This article by Jennifer Morris is a great reminder on some excellent project management communications basics.

Be sure to watch this pmStudent mini-lesson for Quick Communication Tips too!

There is always room for improvement in project management and new ways to get ahead in the game. Whether you are new to the world of project management or if you have been a project manager for years, you’re sure to learn something from these timeless tips, some of which were inspired by Brad Egeland of ProjectInsight.net. If you’ve been managing clients and projects for a long time, think of this as a refresher course. If you’re new to the world of management, read on and pick up a few “new to you” ideas.

Communication is Key

If you want to be successful in your position as a project manager, you need to be a clear and confident communicator and always stay in contact with your team. Remember, you are the point of communication between the client and the company you work for, so you are your company’s representative, the person who the client will contact with questions or concerns. If you are not easy to communicate with or lack clarity and have issues with organizing your thoughts, this is something that you need to focus on improving. If you have issues with communication, Egeland suggests to use reminders on your project resource management calendar to follow up with project sponsors or clients. Touching base with your team is equally important so that you have information on every stage of your client’s project and can relay the progress during client and company meetings.

Schedule Meetings and Stick to Your Agenda

Before you meet with your client and your team, chart a game plan that is loose enough to accommodate sudden changes, but structured enough make sure that everyone is on the same page. A good way to do this is to use a web-based project management program that you can alter to fit the needs of your project. Use Microsoft Outlook’s calendar application to schedule weekly or biweekly meetings with your creative team and your client. Make sure that you have an agenda that suits the planning phase for each meeting so that you don’t jump ahead of a phase for your project’s development.

Launch an Internal Kickoff Meeting

Having a meeting that will bring all of the elements of the project together. This can be taken care of easily if you know the right questions to ask your client and you have a clear vision of who the client is and what their needs are. An internal meeting is also a great way to brainstorm possible ideas, concepts and budget your time with your team. A kickoff meeting doesn’t need to be a long drawn out talking session. You don’t have to address every issue that could come up right there. Keep this meeting brief and to the point. Your client might have all of the time in the world to talk about how great they are, but time is money and you and your team have to get to work.

Whether your company has an endless supply of money to work with or if you’re working on a shoestring budget, these simple practices are essential to the success of any project manager.

Jennifer Morris is an ardent follower of cloud solution trends and database security improvement. She shares tips and advice with her readers on several business-related sites.

We all know that gathering lessons learned is a best practice and part of our professional responsibility. But that doesn’t mean that we all do it. If the reason you do not is because you don’t know exactly HOW to conduct a lessons learned session or you think conducting a lessons learned session is too complicated, here is an easy and effective approach for you to use. When I was a new (and accidental) project manager I was taught this approach by a consultant who had been hired to teach a group of us how to be project managers. I still use this approach today!

Invite your team to a lessons learned session. You want them to know the purpose of the session in advance, so that they can come prepared to share. If you believe that your team will not be able to speak freely in front of you, you should recruit someone else to facilitate the meeting and you should NOT attend. I don’t think this will happen to you, it has not happened to me yet; but you really do want your team to be able to openly and honestly share their thoughts.

Now it is time for the lessons learned session. Consider following this process:

1. Start with ‘Things we could have done better/differently’.
2. Explain to the team that each of them will have an opportunity to provide their ideas. Lessons learned are NOT meant to be personal. The lesson is NOT that JOE should not go on vacation. The lesson is that key resources should have back up resources in order to allow for absences such as vacation, sick time etc.
3. Let the team know that each person can speak, but does not have to speak. If a team member has nothing to contribute, they may say, ‘pass’.
4. Go around the room three times. Each time each team member has the opportunity to provide their lesson learned OR to pass. Write the lessons learned on a white board or a large piece of paper, do NOT list names next to each lesson. It does NOT matter who said what, in fact you want some anonymity.
5. Usually after three times around the room, everyone has exhausted their ideas. If not, keep going!
6. Once all the lessons have been called out, it is time to select the lessons which are the most significant. Each team member receives 3 votes. They can ‘spend’ these votes all on one lesson or on three lessons, however they see fit. I usually accomplish this by having team members come up to the whiteboard and place check marks next to the lessons they are selecting as the most significant.
7. After everyone has voted, review the results. Most of the time you will have some lessons which the majority of the team has selected as the most important lessons learned. If not, you can vote on any items that tie. You are not going to get rid of any of the lessons that do not make it into the top three or top five, you are just going to pay more attention to the lessons that are voted as the top three or top five.

