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.

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!

On today’s Project Management Guide, I’m looking at what to do if you are looking at changing careers into project management. Project management can be an exciting and challenging career, and it gives you the opportunity to work with a wide variety of different people, companies, technologies and industries over the course of your career. I find the variety and surprises of project management incredibly rewarding, and can’t imagine doing anything else!

So if you’d like to become a project manager, how do you go about it? The first thing you should do is take a look at my post on What is Project Management? This is just to make sure you know what you are letting yourself in for!

Secondly, you need to get involved with a project – but not as a project manager, not just yet. The idea of this is to enable you to observe the process of a project in action. Try to notice the ways the different elements of the project, and the different people involved in it, fit together to make the whole (hopefully) successful.

Thirdly, observe a project manager in action. Take a look at the kind of things he or she has to do throughout the project – it certainly isn’t just sitting creating ever more complex gantt charts! You need a number of different skills to be a project manager – and many of these are ‘soft skills’. I’ll be looking at these next Monday.

Finally, you need to jump into project management! Training is always useful, but the best training is through being mentored by a project manager. I started off in project management by working as project support. This enabled me to learn the various process and procedures within project management, and also to learn from the project manager up close and personal.

From this point on, you are in project management, and your learning has only just begun. You will need to keep learning every day, through training courses, through books, through reading Project Management Guide (of course!), but most importantly, through experience.

Project management is exciting, fun, and rewarding. Welcome to the team!

What about you? How did you get into project management? How are you planning to get into project management? Any other tips to share? Post below!

Time for another quick guide to project management blog postings made recently. Given we’ve just been looking at project planning, it is serendipitous that there have been a few posts out there on assumptions.

You definitely need to pay attention to the assumptions you are making when you are planning. As we will see in our next project management guide on scheduling, you must capture them in the process. Making sure you do this gives you a number of advantages. Kent McDonald’s post, Assumptions, Communication, and Donkeys on the Project Connections blog highlights this, and what you should be doing with these assumptions once captured.

As Kent says, one of the things you must do is revisit the assumptions regularly. The environment your project is in will be continually evolving, and those changes may effect the veracity of your assumptions. In addition, it may turn out that an assumption that everyone thought was right turned out to be wrong, even without the environment changing – it just took time to come to light. John Reiling has a post at the PMCrunch blog, Check Your Assumptions, that discusses this in more detail.

Finally, you need to check you are actually capturing all of your assumptions. We all make assumptions in our day to day life that we never consciously recognise. This often happens when we are in a situation we think is the same as one we have previously been in. Unfortunately, because we don’t consciously think about these assumptions, we don’t give ourselves a chance to verify them! Pawel Brodzinski at Software Project Management has a good post, Avoid Unconscious Assumptions with some useful examples of this.

Hope you’ve found this round-up useful. See you again on Monday!

Project management certification is a tricky subject. There is no doubt that there is a significant amount of value in some certifications, less in others, and some are just not worth it. Today, we’re looking at project management certification and training on Project Management Guide, with a round up of a few posts and articles.

Firstly, we look at Myths of Project Management Certification Debunked by Wayne Botha. His 5 myths hit the spot, particularly number 3: “Certified project managers are always more effective than non-certified and experienced project managers.” While certifications are nice, they are not the true measure of a project manager – only the track record of their projects can be that.

That is not to say there is no point in getting some certification. As John Reiling puts it in Top 10 Benefits to Earning a Certification, ‘While it is said that “experience is the greatest teacher,” a certification “rounds you out.”‘ This is very true. While you will need considerable experience to help you in your project management, sometimes you will run across situations or issues you simply haven’t seen before. As well as applying your experience, it is useful to have some practical advice from elsewhere to fall back on.

It is important, however, not to get too hung up on having a methodology. As Joseph Phillips says in Project Management Models, Certifications and the Pyramids, “here’s what I think: project management is project management. I don’t think it matters what approach you take to complete your projects, as long as you complete your projects.”

Project management is too complicated to boil down to just one set of processes, a book of templates to fill in for each project, or a series of steps to take on every project. It involves hard work, soft skills, a logical mind and a creative spirit. These take time to develop and nurture, and while a particular certification path or methodology will provide you valuable pointers and help, ultimately it is down to yourself to make sure you have the right skills and attributes to deliver your projects on time, and on budget. Certification is one of the pillars that will support you in project management, but it isn’t a magic bullet.

So get out there and yes, read the books, follow the courses, take the exams, but, most importantly, do the work as well!

Just a quick one today, with some more information on the importance of your project’s business case.  As you will recall from Building the Case, the business case should explain why you are doing the project.  This is vital moving forward, and needs to be revisited often throughout the life of the project.

PMHut has an article called Writing an Unbeatable Business Case which gives the PRINCE2 thinking behind it, which I personally find very useful.

Don’t forget you can also download my Business Case template (PDF) to get you started.

Just to show it’s not just the British government that doesn’t seem to handle projects well, I thought I’d post a quick story about the FBI’s new case management system.

While it is currently ‘only’ expected to be $26 million over budget and 6 months late, it is also a replacement project for one that cost $170 million that was abandoned as it was “obsolete and riddled with problems” – so not quite so good.  However, scrapping a project which isn’t going to deliver what you need (instead of letting it drift onwards, not wanting to take the hit for stopping it) is actually good project management, so the FBI get points for that.

Unfortunately, the Justice Department’s inspector general’s report (PDF) says the FBI:

“needs to improve the risk management process it uses to identify, monitor, control and mitigate risks before they negatively affect [the project’s] cost, schedule and performance”.