success.

You will want the people on the project to do well in their careers, and a successful project helps that. You will want to do well in your own career! You will have an emotional attachment to the project. There are many reasons why you want the project to be a success.

But there is another side to a project manager’s connection to the project. Yes, we will want it to be a success. But we will also fear it being a failure. And fear of failure can be a very dangerous thing.

We fear having a failed project on our record. We fear a history of failure could hold us back in the future. We fear a loss of prestige. And, worst of all, we fear losing our jobs due to a project failure.

The problem is that we, as people, rather than project managers, have to deal with two risks. There are the project risks, and there are the personal risks. We know how to deal with the project risks, how to evaluate them, mitigate them, remove them, or accept them. But personal risks are a lot more complicated, a lot more difficult for us to deal with.

Let’s face it, no matter how confident we are, the personal costs of a failed project can seem huge. When we fear for our jobs or our future careers if a project fails, is it any wonder we shy away from risky projects? Even if we did the same evaluation as a business, the project manager personally seems to have so much to lose from a failure, and relatively little to gain from a success.

And that makes it rational for us to stay away from risky projects – even though they may be of great benefit to the business!

Now, this is a problem which has to be tackled by the business. After all, they have the most to gain from running riskier projects. So what can be done?

Well, as we’ve seen, the risk versus reward needs to be rebalanced. The project manager fears losing so much, but gains so little from a successful project. This leaves two obvious solutions.

The first one is to greatly increase the possible rewards. Offer huge bonuses, promote a successful project manager, give him or her a share of all the profits.

On the whole, I suspect businesses are unlikely to go this route.

The second one is to greatly reduce the possible losses. Now, this has, I think, more mileage in it. There are simple and inexpensive ways for a business to do this. Here are five examples:

• Don’t just praise success – praise failure. We learn more from failure than success. If the project team has done their job well, but didn’t quite make it, praise them for their efforts.
• Stop saying a project has failed when it hasn’t. If the project team did their job well, but the project still didn’t give the hoped-for result, then praise the project team. The project team can control the output of a project – what is actually produced – but they can’t control the outcome – how that output is received. In other words, if they created the new product that everyone thought the market wanted, but it didn’t sell, they still did their job!
• Stop pointing the finger. Given we know there are risks we can’t control, the business risks that can’t be got rid of, businesses, and the people in them, should stop working so hard to assign blame. Not everything is someone’s fault. Quite often, bad things happen without anyone causing it. Accept it.
• Support project managers. Accept that some things are outside of the control of even the best project managers. If the project has shown areas they are weak in, help them get better. Stop using the result of one complicated, difficult and unique project to predict how the project manager will do in another complicated, difficult and unique project.
• Judge a project manager by project management success, not the project success. Be fair, and only evaluate a project manager based on what is actually in their control.

By taking these and other steps, by working hard to change the culture of the business, they can change the personal risk versus reward calculation for a project manager. Reduce those risks, and get good project managers excited about doing risky projects.

Because risky projects worth doing offer the best reward for businesses, and, in my experience, are a lot more fun to work on for project managers. So, I ask again the question that started all this, I ask it both of project managers and of businesses that run projects – don’t you wish you had riskier projects?

(Image courtesy of afanc. Some rights reserved.)