Repeat steps 1 thru 7, this time using ‘Things we did well or should repeat’. NOW you have your lessons learned. Documenting these lessons should be easy, start your document by discussing the process and then provide your results. Emphasize the top three to five things that could have been different as well as the top three to five things that should be repeated; but do not throw out the items that did not make the top three to five spots, keep them and place them later in the document so that these lessons are not lost.

There you go, an easy and effective way to conduct a lessons learned session.

There is something that most toddlers do that is a good business practice. They ask ‘Why’. At a certain stage they ask why to just about everything. This is probably preferable to the stage where they say “NO!” to everything. Yet I can see where this gets tiring. It seems that no matter how patient our parents were with us during our ‘Why’ phase we often lose that sense of curiosity. That sense of curiosity can really help guide us. What I am referring to here is a tool referred to as ‘The Five Whys’.

Consider using ‘The Five Whys’ for root cause analysis and also to help really understand the reason behind your project. Let’s take a look:

You and the team know there is a problem, yet the problem could stem from multiple issues. This is a perfect time to start with what you know and work backward to the root cause.

1. We delivered product to our customer on the due date and we did not go over budget, yet they will not hire us again.

   WHY won’t they hire us again?  

2. The product we delivered did not meet their expectations.

   WHY didn’t the product meet their expectations?    

3. The customer states that functionality is missing.

   WHY does the customer state functionality is missing?  

4. The customer has a requirements list that does not match the list we used.

   WHY does the customer have a requirements list that differs from ours?  

5. Our initial project manager left the company and there was no clean transition to the new project manager. The new project manager thought he had the right documentation.

   WHY did a change in project manager lead us to use the wrong version of a document?

I am going to stop here because I know you can see how to use this tool. You can also see that sometimes it will take more than five whys and sometimes it will take less than five whys. It is important to keep going until you find the true reasons behind the problem you are analyzing. Of course you may find more than one actionable reason.

You probably already have team members who look at you and say, “And why are we doing this ……?” That is a good thing; they can help you get started. Don’t discourage the why questions. You personally do not have to answer every why. This is a team effort. You can make the why questions fun and part of your team culture. Invite your team to act like kids and question why, why, why, why, WHY?

Or you could hire a toddler as your consultant.

Virtual meetings are not going away anytime soon. If anything we will have more and more of them. As we reach out globally, yet cut back on spending (goodbye travel expenses), we will continue to meet in virtual conference rooms all over the planet. Like any well run meeting, you need to prepare, you need to have an agenda, you want to have strong facilitation and full participation. You also want to personalize this experience so that we don’t all walk away feeling like a bunch of robots. In addition to your other tips for a well-run meeting, please consider adding this to your bag of tricks too:

1. Be Nice – Not because it is OK to be mean when you meet face-to-face; rather because when we are virtual not everything translates. We may or may not see one another’s face and so we have audio and chats to carry our tone for us. This means that what is obviously a joke to you, could hurt your colleagues’ feelings. So yes, be extra nice.
2. Make the Call – This does not mean make a decision or play umpire. It is an acknowledgement that sometimes our chats and our audios and even our webinar tools of choice do not take the place of picking up the phone and having a conversation with someone. When you cannot see each other in-person, this could be the next best thing.
3. Focus – When I am on a conference call, I turn my back to my computer. Why? Because on a long call it is too easy for me to start looking at email and other distractors. When you or your team are not focusing on the meeting, information gets lost. You might THINK that silence means that your team heard you and understood you; but unfortunately it might mean they were not paying attention. Consider setting some basic ground rules for your virtual meeting to encourage people to dedicate their attention to each other and not to their email.
4. Meet in Person – What??  These are the tips on how to have a successful virtual meeting. This is not a suggestion that you power up the transporter from Star Trek (although that would be pretty cool, if it works properly). This means that when you can take the opportunity for team members to see each other in-person, you build your working relationships more quickly. One of the ways in which we lose time in a virtual environment is with team bonding. This is not meant to imply that bonding with the team is a waste of time, it means that it takes us longer to form cohesive bonds when we do not see one another in-person.

