The Hard-Nosed Project Manager

Minutes

Everyone loves writing minutes of meetings; don't you?  Personally I love that activity so much that I write them BEFORE the meeting.  I can hear a bunch of you say that this does not make sense because I don't know what the other participants will say; fair enough.  I still think I'm right for the following reasons:

• I might not know what others will say but I sure as hell know what I want to say and so should you or you'll adlib and risk passing for an idiot.  I'll add their points to my existing document.
• I don't do meeting just for the fun of it; I use meetings to communicate to and to extract information from other participants.  Writing things in advance means that I don't have to think and chew gum at the same time; I talk first, then I listen.
• It's my meeting, I get to take lots if not all of the alloted time and I get to set the tempo.
• It forces me to revisit the minutes of the last meeting, ahead of time.  I can then verify that all the action items are either done or that I know their current status.  I write my minutes by modifying a copy of the last minutes; it saves me even more time.
• Some participants may have an axe to grind and may want to rattle me. It's been tried before, actually more than once, with very limited success. I want to have my agenda and my minutes as a backstop just in case I do get temporarily rattled.
• I send the minutes immediately after the meeting so it is still fresh in everyone's mind.  They may even read the minutes.
• I'm crap at typing and my hand writing is horrible.  If I type as the meeting proceeds it'll never end and if I type from handwritten notes I'll end up pulling whatever is left of my gray hair.

What do you think?  As always 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, please mention the blog in your request.

Kill, kill, kill

No, I’m not angry and no, I’m not going postal.  Anyway, we don’t have weapons up here in Canada.  Do you need a chief killing officer? is the title of an article I read a couple of day ago in The Globe and Mail.

The main premise of the article is that you need to clear out the clutter, the accumulated baggage.  And that applies to products, product features, people, standing (as in regular) meetings, reports, investors (partners), processes, HR practices, and software code.  Give it a little thought and I’m sure you can’t find other things that are in need of a good pruning; for example the project that doesn’t end and for which all hopes of an ROI have long since evaporated.

A couple of anecdote that illustrate the topic:

• In Steve McConnell’s book Code Complete he mentions the case of a lady who cuts the ends of a roast before cooking it.  She does that because he mom did it and mom did it because grandma did it too.  Looks like a best practice to me…  Eventually the lady asks grandma why she used to cut the ends of the roast; grandma’s answer?  Because my roasting pan was not big enough.  As I said, looks like a best practice to me…  

• A couple of years ago I took a couple of courses with Dr. Harold Kerzner.  Let me go in a tangent to say that it feels pretty good when a guy with 40+ years of project management says the things that you think about in your little corner of the world.  Anyway, Dr. Kerzner was advocating periodically weeding out best practices libraries and doing the same with project portfolios.  That sounds like a job for the CKO although the tendency is for project manager to reuse best practices and fight to complete their projects at all cost.  I don’t advocate giving up easy but you don’t want to have your own “Charge of the Light Brigade”; somehow the cry of “For the glory of project management” does nothing for

Now, I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be a CxO; I’d rather be a NOO (that’s a NO O), but I might just change my mind.  Elect me Chief Killing Officer; I promise to be ruthless…

What do you think?  As always 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, please mention the blog in your request.

Laser beam

I love making weird, some say intractable, analogies.  Let me throw one out; maybe it’ll resonate with you.  I don’t know, I may just be the next Yogi Berra…

Having your team members multitask is like trying to cut steel with a light bulb; you end up wasting a lot of energy with little result.

Do you see where I’m going with this?  Do you give up? 

The point I am trying to make is that multitasking wastes energy by scattering it; with 1000W of lighting you generate a lot of heat and some light, with a 1000W laser you cut through steel.  The difference?  Focus.  The same applies to teams and their members; we scatter the energy of teams in a number of ways:

• Not properly closing projects, leaving phantom tasks that need to be taken care of, which creates distractions and frustration.
• Assigning the same person, at a reduced utilization percentage, to a number of projects. This forces the person to switch and regain focus over and over again.
• Holding meetings with unclear agendas or that involve too many people.

