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!

This week I’m going to take a look at Twitter. Twitter is a relatively new social networking and ‘micro-blogging’ service, based on the exchange of 140 character messages.

That perfectly explains what Twitter is, while also completely missing the point. Twitter is about keeping in touch with people, in a simple way. You can update people with a light touch, on a frequent basis. These are the kind of small interactions that help to build a community, or a team.

In Twitter, you choose who you want to hear from by selecting who you would like to ‘follow’. In turn, others can choose to follow you. If you want to, you can also make your account protected – this means only the people you allow to can see what you say.

Obviously this has possible applications for a project manager. Twitter enables you to keep your team members updated on a regular basis. For example, you could ‘tweet’ whenever there is an update of the blog you set up for the project. If the account you are using is protected, you can also tweet about the project status, questions you may have, and answers too.

Because Twitter isn’t one way, you can also follow your team members. This enables you to build a network within your team, with short and frequent contacts – especially useful if the team is scattered around the country or even the world.

The best way to learn about Twitter is to actually start using it. To get you started after you have created your account, you can start following a few useful project management people. Try Project Shrink, PM Tips and PM Opinions to get you started. You might also like to try following Josh Nankivel and, of course, Cornelius Fichtner, who is responsible for the great PM Prepcast.

Oh, and you can follow me too! Just click on the follow button after you have logged in.

Once you see how you can use Twitter, you’ll begin to see all sorts of ways it can be useful in your business. I’ll see you there! Next week, we’ll be looking at another social media tool, one which helps bring together all the other tools out there.

What about you? Are you already using Twitter? Who do you find most useful to follow? Or do you think it’s just a waste of time? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

And maybe they’re right.

Project managers have a bad name. Let’s face it, we’ve all come across people and whole companies that think project managers just cause problems. In their eyes, we insist on the production of arcane documents, we get in their way while they are trying to just get on and do the work, and we hold far too many meetings. And don’t get them started on the metrics. Or the milestones. Or the project plans. Or the requests for progress reports.

Now, you and I know that project managers actually add value. We help to keep the project moving forward. We help to keep the team focused. We help to spot problems early, and deal with them. We help to bring it all together.

But… sometimes, those people who complain about us? Sometimes, they have a point.

When team members are complaining about project managers, one of the main reasons behind it could be our fault.

If project team members are complaining about project management getting in the way, it means they aren’t seeing value from it. And that usually means one of two things: either a methodology is being applied blindly, or the project manager isn’t explaining what the value is.

Luckily, the way to solve either of these problems is simple: take the time to talk to your team. And I mean really talk, and really listen, not hold yet more meetings. If there is someone who is complaining a lot, sit down with them, and have them explain why they aren’t happy. Sometimes, you’ll find that they hadn’t realised the benefits to the rest of the project of what you are doing – or asking them to do.

Sometimes, though, you’ll find they have a valid point. Perhaps you have been insisting on a particular piece of information being gathered, or a particular measurement being made, because it worked on the last project similar to this. But maybe it isn’t appropriate here. Don’t be afraid to learn from your team members that you are being too heavy handed in applying a particular methodology.

Remember, no methodology is ever going to be a perfect fit for your project. You need to flex it, lighten it up here and there, toughen it up in other places. You need to borrow some pieces from one system, and other pieces from another, to fit them together to make the right way for managing your project, right now.

So the next time you hear someone complaining about project management, take the time to talk, and to listen. You never know, they might be right.

What about you? Have you come across people who just didn’t get project management? How did you handle it? Let me know!

In previous posts in the Project Management Guide, I have alluded to the project management structure, the organisation that you as project manager will sit in. In keeping with the aim of teaching project management to absolute beginners, I’m now going to flesh out this idea a bit.

First of all, why do we need a project organisation? As we’ve already learned, a project is a temporary endeavour. A project also tends to be cross-functional, meaning people from across your business will be needed. That means people will be brought together for a relatively short period of time to work on the project, and their line management structure is unlikely to fit with what is needed for project management structure.

Because of this, we set up a project organisation. This organisation can be logically broken down into different levels:

1. Overall corporate (or programme) management
2. Project Executive with information from Project Board / Guidance Group
3. Project Manager
4. Team Manager
5. Team

Now, this seems like an awful lot, but don’t worry – they won’t all be involved day-to-day!

Let’s have a look at each of these levels.

