All of your certainties are under attack. You thought you were on safe ground, a stable platform to start from. But now that ground is moving beneath you, an earthquake shaking everything you have built, threatening to bring it all down. The landscape is changing, and you’re the one who has to try and survive.

Oh, alright, I admit it, that’s just a tad melodramatic. But when you have been working hard to deliver a project, having the goalposts moved can feel almost like a natural disaster, an earthquake knocking you down. This is only to be expected – we all like to think we have control of our work, so it can come as a genuine shock when circumstances prove us wrong.

But, as I have written before, project management can be described as being about managing change effectively. Normally, the change is what the project is trying to achieve, bringing about a beneficial change. A consequence of working with change, though, is that a project itself is almost guaranteed to undergo changes.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Nor, of course, is it necessarily a good thing. But it is something that is going to happen, whether you want it to or not. There’s no point in pretending it doesn’t, or resisting it when it comes along. Far better to deal with the requests for change that crop up – you never know, they may actually make your project better.

So how can we handle these requests for change? Well, now that we have accepted they will occur, we need to make sure we capture them. A change request that comes in should be recorded. You must capture these requests, and make sure they are dealt with. But how they are dealt with can vary.

The first thing to check is – is this really a change? Has the person asking for this change misunderstood or misread the project requirements? Are we actually already doing this? Believe me, this happens far more than you’d imagine…

Now, if it really is a change, you need to prioritise the importance of it. This can vary from an absolutely vital change, to something which is a purely cosmetic change. Try to have a set of different levels. I’ve used a system of four levels before, those being:

• Vital – the output of the project will fail if the change isn’t made
• Important – not having it causes problems, but it could be put up with or worked around for a short period
• Desirable – the change would be beneficial, but the output can still be successful without it
• Cosmetic – unimportant, has no effect on the usefulness of the output

So, you’ve worked out the priority. Now you need to figure out what impact making the change would have. Obviously this is going to vary massively depending on the change, the project, the environment, and so on. But the best place to start from is by analysing what would actually have to change. By this, I mean analysing the change to understand which parts of the project work would have to be done differently, or again:

• What has to change?
• How much effort will this require from the project team?
• How much will it cost?
• Will something else in the project, or linked projects, have to be dropped or altered to make the change?
• What effect will it have on your project schedule?
• Will the change introduce new risks, or get rid of old ones?
• And, importantly, what effect does it have on the Business Case?

Now we have a judgement of the priority and impact of the change, we can start to make an educated decision about whether to make the change or not. But remember, you are working on behalf of the Executive – ultimately, any decision about change is their responsibility.

In general, if the priority is Desirable or Cosmetic, and the impact is low (i.e. can be done well within the tolerances you have been set) then I’d probably just go ahead and make the change, though I would make sure it was flagged up to the Executive. If the priority is higher, or if the impact is higher, I’d refer the decision up to the Executive, unless they have already put some other mechanism in place for approving change.

You may have realised that means I would refer up a decision that was of Vital priority, but very low impact. Why? Why would I not just go ahead and do it? Well, two reasons.

Firstly, if I believe a given change is very low impact but Vital priority, that suggests to me I may have missed something – I want to make sure I take advantage of the Executive’s knowledge of the environment and organisation to confirm my thinking before I go ahead with any Vital change.

Secondly, if the project has managed to get approved with what may be a major flaw like that, I want it to get a good looking at. Has the change request come about because of a dramatic change in the external environment? Has this environment change been factored in to the rest of the project? Did we capture this on the risk log? Do we need to re-evaluate the whole Business Case?

Basically, if there is a change request that is Vital, I want to make sure that we haven’t just been struck by an earthquake, that the ground we have been building our project on really is stable enough to carry on. And that’s a decision that needs the expertise and wisdom of the Executive – after all, it is their neck on the line if it all goes wrong!

What about you? How do you deal with changes? What tricks have I missed?

(Image courtesy of videocrab / Kevin Simpson. Some rights reserved.)

Throughout this series, we’ve been looking at ways you can turn the tools of social media into tools of project management. But there is a much simpler way that social media can help us as project managers. Already there are project managers out there who are sharing their expertise through blogging, and that means there are many places we can go to develop ourselves as project managers.

Today, I would like to share with you some of the best project management blogs and resources that are out there. Now, this list isn’t designed to be comprehensive, but it will point you at some of the places I go.

First up, we have PM Hut. This site is a large collection of categorized project management articles, gathered from all over the web. There are many different project managers appearing here as authors, and a wide range of different views from them.

Next, we have PM Student. This site is primarily the work of Josh Nankivel, who you may recall I recommend you follow way back when we covered Twitter. As well as Josh, there are a few guest authors, and a lively group of commenters to keep you entertained!

Project Shrink is a blog by Bas de Baar, a software project manager. the blog has the tagline “Projects Are About Humans. We Help You Deal With That.” The site has a variety of posts that can help you be a more flexible and people-focused project manager. Take a look!

