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.

Last week I blogged about the going getting tough for project management. In that post, I suggested that we, as project managers, needed to start doing some new things.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s a few other views out there. Pawel Brodzinski posted Why the Hell Project Management Should Be Different During Recession? where he points out that the principles of project management don’t change just because there is a recession.

The thing is, that’s not wrong. The principles of project management haven’t changed – we’re still aiming to deliver projects successfully. But thinking a recession doesn’t mean we need to change, that’s not right.

I’ve blogged in the past about how I believe project managers can do well in a recession, and I still think that. Good project managers have the chance to show how project management contributes to successful projects. And successful projects can contribute to business success.

But here’s the thing: good isn’t good enough.

With companies in financial straits, with organisations looking to cut costs, with jobs being lost, being a good project manager is now the bare minimum. If you really want to shine, you need to be better than that. You need to show how your skills benefit not only your project, but the business as a whole.

That doesn’t mean you need to short change your project. It certainly doesn’t mean you should change the principles of project management. But it does mean you need to be even more sensitive to what is going on in the company.

Example: All companies are likely to find it much harder to access credit. But they have got used to getting it easily over the past decade. Suddenly, it’s not possible to fund day to day activities from credit in the expectation of a bigger pay-off later on. Instead of being able to wait for a project to produce a product in 6 months which they can sell for $500, now they need to cut costs and gain cash flow. Instead of waiting for an executive to tell you your project is canned, build the options – maybe you can deliver 80% of the features in half the time, and start selling it for $200. Overall, the company would make less money – but it would gain cash-flow.

A good project manager would keep his project on track. A very good project manager would see that the economic situation changes the business case. A remarkable project manager does both of these, and provides options to his executive – such as delivering less, but earlier.

The aim of a successful project isn’t to deliver a product. It is to deliver a product which itself delivers a benefit to the business. For most businesses this benefit is going to boil down, in some shape or form, to money. Saving it, or making more of it.

The aim of a good project manager is to have the project deliver a product. The aim of a very good project manager is to deliver a product which delivers a benefit. The aim of the remarkable project manager to is deliver the benefit.

Sure, we need to use the same project management techniques and principles as always. But we also need to recognise that the environment all of us work in has changed. That has implications for our projects: assumptions need to be checked, business cases need to be verified, timescales need to be examined, and so forth.

But it also has implications for us, as project managers. With fewer jobs, fewer companies, fewer projects, there is increased competition for all jobs. There’s competition just to keep our jobs.

Put yourself in the shoes of a businessman. You have the choice of lots and lots of good project managers. But what you really want isn’t someone who will deliver the project. You want someone who will deliver the benefit. You want someone remarkable.

This is a time for remarkable project managers to show that project management skills enable them to be remarkable business leaders too.

Because in a recession, our new project is to deliver, at the end of this recession, a company that is stronger, better, and fitter. A company that is ready to expand into the growing economy. A company that has survived, and is now ready to prosper. A company that is remarkable.

What type of project manager do you want to be? Good, or remarkable?

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.

In our projects, we seek to provide benefit to our business, by delivering a product at the required quality, on time, and on budget. Now, when economic times are tight, and budgets are being squeezed, we need to start looking how we can deliver on another, bigger project: keeping our business in business.

It is too easy for a project manager to only look at their project, and only think about how to deliver that. In normal times, this is probably what a business wants, but now we need to raise our sights a little.

Be sensitive to what is going on in the business more generally:

• If they are looking to save money, proactively look at which parts of your project could be cut. It is better to achieve most of the benefit at a lower cost, rather than risk delivering no benefit, because the company has run out of money. Effective planning should mean you already have an idea of what the impact would be, in terms of time, features, and budget.
• Don’t be afraid to speak up. If you see inefficiencies in your business that could be solved quickly with a new project, with the application of a bit of project management, speak up about it.
• Make sure your projects stay focused on their customers, the stakeholders. Encourage your business to stay focused on their customers too.
• Encourage frequent and vigorous examination of all projects to check they are still relevant in changing circumstances – there’s no point delivering your project perfectly if the end product no longer helps the business!
• Most importantly, deliver. Now more than ever, we have to make sure we only promise what is possible, but challenging, and that we then go on to deliver it.

What about you? How are you reacting as a project manager to lean times? What opportunities do you see? What challenges do you face? Let me know!

This week on our Project Management Guide, we’re going to take a look at risks.

Every project will face risks. Risks are those things which could go wrong, or change, and adversely effect the project. The idea of handling risk in a project is not to avoid all risk. Any project will face some risk – projects are about bringing about change, and any change will bring some risk. The aim of risk management in a project is to make sure we reduce the risk to an acceptable level in a cost-effective way.

This means that we need to accept we will face risks, and to examine them with an open mind. It also means we need to track those risks, and think about how we would handle them if they occur.

The first step in managing risk is identifying them. We’ve already seen in Project Plans – The Art of Prophecy that risk analysis needs to be part of the project plan. But how do we go about it?

A system that I use is as follows:

1. Identify the risks: Preferably as part of a group, start to write down as many possible risks as you can think of. At this point, don’t try and think about how likely a particular risk is, just try and capture as many as you can. Include risks from a wide variety of areas, from technical nitty gritty details, all the way up to the environmental risks, such as natural disasters! Also include business risks, financial risks, etc.
2. Evaluate the risks: You should now have a nice list of risks. Now we need to evaluate the risks in terms of their probability and impact. Probability is the likelihood of a risk occurring – so, for example, a natural disaster is astonishingly unlikely to happen, while a computer failure is much more likely. (Knowing my luck, the Redoubt volcano in Alaska will blow just as I post this…) Impact is how much of an effect the risk would have – natural disasters next door, quite a lot. Computer failure, not so much.
3. Plan a response: You will now have a set of risks, with probabilities and impacts. You can now start to decide what to do about them. Your options are likely to include avoidance (doing things differently so the risk doesn’t occur), mitigation (take some action so the probability, impact, or both, of the risk are reduced), acceptance (just live with it) and contingency (a prepared plan of what to do if the risk occurs to deal with it quickly).

We don’t just stop there – this is just the first run through. You should record these risks in a risk log (or risk register, etc.) and make sure you monitor them throughout the project – and add new ones as necessary. We’ll look at this in more detail later.

Two tips:

• When it comes to evaluation of the risks, usually simpler is best. Grade the impact as High, Medium, or Low, and do the same for the probability. If you assign High a value of 3, Medium a value of 2, and Low a value of 1, you can simply multiply the probability and impact together to get a quick and dirty numerical grading for your risks.
• The grading of risks should have some bearing on how much you are willing to spend to deal with them. Obviously risks that have a high probability and a high impact should be looked at first!

Hope you’ve enjoyed this quick guide to getting started with risks. Do you have any tips? How do you start identifying risks? 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!

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