Lessons Learned

Your ultimate goal in rendering a project is to finish on time, below budget and with a happy client. But how do you perform it? Here are five tips to assist you.

Be Honest

As the saying goes “Honesty is the Best Policy”.You have to be honest all the time in dealing with your customers. Tell them if their project is not feasible or if you don’t acquire all of the resource, cash and time involved to carry it out successfully from the start. Set their anticipations by saying to them what you will carry and by when. And if it eventuates that you can’t render on your promises, then state to them about it directly. By having an “open book” policy, you’ll have your client’s confidence. And if you involve them early enough, they will be a lot supportive to your cause.

Hand it over
Managers oftentimes fall into the trap of believing that they can manage things much efficiently than staff. Of course in a lot of cases they may be right, but the problem is that they don’t have the time to perform everything themselves. So a bright manager always tries to delegate as much as possible to staff. It presents them the time needed to supervise the project and support their team. It’s a delicate task, but even if you recognize you can do a job more expeditiously than others, delegate it anyway.

Become a leader
When you economize time by delegating your jobs, you have   time for  leading and motivating your group. Make this by regularly communicating the project  to your team, honoring them for progress and accrediting their accomplishments. Have their respect by showing them you care. Build Up team liveliness by bringing them to lunch on a daily basisand uttering about what they accomplished unitedly. Remember, there is no “i” in “team”.

Expect the unexpected
Always expect matters to change and be ready for it when it comes. People have ideas, your client may require changes, and the industry and technology change over time as well. It’s not the change that’s significant, it’s how you react to the transformation that weighs. Always handle change, but be suspicious of it. Question it, double-question it and only when you’re positive it’s for the greatest, apply it.

Work smart, not hard
Attempt not to begin from scratch. Give yourself a head-start wheresoever feasible by using tools like project management guides. These templates encourage the quality of your deliverables, while keeping you time and effort.

Jason Westland has been in the project management industry for the past 15 years and is the author of the book “A Project Life cycle”  if you would like to find out more information about Jason or his project management software you can visit projectmanager.com.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the recent news with Toyota. Recalls happen. It’s a statistical certainty that companies are going to have recalls from time to time. Usually it’s something minor in nature but recently Toyota has had multiple issues regarding accelerators sticking and potential braking system issues. The part I’m in mourning about…

This is a guest post from Utpal Vaishnav.

We take utmost care to protect our computers, laptops and mobiles from viruses but have we ever thought that the projects we are managing can also be infected by viruses?

At Last: IEEE Approves 802.11n Wi-Fi Standard After 7 Years; and Institutions vs Collaboration video

I am a lifelong project manager with some 40 years of project management experience under my belt, most coming from construction project management.

Over the years, I had noticed that some people are just naturally better project managers than others. Looking back over the years, it didn’t seem to matter whether they were engineers, nor did it matter if they were men or women, and having spent most of my life working around the world, it didn’t seem to matter what country they called home or what language they spoke or how they worshiped their God. It also didn’t seem to matter what astrological sign they were born under, nor did it appear obvious that those who were naturally good carried lucky talismans.

And most certainly, it didn’t matter if they did or did not have their PMP, PRINCE2, MBA or PhD behind their name!!

So what was that elusive “something” that made some people just “natural” project managers?

As I began my PhD research, trying to answer the question “Is project management a profession? And if not, what is it?” I intended to include part of that research a chapter on behavioral attributes, but as with most projects, time and quality constraints won out and I had to “descope” and the part that got descoped was the research about behavioral attributes.

Behavioral Attributes Rise From The Dead

But that was only a temporary diversion, and now, PhD in hand, I am resurrecting my interest in the behavioral attributes.

To start with, I relied on previous research done by my good friend and mentor, R. Max Wideman. Max chose to use Myers Briggs, and his research proved not to be sufficiently detailed for the work I had in mind. http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/profiles/myersbriggs.htm

So my quest for something more granular finally turned up a Dr. Dan Harrison, and his Harrison Assessment. http://www.harrisonassessments.com/ Unlike Myers Briggs or Kiersey, the HA Instrument tested for some 155 different behavioral attributes. Furthermore, HA has a feature that measures the CONSISTENCY of the responses, which provides and accurate measure of how truthful the respondent is being, or are they trying to game the system. Having found what I was looking for, I contact Dr. Dan and he suggested I contact his regional representative, Mr. John Suermondt, john@harrisonassessments.com and work with him at least in setting up a pilot. John is originally from the Netherlands, a former commercial diver, now living in Perth, Australian and a really dynamic and cool global kinda guy. And with over 19 years working with Harrison Assessments and was just as excited as I was to pilot this.