1. Overall Corporate (or programme) management

This level represents the people at the very top. These are the people who have the final say over whether a project starts, stops, or varies. However, they are likely to be involved very rarely – they have responsibility for appointing a Project Executive to kick the project off, and to be available to guide the Executive should he need it.

2. Project Executive with information from Project Board / Guidance Group

The Project Executive is the person with overall responsibility for the project. You, as the project manager, will report to the Executive – he is your boss. It is the Executive’s responsibility to represent the business interests in the project. This means, for example, he or she will need to ensure the Business Case is kept up to date, that the project is still meeting a business need, and so on.

The Executive also monitors the progress of the project through two routes, the information you provide as project manager, and through the project assurance route. More on that later.

In addition, it is also useful to have the interests of the user (of the final product of the project) and the supplier (who is making that product) represented at this level. This can be done through the formation of a project board, with a User Representative and a Supplier Representative on it. However, this doesn’t make the board a democracy – it is still ultimately the Executive’s responsibility to guide the project to success.

3. Project Manager

That’s you! You have responsibility for the day-to-day management of the project. The Project Executive and other members of the board are likely to be doing their project roles in addition to their normal jobs. Because of this, you need to enable them to manage by exception.

What this means is that you should seek their approval at the beginning of each chunk of work (which should last a reasonable length of time). You will also set tolerances, as discussed in Project Plans – The Art of Prophecy. When that is done, you keep the Executive updated regularly, but only go back to him or her for a decision when either you have finished the chunk of work that was approved, and need to have the next section approved, or because something has gone wrong, and you have gone over one of your tolerances.

Obviously there is far more to the role of Project Manager, but this explains how it fits into the project organisation.

4. Team Manager

This role is the management of the team carrying out the project work. It is an optional role – the project may be of a size that the Project Manager also does this work. However, for various reasons, such as the complexity of the work, the technical knowledge needed, or even because the team is in a different company to the project manager (think of a client – supplier relationship), you may want to have this as a separate role.

The team manager agrees with the project manager the scope of the work the team is to carry out. This is generally done through the agreement of a package of work. The team manager then reports on progress to the project manager.

5. Team

These are the people that actually do the work! They are responsible for building the end product to the required quality, on time, and on budget.

One last role

That’s the broad overview of the management structure, but there is another function that I also want to talk about. This role can be called Quality Control, Project Assurance, Project Monitoring, etc. While it has many names, the main purpose is to ensure that the project is on track, and that the information that the Executive is getting is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

This role needs to provide an independent check on the information the project manager is providing. In addition, it can also provide information and guidance to the project manager, if there is something that he or she has missed.

Because the role needs to be independent, the project manager shouldn’t have anything to do with appointing or managing them. Ideally, the Executive, and User and Supplier Representatives if present, should each choose someone to perform this role for them. The Executive’s choice should focus on ensuring the project’s work and outputs are meeting the needs of the business, the User’s the needs of the users, and the Supplier’s the needs of the suppliers. This provides more information for the Executive / board and the project manager.

That’s a quick whistle-stop tour of a sample project management structure / organisation that I have used in the past. The structure can be formal and rigid, or informal and relaxed. Of course, every project and every business is different, and has different needs and drivers, so don’t be surprised to find very different management structures out there!

What about you? What type of project management structures have you worked in in the past? Do you prefer a formal structure where everyone knows what is expected of them, or a more relaxed structure where everyone can jump in where they think they can help? Let me know!

29th Jan: Edited to make role of Project Board / Guidance Group clearer

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!

I’m going to start with something you should all be familiar with, but may not have used in a project context – blogs.

Now, I’m assuming if you are reading this you know what a blog is, because, well, you’re reading one. They are a great tool for getting a message out, but also, thanks to allowing comments, a great way of gathering information too.

A project blog is useful because whoever in the team you allow to post (and I would encourage you allow everyone in the team to do so) can put up some information, and ask for feedback. No matter where in the world the members of your team are, they can read the article, and post their comments.

And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to put your dirty washing out for the whole world to see! A blog could be internal to an organisation, or it could even be restricted to just project team members. If your team is across multiple organisations, you could have it password protected on an external server so only those you allow can see it. (This is even possible using major blogging platforms, like Blogger and WordPress, which allow you to set your own privacy settings.)

You can also use the blog to get your message out. Project status reports, risk logs, all the documents you use to manage the project, can be updated and placed onto the blog. This ensures everyone has access to the information they need and want, when they want.

