Archive for category: Weekly tips

It is natural that projects attract a lot of stress, as you have a fixed set of deliverables to produce in a fixed timeframe and with fixed resources – and all with your project sponsor breathing down your neck.

Positive stress can be generated in an environment which boosts productivity and focuses your team on the end goal. But negative stress can demoralize staff, reduce efficiency and de-focus your team. In this type of environment, you need to turn negative stress into positive stress.

Step1. Team Building

Positive stress can be generated when people within teams have positive relationships. These positive relationships can be facilitated by the project manager through team building techniques. This can include lunches, morning donut meetings, positive and fun status meetings, and doing things to help each other. There are many opportunities for team-building during the work day and even after work.

Step2. Rallying

The next step is now to rally your team around a cause – your project. Make sure everyone understands the objectives and outcomes of the project and reiterate them often. Make sure the team sees how their contribution is helping to achieve business value.

Step3. Boosting

Rallying works fine for teams, but may not be enough for individuals. You need to “boost” every team member by making them feel good about themselves and allowing them to gain confidence in completing the tasks assigned. You can do this by:

• Recognizing great performance when you see it
• Conducting informal staff reviews and providing positive feedback
• Introducing team awards and prizes

You usually don’t have the ability to give financial awards, but recognition and attention goes a long way to keeping people boosted.

Step4. Pin-Pointing

Often stressed teams have an “instigator”. This is a person (or people) who generate a lot of negativity and who influence the performance of others around them. Make sure the negativity of an instigator is identified and work with them to be a positive influence if possible.

Step 5: Self-Administering

As the project manager, you need to be in the right “frame-of-mind” yourself. If you are negatively stressed, then those around you are likely to be also. So to “practice what you preach” you need to feel up-beat and positive about the team. You need to feel fit and healthy, focused, yet inspirational. If you can achieve this frame of mind, then you can turn negative stress into positive stress and give your team a real chance at succeeding.

Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

Knowing how to gather requirements is a skill that every analyst, and project manager, – should have. However, it seems to be a skill that is generally lacking in many organizations. Poor requirements gathering is a major cause of project problems in many organizations.

Gathering requirements is more than just asking a few questions and then proceeding to the next step in the lifecycle. We have a four-step process for gathering requirements that all projects should utilize to some degree. If your project is small, you will go through thee steps quickly. Larger projects may spend quite a lot of time working through the process.

1. Elicitation

The Elicitation step is where the requirements are first gathered. To elicit accurate requirements, the analyst must ask the right kind of questions and then listen carefully to the answers. There are a number of techniques for eliciting requirements and your project may need to use multiple techniques depending on the circumstances. This includes interviews, facilitated sessions, prototypes, questionnaires and more.

2. Validation

The Validation step is where the “analyzing” starts. The purpose of validation is to make certain that the information conveyed during elicitation accurately represents the needs and expectations of the clients and stakeholders. The work here includes consolidating requirements, rationalizing them, looking got overlaps and gaps and creating models to help visualize processes.

3. Specification

During this step, the analyst prioritizes and formally documents the requirements in a Requirements Definition Report. The requirements are also numbered in a way that allows them to be tracked through the rest of the lifecycle. Finally, they are checked to make sure that they can ultimately be tested.

4. Verification

The final step in the requirements gathering process is verifying that the documented requirements accurately and completely communicate the needs and expectations of the client. The requirements are reviewed and formally approved. During this step, the analyst can also develop acceptance criteria and start to write test cases for the final solution.

The truth is that all team members need to appreciate the value of good business requirements and should have some fundamental skills in gathering them. Gathering good requirements up-front saves.

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Contact us today to help you implement the right requirements process for your organization – traditional or Agile.

One problem that many project managers never get comfortable with is dealing with poor performers. Some people are such poor performers that they ultimately fire themselves. Maybe the bigger challenge is trying to improve marginal performers. These are people that constantly disappoint. They miss a high performance bar, but when you lower the bar they miss that as well. In spite of these marginal performers, you still have to complete your project successfully. You should look at a number of possible causes for marginal performance.

Does the person have the right skills and experience?

Sometimes people do not deliver up to expectations because they do not have the right skills to do the job. For instance, you assign a person to complete the analysis for a new set of reports, but he is not sure how to ask the right questions or frame a discussion with the clients. If anyone falls into this category, you need to decide whether he could do the work with the right training or coaching or whether he should be replaced.

Do they understand your expectations?

If people have the right skills, ask whether they really understand what the expectations are. For instance, sometimes when a team member misses a deadline, he might come back and say that he did not think the work was due at that time. If there is some confusion on the expectations, you can have the person confirm back to you in writing his understanding of the expectations for deliverables and dates.

Are they motivated?

Some people are not motivated to do a good job regardless of the assignments and skills needed. You can take one shot at trying to motivate the person. but after that you would need to being this to the attention of the person’s functional manager.

