The Hard-Nosed Project Manager

Learning, Education, and Development CoP webinar; 3/2 at 12h00 Eastern - Emotional Intelligence in Project Management

There will be a Learning, Education, and Development CoP webinar titled "Emotional Intelligence in Project Management" on 3/2 at 12h00 Eastern.  Those who can’t attend should look for my comments after the webinar.

Innovation and New Product Development CoP webinar; 3/6 at 13h00 Eastern - Four Skills You Need to Survive an Agile Project

Just to let all know that this webinar has been pushed again to 3/6.

Leadership in PM CoP webinar; 2/27 at 14h00 Eastern - The 7 Deadliest Communications Sins of a Project Manager

There will be a Leadership in PM CoP webinar titled "The 7 Deadliest Communications Sins of a Project Manager" on 2/27 at 14h00 Eastern.  I'll try to attend and, if not, listen to the recording.  Those who can’t attend should look for my comments after the webinar.

Just noticed that I've been doing this for over two years...

Damn!

Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance webinar

Today I listened to the recorded PMI IS Cop webinar called Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance.

This was a Neal Whitten webinar; basically a top ten list on leadership.  The top ten:

• Think like a leader.  Great companies are great because of leadership.  I subscribe to his view that leaders do not believe in fatalism.  Nothing is scripted all the way to the end.
• Manage to your top three priorities/problems every day.  Leaders do not sweat the small stuff.  Leaders delegate to others the details.  Getting small thing done and skipping over the big stuff is a recipe for trouble.
• Never avoid necessary confrontation.  The keyword here is necessary.  No picking up fights for the sake of picking up fights and no appeasing from the sake of harmony.  Forming, storming, norming, and performing they say.  No storming equals no team.
• Check your ego at the door.  It’s not about you.  Making things personal will get you and you project in trouble
• Think for yourself.  That would not be leadership would it?  Listen to opinions from everyone and then make up your mind.  Also play you game, not someone else’s game.  Hold others to their commitments, for example delivery dates.
• Embrace integrity in all you do. It is all about trust.  If you do not act in a trustworthy way others won’t either.
• Don’t require the approval of others to function.  Don’t be an ass
• Live in your present moment.  I’m on the fence on this one; the past is the past but the future can be influenced.  A leader’s time is best spent looking in the distance for looming problems.  If you don’t consider the future, I think you will succumb to fatalism.
• Treat others as you’d like to be treated.  Again trust.  Also decency.
• Define who you choose to be.  I guess this is slightly repetitive since you should not require the approval of others and think for yourself.

The webinar can be seen as a motivational talk but that is OK, leadership is significantly about motivating people.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Tearing Down Project Barriers Between the Business and IT webinar

Today I listened to the recorded PMI IS CoP webinar called Tearing Down Project Barriers Between the Business and IT.

The webinar speaks to IT as a tool to achieve business goals of an organization as opposed as IT as its own beast with it own goals.  I believe the same focus, on business goals, should be applied to other business entities like marketing, accounting, and production (includes engineering, construction, software development, etc.).  Business entities serve the business, not the other way around.  Just look up business score card approaches for more on the subject.

The webinar identifies problems with project inception or concept as a major culprit.  Imprecise scope, inflated expectations, immature technologies, and hype.  Business user many not speak the language of your domain; you have to align and adapt. Business users may want something that is hard to do but you have to help them understand that and that difficulties may have to be surmounted for them to get what they need.  Hype usually “forgets” that there are implementation difficulties. 

Alignment between stakeholders or business entities is essential but very tough to reach.  By the time the project is recognized as such, expectations (realistic or not) have already been brewing for a while.  Often time the inception process has been going on in a vacuum.  Various stakeholders may add requirements that satisfy their business entity but take the “project” away from actual business goals.  Think of a product designed to sell at a given price point; it may not be enticing to the consumer because it lacks certain features.  Think of a product designed to yield a given profit margin, it may be very inexpensive to produce but no one wants it because it is perceived as cheap.  Think of a product that I seen as easy to bring to production; maybe it is already obsolete compared to what the competition has.  Also, if the expectations are not aligned with the capabilities of the organization, there will be pushback from the project team.