PM Tips is a collaborative blog that covers not only project management, but also “collaboration, knowledge management and all other work 2.0 concepts present in today’s web 2.0 world”! It offers practical tips and advice to help you be a better project manager.

Finally, do take a look at Pawel Brodinski on Software Project Management. This blog is more personal than the others I have mentioned here, and covers a lot of ground.

There are many more high quality blogs out there as well – I haven’t mentioned Jurgen Appelo’s Noop, Elizabeth Harrin’s PM4Girls, or John Reiling’s PM Crunch, all of which deserve a look.

Don’t forget, however, that if you join the Project Management Guide FriendFeed room the feeds from these blogs, and more, are pulled together into one handy place. Join in, and get commenting!

As I say, these are just a few of the blogs I go to. What blogs do you recommend? Which ones have you found to be most useful? And why? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

Today on Project Management Guide we are going to look at quality. In a project, quality has an important and specific role. So, for those beginning project management, what do we need to know?

As we have learned, a project exists to produce certain outputs, and part of the process of gathering requirements for what those outputs are must include information about what counts as an acceptable level of quality.

It is an understandable desire to only ever produce outputs of the highest quality. However, this level of quality is likely to take a lot of time, money, and effort. We don’t need our outputs to be the best, but late and expensive, we need them to be good enough, and on time and on budget.

So how do we go about making sure what we produce is of an acceptable quality? Well, you’ll remember from our post on project plans that one of the areas we need to cover in the plan is quality criteria.

What this means is that at the time of creating the project plan you will have agreed what criteria the output needs to meet, and how this will be measured. This will have been agreed with, at a minimum, the Executive and a representative of the end user, and hopefully with a representative of the people doing the work too!

Remember, quality criteria can be influenced by many things. Your business, or your customer’s, may have specific quality systems in place. Certain recognised standards of quality, such as ISO standards, may be mandated by contract. And, of course, the final use of the output will dictate what is needed – the quality required of a component in a washing machine is significantly different from an equivalent component in a nuclear submarine!

Now, these criteria, once agreed, tell you what success is, what completion of the project is. They need to be SMART:

• Specific – Clearly defined and precise
• Measurable – e.g. not “new computers”, but “computers with 2Gb of memory”, etc.
• Attainable – Don’t ask for the impossible
• Relevant – Is the criterion actually related to the aim of the project?
• Time-based – Enough time to achieve this. There is no point expecting a year’s worth of work in one week!

You will also need to decide who has the final say over the quality of the outputs. Hopefully your work on defining the quality criteria will mean there are no arguments over the quality (i.e. no qualitative judgements, only quantitative).

But quality isn’t something that you worry about only at the end of the project. The quality of what you are producing should be monitored throughout the project. Intermediate steps on the way to the final output, or separate, discrete pieces of that output should be quality checked as the project is carried out.

That’s a very quick overview of quality in a project. What tips do you have about quality in a project? How do you make sure you’re meeting the customer’s expectations, while also meeting your business needs? Let me know!

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!

Wikis are websites that allow the people who access it to contribute to it, or to change and update the information that is already there. The most famous example of a wiki has to be, of course, Wikipedia, which has harnessed the efforts of individuals around the world to build a resource with a remarkable breadth, though with sometimes variable quality!

But can a similar system be of use to us as project managers? We’ve already looked at the benefits of FriendFeed, most notably that as all the ‘conversational’ information is being captured, it generates a searchable resource of this information. However, sometimes we need to make things more formal.

While we can use blogs to share formal documents, they are primarily a one to many communication tool, in that the person writing the posts has the most control over putting information out. In other words, while a blog is useful for gathering comments on the information, it is not good at allowing collaboration in the creation of it.

When all of your team are close by, this may not be a problem – you can walk over and talk to them! Unfortunately, this is increasingly often not the case, and this is where a wiki can come into its own.

By putting up a wiki page, you enable the people viewing it to add information, to modify what is there, and to improve the usefulness of it. This means you can gather the knowledge and expertise from all of your team members, who can contribute to the generation of this resource.

This is useful when you are looking not only at the documentation around running the project, such as risk logs, but also when you are looking to create the documentation about the product – in other words, the documentation about using the product, which should be part of the output of the project.

A wiki isn’t the perfect answer, of course. While, hopefully, the documentation produced on the wiki will be good, it still needs to go through a quality process before release, and this may uncover problems. And, of course, actually getting your team to contribute needs discipline on both your and their parts. There may be a temptation to set up a wiki and leave it alone, assuming that the documentation will magically now get written. This works about as well as you would expect.

But while a wiki brings some challenges, the benefits of using one can be great. Having the accumulated knowledge and expertise of the project team around this project put down in an organised manner is incredibly valuable. And if it is done throughout the life of the project, it is likely to be much more successful than when tacked on the end.

Have you used a wiki in project management? Was it useful? Or did it just mean another thing that had to be monitored? What do you think? Let me know!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.

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.

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.