To learn more about these tips – please check out this pmStudent mini training video and be ready to host better virtual meetings.

Josh Nankivel who created the pmStudent community that we all now enjoy, was an accidental project manager.

Well me too! And maybe you as well.

Apparently it is not all that unusual that some of us stumbled upon project management

In fact last week I was on the phone with a client (he was learning about how to become a project manager) and he stated, ”It seems like so many of you somehow just turned into project managers because that is what your employer needed you to do.”

Now we did not all get here by accident. Many of you found out about project management and made it part of your career plan.

You did not find out your job title when someone pointed at you in a meeting and said:
“Well, YOU ARE the project manager.”

That is how I learned my title. (Click here to watch the video and as I share my story with you.)

Fast forward to today – I have been in project management since 1997. I have been a program manager and even briefly managed a PMO (Program Management Office). Now it is my joy to support you as you manage projects. To be your resource and your coach and your instructor.

I am no longer an accidental project manager. Today I am a purposeful supporter of project managers. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your world.

So earlier this month I was at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

I got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a spacecraft launch. (Here’s my own video from my iPhone edited in with some NASA footage)

My teams and I have spent the last 5 years of our lives (and some more) on the LDCM mission, and it was an experience I’ll never forget.

Transitions

Now, I am moving on to new opportunities in my career. My family has relocated to California from snowy South Dakota, and I’ve started a new job.

With the new and heightened demands of work and family, the reality is I don’t have much bandwidth left over at the end of the day. You may have already noticed my blogs have been coming with less frequency.

I think we’ve built something special here together at pmStudent though. Thousands of new readers find an article or video every day and *hopefully* get some much needed direction for their project management careers here. It needs attention, the community deserves it.

I made a short list of people I know and trust who share my values and approach to serving their own communities. I needed someone special to take the torch and carry the community forward into the future. I found THE perfect person for pmStudent in my opinion, and I hope you all agree.

Please watch this short video and start getting to know Margaret. I think you are all in for a treat, and I look forward to seeing what pmStudent becomes under her leadership.

Thank you all!

Josh

Do you know what the biggest pain in project management is?

I’ll tell you what it is.

Building something nobody wants.

I’ve learned the hard way over the years that it’s easy to forget the basics when you start getting immersed in all the flashy concepts, funky language, and fancy tools out there for planning projects.

But it all really comes down to 3 things.

And they must be done in order.

Why

How many of you have managed a project without any clear idea of why you are doing it?

*Josh raises his hand*

You may think you know.

“Well, we’re going to set up this ERP system and customize it.”

But why?

If you are managing a project because some customer or government agency gave you a contract, that’s not a good enough “Why”.

Be it user stories as in Agile development or some other method, “Why” should be answered at many levels.

“Why” for the whole thing. “Why” for this feature. “Why” for this requirement.  In particular, with the context of whom you are providing the benefit to and a clear understanding of why it’s a benefit to them.

What

Only after you know “Why” can you effectively define “What”.

This is your product breakdown or work breakdown structure.  Even if it’s just a list of deliverables, it’s the “What”.

It must be deliverables-based, else you’ll fly off into Neverland.

It’s got to be clear “What” you are delivering and how those deliverables fulfill the promises you defined in the “Why” step.

How/Who/When

This should be the last step.

Unfortunately, it’s the first step for many project managers.

If you fire up MS Project or other scheduling tool first thing, you’re doing this all backwards.

You’re getting into the solution now.  How are the deliverables going to be provided, who will do it, and when will they be delivered?

You iterate between these three aspects of the solution as your basis of estimates or task list, schedule, and resource planning come together.

But again, these can only be grounded when you’ve already got your “Why” and “What” clearly defined.

Simple

This is blocking and tackling, folks.

If you disagree with me that every effective approach to planning projects must follow this framework, leave a comment. I’d be interested to hear about it.

If you agree these 3 steps are critical, tell me so.