I contend that if project were to follow Balanced Score Card (BSC) principles, greater focus would be achieved, team members would enjoy a greater sense of accomplishment, and energy (and $$$) would not be wasted.  When I first made mention of Balanced Score Cards, Glen Alleman contributed this document; you might want to steal a copy!

What do you think?  As always 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, please mention the blog in your request.

How to make enemies

Every project manager has had situations where he was not feeling the love; for example team members that do not provide feedback on their tasks, people that “forget” to provide important information, or team members that are always late for meetings.  Derek Huether describes this last situation in this post.

I do agree with him until he states:

“So, how do you correct this negative behavior?  I like to zone in on something that makes the violator uncomfortable.  I’ve made them sing.  I’ve made them dance.  I’ve stopped the meeting when they’ve arrived late and then made them go from person to person on the team and say “I’m sorry for wasting your time”.  This may sound a little over-the-top but they slighted everyone on my team.  Everyone else was there on time; they should be as well.”

Taking this path is horrible.  Under no condition should a leader humiliate a team member; if you do this you are creating an enemy.  Projects have enough challenges without having to watch your back because a team member is now an enemy.

My suggestion is to take the person aside and discuss the matter.  If there is no legit reason for the person being late; for example they can’t make it at that time because of daycare hours which could be accommodated by changing meeting time, tell the person that the next time they are late they will hit a closed door.  Have this conversation only ONCE and then act as you said you would.  Never make a threat, make a promise.  Walking the walk creates trust.

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, please mention the blog in your request.

Stick to your guns

Have you ever had a stakeholder that had a knack for getting people on the defensive?  I once took over a project that was in deep trouble because scope concessions had been made without a proper analysis of the impact of the change on the schedule and budget.  That project was now in crisis mode and the stakeholder was using the weekly progress (what progress?) meeting to attack the current project management staff.  That person was so good at getting under people’s skin that the meeting would turn into a shouting match within minutes.  This was amplified by the stakeholder insisting on a set of topics to be discussed and the project management staff not complying.

When I took that project over I decided to do two things and to never move from that decision:

• First thing was to use the same tactic that allows a young soldier to survive a stark raving lunatic maniac aka his drill instructor. What you need to do is have a master interlock that paralyses your mouth while being yelled at. It helps if you have a little voice in your head that yells back at the abusive moron.

• The second thing was to stick to the list of topics that had been requested and agreed upon. Every time the stakeholder would try to move to something that was not on the list I would obstinately resume my briefing from that list.

Eventually the stakeholder from hell got tired of not being able to get under my skin and “delegated” the meeting to someone who truly wanted to work at resolving the project’s problems.  It took time but we got to the end of it.  Moral of the story?  Stick to your guns.

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, please mention the blog in your request.

PACER - SPACER

I was just reading an electronic newsletter sent by the Business Development Back of Canada (BDC) and one of the items was meeting with success.  That jogged my memory about meeting best practices I learned while working on a project for a large American corporation. 

Now let me explain the MLA (multiple letter acronyms) post title.  All of my client's meetings started with a SPACER which stands for Safety, Purpose, Agenda, Code of conduct, Expectations, and Roles.  I will not go into the details of each item; you can easily deduce them from the article.  It must be noted that the mnemonic starts with Safety, the most important aspect in manufacturing organizations; using PACERS instead just would not have been as powerful.  Non manufacturing organizations might want to use PACER instead.

I believe the best advice lies in practice #3.  I’d close and lock the door and refuse entry to anyone that is late.  I also like the contrarian approach on not inviting everyone to a meeting.  We all know people that never contribute anything and just sit there; let’s not waste their precious time.

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

Connect with me on LinkedIn.  I am a LinkeIn Open Networker (LION); you can use “Friend” to add me to your network, please mention the blog in your request.