Life management = project management

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I manage my life like one long project. Quick review: It’s a project because my life is a temporary endeavour (I don’t want to live forever) that is unique and comes with a budget. Life is messy so it really needs managing! Here’s why I project-manage my life and you should manage yours, too.

Priorities are important – and the primary stakeholder is demanding. Like any project, there are many possible outcomes and multiple ways to reach each outcome. Prioritizing outcomes and deciding how to achieve them is my approach to projects: Understand the possibilities, look at the alternative strategies and choose the best one. For my life project, I decide what I want, how I can achieve those things, and pick my path. The big difference between my life and a project is the primary stakeholder…I’m more demanding and second-guess myself more than any of my other project stakeholders have ever done!

You never get time back. The first question about a project is usually “what’s the schedule?” My first task every morning is to check my schedule. Whether for personal time or a project, every minute is something you can’t redo. Getting the most out of time is important, whether I’m managing deliverables or delivering dinner to friends.

Money creates balance and safety. A budget helps balance income and expenses in projects and in life. Effectively managing finances helps support my lifestyle — my home, car, hobbies travels, and philanthropy. Think cost-benefits. Finances support the tools and people who deliver my “lifestyle” and minimize the risk of my life project being cancelled!

Regular health checks are vital. Exercising, keeping fit, eating properly and regular medical check-ups maintain my vitality. Besides hiring the right people, deploying the right tools, and managing diligently, regularly scheduled life status meetings are important. Not just medical check-ups. It’s important to take the time to evaluate my life and decide whether my goals have changed. Life status meetings are also a good time to identify what’s working, not working, and what I could be doing better. (If you don’t like meeting with yourself, consider creating a board of directors for your life – which is a topic for another article.)

To check out my courses, jump to http://linkedin-learning.pxf.io/bonnie-blog

Things going badly? Have More Meetings!

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When your project isn’t going well, you and your stakeholders need information. FAST! As counter intuitive as it sounds, the best thing to do is to have MORE meetings. Not just any meetings, however. Here are a few effective meeting strategies when things are rocky:

Run short, focused data-sharing sessions. Project conditions change rapidly when problems and unexpected circumstances surface, so constant communication is needed. Try holding multiple 15-minute meetings, for example, one at the start of the day and one right after lunch. These meetings help you provide team members with what they need to know and what they need to do to recover the project. Frequent focused meetings also help ensure you have the latest status of recovery tasks.

Skip the “everyone is invited” norm. People often complain that meetings are a waste of time—and that’s a legitimate complaint. Meetings usually run too long and aren’t useful. When your team is under pressure, determine who needs to be at your short, focused meetings. Set conditions for team member attendance and communicate those expectations so people who don’t need to attend can continue working on critical tasks. For example, a team member is finishing a critical deliverable and can miss the meeting to get it done.

Hold separate meetings with content relevant to specific attendees. To avoid wasting time, hold meetings for different groups providing information relevant to that specific group. Divide your stakeholders into teams of people that need to work together and have separate meetings for each team. To maintain synergy with your full team, consider having your entire team attend one of the daily meetings each week. Set the agenda for that meeting with items relevant to the entire team.

Talk about the “elephants in the room.” Information is key to success. The more transparent you are, the more transparent your team will be. The earlier you share good and bad news, the more information you will receive in return. Above all else, accurate and complete information can help you recover your project.

Remember that you are leading humans. Effectiveness comes from team members who know and understand each other professionally and personally, especially when things are challenging. Recognize birthdays, significant accomplishments, not so significant accomplishments, and instances when stakeholders acted as a team. On occasion, bring food to your team meetings. Remember, people with fears and concerns are in the room with you. Be thoughtful and calm, and your stakeholders will mirror that behavior.

For more about meetings, check out Dave Crenshaw’s Leading Productive Meetings course.

How projects fail and what to do about it

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Photo by Mauro Sbicego from Unsplash

You don’t have to look far to find project failures. While many circumstances contribute to project failure, a few common circumstances often are the culprits that make good projects go bad. Here are the most prevalent management failures that lead to failed projects:

A lack of proper management. Projects without professionally trained —and supported— project managers are like sailboats without a rudder. Eventually they will crash. The only question is what they will hit before sinking. Proper project management is mandatory.

Poor stakeholder management. Generating deliverables that don’t meet the expectations of stakeholders usually results in project failure. Disenchanted stakeholders rarely use deliverables they didn’t want or expect, no matter how good they may be. Making sure stakeholders buy into the products you’re producing is vital to delivering successful projects.