Don’t take this as a replacement of other communication methods, though – if there is vital information that team members must have and read, then use the most appropriate tool, be that email, tele-conference, or even face to face meetings. But to make your job, and the jobs of your team members, easier and better, use the blog as an additional tool, not a replacement.

You can go a lot further than just a simple blog, of course, with other collaboration technologies. But I’ll come to these in a later post.

This is just one example of how a blog can be used. What about you and your teams? How have you been using blogs? What value do you get out of them? What do you recommend as best practice? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Project Management Offices can be wonderful things. They can help an organisation immensely, by setting out and assisting in the implementation of project management standards. Unfortunately, they are often not valued, neglected, and because of this, ineffective.

Recently, Planview commissioned OpenSky Research to do a study on PMOs today. (You can access it here, but they do want you to register.) Luckily for you, two very good sites have already posted some commentary on the report – PMTips have New research into PMO effectiveness while Elizabeth Harrin at A Girl’s Guide to Project Management has How good is your PMO?

If you’re interested in more information about PMOs, I recommend you take a look at All About Project Management Offices which is, well, all about Project Management Offices… Take a look at Two Types of PMOs – Yours and NOT yours for an example.

As a project manager, you are likely to have to attend and run a lot of meetings. Indeed, some people see project management as basically making Gantt charts and holding meetings. But are we running meetings well?

I have a confession to make. I hate meetings. Always have. I started my working life in an organisation that seemed to love holding as many meetings as possible. The building we were based in kept converting rooms into more and more meeting spaces, and they were still always booked up. We always had weekly update meetings. This was the kind of meeting that infuriated me the most. A group of people whose only connection was their manager would sit and say what they had done for the last week. The work was often compartmentalised and unconnected to others, yet we all had to sit through this meeting every week. The mind-numbing boredom of these meetings has given me an extreme antipathy to all meetings ever since.

Unfortunately for me and my irrational prejudice, there is no denying that sometimes, just sometimes, meetings are needed and useful. So, as a project manager, how do I get through a project with as few and as useful meetings as possible?

1. Identify which meetings are needed. The quickest meeting is one that doesn’t happen. Look at the meetings you are holding, and decide which of them are really needed. For example, take a look at one of those perennial favourites, the project update meeting. Your project team dutifully troops into a meeting room, and you go around each of them individually, asking them to give an update on where they are up to. The only people getting value from this meeting are the manager and, while he or she is speaking, the person doing the update. The rest of the participants just sit around being bored until it is their turn to speak. Get rid of it, and find another way.
2. Find better ways of getting information. In the project update example above, attendees were sitting around bored for the majority of the time. You still need the information they gave, so schedule one-to-one meetings (what I like to call ‘a conversation’) with them to get this information. But make sure you are giving value back – give feedback, take on board any obstacles they are facing, and help them with any issues they have.
3. Identify who needs to attend. Meetings need to add value for you and for participants. Otherwise you are just a burden on their time, a drain on their resources. If an attendee isn’t adding and getting benefit from a meeting, they don’t need to be there. Free up their time and yours by letting them escape meeting hell.
4. Use better ways of giving information. If your team needs to have certain information, then get it out to them. But use an email, not a meeting. Take the information from the one-to-one’s above, and put it into a weekly update brief to send to people. Then they can see the parts that are relevant to them, and skip those that aren’t.
5. Have an agenda. If a meeting needs to take place, and you have whittled it down only to the people who need to attend, it is time to make sure the meeting is focussed on what it needs to achieve. Make sure you have an agenda in place, and circulated to all participants, at least 24 hours before the meeting start time. And it’s no good having an agenda if you don’t stick to it. Sure, major issues could arise before the meeting, but anyone who vitally needs to discuss that now can speak to you before the meeting starts. Don’t let rambling diversions occur in the meeting itself.
6. Achieve something. Decide what you need answers to, and get them. Decide what actions need to be taken, and assign them.
7. Be a facilitator, not an attendee. You’ve called this meeting, so you have a responsibility to make sure it goes well, smoothly, and quickly. Stick to the agenda, move the discussion along, agree the action points. Don’t allow the meeting to become a talking shop. This means being firm. Your meeting has a start time – stick to it, regardless of who hasn’t turned up yet. Your meeting also has an end time – stick to it, moving the meeting along smartly to make sure you achieve it.
8. Prepare. We’ve already seen you need to have an agenda. What else do you need to have the meeting go smoothly? A meeting room? Book it. A projector? Make sure it is there. A note taker? Bring someone along to do this. There is no excuse for slowing a meeting down because of your poor preparation.
9. Be brief. In my experience, a meeting should not go on for more than an hour. People stop concentrating, they stop engaging, you cease to get any value out of them, and they cease to get any value out of the meeting. If you think you have a meeting that will go on longer than this, see if you can split it up – and see if you can do it with fewer people in each meeting. If you really can’t split it up, then at least have a break in the middle.
10. Think of the money. Look around the people in your meeting. Have a rough guess at how much they are paid, and what that works out to per hour. Include your own hourly rate. Now calculate how much all of those people spending in a one hour meeting actually costs the business. Have you added that much value to the business in the meeting?

