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.

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!

So far in the series, we’ve looked at blogs and Twitter, two social media tools you can use for project management. Today, I am going to introduce to a relative newcomer to the social media world, one which I think is going to become much, much bigger over the next year.

The tool I am looking at today is FriendFeed. Now, the FriendFeed site says it “enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.” That doesn’t sound terribly useful for project management.

However, the important thing to see is that FriendFeed mainly uses something called RSS to gather information. An RSS ‘feed’ is a common way of sharing information – many blogs have them, including this one! But they aren’t limited to blogs – most sites that are regularly updated use them as a way of letting people know when new information is available. (The web has lots of information about RSS. For now, all you need to know is lots of places use it.)

Once this information has been brought in to FriendFeed, anyone can add a comment to it – enabling discussions to take place.

Because FriendFeed uses RSS, and allows you to submit your own chosen RSS feeds, we can build a powerful project management tool.

Now, this post could get very technical here. FriendFeed isn’t the easiest of sites to explain, or to describe. There are a number of places you can go to find out more (try How To Use FriendFeed on Mahalo), and they do a much better job than I can about explaining this!

What I’d like to do, though, is talk in general terms about how you can use FriendFeed in project management. The specific part of FriendFeed that we want to look at is the ability to create “rooms”. These rooms are separate little areas that you can link to different RSS feeds.

Now, when you create a room, you can add what you find useful. For example, we talked last week about Twitter. If you are using Twitter publicly, you can use a special hash tag, such as #myproject, in all of your tweets. You can then do a search for that hash tag to find just those tweets. (Here is an example search for the #superbowl tag.) On the right of the search results you will see a link to “Feed for this query”. It is this link that you need to import into your new FriendFeed room. (Right click the link, and then choose “Copy link location”. This will put that link into your clipboard.)

If you have a blog that you set up for your project, chances are that will have an RSS feed too. You can import that into your FriendFeed room as well.

Now, I imagine some of you are wondering why we would want to do this. Well, now we have added these RSS feeds, every time there is a new post with our hash tag, and every time we update the blog, this will feed through to our new room. And, importantly, this means all of the social media tools we are using to help us in project management are now feeding into one place. Even better, everyone in your project team can join your room, and hold discussions there.

This one room now collects all of the information we are producing and the conversations the team is having. And even better, this information is now fully searchable, right from the FriendFeed room. Once you click into the room, the search box at the top of the page will search only within the room. I am sure you can see the value in being able to search all of your information quickly and easily!

I think this is going to be a fantastic tool for helping collaboration of geographically scattered teams. I’ve barely touched on the functionality of FriendFeed, such as the ability to start a conversation about any posted item, or the ability to ‘Like’ an item to push it to people subscribed to you.

FriendFeed is a huge topic, and one which I can’t cover all of here – not least because I am still finding new ways to use it! I’d really encourage you to get over there and create an account, and to start playing around with it. I’m already on FriendFeed, and you can subscribe to me there, just like you can follow me on Twitter. In addition, I have created a Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room which you are all more than welcome to join. Currently, it has the feeds of a number of PM blogs I read, and a feed of certain Twitter updates – I’ll do a quick post on those tomorrow, if I haven’t exhausted you all!

FriendFeed is really new, and looks like being a really powerful collaboration tool. I can’t stress enough how important I think it is for you to get involved now, to start to get used to it. I’ll see you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

In our projects, we seek to provide benefit to our business, by delivering a product at the required quality, on time, and on budget. Now, when economic times are tight, and budgets are being squeezed, we need to start looking how we can deliver on another, bigger project: keeping our business in business.

It is too easy for a project manager to only look at their project, and only think about how to deliver that. In normal times, this is probably what a business wants, but now we need to raise our sights a little.

Be sensitive to what is going on in the business more generally:

• If they are looking to save money, proactively look at which parts of your project could be cut. It is better to achieve most of the benefit at a lower cost, rather than risk delivering no benefit, because the company has run out of money. Effective planning should mean you already have an idea of what the impact would be, in terms of time, features, and budget.
• Don’t be afraid to speak up. If you see inefficiencies in your business that could be solved quickly with a new project, with the application of a bit of project management, speak up about it.
• Make sure your projects stay focused on their customers, the stakeholders. Encourage your business to stay focused on their customers too.
• Encourage frequent and vigorous examination of all projects to check they are still relevant in changing circumstances – there’s no point delivering your project perfectly if the end product no longer helps the business!
• Most importantly, deliver. Now more than ever, we have to make sure we only promise what is possible, but challenging, and that we then go on to deliver it.

What about you? How are you reacting as a project manager to lean times? What opportunities do you see? What challenges do you face? Let me know!

This week on our Project Management Guide, we’re going to take a look at risks.

Every project will face risks. Risks are those things which could go wrong, or change, and adversely effect the project. The idea of handling risk in a project is not to avoid all risk. Any project will face some risk – projects are about bringing about change, and any change will bring some risk. The aim of risk management in a project is to make sure we reduce the risk to an acceptable level in a cost-effective way.

This means that we need to accept we will face risks, and to examine them with an open mind. It also means we need to track those risks, and think about how we would handle them if they occur.

The first step in managing risk is identifying them. We’ve already seen in Project Plans – The Art of Prophecy that risk analysis needs to be part of the project plan. But how do we go about it?

A system that I use is as follows:

1. Identify the risks: Preferably as part of a group, start to write down as many possible risks as you can think of. At this point, don’t try and think about how likely a particular risk is, just try and capture as many as you can. Include risks from a wide variety of areas, from technical nitty gritty details, all the way up to the environmental risks, such as natural disasters! Also include business risks, financial risks, etc.
2. Evaluate the risks: You should now have a nice list of risks. Now we need to evaluate the risks in terms of their probability and impact. Probability is the likelihood of a risk occurring – so, for example, a natural disaster is astonishingly unlikely to happen, while a computer failure is much more likely. (Knowing my luck, the Redoubt volcano in Alaska will blow just as I post this…) Impact is how much of an effect the risk would have – natural disasters next door, quite a lot. Computer failure, not so much.
3. Plan a response: You will now have a set of risks, with probabilities and impacts. You can now start to decide what to do about them. Your options are likely to include avoidance (doing things differently so the risk doesn’t occur), mitigation (take some action so the probability, impact, or both, of the risk are reduced), acceptance (just live with it) and contingency (a prepared plan of what to do if the risk occurs to deal with it quickly).

We don’t just stop there – this is just the first run through. You should record these risks in a risk log (or risk register, etc.) and make sure you monitor them throughout the project – and add new ones as necessary. We’ll look at this in more detail later.

Two tips:

• When it comes to evaluation of the risks, usually simpler is best. Grade the impact as High, Medium, or Low, and do the same for the probability. If you assign High a value of 3, Medium a value of 2, and Low a value of 1, you can simply multiply the probability and impact together to get a quick and dirty numerical grading for your risks.
• The grading of risks should have some bearing on how much you are willing to spend to deal with them. Obviously risks that have a high probability and a high impact should be looked at first!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this quick guide to getting started with risks. Do you have any tips? How do you start identifying risks? Let me know!