Can you assign them other work?

Perhaps the person could do better – perhaps excellent – if they were assigned different type of work. Look through your schedule to see if you have flexibility to assign work that is valuable to you and that they can do well.

Are there extenuating circumstances?

Another area to consider is whether there are any business or personal factors that could explain a person’s performance. For instance, a member of your team may not be very motivated to work if his spouse is very ill. If you can find a cause, it will give you some ability to respond or at least acknowledge the cause.

If people have the right skills and the right expectations, then the project manager’s options become more limited, and you start to enter the realm of the performance management. It is possible that some team members are not going to do be able to perform up to expectations. They may not be willing to do the job, or they may not be able to do the work regardless of the training and support you provide. If you feel you are at this point, you need to get the appropriate functional manager involved.

It is difficult and frustrating to work with and rely upon people who do not come through. After you look at the problems and try to determine the cause, you may just decide if there are things that you can do as a project manager or if there is a performance problem that needs to be brought to the attention of the functional manager.

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Do you need help assessing your organization, deploying project management, coaching or other processes? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

Project management methodology is a framework that allows project managers to successfully manage projects of varying sizes. Many organizations do not follow a formal, consistent methodology of any kind. How do you start with an initiative to introduce project management practices within an organization?

From a project management perspective you would probably start the project by identifying stakeholders and formally planning the initiative. But let’s assume that work is done. Where do we start in the actual work associated with this type of culture change?

Step 1. Current State Assessment

When you are planning to change organization behavior it is usually good to understand the current state. This gives you the perspective and baseline to understand what needs to change. The Current State Assessment looks at project management practices, enablers, barriers, roles and responsibilities, tools, skill levels, portfolio processes, etc.  You can uncover the nature of the current state through a formal assessment. The assessment could involve talking to many people in the organization and reviewing evidence from current projects. The assessment could also be as simple as a workshop discussion with a cross-section of staff members that can form a consensus of the current state.

Step 2. Define the More Desired Future State

While you are looking at the current environment, you also need to ask what the future vision would look like. This is usually not so difficult in may areas. For instance, if the current state shows that project managers have weak skills, the future state will probably be that all project managers have a basic skill level, and perhaps a certification. Seeing the weaknesses of the current state will help paint a picture for the more desirable future state.

Step 3. Define the Gap Between the Current and the Future State

Many change initiatives start off by trying to define what the future vision looks like. However, describing the future state of project management in your organization is not the major deliverable at this point. The ultimate deliverable is a Gap Analysis that shows what you need to focus on to move the organization from where it is today to where you want it to be in the future. This is important because you do not want to spend your time implementing in areas where your organization already does well. At the same time, you don’t want to implement a number of changes and still see your effort fail because you did not address other important areas as well.

Next Steps

Once you have the Gap Analysis, everything else flows from there. You can describe the work required to close the gaps, the resources needed, the priorities and timeframes, etc. You can also define the organizational change management components that are required to move to the organization to your future state. You now at a point where you can move forward with the deployment project.

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Do you need help assessing your organization, deploying project management or other processes? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.

I think most people are asked to create regular project status reports. Really, status reports are the minimum expectations for project management communication. However, when communicating status, there are other elements that should be communicated in addition to a formal status report.

When you communicate project status, you should include the following project management documents as well.

1. Status Report

Yes, you need to actually send a status report. This provides a recap of the project status today and communicates anything interesting that the reader should know. This report should be detailed enough to answer questions about the current health of the report, yet not-so detailed that people who read it are lulled to sleep with trivial details.
This report should answer the following questions:

• Where do things currently stand with this project?
• What are the next steps on this project?
• What obstacles are in the way of this project coming to completion?
• What is the current state of key project metrics (schedule, budget, etc.)?

2. The Risk Register

The risk register is another vital report. Risks are always lurking in the background of any project just waiting to knock it off course. The risk register identifies those risks, quantifies the potential impact they could have on a project, and then offers mitigations plans for each of the identifies risks.

3. The Issue Log

The issue log report is your way of identifying, tracking and managing current problems that require help outside the project team.　 This log should show what is actively being done to address each issue and prioritize them by area of impact on the project.

4. Scope Change Log

This log shows a prior and current scope change requests, and their resolution. This is important to keep the management stakeholders aware of how their scope approvals are changing the nature of the project over time.

5. Other tracking logs not included in the Status Report

Generally you don’t want to track and report project information in two places. For example, you should place schedule and budget information on your status report. But the Status Report is for the summary information. You may have reports or logs that you are using to track schedule and budget details. If your stakeholders would like to see these details you can include your separate tracking logs.

You don’t want to copy/paste this information from your detailed logs to the status report. The status report contains the summary information. If your stakeholders want to see the details, just attach the separate logs for their review.

Are your projects less than successful? Contact us today to discuss implementing solid project management practices in your organization.