And as an extra bonus tip:

• Avoid meetings that don’t add value to you. I once worked on a project that wanted me to travel for 3 hours every week to attend a 3 hour meeting with the programme manager and the rest of the project managers, and then spend 3 hours travelling back. This was 9 hours of my life that gave me no value. The value I added to the meeting could have been done much more easily via the report I sent in every week. Eventually, I was able to move to attending by teleconference, and ultimately to attending only every fortnight – not ideal, but at least I had reduced the amount of my time spent on this time-sink from 36 hours a month to 6.

These are the tips I try to follow in a project, to reduce the amount of time, both mine and everyone else’s, spent in meetings.  What about you?  Do you have any other tips to share?  Or do you think I need to get over my aversion to meetings?

There are a number of qualities a good project manager needs.  A lot of these are so-called ‘soft skills’.  Let’s have a look at some of them.

• Be organised.  A large part of project management is keeping track of the project, and making sure the right things happen at the right time.  Naturally, being organised is a great help in making sure that this happens.
• Be a two way communicator.  You will be overseeing a disparate team, who all need to clearly understand their goals and responsibilities, to be given information about their performance, and the performance of the project, and to understand the expectations of the project and its customers.  But part of being a good communicator is also taking information in – it is important you can bring in feedback, and handle it correctly.
• Be a team builder.  Project teams are often temporary creations, and melding people who may or may not know each other into an effective unit can be vital to the success of the project.  You must be able to bring people together.
• Show integrity.  Your actions must demonstrate a commitment to the project, to the team, and to behaving ethically.  Showing and using these values will help bring everyone together.
• Show empathy.  You will often be working with a team you have no line management responsibilities over.  You will need to bring them together into a team, and one of the most important ways to do this is through showing you understand the needs of the team members.  This doesn’t mean you should be a pushover if someone tells you they aren’t going to finish a task assigned to them, but you do need to understand their position, and perhaps see if you are indeed asking too much.  Put yourself in their shoes.
• Be calm.  A project manager should strive to be calm at all times, even when the pressure is really starting to build.  Having confidence in your team and yourself to cope with problems, a self-assurance that can be seen, gives a boost to the whole team, and helps build their confidence also.  There will always be problems that face a project, there will always be stressful situations.  Having the right attitude to tackle them will help immensely.
• Delegate.  You simply cannot do everything yourself!  Often you will be brought in to work on a project which, for the actual nuts and bolts work, requires considerable technical knowledge you may not possess.  Equally, there are a number of tasks in project management which should be delegated to project support personnel, or to a project office.  You must be able to demonstrate your trust in other people by allowing them to get on with the work they are best suited for, allowing you to work on the tasks that really need you.
• Be a creative problem solver.  Project management is about solving problems.  Part of it is about making sure the right things happen at the right time.  There will often be barriers stopping this!  You must be able to look at issues and see the way around them, often needing to find novel approaches to do this.  Believe it or not, creativity is an important quality in project management!

What about you?  What other qualities do you think are needed?  Post below!

Yesterday I posted about why I am still feeling pretty optimistic about the prospects for project managers, even given the current state of the economy. That’s got me thinking a bit wider, about why I enjoy being a project manager so much.

Now, I am sure there are as many reasons for this as there are project managers. I came across one post, Why I love Project Management by Alora Chistiakoff which, while it was good, didn’t quite hit what I find so enjoyable about project management.

Alora talks about how she loves to implement change, and I can certainly see the attraction. But for me it’s about something else.

What I really love doing is solving problems, all sorts of problems. From great big huge problems, right down to tiny niggling little problems. And, to me, this is what project management is about.

First of all, you have your great big huge problem, looking for a solution. This is what would make me start a project – to deliver the solution. Then within the project, you have a series of smaller problems, some of which can be broken down further.