Throwing good money after bad. One of my favorite phrases is, “Fail early, it’s cheaper.” Nowhere is this more accurate than with projects. Once a project becomes troubled, cancellation may be the best outcome, because it saves money, time and, in the long run, can enhance your reputation. Justifying spending more money to validate the money you have spent so far is foolish. Look at where the project is today, and the time and money it will take to generate business value. If the money it takes to recover the project stands up to the scrutiny of a business case, then continue. If not, cancellation is the best alternative.

Avoiding the perception of failure while you are already seen as failing. Managers rarely understand that failed projects that take forever to “go away” do more reputational damage than one cancelled to minimize corporate impacts. Project cancellation is a proactive alternative to failure. When things go bad, understand the root cause and stop the project. Then, perform better project definition, risk management or other alternatives to start a new project with an increased chance for success.

For more about project management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Top 5 team building tips for PMs

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Photo by Leon from Unsplash

Project managers set the tone for their project teams. The best team building occurs when you take advantage of everyday opportunities to boost your team’s morale. Here are some project management team building tips:

Use your kickoff meeting to shape your project team. Anytime you get your team together is an opportunity to build team morale. The kickoff meeting is the first – and in many ways the most significant – opportunity to develop team synergy. Hold a contest to pick a team name. Have your sponsor give a motivation speech to the team. Or schedule time to get to know one another.  

Boost your team during weekly status meetings. Status meetings are great opportunities to generate enthusiasm. Recognize achievements such as consecutive periods of “all status targets met,” handling a sensitive customer situation, or a technical idea that moves the project forward. When things aren’t too great, use the status meeting to generate new ideas to rescue the project and encourage the team to keep moving forward. 

Celebrate milestones. Recognize the team when you reach a milestone. When a milestone was late or over budget, acknowledge the obstacles that were overcome and the lessons learned. That helps boost morale. For longer projects, create milestones to recognize progress, which will help maintain morale and forward momentum.

Reach out to team members – particularly remote team members.  Hold one-on-one conversations with project team members on both a business and personal level.  Here are two great questions to enhance a team member’s sense of belonging and purpose: “What does this project mean to our customer?” and “What does this project mean to you?” Listen carefully to the answers. The first question can confirm team alignment. The second question can help you choose the best assignments for your team members to maximize the value the project provides to them.

Formally recognize the value your team members deliver. Write a one or two paragraph summary of each team member’s contributions and send it to their manager. This helps you earn a loyal team member for future projects. Do this diligently and you’ll have a team with high morale before your new project even begins, because team members will pursue a position in your projects!

For more about team management, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course or Cyndi Snyder-Dionisio’s Leading Remote Projects and Virtual Teams course.

The Top 5 Skills of Senior Project Managers

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Senior level project management is more than competence. The myriad responsibilities that come with this role require broader skills.

Razor-sharp business focus. Senior PMs understand and manage their project priority against other active initiatives in the portfolio. Senior PMs clearly articulate this information to negotiate with stakeholders. They also keenly leverage their sponsor’s strengths to successfully launch and guide their projects.  Senior project managers also deeply understand their project’s products and how they’ll impact their stakeholders.

An easy manner with all stakeholder types. Senior project managers readily deal with all kinds and levels of stakeholders, even the ones who don’t share the same agenda.  They advise senior leaders to influence their decision making.  They also work well with entry level team members because they generate trust through straightforward communications. Senior PMs can manage stakeholders because they fully understand the status and role each stakeholder plays in their projects.

Delegation and coaching to support their projects and team members. As larger, more complex projects require more management, the Senior PM delegates – especially technical items – to team members with specialized skills. They also rely on others to directly manage the project, including the coordination of status reporting, detection and resolution of project issues, and handling some customer interactions. The Senior PM takes time to understand other’s capabilities, so they know when to intervene to get tasks accomplished. The best senior PMs use coaching to develop team members. Skillful coaching allows the Senior PM to support and enhance the skills of others and get the best out of their teams.

Change Perspective.  Senior project managers determine the degree of organizational change their stakeholders can handle. This involves both the short-term impacts and how the project’s deliverables fit into the business’s strategic direction. Senior PMs design their projects to successfully deliver change with both sound business processes and technical deliverables. 

Change from a business perspective requires the Senior PM to understand the actions of competitors, new demands from customers, and other changes in the marketplace that require the business to respond. They also understand the capabilities of their business team members, so the project’s new tools and processes are understandable to business stakeholders and can be readily deployed. 

Mastery of risk management. Senior project managers cope with risks that aren’t in their direct sphere of influence. They utilize risk response plans that are tailored not just to the outcome of a risk event, but also the multiple causes that can trigger it. For example, purchased components may not show up in time. The lesser experienced project manager will order extra product from another vendor to mitigate the risk. That’s a good response strategy…unless delivery drivers are on strike. Senior PMs anticipate and accommodate the different events that can turn risks into issues.

For more about being a project manager, check out the courses in the Become a Project Manager learning path.