This is a great talk from Jason Fried about the problems with working in an office, with all the distractions that implies. It is interesting and provocative, and well worth a watch.

An important lesson from this, for me, is to remember what a project manager is for. The people who are actually doing the work in your project are the most important resource you have, and you as a project manager should be guarding their time jealously.

Now, most of us are pretty good at this when it comes to resisting attempts from outside the project to take away our team members’ time, but how do we perform in making sure we aren’t destroying their ability to work?

If nothing else, I can certainly get behind the idea of reducing meetings – maybe we can’t get rid of them altogether, but we can certainly improve on them – check out my post on 10 tips for better meetings.

Last time, I talked about the importance of teams, and the importance of making sure they didn’t turn into cliques. That got me thinking about the good side of teams.

A team is really just a small community, a group of people who work together to achieve something. Now, a team at work is unlikely to be as close as other communities (which, as we have seen, is probably a good thing), but it is still a community.

Human beings like being in communities. We are social creatures. But it can be very hard to create a community deliberately, rather than having one gradually grow up. In a project, though, you want to ensure your team gels quickly.

This often means you, as the project manager, have to take steps to foster the growth of a team. Yes, this may mean talking about the dreaded team building activities.

One example I have is of the head of a department deciding the whole department should go and help out at a local nature reserve. Their job, when they arrived, was to use shears and secateurs to clear out some of the undergrowth within some woodland.

I can’t help but feel sending an entire department out into the wilds after arming them with sharp metal implements was a brave thing to do, especially as the senior management were out there with them…

However, it seems to have worked – though at least in part because the department bonded over the absurdity of the whole process!

This is where I throw it open to you – how do you go about creating a real team? What do you do to help them form a community? Any particular tips, techniques, even activities that you use?

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!

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?