Now, some of these problems will have known solutions – the processes and methodologies of project management can provide some of them. Others won’t, and this is where I find it gets really fun – getting over the obstacles in the way to a solution. You get to ask great questions, ones that start with “Why don’t we…?” or “Is there a better way to…?”

It is this side of the work that I love. Finding solutions no-one else has, being novel, innovative, creative. I’ve worked with many people who have thought that there was nothing about project management that required creativity or original thought – boy, are they wrong!

Project management is about finding the solutions, about getting stuff done. And because we are dealing with an environment of change, we can’t rely on what has worked before. Sometimes we need to make that leap, and find the novel answer, the innovative way, the creative solution.

And that’s why I love project management.

What about you? What made you want to be a project manager? What about the job keeps you getting up everyday? Let me know below!

Josh Nankivel has a post on pmStudent asking for your feedback, Your Feedback Requested: Impact of the current economy on PM, which got me thinking. (Incidentally, you should go and give your feedback, if you haven’t already.)

We’ve been hearing a lot about how bad the economy is, and how much worse things are going to get. Now, I’m not disagreeing that things are bad, but I think there are reasons to have some optimism. While many businesses are likely to start paring back on some projects, it may well be that these projects should have been cut a long time ago. We’ve all seen the projects that have limped on for too long, but no-one wants to be ‘the bad guy’ in getting them stopped – well, now you can seem like the good guy for stopping failing projects, and saving a business money.

But in the public sector, governments around the world seem to be looking at expanding spending drastically, as Gregory Balestrero, the President and CEO of PMI points out in his blog post, Optimism. Given some of the poor project management that we’ve seen from governments (see here, here and here for details) it seems inevitable that there will be a new and strong demand from governments for project managers.

But more than that, times of financial frugality are times when project management should be in stronger demand in the business world. Yes, there may be fewer projects, but business can no longer afford to allow any projects not to be tightly focused on delivering success. This is your chance to shine, to demonstrate the value of effective project management, to show how project management can lead to business success.

The current economic climate is the time to really get back to the fundamentals of project management. Focus on each project’s business case, make sure it is meeting a real business need, and make sure the benefits expected amount to something of more value than the costs of the project. And become an evangelist – make sure you explain the value of project management in your business, and beyond.

So if you are a project manager, don’t be scared of the state of the economy. Yes, it’ll be tough, and it may get bumpy for a while, but fundamentally, what we do is of importance and value to every business. Effective project managers will be able to sell their skills as a way for business to save money and be successful – and what business is going to turn that down?

What do you think?  Am I being too optimistic?  Do you have another take on the situation?  Let me know!

Today on Project Management Guide we are looking at project scheduling, a vital part of the project planning process.  I am going to try and focus especially on how to get this kicked off with a meeting, bringing in other people from your project team.

As we saw in the previous section of the guide, Project Planning – The Art of Prophecy, scheduling is just one of the many parts of a project plan.  To pull our schedule together, we need to draw on some of the other sections.  Remember, though, that scheduling is just one part of the plan, so it will feed back information into the plan, as well as drawing from it, until you have a completed plan.

At the start of a project, I find it most useful to use something called top-down scheduling.  In essence, what you are doing is organising the project into discrete chunks, each of which ends with a milestone.  Then, drawing on the knowledge and expertise of your project team, work to identify what tasks have to go into each of these sections to achieve the milestone.  You can then estimate how long the sections will take.

Another option is to use bottom up scheduling.  This basically takes the reverse approach!  You and your team identify what tasks need to be done, and identify milestones from the tasks.  This can be particularly useful in some software projects.

These two broad techniques are very useful.  What I find to be most useful in them is the way it brings other team members into the process, enabling them to buy-in to the final schedule.  One of the best ways to do this is run the scheduling meeting in the right way.

For example, I have often used pads of sticky notes to get everyone involved.  I hold a meeting with appropriate members of the team, and make sure all of them have a pad.  Once we have agreed the major milestones, I encourage them to start writing tasks down on their pads, and sticking each task on the wall, under the appropriate section of the project.  This helps to start discussion between the team members, and can also help them to see the dependencies across different project streams.

By the end of the meeting, you should have a good idea of the schedule, and can then start to put it together – with an eye on the resources for each task.

I hope you have found this section of the Project Management Guide useful.  What other techniques do you use in planning and scheduling?  What has been most useful to you?  Comment below!