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!

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.
• The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.
• The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get one with their tasks.
• The project manager doesn’t do the project work. The project manager does the project managing.
• Only work a project team member is doing on something assigned by the project manager is project work.

Today I want to look at the knowledge that all project managers need about the work on their project. The project management concept I will be looking at today is: Project managers need to know what has been done, what is being done, and what needs to be done.

We need to have knowledge of what has already been done. It is important for us to know the path we took to get to where we are now, to understand the decisions we took, to remember the obstacles we had to overcome. In this way, we can learn from our project experience, and make our future path smoother.

We’ve already seen that we need a good awareness of what is happening in the project at present. This awareness, this knowledge of what is happening right now is means we become aware of problems as soon as possible, to make sure we can solve them as quickly as possible.

We also need to have knowledge of where we plan to go next. It is important for us to have a clear idea of where we are going, to understand the challenges that we will face, to accept that unforeseen problems will arise, and to plan to deal with surprises. To make sure these unexpected events don’t derail the project, we have to have an understanding of our final objective.

By having knowledge of these three areas – the past, present, and future – we can improve our project management. We can do this by drawing on our experiences from the past to help us overcome obstacles we face in the present, and plot a course around foreseeable problems in the future.

And that leads us to today’s project management concept: Project managers need to know what has been done, what is being done, and what needs to be done.

(Image courtesy of Jacob Bøtter. Some rights reserved.)

Communication is vital in project management. In fact, I’d say good communication skills are one of the most important qualities a project manager can possess. But is a project manager getting involved in the internal communication of the project team actually providing value?

As a quick thought experiment, let’s imagine a team of five members. In a self-organising team, it may be that each member has a discussion with every other member to let them know where they are up to, what they are working on, etc. This communication, in one direction (i.e. person A telling person B their situation) takes an amount of time I’ll call t.

Now, the communication cannot be one way – person B also needs to tell person A what they are up to. So they also take time t to pass that information on. So the total time for the update conversation is 2t. But the total work time is 4t – i.e. 2t for each participant.

I have shown this situation in the 5 person team in the diagram. In this situation, each person talks to every other person. There are 10 conversations, each taking a time of 2t. This means, with two people in each conversation, the total work time used is 40t.

Now let’s look at the situation when we add a project manager. In this case, I have assumed each team member tells the project manager where they are up to. The project manager then evaluates the information, and feeds back to every team member. The two way conversation thus still exists, though the two ways may happen at different times. In this model, there are 5 conversations, each of which take time 2t, giving a total time of 10t, or a total work time of 20t.

In other words, adding a project manager reduces the time the team spends in sharing information by half – in this particular case.

Of course, there are other possibilities. It may be the self-organising team shares information through a meeting, rather than separate conversations. This would dramatically reduce the total time. In this model, person A tells all the other members of the team what they are doing at the same time. Then person B does so, and so on.

This reduces the total time taken to just 5t, but the total work time is only reduced to 25t – it only takes person A time t to update the other 4, but each of the 5 has to be there, a total of 5t work time. This is repeated for the other 4 people.

In a team with a manager the total work time would be higher – purely because the project manager has to sit in the meeting too. If, however, the project manager receives updates from the team members individually (for a total work time of 10t) and then feeds back to the entire team (for a total work time of 6t) then we have a total work time of 16t – again less than in the self-organising team.

We can easily expand this up to teams with 10 members. In this case, team members holding individual conversations gives us a total work time used in communication of 180t, a team holding a meeting gives a total work time of 100t, while a team using a manager and meetings takes a total work time of 31t!

At this point it all looks cut and dried – self-organising teams, even if they use meetings, spend far more time in communication than a managed team.

Of course, that’s only true when you have been as grossly unfair with the figures as I have. (Using pseudo-scientific methods and information to draw unfounded conclusions is fun!)

The most obvious way I have been unfair is assuming the project manager can condense down everything all the team members need to know massively. In the model where the manager has a conversation with each team member, I have decided the information which the other team members took 4t to pass to him can somehow be condensed down to only take t for him to pass on! This seems rather unlikely…

So no, I’m not saying these figures are going to be accurate. But they do illustrate some important ideas.