All of the participants in the pilot study came from people in the various in-house classes that I teach for our Fortune 500 clients. These classes were either the PMP or CCC/E Prep, or in my graduate level university classes at either ESC Lille Masters of Science in Project Management http://esc-lille.audaxis.com/en/Programmes/MS_MSc/Project_Management_Supply_Chain_Organisation/Specialised_Master_in_Project_and_Programme_Management or the University of Western Australia’s Masters of Energy Systems or the Masters in Petrochemical Engineering degree. http://www.blendedlearning.ecm.uwa.edu.au/

Project Manager Pilot Group

What I did was select a pilot group of 28 practitioners who were deemed “successful” project managers. In order to be deemed “successful” they had to pass three tests:

1. They had to hold the job title of “Project Manager” in their company
2. They had to have demonstrated to me in the classroom environment that they had exceptional leadership skills (top 5% of the class) and
3. They had to have at least 5 years of working experience

This initial pilot study group of 28 consisted of:

• exactly half men, half women;
• about 30% were Muslim
• about 10% were Hindu or Budhists
• remaining 60% were Christian
• 9/28 = 32% Asian
• 6/28 = 21% North American
• 5/28 = 18% Australian/New Zealand
• 5/25 = 18% European (including Eastern Europe, Northern Africa and Turkey)
• 3/28 =11% Central or South America

The industries they represented were:

• Oil, Gas or Mining 9/28 = 32%
• Telecommunications or IT 9/28 = 32%
• HR, Sales or Marketing 5/28 = 18%
• International Development 3/28 = 11%
• Finance 2/28 = 07%

The test was facilitated by John and administered on line (it only takes about 20 minutes) and in all cases, it was conducted in English, although the instrument has been translated into some 15 languages.

Results

Tune in tomorrow for the second part of this series, with the results including predictors, desireable traits, and undesireable traits for project management success!

Tony had just finished a year-long project, and was exhausted. As a good project manager should, he had been keeping a lessons learned file throughout the project, and now that it was completed he was making a final entry, looking back over the whole year.

As project managers, I feel it’s our duty to protect our staff from bad multi tasking. Your project schedule should drive priorities, not a false sense of urgency in adhoc daily tasks.

I’m relatively new to Twitter, but I think I’m officially addicted. It’s a great way to connect with like-minded people (if you use it correctly!) I decided to ask my “followers” (I call them my “tweeps”!) on Twitter to “tweet” me their own personal top lesson learned in 2008 regarding project management. Here are some of the responses…

Imagine being asked to work on a project, only you don’t speak the language in the country in which it will be conducted. You wouldn’t get very far, and you’d most likely experience a lot of raised eyebrows because all you could do is point and smile. Sharing a common language is not the same thing as speaking the same mother tongue. But, as project managers will tell you, project-speak has a dialect all its own. Whether in Singapore or Stockholm, communicating what you mean in business is critical to completing a project on budget and time.

An emerging global business culture has brought with it an ever-expanding language of ‘project-speak’ that you hear in boardrooms around the world. My advice is to learn the lingo in your field as quickly as possible to maintain your competitive edge.

The more diverse the field, the more terms are needed to operate within it. With over three decades of experience with project managers from Shanghai to Stuttgart to Salt Lake City, I have witnessed an explosion of new terminology in project management first-hand (from just over 1,600 terms in the 90′s to over 3,400 today). As globalization broadens markets, the language required to keep up grows with it. What you say is as important as how you say it.

Let’s take the term ‘drill down’. In the oil industry, you might think it refers to the act of seeking oil under the Earth’s surface. In project-speak, it actually means the act of moving from a summarized view of data into a lower level of detail. While on an oil rig in the North Sea, you would want to know the difference.

Or consider ‘unk-unks’. No, it’s not a Bali starling mating call, but a risk management term that stands for unknown unknowns (risks that are unknowable). ‘Pound of flesh’ is another favorite, eliciting scenes from your favorite horror movie. In project management, however, it really means you’re going to have to pay someone back in a huge way for doing something for you. Aside from the obvious hard skills, language is key in project management. After all, projects are people.

There exists an international business culture that has emerged as a result of globalization and cross-border and cross-functional project activity. Managers worldwide tend to be a highly educated, well-credentialed body of professionals who are apt to read the same business books and who listen to the same lecturers and pundits on various topics. It’s best to learn the language so, when you attend meetings, collaborate on projects or are involved in any business activity, you understand what people are saying. And, perhaps more importantly, when it’s your turn to speak up, they understand you, too.

As a Mom, it is important to know exactly where everyone is at any given time, how long they are going to be there, and what they are doing while they are there. Other than that, it’s pretty simple.

As a Project Manager, it is important to know exactly what task each project resource is working on at any given time, how long they will be working on that task , what they are doing and why they are doing it. Other than that, it’s pretty simple.