Gaining alignment requires active guidance.  This process documents requirements, assumptions, risks, organization capacities, etc.  At this point you have a project manager, maybe a system architect, maybe a business analyst, maybe a quality assurance person, but no project team.  At this point you are just not ready to roll.  If you did you may run into one or many walls around technology, schedule, or economics.

Maintaining alignment also requires guidance.  The same team of people guides the project team in staying the course, preventing scope creep and likely unmet expectations on features, schedule, or cost.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Innovation and New Product Development CoP webinar; 2/21 at 13h00 Eastern - Four Skills You Need to Survive an Agile Project

There will be an Innovation and New Product Development CoP webinar titled "Four Skills You Need to Survive an Agile Project" on 2/21 at 13h00 Eastern.  I'll try to attend and, if not, listen to the recording.  Those who can’t attend should look for my comments after the webinar.

Years ago in Nottingham

Eons ago I was working on a project in Nottingham, UK.  One of the guys from the plant stole, from one of their managers, and gave me a book called "Malice in Blunderland".  This is not the book you'd find these days on Amazon but rather a collection of business "laws" like Peter's Law.  Entertaining in a kind of scary way.

I listened to Episode 230 of The PMO Podcast entitled "George Costanza's Top 10 Tips for appearing to be a good Project Manager" which reminded me of those days in Nottingham.  Give it a listen, it 12:17 long and worth your while.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.  I am a LinkedIn Open Networker (LION); you can use “Friend” to add me to your network.

IS CoP webinar; 2/15 at 12h00 Eastern - Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance

There will be a IS CoP webinar titled "Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance" on 2/15 at 12h00 Eastern.  Those who can’t attend should look for my comments after the webinar.

Integration of Earned Value and Risk Management webinar

Today I finally listened to the recording of the PMI Risk Management CoP webinar called Integration of Earned Value and Risk Management.

Glen Alleman issued his own comments previously, here are mine.

I am in a situation that is somewhat different from the one discussed in the webinar.  I typically don't work on fixed cost projects so I do my own risk management activities.  My clients do theirs; I do communicate my risk assessment to clients.  The Management Reserve (MR) is invisible to me until a risk turns into an issue that requires funds to mitigate.  The size of the MR is actually unknown to me.  Same goes with any slack they built in after the deadlines they communicate to me.

Given that, if a risk does not materialize or if it is mitigated using the existing budget (with or without drawing on the MR), what is left is returned to the pot for use at a later date (or not).  Same goes with any slack in the schedule.

I would add a Work Package (WP) to the schedule only if the risk, now an issue, involved a missing deliverable.  Otherwise, tasks would be added to an existing work package and to the schedule.  In either case the MR might get drawn down and Earned Value (EV) affected.  If I deliver more value to the project, as opposed to fixing an unforeseen issue, more value is being delivered and that offsets the potential change is cost.

Although it does not happen in my projects; if a risk does not occur, I don't see how leaving the associated funds (or slack) in the PMB would improve performance.  If I read Glen's comments accurately, we are on the same page.  No deliverable equals no value and keeping the extra funds in the calculation would mess up EV.  Same with any extra slack; no issues does not mean you get free slack.

I liked the answer on the use of Monte Carlo simulation in risk management.  Limiting the Monte Carlo simulation to the tasks on the critical path is dangerous in my opinion.  You could have significant changes in the critical path of a schedule depending on the varying work durations during the simulation.

I would also not say that the MR is for "unknowns unknowns" in the schedule.  A bit too Donald Rumsfeld for my taste and also a bit too restrictive in my opinion.

Overall it was an interesting webinar because it gives some insight on how grown ups manage projects.  If a risk become an issue you keep on using good project management practices instead of watching the wheels fall off the cart.  I also liked that there was not too much material for the hour and that the presenter did not have to race through the presentation.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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