1. Time taken to communicate amongst a team rises dramatically with team size.
2. The most effective way to reduce this is to hold meetings, so team members don’t have to repeat themselves with each other member.
3. Project managers can aid communication if they act as a central collation point.
4. But the best improvement in communication comes if the project manager condenses or filters the information.

In other words, you need to be more than good at talking. A project manager needs to understand the project well enough to know who needs to know which pieces of information, and just as importantly, which pieces of information are of no use to other members. You need to act as a filter, to make sure you’re not wasting the time of your team members.

Communication isn’t about how much you say to everyone, it’s about saying the right things to the right people.

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.
• The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.
• The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get one with their tasks.
• The project manager doesn’t do the project work. The project manager does the project managing.

Today, I want to look at one of the fundamental ways we maintain control on a project. As we’ve already seen, control is impossible without awareness. So we’ll also look at one of the ways we gain awareness in the project. The concept I am looking at today is: Only work a project team member is doing on something assigned by the project manager is project work.

We know we need both awareness and control. One of the clearest and simplest way of gaining awareness is for the project manager to assign all work that takes place on the project. Indeed, this is one of the purposes of the project manager role – to allocate the work sensibly, without doing it himself.

But by assigning work, the project manager is also taking control. By doing this, he or she is demonstrating to the project team that only work assigned like this is work on the project. Thus, assigning work gives a project manager both awareness and control.

And that gives us our project management concept: Only work a project team member is doing on something assigned by the project manager is project work.

Some projects are done entirely in-house. The business has all the tools and people it needs to get the final result that they want. Often, though, a project will need to bring in outside help – such as buying in equipment.

I’ve worked on some projects which have had major procurements as part of them. I don’t want to talk about the process of that procurement – that’s what procurement departments are for! But I do want to talk about how to handle your supplier once you have decided who it is.

With your internal project team, it is quite likely you won’t have line management responsibility for them. This is what makes your people skills so important in project management – you need to inspire and encourage without having the usual tools a manager does to back it up.

However, with an external supplier, you quite often have a lot of power over them. After all, the whole reason they are there (as far as they are concerned) is to get their invoice paid. If you control the money, you can control them.

But I really wouldn’t recommend this adversarial kind of mindset. Making it all about Us and Them isn’t going to help the project at all. That’s not to say there isn’t a time for that mindset – but that time is in the procurement process, when you are making sure you get the best value for money you can.

When I am bringing a supplier into the project, I really want to make them feel a part of the team. Firstly because they really are part of the team – they are supplying something you need to make the project successful, just like every other team member.

But more cynically, it’s also much easier to get the supplier to go the extra mile if they feel included in the team, if they have some emotional investment in making the project a success, if it is about more than just the money. I’ve had suppliers really push hard to solve problems for me – in one case even getting into trouble with his boss to manage it!

Finally, it just makes for a better working environment. Being inclusive makes the project more fun for everyone to work on, and a happy project team is often the successful project team.

What about you? How do you handle your suppliers? What tips and techniques have you used to get them to go the extra mile? Let me know!

Projects are temporary, by their very nature. That means all of us are going to have to close down our projects. But this is part of project management that is too often neglected. So what are we actually trying to achieve?

When a project approaches the end of its work (or when a decision is made that it should be ended early) we need to begin preparing to close it down. The basic idea is that every project, and the business, benefits from having a controlled and organised shut down.

By this point, the project will have delivered on its objectives. The products that were supposed to be produced should be finished, and ready to go. The aims of the project should have been met.

This means we need to:

• Confirm we have actually met the project’s objectives
• Alert those areas we drew resource from that their people are coming back
• Formally hand the product over to the business (or whoever is using it)
• Set out any follow-on actions to be carried out by the business after the project is complete (e.g. measure the benefits after a period of time to see if they meet expectations)
• Get confirmation from the Executive that the project can finish
• Archive the project documents

I also like to make sure the team as a whole gets together and identifies any lessons the business can learn from the project – what went well, what didn’t, and so on.

That’s a quick look at project closure – what else do you do? Do you have a formal closure at all, or do you just turn out the lights as you leave? Let me know!

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.
• The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.
• The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get one with their tasks.

Today I want to look at something related to the last concept. We already know we need to protect the project team, and make sure they can get on with the tasks assigned to them. But this also means we need to get on with the tasks assigned to us, the job of project management. The concept I am looking at today is: The project manager doesn’t do the project work. The project manager does the project managing.

Project management is hard work. On all but very small projects, it is a full-time job. And that means you really shouldn’t be being pulled off to do project work.

I’m not saying that project managers don’t have the skills to do some of the project work. Many of us will have worked our way up to project management through project work – we are used to it, and we understand it.

But if a project manager is doing the work, then he isn’t managing the project! We need to remember where our skills lie. Often we will get dragged into doing the project work, but this is a failure of project management (usually on the organisation’s behalf, not the project manager’s), not an essential part of it.

Make sure you are using appropriate resources to get the work done. The project manager is rarely an appropriate resource! And that gives us a project management concept: The project manager doesn’t do the project work. The project manager does the project managing.

(Having said that, I have ended up doing project work for the vast majority of projects I have worked on. This isn’t a good thing, but it is the real world. You should aim to avoid this if at all possible.)

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.
• The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.

Today, I want to look at what is controlled, the resources that a project manager uses to carry out the work of the project, and particularly the most important resource. The concept I am looking at today is: The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get on with their tasks.

We’ve already seen that the project manager can, within limits, control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled. But how are they controlled? Essentially, we are looking at the control of the resources that a project has. A project manager will have a certain amount of time and money to achieve a certain amount of scope.

But the key resource, the one which effects all of the project, is, of course, the project team, the people who are actually doing the work. In them, the three areas of control are combined.

Each of the team members has only a limited amount of time they can work on the project. Each of the team members will need to be paid for. And each of the team members will have different skills, and different abilities.

Project management, then, needs to be able to guide the work of the team in the right way. The project manager must allocate the work to the right individuals, giving guidance as to how long to spend on it, what quality is needed, and, if expenditure other than that on the team member’s salary is needed, how much can be spent.

So, project management needs control of the resources allocated to the project, and that includes the project team. But, unlike money and time, team members can easily be distracted and pulled off to work on something else. But a project manager needs to retain control.

This leads us to another project management concept: The project team is a project’s most important resource. Guard them well, to allow them to get on with their tasks.

I’ve been giving some thought recently as to what lies behind the work we do as project managers. Too often we get caught up in the tools and techniques, the how of what we do, without looking at the concepts and ideas behind it, the why of what we do.

So far, I’ve suggested that:

• The primary aim of every project is to benefit the business.
• Project management is about making the project environment as stable as possible. What is possible varies.
• Project management needs both awareness and control of the project. Control is impossible without awareness.

But how can we control a project? What tools do we have available to us to exert control? What can we do to effect the path we are taking?

In general, we have only three areas we can work with in project management. We can vary how long we spend on a task, how much money we spend on it, and what the finished output of that task actually is.

So, for example, we could spend a week on a task, or a year. We could spend pennies, or millions. We could make something which just about works, or a gold-plated solution.

By working with these areas, we can try to influence how the project progresses. But remember, a project manager would not have ultimate control over any of these areas. They can only vary what is done to a limited extent.

A project manager can’t decide to spend a year on a task if the project is supposed to be finished in 6 months. A task which is supposed to cost pennies can not have millions spent on it on the say-so of the project manager. And the minimum quality required is set by someone outside, not by the project manager.

This brings us to the next project management concept: The project manager can control time taken, money spent, and scope fulfilled – but only within set limits.

Recently, I put together a little series on the social media tools that project managers could use to help manage their teams and their projects. I’ve distilled some of this into a presentation, which you can see here:

You can get more information about any of the tools and techniques at The Social Media Project Manager – Roundup page. Hope you find it useful!